CH07

  Death’s Raid

  Seven days after Luciano agreed to the raid, two figures lay flat against a ridge just beyond the Eastern Federation’s front line, near the lips of the Great Desert. Their suits siphoned heat and scattered signatures. Del Tenebre shadows bred for assassination. They were cataloging every detail below, where a stream of soldiers spilled from a cavern's mouth, forming lines with rehearsed precision around gargantuan Quarkon freighters that emerged one by one from the belly of the Aetherchasm. Cold air rolled from the mining hub’s throat, thick with the cries of labor and the scent of death. Above it all, the Claws of the World rose, jagged peaks that tore at the sky, as if trying to carve back their lost shape. The desert beyond mocked them with shimmering contempt, promising ruin to any who dared trace its skin.

  One of them tapped his earpiece. “The snake’s entering the trail,” he whispered. “No scales among the mass. Protocol clean.”

  His eyes glued on the forming convoy. Don Luciano had tasked them to be his eyes in hostile ground. No flicker of movement escaped him, and none left his own body in return.

  Beside him, the second Shadow shifted forward slightly, like a predator catching the scent of fresh blood.

  “Thought the boss had lost it,” he muttered, grinning. “One of those things? Insane enough. Four?”

  A gust of sand-laced wind brushed across them, muting the moment. He blinked against it, then continued.

  “But when I saw... those things... I’ll admit, I’ve got confidence now.”

  The first Shadow gave a low nod.

  “Standard formation. Standard troops. Nothing hints at elite presence.” He scanned again. “Odd, given the scale of the load.”

  “If they escape past the rally point, the chase turns surgical.”

  The second Shadow scoffed. “Hah. Would you expect this? After the beatings we’ve taken?”

  No. They wouldn’t. Not from Westland. Not the mercenaries who’d hit these routes before, desert warlords, syndicate ghosts, and sand dwellers who lacked the numbers or the grit to go after such a large convoy. No one had the number to hit a transport at this scale. Not this deep.

  This wasn’t a raid. It was an incision into the Eastern Federation arteries. The earpiece cracked, twice.

  “Salt’s on the sand. Snake breaks at the line.”

  Following the message. They glanced toward each other, then toward the desert’s lip, where the convoy would stretch itself thin. A hiss of sandy wind peeled across the ridge, erasing the two shadows in its wake.

  #

  General Feng Wo stood alone atop a platform above the cavern mouth, hands clasped behind his back, spine rigid, as befitting a man of his stature, or so he tried to appear, given the bulge of his belly pressing against a forest green uniform held together by straining buttons.

  His gaze raked across the ten colossal freighters below as they began to lift, their magneto-gravitational engines pulsing like war drums.

  Dust blasted off from the stone around them, shaken loose by the resonance. Unfazed by the cacophony, an arrogant smile tugged at his face. This was his ticket home, and possibly early retirement.

  “The Great Speaker will be pleased,” he said to the wind, as if it would carry his words back to the capital. “Ten months of fuel to bleed Westland thinner. Our people will suffer for a while, but fight harder.”

  His eyes followed the escort drones, ten per vessel, buzzing around each hull in perfect formation.

  He gauged the formation: 2500 soldiers flanking each vessel on either side, fifty thousand bodies in total, functioning as a deterrent wall of flesh.

  The orderly formation satisfied him, yet a detail soured his mood.

  No Scales had been assigned to the shipment. Headquarters had denied his request. Odd. This was their most significant single quarry in cycles. Then again, with Westland crumbling, perhaps the Scales had been redeployed to frontline suppression and spy hunts on the mainland.

  He turned, grumbling. The ten vessel captains saluted in perfect posture, his verbal punching bags, lined up to receive the edge of his mood.

  “Orders are unchanged,” he barked, belly bouncing with reverb. “Stop for nothing. This shipment is the Federation’s lifeblood. You are bound to your vessel. Bring it home or die with it.”

  Their salutes snapped in perfect unison.

  .

  Feng sneered. Their futile toil irritated him. No matter how well a commoner performed, they would never earn a high-ranking office. He had been born into command, his bloodline traced unbroken to the first Great Speaker, etched into him like an ancestral seal.

  He traced his gaze from the Aetherchasm’s depths, the crumbling front line of the war, to the desert beyond. That was his path home, but the sand offered a treacherous journey. The chasm felt like a mausoleum, and the desert threatened to strip him to the bone if he lingered.

  “Three bloody days,” he muttered as the captains dispersed. “Then I’m back to silk sheets and fine women.”

  The vessels had fully risen, their shadows crawling against the cavern wall. The lead freighter drifted forward, laboring with its burden. Behind it, the others trailed. A low hum spread through the stone, and a disciplined march moved the convoy outward.

  He watched the wind trace dust devils that spiraled beyond, perhaps warding them from the desert, perhaps not. He dismissed it and turned back to the platform to find the comfort of his command suit on the fourth vessel, only to find a young officer with a data pad in hand looking eager, or frightened. Feng couldn’t tell the difference, nor did he care. Only the irritation of comfort delayed furrowed his brow.

  “General,” the officer began, swiping his pad. “Perimeter scan picked up two unusual stationary thermal signatures on the ridgeline, overlooking the cavern's mouth.”

  Mercenary? No. Who would be suicidal enough to attack a transport on this scale? He could not help but scoff, and let the desert scum's mouths water over what they couldn’t get.

  “Ghosts,” he dismissed. “Sand scavengers. Let them ogle. None of them have the numbers. They’d rather gut each other than mount a real assault.”

  The officer hesitated and saluted before scurrying away.

  Feng adjusted his collar and headed toward the comfort of his command center. Despite all his certainty, he stilled and threw another glance at the desert beyond, his mind inquiring about the Scales, as if their presence would have sealed his certainty instead of lingering with the blowing wind. Below, the convoy advanced.

  Above, the wind twisted, as if stretching before a storm, carrying whispers of a crackling message.

  #

  Twelve hours later...

  Luciano closed his eyes. His body lay inert atop the Quarkon slab in his suite at the top of the Grand Westland Hotel, hands at his sides, cables bridging the quantum batteries below to the spinal ports feeding into his neural helmet.

  The slab hummed. A flicker of static. Then: vision. He was atop a high dune, somewhere in the Great Desert. His vision swiveled smoothly as his consciousness linked with the sensor matrix inside an advanced battle droid.

  Luciano blinked through the droid, brushing away a thin crust of sand. He stopped mid-motion as the army came into view: twenty thousand RHU soldiers, Markov’s promised army, stood in a perfect grid, motionless beneath the searing sun. Any normal human would have been drowning in sweat.

  An army of corpses. Recycled Human Units.

  The term still tasted foreign on his tongue. But his body eased as the lens registered a cluster of tents nestled at the grid’s center. At least some flesh still spearheaded the operation.

  The droid rose smoothly from the sand, almost human in its grace. As it did, he saw a growing dark line on the far horizon, rumbling with hateful haste, ready to flatten the army below.

  "Sandstorm," he muttered, voice crackling through the distance. Transmission strain made his words flicker.

  "That's our cover."

  He leaped from the dune and slid toward the army. At the perimeter, the RHU didn’t move. Only the faintest twitch or sideways glance acknowledged his arrival. No sign of struggling against the heat, despite the large canister they all carried on their back. When he had asked about the need to overload the troops, Markov stated that it was their sustenance. The logistical nature of their operation made more sense for the RHU to carry their supply.

  An ironic grin spread on his lips at the hotel, though his droid reflected no emotion. Sentience, encased in a tin can, surrounded by human bodies with no souls. He peeled open the command tent. Inside, his four Shadow officers stood alongside the RHU commander, or at least the one Markov had identified as such, hunched over a flickering tactical display. They all turned toward him in unison. The Shadows snapped to attention, stiff with respect. But he caught it: the half-second glance too long, the twitch, the quick eye-dart toward the corpse that shared their tent.

  Their unease gripped his heart. These were his men. They longed for flesh in command, for a leader with a pulse. And yet here they stood, taking orders from a tin can and a walking corpse. But no. They answered to him. Even the corpse was his to command.

  Luciano wasn’t a fool. His life was worth more than sand and shrapnel this far from home.

  The last time he’d led a raid, he’d barely escaped with skin intact.

  He said nothing. The droid nodded, expressionless, mirroring the corpse that stared back.

  The lead Shadow stepped forward and delivered the brief.

  Repositioning due to storm shift. Adjusted angles for the trap corridor. All precise. All professional.

  "Everything is in place, Don Luciano," he concluded, glancing briefly at the corpse, who nodded from his brief like a master approving of a pet's trick.

  Back in his suite, his eyelids fluttered as the data locked into place, failing to notice the Shadow's scowl.

  Moments later, his voice cracked out through the droid:

  “As planned: we cut the snake, and engage the four vessels at the back. RHUs will be divided into twin flanks, ten thousand each. Twenty-five Shadows per legion. RHUs delay their guard. Shadows seize the freighters.”

  His gaze lingered on one of the shadows, who, unlike the other officer, looked like a walking workbench with all the tools strapped to his person.

  “Oscar!” He wished he could grin through the droid, that would have lifted his men’s spirits. “When you blow the line, make sure it ignites the Creator’s fear in those Eastern Federation dogs. We need them running with their tails between their legs.”

  Oscar grinned, and the officers nodded. Despite the scale of the task, there was excitement in their eyes. Luciano had promised a hefty payout, enough to blunt their alienation toward the RHUs and his tin-shelled presence.

  The corpse nodded. If his droid had been designed to flinch, it would have.

  Luciano turned the droid toward the darkening horizon. The storm coiled upward, eager to scatter the army like leaves. Sand lifted like fabric pulled taut across the sky. It was time.

  "Thirty minutes until burial. Position your columns. Gentlemen, entrench and rest. RHUs, initiate a sleep cycle of eleven hours. The convoy arrives in twelve."

  His officers dispersed to relay commands and ready their squads. Luciano turned toward his observatory perch atop the dune. The RHU Commander followed in wordless sync.

  The droid marched without pause, the corpse following in perfect mimicry. Luciano marveled.

  Behind him, the RHUs split into two columns, east and west, forming a corridor the convoy would soon enter, unaware.

  When the spacing was set, the RHUs dropped into their final positions. No ceremony. No sound. They collapsed like puppets whose strings had been severed.

  Across the dune line, the second column dropped just as cleanly. A cloud of sand surged upward from the synchronized fall, like thousands of souls departing at once.

  From his perch beside the RHU Commander, Luciano’s droid would have shivered if it were wired for such a thing. The flesh beside him, meant to hold the reflex, remained stiff.

  “That was macabre,” Luciano breathed through the droid, soft, uncertain, as if fearing his soul might follow theirs. “Like Mahākāla came to collect.”

  The RHU Commander turned slightly. A flicker, just a flicker, passed across his face. “Dormant state initiated. Awakening in ten hours.”

  Back in the suite, Luciano’s real body tensed. The droid, of course, was as stiff as steel can be.

  The storm arrived, and its wind tore viciously across the dune. Sand waltzed into the sky, rattling tents, erasing tracks, and burying corpses. Their presence vanished, one grain at a time.

  The droid folded into the sand with perfect mechanical grace. Luciano watched the Commander fall beside it like a marionette that lost its puppeteer. The last image before he cut the link.

  For a moment, the feed stuttered. The image broke into a red-blue scatter. Static took over briefly before yielding to silence.

  The storm still rang in his ears, low, steady, like a warning.

  The desert exhaled and sealed the ambush. Luciano’s eyes opened and his mind whispered the anticipation.

  #

  Ten hours later...

  Luciano Del Tenebre stood by the semicircular window beneath the opaline dome of the Grand Westland Hotel. A drink sat untouched beside him, the condensation trailing on the glass trickled indecisively sharing his unease. Below, the city writhed in practiced luxury: fountains bloomed with artificial light, cars whispered across highways, and music spilled from the balconies of the elite. None of it reached him. Sleep had eluded him. His weary gaze pierced beyond, past the city's glittering mask, past the horizon, toward the Great Desert, where the Claws of the World loomed faintly in the dusk, like teeth in waiting. His mind drifted further east, to the Eastern Federation side of the Great Desert, where one hundred of his men hid under the sand, surrounded by tens of thousands of corpses.

  Then, static crackled through the comms.

  “Snake… two hours… inbound.”

  Luciano snapped from his trance. He turned, crossed the room in a breath and lowered the neural helmet onto his brow like a crown that no longer fit. The Quarkon slab pulsed beneath him, humming with battery current. He exhaled and flew with the wind. The hum of a machine awaking welcomed him, foreign but intimate. He was a meter beneath the dune’s skin. The droid’s sensors synced with his mind, mapping his geolocation. Above him, the sand shifted with a breeze, as if searching for the missing souls of the corpses buried beneath.

  The droid’s internals calibrated in silence, thermal sensors outlining an inert cold mass beside him: the RHU Commander.

  “Time to wake the dead,” Luciano muttered.

  He spoke through the droid: “Commander,” he said. “Initiate.”

  'Commander' was the only designation Markov had provided. No name, just a tool. Befitting for a mindless corpse.

  The cold body shifted and a muffled voice responded, creeping Luciano as if he heard hell speaking to him.

  “Copy, sir. Initiation successful. All units scheduled for initiation cycle in one hour.”

  Good. The odds were even, but the desert cloaked them. Surprise was a currency he intended to abuse.

  “For your convenience,” the muffled voice added. “You may refer to me as Carl, sir.”

  His pulse spiked.

  He almost issued a reset, locking the name and purging the abnormality. But hesitation won. One wrong trigger and this army, this chance, could collapse. He’d lost enough men in this desert before. He would not allow more to rot in its scorching heat.

  Carl said nothing more. That was… good enough. The name tasted bitter and foreign in his mind.

  A scarab drone crawled from his finger joint and burrowed upward. As it breached the surface, his vision shifted: orange sky, a soft breeze and sand stretching to every horizon. The storm had remade the landscape, like an old god in fury. Tents shredded, footprints erased: his entire ambush blanketed beneath whispering dunes.

  Luciano briefed the Shadows who were buried like old bones under the sand:

  “Platoons, enter standby. Convoy inbound, ETA two hours. Darkness is ours, but the stars are clear. Maintain thermal suppression.”

  “Yes, Don,” came the layered, sand-throttled reply.

  The scarabs stilled, twitching above the dunes. Beyond them, the Claws of the World loomed, sharp, distant. It seemed to warn him that his prey was coming.

  Two hours to impact. Twenty thousand corpses, poised to rise. And one of them had decided it had a name.

