The world inside the night vision eyepiece was green and grainy. Viktor held the device in his hand, pressing it against the helmet’s narrow slit. Awkward. Cumbersome. He moved along the shoulder of the highway, littered with the rusted carcasses of burnt-out cars—monuments to interrupted lives. He had been walking for several hours, and every clanking step of the exoskeleton seemed deafening to him in the night silence.

  At dawn, he found shelter in a semi-ruined church to study Cliff's maps.

  Boring, the Voice whined in his head as he plotted the route. Walking, walking, walking. No explosions, no blood. Just you, your tin can, and kilometers of mud.

  Viktor ignored him. He found the target on the map. About twenty kilometers more. He put the map aside and closed his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. He simply sat in the cold silence of the temple until twilight colored the shattered stained glass the color of caked blood.

  He set off again. The road led through a dense pine forest. And here, he saw them. Ahead, the road was blocked by a roughly hewn barrier. Beside it was a sentry booth, a thin trail of smoke curling from its chimney. Two men. Smoking, talking lazily.

  Targets pose no threat. Bypass. Stick to the mission, he dictated to himself, moving off the road deeper into the forest.

  He had almost passed them, moving in the shadows of the trees, when a snatch of conversation, amplified by the forest acoustics, reached him.

  "...fresh batch arrived at the Institute again," one said, blowing a smoke ring.

  "Yeah," the second replied. "They say the dark-haired one had a temper. Took a while to break her."

  Viktor froze. Dark-haired. Had a temper. The words hit like an electric shock.

  Well, well! Now this is interesting! the inner voice purred. Looks like we found the ones who tortured our girl.

  No, Viktor whispered through clenched teeth. The mission...

  "Yeah, they probably finished her off by now," the first guard continued and laughed—a nasty, guttural sound.

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  The laughter turned into a screech of metal in Viktor’s ears. Peripheral vision vanished, leaving only a green grainy tunnel, at the end of which was a grinning face. The smell of pine was replaced by the taste of copper in his mouth. He ceased to be Viktor, ceased to be a machine. He became a predator.

  He didn't remember stepping out of the forest. He didn't use the pistol. He didn't even draw the knife. He simply walked toward them, and every step was heavy, like the strike of a sledgehammer.

  One man's laughter cut off mid-sentence, replaced by a bewildered wheeze. The second only had time to drop his cigarette; his eyes went wide, reflecting the advancing two-meter steel figure.

  He grabbed the first one by the throat. Steel fingers clenched. The crunch of cervical vertebrae was dry, like a snapping twig. He tossed the body aside without looking. The second tried to raise his rifle, but Viktor was faster. He struck. Not with a fist. With an open palm. The blow landed on the face. A wet, nauseating sound rang out. The soldier's head jerked back at an unnatural angle. He collapsed to the ground.

  The red veil lifted as suddenly as it had descended. Viktor stood over two bodies. One with a twisted neck. The second... was unrecognizable. Just a bloody mess. He looked at his right gauntlet. It was stained with blood and something else.

  He recoiled. Recoiled from what he had done. And how he had done it.

  He began to shake. A cold that had nothing to do with the night chill pierced his spine. He fell to his knees, and the servomotors whined at the abrupt movement. He looked at his hands. Not at the gauntlets. At his own hands hidden inside. They had given the order.

  See? Not so scary, is it? the inner voice purred, now echoing hollowly in his head. The first time is always exciting. You'll get used to it.

  Viktor tore the helmet from his head. He greedily gulped the frosty air, trying to rid himself of the smell of blood. He looked at his armor, at the steel plates covered in someone else's life. He was a monster. A walking sarcophagus with a killer sitting inside.

  He punched the ground. Once. Twice. He struck until he felt dull pain in his own knuckles through the metal. And then it hit him.

  The pain. It was his. Real. But the rage... the rage was alien.

  He looked at the armor in a new way. And he was seized by an icy, existential horror, far more terrible than the sight of dead bodies. He remembered his grandfather's words: "The rage of everyone we tortured entered me..." He thought it was a metaphor.

  It wasn't a metaphor.

  The thing that lived inside him, that primal force which had broken free, was so powerful that his own body wouldn't have withstood it. His muscles would have torn themselves apart. His bones would have snapped from the tension. He would have turned himself into mush.

  He looked at the steel plates, at the servomotors, at the bundles of artificial tendons.

  This wasn't armor. This was a cage. An external skeleton that kept him from tearing himself to pieces when the real monster took over.

  He sat on his knees in the middle of the road, between two corpses, and laughed. The quiet, breaking, insane laugh of a man who had just looked into his own soul and seen the abyss.