Chen Feng brought the adamantine axe down in a final, furious arc, severing the last of the thick, noodle-like vines ensnaring Flora's armor. It shrieked against the hardened cellulose, a stark sound against the distant war-cries. He reached a hand out to haul her up.

  Flora Rosenkrantz surged to her feet, ignoring his extended hand, her APt-3 'Saturnus' armor shedding clumps of mud. Then, to his utter shock, she drove her armored palm into the side of his helmet. A resonating echoed inside his skull.

  The impact was more startling than painful, a sharp crack that jarred his teeth and sent a static flicker across his display. For a full second, Chen Feng froze, utterly bewildered.

  "Uh... I think Alina Ludwig holds the exclusive license for daily beatings" he side-stepped to evade her second shove. "And you are not her. What the fuck is going on?"

  "I am not a root vegetable!" Her synthesized voice, for the first time, carried a raw, sharp edge that cut through the usual monotone. "You prioritized insulting me over monitoring enemy movements. You treated rescuing lives as a privileged right instead of your soldiering responsibility. Your conduct is unacceptable because everything about it is . Now, shut it. I will not say it again."

  "That was me being 'gentle'," Chen retorted, ignoring the eyeless glare from her visor. "Would you prefer I'd left you tangled? You looked ridiculous. I saved you. I earned the jab."

  Flora's voice, normally sterile and analytical, crackled with something alien—fury. "You were supposed to—"

  Her words were violently severed.

  From the dense canopy and chaotic brushes, a ragged volley of fire . It wasn't aimed, but a saturation attack. Homemade mortars coughed, sending canisters of shrapnel and burning phosphorous arcing down to detonate among the trees. One canister, the size of a kitchen gas cylinder, shattered and sprayed its napalm payload across the terrain. Violent fire surged up, swallowing logs and brush, turning wet, radiated foliage into sickening streams of vapor and smoke.

  Without another word, Chen and Flora turned and ran. Chen sidestepped, letting Flora sprint past him. He stowed the adamantine axe on his tactical mag-webbing, right over his power pack, gripped his carbine, and ducked into a sprint as the firestorm bloomed at their backs. Then they saw it: the Sp-16a "Juno," their .

  The skidded sideways, its tracks churning mud and shattered flora, presenting its armored flank like a shield. Alina's voice was a raw, static-laced scream over the external speakers, cutting through the chaos of the jungle. "Get in! NOW!" she roared, her helmeted head a stark silhouette in the commander's cupola.

  Chen Feng and Flora didn't need telling twice. They lunged for the rear hatch, boots slipping in the muck. They were two steps away from the threshold, from the promise of Adamantine plate and 3cm autocannon support.

  Promise turned to purgatory.

  The world detonated.

  It wasn't a sound so much as a physical annihilation of air. A massive IED, suspended in the canopy of a gargantuan, mutated tree, erupted. The shockwave hit them like the fist of a god. Chen was pounded from above and smashed downward, his armored body slamming into the Vulture's rear ramp with a deafening . Flora was tossed like a doll into a thicket of glowing fungi. Mud, wood, and shrapnel rained down.

  Dazed, ears ringing, Chen pushed himself up on all fours. His internal diagnostics were a frantic, scrolling red text in his visor.

  [Concussive trauma registered. Armor integrity: 96.9%]

  Before he could get his bearings, Flora's voice cut through the ringing, sharp and precise even as she struggled to rise. "Energy spike! Incoming EMP! Faraday field, Alina! Now!"

  Inside the IFV, Alina's hands flew across her console. "Activating!"

  The shuddered. From launchers along its roofline, a half-dozen canisters shot into the air, arcing out to form an imperfect eleven-meter sphere around the vehicle. They detonated with soft , releasing not shrapnel, but a cloud of hyper-conductive mono-filament carbon wires—a shimmering, deadly web that hung in the air for a critical second.

  The EMP hit.

  A silent, invisible tsunami. Its effects were spectacular. The very air seemed to crackle. The floating mono-wires glowed white-hot, channeling the immense electromagnetic pulse, acting as a sacrificial buffer. Arcs of blue lightning danced between them, creating a momentary, brilliant cage of energy. The smell of ozone, sharp and metallic, flooded the area. The 's external lights died, and its engine whined down into an ominous silence.