  The scaleless snake slithered closer. And Commander was now Carl, no longer a nameless corpse.

  #

  Two hours later...

  Luciano paced beneath the seeping moonlight that bled across the floor of his study.

  Any moment now...

  A soft beep, almost shy against the stillness, pulsed through the silence. He lunged for the neural link like a starving predator.

  His breath hitched as he slammed the neural link home and forced the connection. He was the droid in the dark. Then, a blink later, he was the scarab, perched above the dune, willing it into flight, each wingbeat humming the overture of something terrible.

  Through the scarab’s lens, a bloom of sand grew on the horizon. The convoy crept over lazily. The first freighter hovered into view, its massive magneto-gravitational engines displacing sand with a deep, mournful push. Below the sand, a low resonance shook through the desert like a muffled drumbeat. He turned toward his army's supposed ambush point. Only dunes filled the view. Thermal sight showed no heat signatures.

  The behemoths glided closer. The tiny frames of marching soldiers flanking each vessel moved like the countless legs of a centipede, less snake, more machine. He let the scarab hover in place and shifted consciousness to the droid.

  “Scouts, report.”

  For a beat, the silence gnawed at him. Then, a crackled voice rang in his ear, and his chest loosened.

  "Copy... Don, we are trailing behind. The snake has not had any visitors. You are clear to engage."

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  His prey was on track.

  “All units, standby. Snake is inbound. Prepare for embarkment. Carl…” He hesitated. Using the name still felt wrong.

  “Initiate the army. Time to make the Eastern Federation dogs fear death.”

  He smiled inwardly at the unintended irony. His army was an army of death, after all.

  “At your command, Don Del Tenebre. All units are initiated.”

  Something in the tone caught him off guard, a familiarity that should not exist. No. He was overthinking it.

  No time to think it through. The vibration intensified, urging his awareness back to the hovering scarab.

  The first freighter loomed before him, threatening to crush his borrowed body. The scarab darted sideways, avoiding the patrol drone’s gaze, then arced further away. A muted thrum of boots on sand seeped into his audio feed. The army stretched behind, vast, slow, and grotesque. It glided across the desert like it ruled the sand. The freighters were mind-boggling in size. One alone, he'd wager, could supply a quarter of Westland’s capital with Quarkon for months.

  His hesitation caught the next breeze and vanished, his mind already calculating the profit he’d carve from this raid with the first vessel crossing the cutting line. In his study, his jaw clenched. Then the second. The scarab’s wingbeat crescendo drowned beneath the steady drum of boots, echoing his pulse. The third slipped past. The snake slithered on, segment by segment. By the fourth, he allowed himself to breathe. The soldiers, the drones, the crew—none of them knew what death waited just beneath their feet. The fifth passed. He tracked the sixth, ready to issue the command to incise at the perfect vertebra.

  On the sand... An Eastern Federation soldier trudged wearily. The march was endless and dull. He looked up, hoping the moon might bring peace. Instead, a flicker caught his eye, a falling star? He smiled. Then frowned. No… not a star. A drone fired. It was a clean shot. That wasn’t a bug, nor a bird. It was Spy tech, maybe? His heart raced. That would mean an ambush. His officer shouted to stay in line, but he was already moving, toward the wreckage, toward the risk. Another warning could mean desertion. Or it could mean promotion. Maybe even a better life for his family.

  Luciano’s vision veered hard. The scarab spiraled, smoke trailing from its flailing body, before crashing into sand. The feed became fractured, then static.

  “Dammit,” he hissed through his droid in the dark, heart hammering in his study.

  Visuals are gone at the worst possible time. Someone saw something, enough for them to know and be on edge.

  He winced. Caution be damned. Markov would still get his four.

  “Oscar,” he barked. “Blow it!”

  His voice cracked, too loud, he feared the army above would hear him even with the sand muting him.

  Five hundred meters from the marching column, two meters under the sand, Oscar hadn’t moved in eleven hours. He clutched the detonator, holding his breath.

  Above, the silence had thickened into a vibration of boots thumping into a slow hymn of dread. Luciano's order bore through his earpiece like a starving insect. He didn’t blink. Didn’t question. He merely inhaled once and pressed the trigger.

  Above…

  The soldier sprinted toward the wreckage, ignoring shouted orders. Fell on his knees, gloved hands brushed the scarab drone’s scorched remains. His heart seized, this was surveillance tech. He turned, mouth opening to warn his officer, but the ground beneath him shook. Light tore across the desert. He and the sand lifted into the air, sucked skyward. The last thing he saw was the gentle glow of the moon.

  A rumbling explosive roar followed a fraction of a second later, the first movement of a dreadful sonata.

  The sand parted like the Creator had drawn His finger across the desert, a perfect incision between the sixth and seventh vessels. Flame erupted and sand billowed. Soldiers flew, flailing in the air. Some screamed. Some didn’t have that luxury. Fire and grit devoured all. A trench yawned open, brutal and hungry and the desert fed on men.

