The Enforcers moved with rigid purpose, unstrapping the massive, bell-mouthed blunderbusses from their backs.

  They positioned themselves in a staggered line, barrels aimed at the treeline. Kneeling in front. Standing behind. A wall of grey steel and waiting fire.

  And then—

  BAM.

  The first beast emerged.

  It was lean and fast, the size of a large dog, its entire frame built around one ecological purpose: arriving second.

  Always second. Always after something else had drawn blood.

  Its body was a patchwork of tarnished brass plating across the back and shoulders, protecting what mattered most, while its underbelly gleamed with pale yellow-white quartz, translucent, fragile, beautiful in the way of things meant to be exposed.

  It had been following the Rhinothorn for hours.

  Not hunting it. That would have been suicide. Instead, it had shadowed it through the undergrowth, tracking the steady pulse of its crystal horn, the red scanning light sweeping the Mid-Locus in slow, rhythmic beats.

  A signal the Brass Jackal couldn't produce and couldn't fight, but had spent generations learning to read.

  As long as that light pulsed, the Jackal kept its distance. Circling. Waiting. Patient in the way of things that survive not by strength but by timing.

  Then the pulse stopped.

  Valerius's cleaver had seen to that.

  And the moment the red light died, the moment the Rhinothorn's signal went dark. Every Brass Jackal in range felt the silence. To them, silence meant one thing: the apex predator was down.

  The kill site was undefended. Whatever the Rhinothorn had been hunting was lying on the ground with nothing standing over it anymore. The window was open.

  It stopped at the edge of the clearing. Yellow eyes fixed on the Enforcers. On Rubin's body. On Aeron.

  Then another stepped out behind it.

  And another.

  And another.

  The Enforcers responded in kind.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

  The first Jackal barely made it a few feet before its sides were littered with holes the size of a man's fist, the impact lifting it off the ground and throwing it backward into the undergrowth.

  Its fragile quartz underbelly exploded inward in a shower of pale yellow-white fragments.

  Another took its place. Stepped over the twitching corpse of the first and kept coming, yellow eyes never wavering.

  Bang. Bang. Bang.

  It fell too. Then another. And another.

  They just kept coming.

  Aeron stared as the Enforcers dismantled the beasts, the bottom half of his pants already soaked.

  Well, who could blame him? Just a moment ago, he would have died if not for their timely intervention.

  He looked at the blade in his palms. It had once belonged to his partner. Well, his now-dead partner. Now it was his.

  Now it was his.

  A Chrysic blade. The only thing capable of dealing with Ferro-Locus beasts. He had watched Rubin use it countless times, seen the way heat bloomed along its edge on command, how it sheared through metal and flesh like they were nothing.

  He looked forward. A mountain of dead bodies. Specifically beasts.

  He gulped. Even with the blade in hand, there was no way he could survive out here.

  His gaze shifted to the Enforcers, still locked in combat. They moved with terrible efficiency—firing, reloading, stepping over corpses, firing again.

  No hesitation. No fear. Just the steady, mechanical rhythm of killing.

  Only one thought ran through his mind.

  Monsters.

  When was the last time an Enforcer set foot outside the Residuum? He couldn't remember. Maybe never.

  Whatever they were doing out here, he didn't want to know.

  BANG.

  A last shot echoed through the clearing.

  The last Brass Jackal crumpled mid-leap, its body twisting in the air before hitting the ground. It twitched once, twice, and then lay still.

  Silence.

  The fight was over. It lasted maybe thirty seconds from the first shot to the last. Ended almost as quickly as anyone with enough understanding of what an Enforcer was would expect.

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  Because that was the thing about Enforcers, they didn't win fights through heroics or luck or desperate last stands.

  They won through mechanics. Through drills and conditioning, and the kind of brutal efficiency that came from having hesitation beaten out of them before they learned to walk.

  Aeron stood in the center of their formation, still alive, still breathing, still trying to process how seven men had just turned a charging pack into a mountain of corpses in the time it took him to remember how to blink.

  Smoke curled from blunderbuss barrels. Cleavers dripped with something that steamed in the cold air.

  The Enforcers were already scanning the treeline, reloading, preparing for the next wave that might or might not come.

  They didn't celebrate. They didn't even acknowledge what had just happened.