  For Chen Feng, the world inside his helmet went dead. His tactical projections, comms, and enhanced optics flickered and died, plunging him into a sudden, claustrophobic darkness, broken only by the narrow viewport of his helmet. A systems warning, the last to die, flashed:

  [FARADAY INTERCEPTION SUCCESSFUL. SECONDARY SYSTEMS OFFLINE. MANUAL OPERATION REQUIRED.]

  The power armor itself, a masterpiece of hydraulic and mechanical engineering, was still moving. He was a man trapped inside a functioning, one-full-ton sarcophagus.

  And then the Scavengers came.

  They rose from the foliage, from behind trees, their guttural war cries now filling the void left by the silenced technology. A massive volume of suppressive fire erupted—not aimed, but a storm of solid slugs, homemade rockets, and flechettes designed to pin them down and chop them to pieces.

  "Damn it!" Chen snarled, the word echoing inside his silent helmet. He brought his Type-95k carbine to his shoulder, relying on pure, unaugmented human instinct. The weapon felt dumb and heavy in his hands.

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  He saw movement—two Scavengers ducking behind a dense curtain of vines, thinking themselves safe. Chen aimed through the familiar iron sights of his carbine and squeezed the trigger twice.

  The Lp-95k responded with its characteristic brief, blinding blue flash. The pulses tore through the vines as if they weren't there. On impact, the massive energy discharge created fist-sized plasma explosions. The lurid, bioluminescent green of the jungle was violently painted over with a mist of vaporized blood and scorched organic matter. The two Scavengers were gone, replaced by a grotesque, steaming Rorschach test of crimson on the foliage behind them.

  It was brutal, archaic, and horrifically effective.

  Chen Feng's world had shrunk to the narrow, un-augmented viewport of his helmet. He swept his carbine across the treeline, his breathing loud in the sudden, dead silence of his armor. There—a rustle of leaves, a flicker of unnatural movement in the dense canopy. He didn't hesitate. He fired a three-round burst into the greenery. The pulse lasers tore through the foliage, their plasma flashes illuminating the shadows within, but no scream followed. They were hunting him.

  The attack came from behind.

  A steel bolt—a sharpened rebar with a length of a man's arm, launched from a heavy ballista—slammed into the sloped armor of his power pack with the sound of a cathedral bell being struck. The impact threw him forward a step. The bolt shattered, the hardened steel failing against the Adamantine super-alloy, clattering to the ground in pieces.

  Somehow even among the chaos of the battle, a memory, unbidden, surfaced from his pre-cryostasis life. Chen remembered some voice lines from an ancient video game he played, back in China, 21st century. The audios played inside his mind.

  “Critical hit!”

  “That one bounced!”

  But the armor was more than just metal. A fraction of a second later, a pale, ghostly tactical projection flickered to life in the corner of his damaged visor. The APt-3’s secondary AI, hardened against EMPs, had triangulated the shot.

  [Kinetic impact. Bearing 278. Threat assessed.]

  Chen spun on his heel, servos whining in protest. He saw a figure draped in a cloak of vines and scrap metal, reloading a heavy, crank-powered ballista on a tree branch thirty meters away. Chen fired. His shots went wide, chewing splintered craters into the tree trunk as the Scavenger dropped out of sight. The archaic sights and his own adrenaline were betraying him.

  It was then he noticed the soft hum returning to his armor. The flickering projection stabilized, painting targeting reticles over the jungle. A status report scrolled.

  [SYSTEMS REINITIALIZING... COMMUNICATION OFFLINE. TELESCOPIC OPTICS OFFLINE. PRIMARY SENSORS... ONLINE.]

  He had his eyes back. But Alina was still silent.

  His own situational awareness now restored, he looked toward the . What he saw sent a fresh jolt of ice through his veins.

  Warrant Officer Flora Rosenkrantz was not fighting. She was at the rear hatch, her armored fingers jammed into the minuscule gap between the door and the frame, her whole body straining against fifteen tons of sealed Adamantine. She was trying to it open with brute force.

  "What the fuck are you doing?!" Chen barked, his voice loud in his now-functioning helmet. He staggered to her side, putting his back to the IFV's hull to cover her. "Why is it sealed?!"

  Flora didn't stop her futile effort. "The internal electronics are dead! The manual overwrite is on the ! I cannot access it!" Her synthesized voice was strained, the calm precision fraying into frantic exertion.