  Luciano’s droid breached the sand with a front-row view of the mayhem and the extensive sprawl of the convoy’s tail.

  he thought bitterly.

  The convoy writhed like a severed worm. Its head surged onward, unaware its tail was gone.

  The sixth freighter tilted hard, thrusters screaming, fighting to escape the falling sand and gaping maw sucking it.

  #

  The sand shifted, tens of thousands of movements encircling the convoy’s severed tail. Bolts of blue light stitched the air, cryo-darts fired moments before the figures themselves broke the surface. RHU soldiers rose like vengeful specters out to collect old debts left unpaid, raining calculated death onto the Federation’s flank. Their Vivifica canisters bloomed like grave flowers across the death-soaked sand. Sand still trickled from their limbs as they fired a third volley. Luciano watched with reverent disgust as the RHUs rose and Federation’s ranks fell before their mouths could shape a scream. The dreadful sonata surged into its second movement, as soldiers screamed in horror before desert ghosts that froze their comrades mid-breath.

  The Eastern Federation patrolling drones snapped into defense a beat too late, as their sensors were still locked on the gaping maw that had severed the convoy. They rained a furious cascade of projectiles onto the RHU ranks, halting the ambush mid-breath. Some RHUs barely pierced the sand before falling still, as if denied resurrection.

  The Eastern Federation army reorganized itself faster than expected forming a tight knit meat shield around the colossal freighter. The drones shrieked overhead, commanding the night sky with ruthless efficiency. Cryo-gun signatures flared, then fell silent.

  The RHU ranks began to collapse. They just… fell, motionless, as if their AI glitched out. Luciano’s breath hitched. He nearly fell forward, tumbling down the dune.

  “What is going on?” he barked, at Carl, at the desert, and at the unexplained reversal in momentum.

  RHUs are emotionless and do not register pain. How could they fall after being shot with a single bullet? Below, his army was trimmed systematically. Bodies hit the sand like mannequins clipped from their strings. He spotted Shadows moving through the storm, once synchronized with the ambush, now adrift. The battlefield no longer moved with them.

  One Shadow stumbled over two RHU bodies dodging a shot. As he rose, he caught the thinning tide of movement and dropped flat. The RHU beside him was intact. No wounds. No damage. Just silence, and those eyes, empty, almost expectant. Eyes stared back, unblinking, as if asking:

  .

  Around him, other Shadows followed suit, lunging for cover among the fallen RHU. Trapped in this predicament, surrounded by corpses and prowling enemies. Their rhythm was gone. A moment ago, they were slicing through the Federation flank. Now they were being cut down with twice the cruelty.

  Atop the Quarkon slab, his real hand trembled into a fist, one meant for Markov’s grinning face.

  The ambush was gone, his army was gone, and his men, abandoned in an uncertain destiny. All he had left was a taste of guilt from another failed raid.

  If the droid could tremble in fury, it would have. Instead, it swiveled and locked onto Carl, who stood still, impervious, almost relaxed.

  Luciano wanted a scream, a flinch, anything. But Carl kept watching with chilling serenity.

  Of course, he wouldn’t react. He had no empathy or fear. He was just a corpse watching other corpses fall. Still, Carl was the only thing he could pour his fury into, even if it meant raging at a wall.

  “What the bloody hell is going on!?” Luciano barked again. His hand twitched, ready to tear Carl limb from limb if his answer failed to make sense.

  Carl was unfazed. He lifted one arm that slowly pointed toward the crawling shapes of Federation soldiers picking through RHU corpses and spoke with cold indifference.

  “The Reset, sir.”

  The words struck but made no sense. Rage still boiling, Luciano blurted:

  “What?”

  “Numbers win battles,” Carl said.

  “However, deceit wins them with superior results.”

  The words sliced through Luciano’s thoughts, dragging him further into confusion.

  Confusion cooled him enough to scan the field again without the fog of anger clouding his vision. Yes, the RHUs had fallen. But their bodies were neatly lined. No massacre was that clean. They hadn’t just perished, they’d arranged themselves.

  Luciano found himself wondering, as dread gave way to curiosity.

  #

  The battlefield stilled with apprehension. Even the desert wind paused, as if it too sensed the unnatural event about to unfold. Luciano watched the Eastern Federation soldiers scatter, creeping across rows of fallen RHUs. He sensed their tentative steps, the brittle relief slowing their movements. How carefully they stepped, how they prodded the bodies with stiffly held rifles, never with their gloved hands.

  Soon, however, the soldiers moved with the posture of victors, their spacing widening, their cadence casual. Someone laughed. Another called out a number. Others still kicked over fallen RHU bodies, some checking for warmth. They found none, only empty shells.

  Luciano’s dread was now a memory, replaced by expectation laced with awe. A memory from the sleeping cycle initiation surfaced, leading him to a conclusion: RHUs could deactivate and reactivate at will.

  “You’re setting up a second ambush,” he muttered, realization dawning.

