The first shot came after the retreat had already started; that was the problem with retreating forces that still believed in spite.
The Indie vehicles reversed in uneven bursts, tires biting rubble, engines whining as they fought for traction. Their gunners kept firing in short, angry rhythms, less to hit something and more to announce they refused to be intimidated by a new variable. Smoke hung low across the street. Dust drifted in slow sheets. The air tasted like burnt fuel and pulverized concrete.
I stood beside the Pari tank's dead bulk, hands still open, posture still neutral enough to qualify as a threat in every language. I did not move toward the COG line. I did not step back either. I held the position because anything else looked like escalation, and I had already introduced myself to history by landing on a tank.
Adam Fenix kept his rifle up. He did not aim it at me anymore; he aimed it at the possibility. Collins hovered close, half behind cover, half out of it, the kind of indecision you only see when the training manual stops being helpful.
Behind them, soldiers shifted and spread, trying to build a perimeter that accounted for both the enemy and me. Their eyes flicked between the retreating APCs and my armor. They did not speak much. Nobody wanted to be the first person to say something stupid in front of something impossible.
Then the potshot found its target.
A single crack, sharper than the rest; a higher-caliber report that cut through the general noise. I saw the muzzle flash atop a retreating APC that had angled just enough to see the COG line through the smoke. The gunner did not spray. He took a careful shot.
Adam jerked as if the ground had kicked him. His leg folded wrong beneath him. He dropped to one knee, weapon dipping. For a fraction of a second, he looked more surprised than hurt, like he had been offended by the audacity of physics.
Blood darkened his pant leg near the thigh. The bullet had hit hard enough to punch through; not a graze, not a warning. The kind of wound that did not kill quickly but could kill reliably if you ignored it.
Collins shouted and lunged toward him. Two soldiers tried to move at the same time and collided, both rushing for cover, both trying to avoid becoming the next target. The COG line wavered, not breaking, but losing its shape.
The APC gunner took another breath.
I moved.
Not slowly. Not in the careful way I had tried to manage since stepping out of the treeline. I moved with the sudden, ugly certainty of a decision that should have happened earlier.
Adam's Mark 1 Lancer lay close to his position, dropped when he fell. Older model; chunkier; the kind of weapon that looked like it had been designed by someone who expected to be angry for the rest of his career. I snatched it off the ground.
It fit my hands poorly in the sense that it felt small. It is still balanced. The stock pressed into my shoulder with familiar geometry. My body did not remember rifles; my mind did. That was enough.
I sighted the gunner through the smoke.
My eyes did the rest.
The distance should have made the shot guesswork. It did not. My vision sharpened the target with obscene clarity. I could see the gunner's posture; the way he leaned into the mount; the slight shift as he compensated for the vehicle's movement. I could see his helmet's scuffs. I could see his mouth moving as if he spoke to someone below.
I fired.
The Lancer bucked once. The sound was loud and flat, swallowed by the ruins, but the impact was not subtle. The gunner's head snapped back. He fell off the mount like a puppet whose strings had been cut with irritation.
For a moment, the APC kept moving as if nothing had happened. Then the mounted gun sagged to one side and began firing into empty air, trigger pinned by a body that no longer understood its responsibilities.
I fired again, two controlled shots into the weapon mount. Metal sparked and twisted. The gun went quiet.
The APC swerved as if the driver noticed a problem and decided to solve it by being somewhere else.
I lowered the Lancer and looked at Adam.
He gritted his teeth, one hand pressed to his leg. Collins knelt beside him, hands hovering like he did not know where to touch without making it worse. Adam's face held the same tight focus as before, but the pain showed in his eyes; not panic, just anger at the interruption.
I did not ask permission.
I crossed the distance to them in a few strides. The soldiers nearest tensed and raised their weapons toward me. I stopped just far enough to signal I understood what they feared. Then I crouched beside Adam.
Up close, he looked older than I expected. Not in age; in wear. The face of someone who had already been tired for years and kept going anyway. That wear sat in the lines around his eyes, and the way his jaw set hard the moment he saw me.
He did not flinch when I reached toward him. He watched my hands instead, tracking every movement.
"I am not here to finish it," I said, voice low.
Collins snapped his gaze to me, startled by the fact that I spoke like a person.
