The thermal cannon screamed, a blinding white funnel opening in the barrel to turn flesh into ash. Lu Wanchen did not brace. He kicked off the rusted plating beneath his feet, the metal crumpling like foil under the sudden burst of explosive force. Targeting arrays swept the air, red laser grids frantically painting empty sand. The digital guidance Suite on the Ruin Bringer could track missiles moving at Mach 6, but it looked for kinetic mass, heat trails, exhaust bloom. It had no logic for a human body sliding along the path of least resistance, carried on a slipstream of displaced air. He dropped out of the sky like an autumn leaf. His palms met the glowing muzzle of the heavy cannon before the charge could break the lip. He did not fight the heat. He aligned his wrists, twisted his hips by a fraction of an inch, and drove an open palm strike—*Mountain Cleaver*—straight into the firing pin's hydraulic seat. A dull, ringing thump echoed through the stadium. The reinforced super-alloy barrel folded outward like peeling fruit. The contained blast misfired inward, blowing the Ruin Bringer's left arm completely out of its shoulder socket in a rain of hydraulic fluid and screaming circuits. The towering war machine pitched sideways, its gyroscopes shrieking, before crashing onto the pulverized ferro-concrete of the arena floor with a ground-shaking boom. Silence fell across the three hundred thousand spectators in the bowl. Wanchen landed on one knee, his lungs burning with copper and salt. Beneath his torn flight suit, the hard quartz creeping across his breastbone throbbed, locking another inch of muscle into petrified stillness. He coughed, spitting a mixture of dark blood and fine, glittering powder onto the dirt. "Match concluded!" the automated referee drone blared, its synthetic voice echoing across the rafters. "Cadet Lu Wanchen wins by total mechanical disablement! The Genesis Pod allocation—" The roof shattered. A four-story shadow plunged through the reinforced dome of the colosseum, trailing torn girders and severed power lines. It landed dead center in the arena, the impact shockwave kicking up a curtain of pulverized stone that knocked the referee drones out of the air. It was a monstrosity of black composite and twitching, synthetic muscle-fibers—a custom siege chassis that bore no markings from any sanctioned manufacturer. Four hydraulic legs anchored it like an arachnid, and from its midsection protruded two heavy harvesting arms tipped with surgical drill bits. The external speakers crackled, projecting the Arch-Splicer's voice, stripped of all its grandfatherly warmth, replaced by a cold, grating rasp. "Cadet Lu Wanchen has been compromised," the elder's voice boomed across the Star Network feed, rattling the glass of the observation rings. "Biometric scans indicate a rogue sentient code-construct has seized his motor cortex. Under Aegis Martial Statute 404, I am executing an immediate field purge. Stand down." "Vang!" Wanchen called out, standing upright despite the agony tearing through his ribs. "You sit upon a mountain of corpses and call yourself a healer. You want what is in my blood? Come take it yourself." "Insolent whelp," the machine spat. A crane-like arm swept horizontally, moving at sickening speed. Wanchen crossed his forearms to deflect, gathering every scrap of remaining Qi to cushion the blow, but the raw torque of an industrial piston hit like an atmospheric reentry. His forearms held, but the impact caved his sternum inward. Three ribs snapped with a wet crunch. Wanchen flew sixty meters backward, skidding through the crushed debris until he smashed into the arena's perimeter barrier. He slumped forward, his vision swimming in grey static. His petrifying heart skipped two beats, then seized, locking his breath in his throat. He couldn't lift his left arm. The bone was intact, but the nerves refused to transmit past the shattered shoulder. The black warmachine lumbered forward, its drills spinning up with a high-pitched drone that set Wanchen's teeth on edge. "A miraculous specimen," Vang whispered through the comms, audible only to the arena. "Every strike makes your marrow denser. When I drain you, my cellular breakdown will reverse in hours. You should thank me. Your useless life will grant eternity to the masters of the Aegis." Wanchen wiped his bloody chin on his shoulder. He looked past the advancing horror, his gaze rising toward the third tier of the eastern observation deck. There, high above the dust, a lone glass booth flickered with rogue data lines. Luo Qingyi was slumped over a jury-rigged terminal, her trembling hands buried inside a bypass relay. Her skin was ghastly pale, her eyes bloodshot from neural strain. She had jacked her personal diagnostic datapad directly into the venue's primary broadcasting array. *Buy her five seconds,* Wanchen thought. Just five. He dragged himself to his feet, setting his heels into the broken stone, his breath a wheezing gasp. "Your flesh rots from within, old man. No marrow can save a spirit that has already decayed." "Die like a dog, then," Vang snarled. The machine raised a broad crushing foot. Then, every holographic screen in the colosseum went white. The live broadcast feed from the Star Network cut out, replaced by a cascading flood of crimson medical logs. Towering twenty-meter projections filled the sky above the arena, visible to billions across the orbital ring. *PATIENT FILE: VANG, ARCH-SPLICER.* *CELLULAR STABILITY: 11%. TERMINAL DEGENERATION.* *UNSANCTIONED PROCEDURES: 1,412 ILLEGAL GENETIC HARVESTS.* *CADET MATCH TAMPERING CONFIRMED.* Audio recordings, captured from the Arch-Splicer's private spire chambers, thundered through the venue's public address system. Vang's own voice echoed across the crowd: *"Let the boy fight until his heart calcifies to the limit. When he wins the pod, override the doors and pump in the paralytic. We drain him completely while he's warm."* The arena erupted into absolute chaos. Alarms blared. Students and high-ranking officials leaped from their seats in horror, pointing at the dreadnought. Inside the cockpit, Vang stared at the data streams flooding his displays, letting out a raw, ragged shriek of humiliation. Decades of pristine reputation, centuries of carefully cultivated godhood—shredded in an instant by a dying grease-monkey. "The mechanic..." Vang hissed, his voice distorting into a feral scream through the speakers. "That filthy little gutter rat!" The dreadnought's torso swiveled violently away from Wanchen. Its central chest plating ground open, revealing an illegal graviton core spinning at maximum velocity. A blinding violet lance of radiation began gathering at the core's center, humming with enough output to vaporize half the eastern concourse. Vang locked his crosshairs not on the floor, but straight up at the fragile glass box of the third-tier repair deck where Qingyi sat, completely defenseless. "Die with your garbage, girl!" Vang howled as the core reached critical charge.

Harvest of the Arch-Splicer