  Carl ignored him, lifted an arm, and snapped his fingers once. The sound was crisp, shattering the silence like a baton tapped on a conductor’s stand. Luciano flinched. His droid’s lens narrowed, combing the battlefield like a hawk locking onto prey. Then he saw movement.

  A young, unremarkable soldier crouched beside an RHU. The body had no wounds, no heat signature, and by all intents and purposes, from his perspective, his enemy was dead. He reached for the RHU’s gun. He did not see the body’s finger twitch. He did not hear the dart fire. The soldier froze mid-motion. A cryo-dart embedded cleanly between his brows. He toppled like a piece of furniture. A nearby soldier noticed the oddity and moved to check, but fell like a cut tree instead, frozen before he hit the sand.

  Across the battlefield, it repeated again and again. The dead rose with relentless cadence. As they did, the living fell. Drones spiraled from the sky, trailing smoke. RHUs rose with a grace that wasn’t human, movements too smooth and too precise, executed with silenced efficiency.

  Luciano gawked at the one-sided slaughter. The Federation’s ranks froze and fell, without ceremony, without grace.

  The battlefield had shifted. He was no longer the war master. In his stupefaction, he forgot to shout orders. His Shadows still lay flat, dazed. Dread had calcified into confusion.

  Carl lowered his hand, like a maestro closing a grand concert. The last Eastern Federation soldier fell with the final note of the third and final movement of the dreadful sonata.

  Luciano stared blankly at the absurdity of it all. Markov had made an immortal army.

  #

  The battle was over.

  The four colossal freighters had fallen silent, their crews neutralized by the invading RHUs. All that remained was the stuttering hum of magnetic engines, like the vessels themselves hadn’t yet processed what had transpired.

  His droid did not blink, but Luciano’s mind reeled. He was staring at serenity sculpted from death, frozen faces bathed in the gentle light of the moon. Some were serene. Others were locked in confusion. A few still wore the mask of hysteria.

  Once again, the battlefield stilled. A sigh of finality rode the passing breeze, trickling sand anew down the dunes, as though Mahakala had resumed time. Smoke drifted from the fallen Eastern Federation drones. The sight was uncanny. Luciano, at a loss for words, felt as though the desert had stolen the souls of the dead.

  His comms cracked.

  “Don? What… what is your command?”

  At first, he didn’t register the voice.

  Then he saw them, figures gliding among the dead, moving toward the freighters. His men. Living men. His precious Shadows.

  He had forgotten their purpose, forgotten the raid itself. The sight of them jolted him back.

  “Move! Get those transports secured!”

  His voice sounded hollow, like an echo that arrived too late—one that should have been issued moments after Carl’s fingers had snapped.

  He winced, though the droid did not. What was there left to secure? The RHUs had already completed the mission without him.

  Luciano’s droid trailed down the dune as his Shadows moved to man the freighters, Carl in tow.

  Once below, he saw the RHUs moving like ants: systematic, unfazed, unwearied. They collected the frozen Eastern Federation corpses into neat stacks before the freighter loading docks. His droid turned to Carl, tilting its head. The RHU commander said nothing.

  “Why collect the bodies?” he muttered, frustrated the droid couldn’t snarl for him.

  “Let them rot in the sun. That would send a message to the Eastern Federation dogs. Westland is no longer on its last leg.

  Is that not the goal here?”

  Carl stopped and faced the droid, equally devoid of emotion.

  “Why leave a good harvest to rot in the sun?

  The Quarkon freighters are built to preserve volatile minerals in subzero temperatures.

  They make perfect warehouses for pristine corpses.”

  Why would they need to... Luciano’s eyes widened.

  This was never about more Quarkon or yanking the lion’s tail. It was about harvesting corpses and growing the army.

  The pay was high, but the flock was dead. And the job was degrading.

  Another question lingered. He let it loose.

  “Carl…”

  The name still felt foreign, malformed in his mouth.

  “How are you, Carl?”

  Carl stared at him impassively. It felt like the hollow shell was gauging his intelligence, an insult veiled in silence, before responding, matter-of-fact:

  “Quite simply, Don Del Tenebre. A memory stored in this body... Appear strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong.”

  Again with the title. If his droid could glower, it would have.

  No, that wasn’t what mattered. It was the manner of speaking, his phrasing. A name surfaced, old and elusive, one that once ruled the world from the shadows. Carl had just quoted a Zhanlüe Xuezhai tenet.

  Did the corpse have access to its host’s past?

  He had underestimated the project’s potential. He glared at Carl, who wasn’t a walking corpse anymore. He was a corpse that remembered.

  Back at the hotel, his actual body shivered.

  Oscar arrived at the carnage, well, what was left of it, and growled at the RHUs loading corpses into the freighter.

  “This all seems rather pointless, and it’s only going to slow us down,” he muttered.

  Oscar was the only one who hadn’t seen the massacre. Ben didn’t turn to acknowledge him. That earned a curious lift of Oscar’s brow.

  “Did you eat a scarab under the sand? Why the long face? We won. Payday’s just a few days out.”