  The memory hit Chen Feng with the force of a physical blow. The Sp-16a's manual overwrite lever. Of course. A safety feature to prevent forced entry from the outside. The electronic control, which could be operated remotely, must have been fried by the EMP. They were locked out.

  He slammed a fist against the cold hull. "Alina!" he shouted, switching to the external speaker, his voice raw. "Alina, the back door! Get it open! Can you hear me?!"

  Silence.

  No response from Alina Ludwig. No sound from within the vehicle. No hum of backup systems, no chatter of the internal comms. The was a silent, immobile fortress, and they were trapped outside its walls.

  The sheer, terrifying helplessness of it all—the silence, the locked door, the unseen enemy, the fate of their commander unknown—boiled over.

  Chen Feng drove his armored fist into the hull again, a useless, furious gesture.

  “FUCK!”

  The world dissolved into a storm of shrieking metal. A volley of sharpened rebar bolts, fired from multiple ballistae, hammered into Chen’s chest and shoulder plates. It wasn't the precise strike of before; this was a sledgehammer blow meant to overwhelm. The concussive force was immense, knocking his legs out from under him and slamming him back-first into the mud with a sound like a car crash.

  Before the diagnostics could even finish scrolling across his visor, a new threat whined through the air. Grapple hooks, crude three-pronged claws on high-tensile cables, shot from the tree line. He batted one aside with the barrel of his carbine, his armor's servos screaming as he twisted to avoid two more. But the last cluster found their mark. One bit deep into a shoulder pauldron, another snagged his leg, a third clamped onto his power pack. The cables went taut.

  With a brutal, mechanical jerk, he was yanked off the ground and dragged through the muck. The world became a dizzying, nauseating blur of inverted trees and churning earth. He caught a fleeting, stabilized image from his sensors: his attackers weren't on foot. They were astride roaring, scavenged motorcycles, their tires churning through the swamp, the grapple lines spooling from winches mounted on the frames.

  His grip on the Type-95k was instinctual, a soldier's reflex. The armor's magnetic hand-lock engaged with a definitive , sealing the weapon to his palm. He was a prize, a heavy, struggling catch being hauled back to the hunter's den.

  "Engage all joint-locks! Flood interior with impact-absorber foam!" he snarled, the command sharp and immediate.

  The APt-3 complied without hesitation. A series of heavy, hydraulic echoed inside the suit as every joint—ankles, knees, hips, elbows, shoulders—locked solid. It was like being encased in instant concrete. A moment later, a low hiss filled his ears as the suit's emergency system injected quick-expanding polymer foam into the voids around his body, cocooning him in a shock-absorbent shell. The HUD switched to a stark, simplified display:

  [BRACE FOR IMPACT MODE ACTIVE.]

  The ride was a symphony of violence. He was a battering ram, crashing through saplings, smashing over rotten logs, and skidding across rocks. The world was a cacophony of shattering wood, screeching metal, and the relentless roar of the bikes. He was a passenger in his own body, a brain jarred inside a fortified shell, enduring a kilometers-long car crash.

  The chaos ended as abruptly as it began. The riders, in a final display of berserk showmanship, slung him into a clearing littered with rusting industrial debris. He hit a crumpled metal container with a deafening, final , the impact rattling his teeth even through the foam and locked joints.

  For a moment, there was silence, broken only by the receding snarl of the motorcycles. They hadn't even noticed. In their violent haste, they had snapped their own grapple lines. Chen saw the frayed cables, still hooked to his armor, trailing in the mud like severed umbilical cords. The madmen were still yelling, still riding, oblivious that their prize was no longer in tow.

  Slowly, deliberately, the joint-locks disengaged with a series of pressurized sighs. The foam receded, draining back into its reservoirs. Chen took a single, steadying breath.

  He keyed his squad comms, his voice flat, devoid of panic, a stark contrast to the madness he had just endured. "This is Chen Feng. I am now isolated from the squad. Maintain comms silence. Do not attempt a rescue. Prioritize your own survival and mission integrity. Acknowledge when safe."

  There was no immediate response, only the hum of an open channel. He didn't expect one.

  With his carbine still locked to his hand, he wrenched himself free from the dented container and rose to his feet. The mag-lock disengaged. He gripped the Type-95k properly now, his movements calm and methodical as he scanned his new, hostile surroundings.