  Because to them, this wasn't a victory.

  A mountain of Brass Jackal corpses piled at the edge of the clearing caught Aeron's eye. His gaze sharpened.

  He knew these beasts. Well, maybe not personally, but he had read enough to understand what their bodies were worth. Just the hide from a single Jackal fetched fourteen tally marks. And that wasn't even the real prize.

  Aeron moved. The dagger in his hand hummed to life, orange light flickering along its edge.

  SLICE.

  He carved through the head, scooping out something that looked like a small, pulsing knot of crystalline fibers. His eyes shone.

  A receiver organ cluster.

  He had no idea what made it so valuable, only that it was worth almost three times what the hide was worth.

  And now he had dozens of them to harvest. The best part? No partner to share the loot with.

  His joy shot through the roof. If he made it back to the Residuum with all of this, he might never have to set foot in this cursed region again.

  Unfortunately, his joy was shot down by two words.

  "Move out."

  Aeron's head snapped up. "Huh? Wait—"

  His features drained rapidly.

  He had known Enforcers operated outside the tally system. They had no use for hides or organs or any of the things scavengers bled and died for.

  That was the whole reason he hadn't hesitated to start harvesting; technically, the spoils belonged to them, but since they didn't want them, they might as well be his.

  The Enforcers turned a deaf ear to his call. Of course, they did. They were already forming up, preparing to move, leaving him standing over a fortune he couldn't carry and wouldn't survive long enough to spend.

  "Wait!" His voice cracked. "I can help you navigate the Locus!"

  Nothing. They kept moving.

  "I know this place!" He stumbled after them, nearly tripping over a corpse.

  "Rubin…. my partner, he didn't bring me for my fighting. There's a reason I'm still alive. I've studied the Ferro-locus for years. The migration patterns, the territorial lines, the things that aren't on any map—"

  One enforcer glanced back. Just a flicker. But it was something.

  Aeron grabbed onto it like a lifeline.

  "If you're tracking something, I can help. The Rhinothorn you killed, that was a territorial apex. Whatever you're after, it's either in deeper territory or it's something that doesn't show up on whatever scanners you're using. But I might know. I might have read about it. Please—"

  Valerius finally turned. He stared.

  His visor gave nothing away. No expression, no hint, just that blank, polished surface reflecting Aeron's own terrified face at him.

  It made Aeron's skin crawl. And for good reason. They could kill him right now and call it a day if he annoyed them too much.

  But what choice did he have? Staying here was no different from dying. It was only a matter of time before the next beast found him.

  He forced himself to meet that empty visor. Forced his voice not to shake.

  "I'm not asking you to protect me. I'm asking you to let me be useful. If I'm wrong, if I slow you down, you can leave me. But if I'm right—" He swallowed.

  The silence stretched.

  Valerius said nothing.

  But he didn't walk away either.

  “A human... lead”

  …

  The Enforcers moved through the Ferro-Locus like men wading through a nightmare, and Aeron watched them with a mixture of awe and terror.

  They were monsters, plain and simple. Built to kill, conditioned to never stop, moving forward even when the Locus threw everything it had at them.

  But even monsters had to read the land. And that was where he came in.

  Day after day, they pushed deeper. The first twenty-four hours were the worst. Aeron lost count of how many times they fought, how many beasts came at them from the shadows, how many times he was sure he would die. But he didn't.

  The Enforcers moved around him like a wall of steel and fire, and he stayed in the center, small and terrified and desperately useful.

  By the third day, he had learned to read the silences. The Locus had its own rhythm, its own warnings, and if you knew what to look for, you could see the danger before it arrived.

  "The Glass-ferns," he said on the morning of the fourth day, pointing to a cluster of amethyst fronds as tall as his forearm. They grew in spiraling, overlapping layers, humming with a faint vibration that made one's teeth ache.

  "You keep brushing past them. Every time you snap one, it screams. A silent scream. Everything within a kilometer knows exactly where we are. You're ringing the dinner bell."

  He didn't add what he was thinking.

  That a scavenger who made this mistake wouldn't live long enough to make it twice. In the Residuum, you learned to move through the world without disturbing it, or you died. Simple as that.

  The Enforcers didn't have that instinct because they'd never needed it. They didn't avoid danger; they walked through it and left corpses in their wake.

  Part of him wondered why he hadn't spoken up sooner. Watched them crash through the undergrowth for three days, alerting everything with a pulse to their presence.

  The answer was fairly simple. They could handle it. Every beast that came, they killed. Every ambush, they survived. The Glass-ferns were a mistake, yes, but it was a mistake that cost them only ammunition and time.

  For a scavenger, that same mistake cost everything.

  So he had kept quiet. Let them do what they did best. Only spoke when the accumulation of small errors started to feel like something bigger, something that might eventually find a crack in their armor.

  Valerius stared at him through that impassive visor. Said nothing. But the next Enforcer to move gave the ferns a wide berth.

  Aeron exhaled. It wasn't much, but it was something. They were listening. That meant he might actually survive this.

  For now.

  It saved them from three ambushes that day alone. By the fifth day, Aeron's knowledge of the land became their only compass.

  "The trail is gone, Commander," one Enforcer reported, his voice flat despite the frustration behind it.

  Aeron's heart hammered. This was his moment. He stepped forward, pointing to a patch of crushed vegetation at the base of an iron tree.

  "See that? It's crushed here. Not by boots. By a drill-beast's leg. Fresh. Maybe an hour ago. Your fancy scanners won't tell you that, but the ground does. You just have to know how to read it."

  He held his breath. Valerius gave a single, sharp nod.

  What followed was a brutal, grinding march that stretched into its sixth day. Aeron's knowledge saved them from the worst the Locus had to offer, but it couldn't make them invisible. Nothing could.

  They detoured around an Amber-clad seigebreaker scent-mark, only to have a pack of juvenile Drill-beasts erupt from a burrow. Each was the size of a wolf, their namesake drills spinning with hungry whines. The Enforcers didn't break formation.

  Blunderbusses roared, filling the narrow ravine with a storm of shrapnel that shredded the first two beasts into metallic offal. The rest closed in, and it became a brutal melee.

  Cleavers rose and fell, shearing through drill-heads and iron legs. One Enforcer screamed as a drill-bit found a gap in his armor, grinding into his hip before Valerius decapitated the creature with a single, brutal chop.

  Thankfully, it was nothing a simple potion couldn't fix.

  On the sixth night, the ground itself gave way.

  They had been navigating through a quiet gully when the crust beneath two Enforcers collapsed.

  One moment, they were walking on what looked like solid ground; the next, they were sinking to their waists in a chemical seep, their armor hissing and smoking, the flesh beneath searing from acidic residue.

  The Enforcers didn't scream, but their jaws clenched and their hands gripped the arms of their comrades, who hauled them out.

  Aeron flinched under the glares that followed. It was pointless to blame him, and the Enforcers knew it. He knew the Ferro-Locus, but he didn't know everything.

  No one did. The Locus didn't allow for certainty.

  Still, the weight pressed down on him as they continued through the darkness, unable to risk stopping for the night.

  By the seventh day, Aeron found himself growing curious despite his fear. What could possibly make Enforcers leave the Residuum?

  Their primary duty was the Factor, maintaining absolute control over the population.

  They didn't hunt. They didn't explore. They suppressed. Yet here they were, pushing deeper into the Locus than any scavenger would dare, looking for something.

  Someone.

  He knew better than to ask. Whatever they were after, it wasn't his business. Asking questions was how scavengers ended up with throats slit or worse.

  But the thought gnawed at him as they pushed forward, fighting off another swarm of saw-blade locusts that left their armor scored with a hundred tiny, shrieking cuts.

  By midday on the seventh day, the terrain changed. The iron trees grew sparser. The ground turned to something that crunched underfoot like broken glass.

  "What's that?" Aeron breathed, pointing to a narrow game trail ahead. But it was wrong. The razor-grass on either side was bleached and brittle, dead.

  They followed his gaze through the dead grass and twisted iron trees.

  They walked forward. Soon, they saw it.

  A gnarled structure rose from the earth, existing on the boundary of something none of them dared venture into.

  It felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with purpose, as if a thousand iron trees had been fused into one gigantic, breathing lair.

  Valerius's helmet scanned the structure, casting a deep red light across its surface. He raised a clenched fist. The six remaining Enforcers froze.

  "He's here.”