  He turned toward the horizon, toward the Claws of The World, and his expression soured.

  “Still have to cross that hell though."

  Ben snapped, voice sharp with irritation, catching Oscar mid-thought.

  “Cut it, Oscar. Lest you become one of them.”

  Oscar frowned. There was no mirth in Ben’s tone. In fact… there was fear. Not for the corpses being hauled into the freighter, but for the ones doing the hauling.

  Oscar scanned the other Shadows, scattered among the soulless mass.

  And saw it in their grim faces, like men who hadn’t won a war, only survived one.

  #

  Further ahead, closer to Eastern Federation territory, an army of under thirty thousand thundered through the desert, kicking up trails of sand that traced their flight in the night sky. Six of the ten Quarkon freighters barreled forward with them, overloaded and underdefended.

  Onboard the third ship, General Feng Wo trembled with a mounting dread that numbed his fingers and muddled his thoughts. The mission had collapsed. Four entire legions were lost, swallowed by the sand. Yes. He must believe it. His gaze leaned on the radar providing real-time telemetry. The four stalled transport markers hadn’t moved since. Their signals were either tampered with, or the raiders had removed the trackers. That alone told him what kind of precision he had fled from, it was the right call. And now he had to explain it to the witch at headquarters, and more importantly, to the Great Speaker. Neither would see reason.

  He stabbed the comms dial with a trembling hand.

  The hologram flared to life, cold blue and flickering. Supreme Commander Ling Yun of the Eastern Federation Front stared back, composed as ever.

  “Feng Wo... it’s unusual to receive a transmission before your convoy reaches the depot. Would this have anything to do with the four stranded dots on our field map, two hours behind you and not moving?”

  Her voice was velvety, laced with mock concern and an ounce’s worth of sarcasm.

  Feng Wo’s mouth moved, but no words came. How could he explain it? That the desert had opened? That demons, no, something worse, had risen from the sand and erased four legions before a scream could form?

  He watched the small holographic figure's eyes narrowing as it snapped.

  “Speak!”

  He flinched, audibly. Then broke.

  “We were ambushed! D… demons of the sand! I… I don’t know!” His voice cracked, eyes darting like prey seeking cover, expecting the hologram to lunge at him.

  “Hold yourself together, you fool.” She cut his rambling short with a soft tone. It felt like a slap to him.

  “I expected reliability, Feng Wo. I did not expect you to be a coward hiding behind the transmission delay. What took you so long to update me?”

  Ling Yun leaned out of frame, and an inaudible whisper leaked through the transmission.

  “We… we need to catch them!” Feng Wo stammered, forgetting himself as panic surged with the uncertainty of what Ling Yun had said. “You must send a retrieval force, or we’ll lose everything!”

  “I must?” Ling Yun’s tone sliced through the channel like drawn wire. “And who are you to command me, General?”

  Her gaze sharpened. “If the transports are lost, it’s your skin on the line, not mine.”

  She leaned closer to the feed. “How many did you see? What did they look like?”

  Feng Wo hesitated. Then, grasping for credibility, he lied.

  “Black. All black. Tens of thousands.”

  The line fell silent as the hologram scratched its head, long enough to aggravate the lie’s consequences.

  Ling Yun’s hologram shifted, doubtful. “Del Tenebre shadows…?” Her hand rubbed her chin.

  He bit his lips, as though caught red-handed. Del Tenebre’s shadows were known to raid transport. But they were whispered assassins, not soldiers. Saboteurs, who had no army and were never this bold.

  Feng Wo brooded. The Westland front had seemed lax, ripe for disruption. That convoy was supposed to elevate the playing field. The resources aboard those freighters were earmarked to push the momentum gained these past months into an irreversible push toward wetland soil. He glared at the hologram bitterly.

  "Things would not have turned this way if I had Scales!"

  The hologram cursed.

  “Damn it, Feng Wo!” Her voice dismissed his brooding and accusation.

  “Our lines are stretched thin already. If I pull a detachment, we open ourselves to retaliation.”

  Her eyes locked on his again.

  “But if we don’t recover those ships…”

  There was no need to finish the sentence.

  Still, she made the decision. The retrieval force would be formed. She would choose the composition personally. She’d have to.

  “You’d better pray we get those ships back, Feng Wo,” she said, voice dropping into iron. “Because if we don’t, your disgrace will stain my name.”

  The hologram blinked out.

  Feng Wo stared into the space it left behind, breath ragged. His heart thudded against his ribs like a drum of shame. Staining Ling Yun's reputation was the least of his concerns.

  He was a nobleman with a title that ordinarily made him virtually faultless. Now the title would only make the spectacle of his downfall all the more satisfying.

  He could already hear the court whispering. Coward. Failure. Disgrace.

  But what terrified him most was the memory that wouldn’t loosen its grip, the look of them, those black ghosts rising from the sand like vengeance embodied. And worse: the imagined gaze of the Great Speaker, cold and dispassionate, uttering the verdict form on his grubby fat lips.