Adam did not answer. He did not thank me for shooting the gunner either. He simply held my eyes, measuring.
I slid one arm behind his back and the other under his knees. His weight surprised me for a fraction of a second; not because it was heavy, but because it was human. It reminded me what this was, beyond vehicles and tactics.
I lifted him.
His body tensed automatically. His hand tried to keep hold of his weapon; it failed, then gave up. He sucked in a tight breath through his teeth as his wounded leg moved.
"Easy," Collins barked, half order, half plea.
I carried Adam toward a patch of cover formed by a broken section of wall and a collapsed slab. Not far, but far enough that the retreating APCs would need to be intentionally cruel to take another shot. The remaining Indie vehicles kept backing away anyway, their courage draining out through the gap where a tank had stopped existing.
Kinnear came running, helmet bouncing, a white-marked first aid pack clutched against her chest. She moved with the controlled urgency of someone who had seen too many wounds and still refused to treat them as normal.
"Put him down," Kinnear said, then stopped short as she looked up at me.
The words died halfway. Her eyes traveled up my armor, then up my shoulders, then to my face. The expression on her face was not fear alone. It was the shock of seeing a thing that did not fit into any category she had prepared for.
I lowered Adam carefully onto the flattest section of ground I could find. Dust rose around us. Adam's boot scraped stone. He clenched his jaw again, breathing through the pain.
Kinnear dropped to her knees beside Adam and tore open the pack. Her hands moved fast, practiced. She cut fabric away from the wound with shears. Blood smeared across her gloves immediately. She didn't comment; she only worked away.
Collins stayed close, weapon still in hand, still aimed loosely in my direction as if he could not decide whether I had done a good deed or merely chosen a convenient moment to get closer.
The battlefield changed again.
A deep rumble rolled in from behind the COG positions, heavy enough to vibrate the rubble under my boots. It built quickly, joined by the clank of treads and the metallic rattle of vehicles moving at speed. The sound carried authority. It sounded like a line in the sand, arriving late and still expecting respect.
COG tanks crested into view behind the defenders, hulls painted in the same worn blue-gray, guns already tracking the highway. Their turrets rotated with a mechanical steadiness that contrasted with the frantic motion of infantry. The first tank fired.
The shell tore into the retreating column, striking an APC near the rear. The explosion lifted the vehicle's back end off the ground, then slammed it down sideways. Fire spilled out in a sudden orange bloom. Debris skittered across the highway like thrown shrapnel.
A second tank fired almost immediately after. It's round hit closer to the front of the retreating group, forcing the remaining vehicles to scatter wider. Some tried to push forward faster; others attempted to peel off into side streets that were more rubble than road. Infantry ran alongside them, some dropping prone, some sprinting for cover that did not exist.
COG soldiers surged out from behind their defensive line.
They moved with renewed confidence, the kind that comes from backup and heavier guns. Rifle fire picked up again, now disciplined and aggressive, directed at exposed infantry and the weaker sides of vehicles. Shouts layered over each other, orders and calls for ammunition and directions to flank. The tension shifted; it stopped being purely survival and started becoming a pursuit.
And through it all, more soldiers began to notice me.
They came in cautious arcs, weapons raised, boots crunching over broken concrete. Some kept their eyes on the highway; others kept their eyes on me. Nobody wanted to ignore the eight-foot armored stranger who had flattened a tank and then carried a wounded officer like a piece of furniture.
Kinnear snapped, "Give me room," and the nearest soldiers stopped, half from obedience, half from the instinct not to crowd a medic. Kinnear pressed a compress to Adam's wound, then rummaged for clamps and a cartridge of coagulant. She spoke without looking up.
"Bullet went through?" he asked, voice clipped.
Adam nodded once. "Feels like it."
Kinnear grunted, then leaned in closer. She probed with practiced care, fingers pressing along the wound track. Adam's breathing tightened. Sweat beaded along his temple.
Collins finally lowered his weapon a few inches. It was not trust; it was reassessment. He stared at me as if he expected me to vanish or explode or reveal a mask. His eyes flicked to the Mark 1 Lancer still in my hands.
"That rifle," Collins said, voice cautious, "belongs to him."
I held it out, grip first, offering it back without stepping closer. Collins hesitated, then took it and set it near Adam's good hand.
