The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Wunderwaffles and Nashir.
Operative Somebody Sad.
Director DeadZoneXD!
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"There are raw materials packed in the rear of the cargo bay," Mark told Kenjiro, stepping back from the impossible machinery resting in the purple grass. "And the loader mech is secured against the bulkhead. All you have to do is unshackle it and put it to work. Marcos will guide you with the construction and handle the rest."
Before Kenjiro could fully process the gravity of the instructions, Mark turned and jogged away, the three towering Elite Guards falling into a synchronized, ground-eating stride behind him.
Kenjiro watched them disappear into the tree line, took one last deep breath to steady his racing heart, and turned back to the task at hand.
He scrambled up the heavy metal ramp of the Shepherd and navigated the tilted cargo hold until he reached the heavy loader mech. Climbing the exterior rungs, he threw open the roll-cage and dropped into the pilot's seat. The cockpit smelled faintly of stale sweat and hydraulic fluid.
As he strapped himself into the five-point harness and gripped the dual yokes, the machine hummed to life beneath him, the engine vibrating through his boots. For a fleeting second, his mind flashed back to the impossible reality Mark had just revealed. A pocket dimension, a defiance of every known law of physics. Kenjiro shook his head violently to clear it.
'Focus on the dirt,' he told himself. They had barely been on the planet for twenty minutes, and they were already about to begin building the foundation of their new home.
What followed over the next hour was nothing short of a mechanized symphony. If someone had been soaring above the ten-kilometer clearing, looking down at the crash site, they wouldn't have seen a disorganized group of desperate refugees. They would have seen an ant colony operating with terrifying efficiency, spearheaded by an unshackled artificial intelligence.
"Alright, Kenjiro," Marcos's voice crackled over the engineer's earpiece, laced with a hyper-focused edge. "Stand back."
The hundred spider-like repair drones, which had been floating, suddenly flared to life. They let out a collective, high-pitched mechanical whine that sent a shiver down the spines of the onlookers. The civilians and the mercenaries who had remained near the Shepherd gasped, instinctively taking a step back as the metallic swarm moved with a terrifying, fluid hive-mind intelligence.
Dozens of the drones converged on the three 3x3-meter nanoprinters. Using specialized tethers, they hoisted the impossibly heavy machines into the air and floated them toward the designated staging area, a wide, flat expanse of land directly in front of the Shepherd's ruined nose.
As the printers touched down heavily into the loam, a deep, rhythmic mechanical thudding echoed from the Shepherd itself.
The civilians jumped, some crying out in alarm as heavy armor plating along the frigate's dorsal and ventral ridges slid backward. From the hidden compartments, a series of dual-barreled, heavy-caliber autocannons extended outward. The massive weapons whirred to life with a menacing mechanical growl. Their targeting optics swept the alien tree line in a continuous, overlapping arc, briefly locking onto a flock of massive, leathery-winged alien birds that had been circling too close, before calculating them as non-threats and resuming their patrol sweep.
"Perimeter defense grid is online," Marcos announced over the ship's external PA system, his synthetic voice echoing across the basin, projecting absolute control. "No threats have been detected. You may all assemble for construction."
The initial fright instantly melted into a profound, heavy blanket of security. Shoulders dropped. The trembling in the hands of the refugees ceased. They weren't some defenseless castaways bleeding out in the dirt. They had a fortress watching over them.
The remaining drones swarmed the cargo bay, dragging out the heavy raw materials Mark had taken out of his inventory and placed there. Kenjiro, having stomped the hulking, twenty-foot-tall industrial mech out of the ship, put the machine to work. The mech's massive hydraulic clamps easily grabbed onto steel foundation beams that would have taken twenty men to lift, ripping them from the hold and carrying them out into the bright light of the three red suns.
Then, the nanoprinters went to work.
Everyone who had ever worked in corporate engineering, orbital manufacturing, or shipyard construction stopped dead in their tracks, their jaws going slack. Standard printers took hours to layer rudimentary alloys, leaving rough edges and structural weak points. However, these printers didn't work as expected. They manipulated matter on a molecular level.
A bright, blinding flash of pure white light filled the transparent printing chambers. The air around the machines instantly tasted like raw ozone. They witnessed as the machines slowly weaved the materials. Ten minutes later, the machines didn't spit out walls or roofs just yet.
Before leaping into the unknown, Marcos had actively stripped humanity's unprotected databanks of everything he could reach, including centuries of advanced architectural schematics. During the nerve-wracking two weeks of planet exploration, he and Mark had settled on a highly efficient, modern modular home design. But knowing they were landing on an uncharted alien world with unknown ground predators, flood risks, and unpredictable terrain, they had made one crucial adjustment: elevation.
The printers first extruded massive, heavy-duty support pylons and thick, interlocking steel-composite grid frames.
"Clear the grass and level the dirt!" Kenjiro yelled from the booming loudspeaker of his loader mech, his voice cracking with sheer excitement.
The spell broke, and the camp exploded into action. The seventy Peacekeeper Infantrymen, their burgundy and black uniforms cutting a striking image against the landscape, slung their rifles over their backs and grabbed shovels, picks, and laser levels from the cargo crates. They moved with efficiency, their squad captains barking out grid coordinates.
The mercenaries worked side-by-side with the civilians. Driven by the impossible sight of the printers, they tore up the purple grass, using the spider-drones to aggressively flatten and compact the dark, rich soil. Kenjiro piloted the mech with masterful precision, using the hydraulic arms to drive the heavy pylons deep into the dirt, locking the massive support frames exactly ten feet off the ground.
Once the elevated foundations were set, the printers shifted to the living spaces.
The drones darted forward, attaching their tethers and pulling on pristine sections of walls and floors. Elias, an older civilian who had spent thirty years as a structural engineer for the IUC, stared up at them in a trance.
The modules were eight inches thick, composed of a lightweight but incredibly dense composite alloy he had never seen before. But they weren't just walls. The copper wiring was already perfectly threaded through the interior conduits. The high-pressure plumbing pipes were seamlessly integrated into the baseboards. The thermal insulation was packed tight, and sheets of reinforced, polarized glass were permanently set into the window frames.
Because the modules took exactly ten minutes to print, and with three machines running simultaneously, the math was staggering. Every twenty minutes, the printers produced enough individual components to assemble a complete, modern, open floor plan, two-to-three-bedroom home.
The drones flew overhead, carrying the freshly printed modules, and lowered them gently onto the ten-foot elevated frames. The mercenaries and civilians scrambled up the freshly printed exterior staircases to meet them. The moment two modules touched, the crews rushed in with heavy pneumatic sealers, locking the eight-inch-thick walls together. A sharp hiss of thermal bonding echoed through the clearing, and the seams virtually disappeared.
By the time the remaining hundreds of civilians and flight crews from the other ships finally arrived, having made the grueling, hour-long trek across the clearing from their respective landing zones, they were completely speechless.
They had expected to find a disorganized mob huddled in a mud pit. Though they could hear the sounds of activity from a little ways away, they were left at a loss for words once they crested a small rise and the staging area came into view. It was as if they had walked into a booming, meticulously organized industrial zone.
Three elevated modular homes were already fully constructed and locked together in a neat, symmetrical row, hovering ten feet in the air like a frontier outpost. The heavy roof components were currently being lifted by the blue-glowing drones and secured by sweating, smiling refugees on the upper decks. The noise of pneumatic drills, the thud of Kenjiro's mech, and the blinding flashes of the nanoprinters creating the fourth home created an atmosphere of absolute, unstoppable progress.
Captain Vance of the Aegis Prime dropped his heavy duffel bag into the dirt, staring at the elevated homes, his mouth hanging open. "My god... they're actually doing it."
"Welcome to Rubrae I," Marcos greeted the newcomers over the Shepherd's exterior PA system, his synthetic voice surprisingly warm. "You can grab a tool or grab a bite. Lunch is being served near the med-tent."
A dozen spider-drones hovered out of the Shepherd's cargo hold, carefully lowering heavy pallets of MREs and purified water near the medical triage area Sister Elara had set up beneath the shade of a massive burgundy tree.
But nobody stopped working.
Only the children, the elderly, and those physically unable to lift a hammer sat down to eat, watched over by the nuns. The orphans sat on the purple grass, their eyes wide with wonder as they watched the spider-drones dart through the sky, chewing on their food while Sister Elara smiled, tears of pure relief standing in her eyes.
Everyone else, the hardened mercenaries, the exhausted freighter captains, the mechanics, and the refugees, simply walked over to the pallets, grabbed their rations, shoved them in their pockets, and kept moving. They asked the Peacekeepers where they were needed, grabbed tools, and joined the assembly lines.
They were fueled by an intoxicating, burning adrenaline. For the first time in their lives, they weren't building corporate assets for a faceless CEO. They were laying the foundations of a city that belonged entirely to them. