The hologram faded into gray particulate, but the coordinates remained stamped behind Isken’s eyelids like phosphor burns. "Don't look at me like that, Fennic. Put the damn slate away before you drop it in a ditch." Fennic scrambled to shove the ruggedized drive beneath his patchwork canvas smock, teeth clicking together like dice in a cup. "Isken, that was you. That was your face. Why did your face look like an officer who actually had breakfast this morning?" "Because the past is an overfunded joke," Isken muttered, checking the slide on his scarred service pistol. He glanced toward the mist-slicked trail ascending into the quarantine gorge. Behind them, the massive silhouette of the resurrected Wolf-Chimera padded silently over wet slate, its bone-fused paws leaving depressions the size of coal scuttles, its ribcage glowing with sickly green necrosis. They hit the low perimeter gate of the Black-Mire Ward twenty minutes later. The rock walls rose hundreds of feet into the ceiling of smog, corrugated tin shanties stacked haphazardly atop oxidized steel scaffolding like a termite mound built out of artillery scrap. "Halt right there, ditch-rat," a voice drawled from the wooden staging platform above the trench-line. Gavril Krest stepped down off a stack of salvaged munitions crates, polished calfskin boots splashing into the muck. He was wrapped in a tailored fox-fur mantle, his fingers weighed down with heavy brass rings salvaged from dead bankers. Behind him stood six mercenaries from the Brass-Fang Guild, heavy auto-shotguns leveled at Isken’s chest. "You're late on the toll, Isken," Gavril said, teeth gleaming behind a manicured beard. "And word travels fast down the spillway. Little Fennic found something bright in the mud out near Sector Nine. Hand it over. The Guild will credit you three tins of spoiled dog meat and half a box of damp nine-millimeter." "The drive isn't trade goods, Gavril," Isken said, not lifting his hands. "Go back up to your penthouse and oil your mustache." Gavril drew an ivory-handled revolver in one fluid jerk. Without another warning, he pulled the trigger. The crack of the shot was deafening in the narrow cut. Lead bit into Isken’s left collarbone, tearing through wool, flesh, and gristle. The impact spun him half a step backward into the slime. Fennic shrieked, folding into a fetal ball behind a rotting railway tie. Isken looked down at the dark, smoking tear in his coat. A dull, rhythmic heat throbbed beneath his ribs, but the pain felt detached, muffled beneath a cold, static buzz vibrating behind his ears. [Tune in next week, folks! Our boy took one right in the meat. That's a minus five for tactical awareness, but a solid ten for rugged fashion. Shall we let him have it, or should we introduce him to the family business?] "You should have taken the dog meat," Gavril scoffed, lowering the smoking muzzle. "Strip him." "I wouldn't step forward," Isken whispered. He spat a mouthful of dark brassy bile onto Gavril’s boot leather. The mist behind Isken peeled backward. The ground buckled beneath sudden weight. Four stories of stitched tendon, exposed canine spine, and calcified rib plating surged forward from the fog. The Wolf-Chimera lowered its vast skull, jaws parting to reveal rows of jagged, human-thighbone teeth dripping with viscous embalming fluid. A low, sub-audible vibration hummed from its chest, rattling the loose sheet metal across three tiers of the ward. The Brass-Fang mercenaries froze, their shotguns dipping toward the mud. "What... what did you bring back?" Gavril stammered, his ivory revolver trembling as he retreated two steps. "Shoot it! Kill it!" "It’s already dead, you illiterate fop," Isken rasped. From the shadow cast by the beast's flank, the Pale Stalker materialized. It folded into reality through the sheer fabric of the fog without a sound. A gaunt, translucent specter in an officer's trench coat, its face an empty oval of shifting frost. It raised a long, spectral suppressed pistol with absolute, mechanical stillness. *Pfft.* A jet of pale blue phosphor punched through Gavril’s forehead, blowing out the back of his skull in a spray of vaporized marrow. The guild master retained his grip on the revolver even as his knees buckled and he collapsed into the bog. Silence seized the gully, thick and choking with the stench of ozone. "My turn," Isken said. He reached out with his bloodstained right hand, curling his fingers like he was tugging on invisible fishing line. [Host targeted. Extraction completed. Welcome our newest intern, folks! Minimum wage, maximum overtime!] The flesh on Gavril’s corpse sizzled and melted into boiling grease, running off his bones in seconds. The ivory-white skeleton jerked, shuddering as spectral tendons snapped into place around its joints. The skull rattled, jaw clicking furiously as it scrambled to its feet, stripped clean of its fine clothes, fur, and pride. "Isken—you bastard! What did you do to my hair? What is this smell? Why can't I feel my feet?!" Gavril’s dead voice rattled out through dry, clattering teeth, a tinny vibration echoing within his hollow ribcage. "Grab those crates," Isken commanded. "I am the Guild Master of the Brass-Fang! I refuse to haul—" Isken’s will seized the marrow of the skeleton's spine, forcing it downward. Gavril’s bony arms swept under two massive steel boxes of forty-millimeter mortar shells, each weighing eighty pounds. The joints screamed under the load, but the necromantic tether held him fast. "Carry them. And keep up," Isken said, stepping over Gavril’s puddle of dissolved flesh. The surviving Brass-Fang guards turned to sprint for the stairs, but a single, deafening crack rang out from the gantries eighty yards above. A round slammed into the ground inches ahead of the lead guard’s boots, showering him in shattered shale. "Drop the scatterguns and clear the gully," a woman’s voice cut through the iron mist, flat, dry, and cold as river ice. Mireya Solen stepped out onto the corroded gantry crane overhead, cycling the bolt on an anti-materiel rifle that looked almost too long for her slender frame. Her dark hair was tied back with dirty lead wire, a soot smudge tracking down one cheekbone. She vaulted over the guardrail, dropping ten feet to land lightly on a weathered boiler, then hopped down into the muck beside Isken. She spared no glance for his bleeding shoulder or the four-story Chimera standing obediently behind him. Her gray eyes fixed entirely on the data-pad peeking out of Fennic's jacket. "Where did you drag that out of?" Mireya asked, her rifle barrel resting casually against her hip. "Sector Nine," Isken said, his voice tightening. "Buried under a collapsed bunker." She reached out with a grease-stained thumb, swiping the frost from the edge of the casing. A bitter, sour expression pinched the corners of her mouth. "That’s an Aegis-Seven cryptographic casing. The seal has three cross-hatches on the lock-pin. Only one detachment carried that sequence through the chasm during the first purge." She looked up into Isken’s eyes, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper. "That was the unit that left my squad locked in the lower filtration vaults to drown in the bile. Why is your face in its boot-sequence?" Isken opened his mouth, but before he could muster a deflective lie, the canyon itself screamed. An iron siren mounted atop the ward's highest precipice began to wail, a broken, warbling shriek that rattled the scrap walls. It was immediately drowned out by the thunder of collapsing steel from deep within the gorge. Below them, past the residential stacks, the quarantine blast doors that separated the slums from the infected deeper caverns were buckling outward, groaning as hundreds of tons of iron were sheared like paper. The alarm wasn't warning of an attack from the wastes. The breach was coming from the inside.

Dead Weight and Ammo Crates