"Thanks," Collins added after a beat, as if the word tasted strange.
I did not respond. Not because I wanted to be dramatic, but because I did not know how to respond in a way that would not create the wrong kind of attention. Gratitude could turn into questions. Questions could turn into containment. I had seen the laboratories of the COG. I had no desire to find out what the COG did with unknowns.
Kinnear's hands worked again. She found that the bullet fragmentation was not the issue; the issue was bleeding and shock. She took a set of forceps and began working near the wound, eyes narrowed, breath steady. Adam never took his eyes off me.
Even when Kinnear pressed hard. Even when Kinnear shifted his leg to get a better angle. Even when the pain clearly spiked, Adam's knuckles whitened around the edge of the rubble. Adam watched me like he believed the real danger stood in front of him, not inside his own leg.
It was not an unreasonable assessment.
I stood still and let him watch. My posture stayed neutral. My hands stayed empty now. I could feel soldiers around us forming a loose half-circle; not a full encirclement yet, but the beginning of one. Their rifles remained ready. Their fingers rested too close to triggers.
The tanks continued firing. The highway lit in intermittent flashes. One APC exploded in a bright bloom that sent a wheel spinning into the air. Another carrier fishtailed, then slammed into a fallen beam and stopped dead. Infantry scattered, then fell under rifle fire or disappeared behind rubble.
The retreat became a rout.
A soldier near the edge of the group shouted something about prisoners. Another shouted back, voice sharp, that there would be time for that later. The kind of argument that only happens when you believe you have won enough to debate ethics.
Kinnear finally found what she needed. She pinched, pulled, then held up a blood-slicked slug between the forceps. She tossed it into a small container without ceremony and immediately applied coagulant. Adam hissed once and then went quiet again, face hard as stone.
Kinnear wrapped the wound tightly, layering bandage and pressure dressing. She checked Adam's pulse with quick fingers, then nodded to himself as if the numbers satisfied him.
"You will keep the leg," Kinnear said. "And you will hate me for a week."
Adam managed a thin exhale that might have qualified as a laugh in another life. His eyes never left mine.
The sound of firing diminished. The tanks stopped one by one as targets vanished over broken terrain. Smoke drifted across the highway in heavy gray curtains. The last visible Indie vehicle disappeared behind a rise, engines fading, leaving only scattered infantry who either surrendered or ran.
COG soldiers began to close in.
Some approached Adam first, kneeling to check him, speaking fast and relieved. Others approached me with slower steps, their faces guarded. One soldier raised his voice.
"Sir," he called toward Adam, then stopped as if unsure whether to address Adam or the fact that Adam lay wounded beside an armored giant.
Adam finally looked away from me long enough to answer his own people. "I am fine," he said, voice tight. "Secure the area."
Then his gaze returned to me, and the question in it sharpened.
He had seen what I could do. He had seen me fire at an impossible distance. He had seen me lift him like a piece of paper. He had seen me refrain from killing anyone on his side when it would have been easy.
Those observations could only lead to one conclusion for a man like Adam Fenix.
I was a problem worth understanding.
Kinnear finished tying off the bandage and shifted back on his heels. She looked up at me again, still uneasy, still curious despite himself. His voice dropped.
"What are you?" he asked.
Collins did not correct her. He did not mock the phrasing. He stood silent, watching me the way you watch an unexploded shell: respectfully, from a distance, ready to move if it changes its mind.
I took a slow breath. I could feel the weight of the moment pressing in from all sides again, not bodies this time, but eyes and expectations. I could feel the system in my skull remain quiet, as if it had decided this counted as diplomacy, and diplomacy was not a menu option.
Adam spoke before I did, voice-controlled.
"You saved my life," he said. "That buys you a few seconds. Use them well."
So that was it. The battlefield had ended, and the interrogation had begun.
"A Lab Rat." My voice croaked; it was the only reasonable explanation as to why I had awakened within the mountains of Kadar.
My body, unlike my previous one, was far too large, bulbous, and strong. It resembled the Locusts where I had compared my looks and physical body, yet I remained human to some extent.
The group stared at my answer before Adam simply spoke.
"Well, you do look like an experiment gone array" Although Adam seemed to be joking, the tone he said it in made it seem like an insult.