  Execution. No. He would push the blame on the officer commoners and buy himself as much leeway as possible. A sadistic grin spread on his lips, as though insanity had already placed a hand on his shoulder.

  Back at the Eastern Federation Headquarters, deep in the Aetherchasm, Ling Yun stood before a glass window that overlooked the chasm in its majesty. Her mind, however, was plotting her next move, one that would save her skin.

  Screens blinked behind her. She exhaled through her nose, and steam clouded the glass, blurring the chasm and revealing her sour features. She turned toward the ops table, gaze sharpening as if each icon were a piece on a board.

  Feng Wo had made a mess. But there was always leverage in a mess. She would let him flail, let him fall, so long as his collapse bought her time.

  Never let a collapse go to waste, she reminded herself.

  Already, she was calculating: the strength of the retrieval detachment, the quiet reallocation of elite troops. The convoy had been under-defended by her design. She hadn’t assigned any of the Scales, her finest units, because she thought Westland was broken.

  That error stung, but she would not let it be her downfall. It would not happen again.

  “Bring me General Ming,” she said to her adjutant, who snapped to attention.

  The operative nodded and vanished.

  Ling Yun stood still for a moment longer, then her lips curled in a calculative scheme.

  “Del Tenebre…” she whispered. “How about a taste of your own medicine.”

  #

  While Feng Wo’s world spiraled into madness and Ling Yun schemed from her perch in Aetherchasm, the battlefield between them was swept clean. Only snail-like trails remained, all tracing back to the freighters.

  Luciano walked toward the command deck of the second freighter, where Carl stood watching the Claws ahead, outside. The RHUs moved in unison. Their column was reformed, flanking each vessel with two thousand five hundred units.

  His droid halted beside Carl, who wore that impassive, unbothered mask. He did not look like a man who had won a battle. Instead, he gave the impression of a manager supervising a production line. His quarry was just another batch of stock ready to be processed.

  Carl turned to face the droid.

  “Shipment is secured. The added load will not reduce our pace. Rendezvous with Beta Force at the front is expected in approximately twenty-five hours. Shall we proceed, Don?”

  His tone was business as usual, as though the massacre he had just orchestrated was nothing but hubris.

  Luciano's expression soured, and his droid leaned forward, intent on throttling the RHU. His title, “Don,” rubbed like salt on his wounded ego.

  His consciousness taunted him:

  Ruppert's needs now seemed real and his concern valid, but he shrugged it off.

  he spat back at his consciousness. The opportunist had returned. He would walk out of this richer than ever.

  Oscar and Ben joined them. Oscar was still covered with sand, and his tools needed care. His hair was disheveled by grit-laced wind. He grinned, almost eager. Ben, however, stood stiff and reluctant, his gaze flicking between the endless lines of RHU soldiers, the phantom stillness of Carl’s form, and then to him, or to the droid he was.

  “Well boss, it looks like the haul was a success, but why the bodies?”

  Luciano winced at the cheerful tone masking the concern. Even Oscar was unnerved.

  “We all are getting paid,” he answered, lifting a hand to Carl, accentuating the word .

  Oscar's eyes widened briefly as his mind puzzled the pieces.

  “Oh... that.”

  Luciano did not miss the slight sidestep, as if Oscar had just woken from a dream into a nightmare as if he had forgotten that these were no humans they were working with.

  His eyes, or rather his droid, narrowed on a pitch-black line that erased the star as it advanced in their direction. Another sandstorm approached.

  A second passed.

  Then, he announced, “Let's move.”

  Oscar and Ben nodded and peeled off to give the order, but not before casting a skeptical, wary glance at Carl. They no longer worried about enemies, but of death walking with them, of an uncertain future ahead.

  Luciano's droid turned one final glance toward Carl.

  “They’ll be coming for us soon,” he stated, matter of fact. Under no circumstance would the Eastern Federation let them escape safely through the Claw or the Aetherchasm, even if he used his hidden trails.

  “How do you plan to deal with retaliation?”

  Carl did not turn, his attention still glued to the Claws.

  “That is Mother's wish,” he said. “Retaliation means more bodies. The more we acquire, the more we grow. And our growth means Westland's salvation, is it not?”

  That sounded like sophistry. He swallowed hard, unable to shake the feeling that he was just a pawn in a far larger scheme than Carl would let on.

  The convoy shifted into motion, a centipede of death slithering along the sand, swallowed by the sandstorm that erased the traces of battles, as if the creator himself did not want to remember what had transpired.

  A blinking light flailed in the storm, tethered on a line latched to the fourth freighter. It was one of the trackers, dead since the ambush and discarded by the shadow. It had come back online.

  “And the bait is set,” Carl whispered.

  Supreme Commander Ling Yun jumped from her chair as a single blip flicked to life on her radar.

  Her lips curled, scheming.

  “There you are, you thieving rat,” she murmured.

  She did not need to issue a command; General Ming was already en-route.

  Luciano Del Tenebre only had so many routes home.

  #