Chapter 21 Scared Jace
They were one block out when Karl felt it.
Not saw. Felt. The specific shift in the air that the wasteland had taught him to read before his conscious mind could name it. Too quiet in the wrong direction. The absence of the ambient machine sounds that had become background noise over the last three weeks sitting differently on the northwest side, not the silence of absence but the silence of things holding still on purpose.
He raised his fist, and the entire team stopped.
Then he turned to Vael and pointed two fingers toward the roofline to the north.
Vael looked up and gave a single nod.
He had seen it too.
A shape that wasn’t part of the broken skyline, pressed flat against the edge of a building with the kind of stillness that only came from someone trying very hard not to exist.
They knew the team was here.
Karl looked at Jace.
Jace was staring straight ahead. His jaw was tight. His breathing was even. But he hadn’t reacted to Karl’s signal with the same half-second delay everyone else had shown.
He had stopped before the fist went up.
He had already known.
Karl turned back to the street.
He had maybe four seconds before whoever was lying flat on that roofline sent the signal.
He spent three of them reading the street.
The faces of the buildings on either side. The narrow gaps between structures. The angles. The places where a body could move. The places where a body could disappear.
Then he moved. Not away but forward.
Because when you were caught between two positions, stepping back only gave the people behind you time to close the retreat.
You drove forward into the gap before it sealed. You took the chaos and made it yours before it could become theirs.
“Go,” he said.
The trap sprang thirty meters earlier than it was supposed to with raiders coming around from three directions at once.
Left alley mouth. Right side, groundfloor windows. Rooftop above.
Twelve bodies moving fast, clean, and coordinated. They were armed well enough to make one thing clear, the rival colony had been planning this operation long before Jace became part of it.
Torres moved on the right windows while Vael and Drask broke toward the left alley mouth. Selene stayed one step behind Karl.
The rooftop raider came first. He dropped fast on a rappel line, coming straight down in front of Karl with a blade already out. Karl caught the line mid-drop with one hand and yanked hard. The man’s descent turned into a violent swing.
Karl heard the impact more than he saw it - a wet crack as skull met concrete then the line went slack.
Two raiders broke past Vael on the left and came at Karl from the side. The first one he hit hard enough to lift him completely off his feet. His body spun sideways through the air before slamming shoulder-first into the road. He didn’t get back up but the second managed to land a strike across Karl’s collarbone. Pain flashed hot and sharp. Then Karl’s elbow found the man’s jaw. He went down with the heavy sound of wet sand hitting pavement.
For a second, Karl thought they still had it.
That was the thought forming in his head when the machines activated. They appeared from the far side of the ruins, exactly where he had mapped them.
But faster. Much faster than he had calculated.
Six units closed the distance between their holding point and the fight in a time their chassis weight should not have allowed.
The AI had upgraded them.
Not quietly. Not in ways he could have missed. The movement was wrong because it was all too fluid and too fast to even make sense. They no longer moved like heavy machines forcing momentum through steel.
They moved with terrifying control, as if the weight no longer mattered. Machines that had been changed significantly since the last time Karl had watched them from the overpass.
The first one hit him like a vehicle as the hit landed across his whole body. No windup. No warning. Just mass and speed turning into impact. It lifted Karl clean off his feet and hurled him across the width of the street, back slamming into the far wall hard enough to crack concrete. Plaster burst loose around him. He slid down through a rain of dust and broken fragments and stayed there for one second because his body demanded it, no matter what his mind was ordering.
He heard Selene shout something.
He heard Drask’s pipe strike metal.
He heard a sharp sound that might have been Torres.
Then he forced himself up.
The nearest machine was already on him. There was no space to dodge. So he had no choice but to take the blow as its strike arm drove straight into his chest.
Something deep inside him gave under the impact. Pain spread through his torso in a sudden violent rush, hot and bright, reaching everywhere at once. Before the arm could pull back, he caught it with both hands.
The machine tried to retract.
His boots scraped across the pavement as it dragged him. He held on then he used the pull and swung himself around the line of its arm, driving his boot hard into the machine’s knee joint. The metal bent and the joint folded.
Karl yanked the arm downward and slammed the machine’s own limb into its sensor housing not just once, twice and on the third strike the casing broke apart with a burst of hot oil that sprayed across his face and neck. It burned wherever it touched bare skin. The machine dropped.
The second one hit him before he had even let go of the first. A hard blow across his back. He went down face-first.
His forehead struck the pavement hard enough to split skin. Light flashed white behind his eyes. At the same time the damage inside his chest shifted against itself, sending a deep grinding pain through him that made breathing feel impossible.
For a second the street disappeared.
He pressed both palms flat against the road ans pushed. His arms shook under the weight as he got his chest off the ground.
Got one knee under him. Then the machine’s foot came down across his back. The force crushed him flat again. His lungs gave out and the air left him. His hands slipped. He tried to rise and nothing happened. And for the first time since the fighting started, his body refused him. He turned his head sideways, cheek pressed against the cold road, and looked across the street.
Jace was standing six meters away. He wasn’t fighting. He wasn’t moving.
He just simply stood with his weapon hanging at his side, looking at Karl pinned beneath the machine’s foot. And the expression on his face was the most human thing Karl had seen there in weeks.
Not triumph or satisfaction. It just looked more like someone watching a verdict being delivered like a judgment he had asked for, and now wasn’t completely sure he wanted to witness.
He didn’t move. He only watched.
Something inside Karl went very cold.
Very quiet. He forced one hand under his chest until his palm found the road.
Then he pushed. Not with desperation but with everything Level 9 Strength had left.
Pain ripped through his chest so hard it dragged a raw sound out of him. His arms locked. Every muscle in his body strained against the crushing weight. Then the machine’s foot lifted just enough. Karl twisted hard, rolled free, and forced himself upright.
Selene was there. She came in from the side and drove her steel pipe straight into the machine’s sensor housing. No hesitation. No pause to think. Not even for calculation. Just movement. The kind that came from seeing someone about to die and acting before fear could catch up. The machine lurched sideways from the hit. Karl stepped in.
He grabbed the head unit with both hands and tore it free.
Cables snapped apart with sharp wet pops. Hot oil poured over his hands and down both forearms. The machine collapsed beneath him in broken sections.
He was breathing hard now, short pulls that weren’t bringing in enough air. Four machines left. He went at them.
What happened next would never come back to him clearly.
Later, it would exist only in pieces.
He remembered pain, not as one thing, but as layers. The sharp language of broken parts shifting inside him every time he moved. His body taking hits. Giving them back. Taking more. He remembered metal breaking under his hands again and again.
He remembered hot oil running over skin already burned raw.
He remembered blood in his mouth which was so constant that after a while it stopped meaning anything.
When he would hit the ground twice, he would get up twice more.
The second time, he wasn’t completely sure he could. For one thin second he felt the edge of it, the place where body and will stopped agreeing.
And then something deeper took over.
Past thought.
Past tactics.
Past decision.
Past anything the system had built. Something older. Harder. More absolute. It made the choice for him. And then the system came.
\[CRITICAL THRESHOLD EXCEEDED\]
\[SUPPRESSION SHATTERED\]
\[STRENGTH: LEVEL 14 / 100\]
\[HEALING: LEVEL 8 / 100\]
\[SPEED: LEVEL 6 / 100\]
\[PAIN TOLERANCE: LEVEL 7 / 100\]
The heat that moved through him this time was not warmth. It was fire.
It tore through him. He felt it in every damaged place. In his chest, where something had cracked deep inside and now pulled itself back together with violent force. In his forehead, where split skin tightened and sealed. Across the raw burns on his neck, where the sharp edge of pain began to vanish.
He stood in the middle of the ruined street while the system rebuilt him. And it was the most violent thing it had ever done to him.
Then it stopped. And something was gone. Not quieter. Not fading.
Just gone.
There had still been something there before, a small surviving register inside him, weak but steady, still answering when the world touched it. Now there was nothing. He stood very still and tried to search for it.
Found empty space where it had been. Then he looked up. The street around him was wrecked.
Broken concrete. Oil. Scattered metal. Bodies. Smoke hanging low in the cold air.
Three of his people were still standing.
Torres had blood running from a cut at her temple.
Drask was favoring his left leg.
Vael was upright, breathing hard, his face unreadable. The human raiders were down or gone. The machine activation had shattered the ambush for both sides at once, turning the whole street into chaos. Selene stood a few steps away. Her pipe hung lowered in one hand. She was looking at Karl with an expression he couldn’t fully read.
And Jace. Jace was standing exactly where he had been when Karl was pinned to the road.
He had not moved. He was staring at Karl the way people stared at something that had just broken every rule they had built their world around.
Karl was alive. He was standing.
And every calculation Jace had made, every piece of the trap he had prepared, baited, and waited on, was lying in broken pieces around Karl’s feet.
Karl looked at him across the destroyed street for a long moment. He felt nothing. No anger. No triumph. No relief.
Just nothing. And that absence, the emptiness where something should have been, was the thing that finally made Jace afraid.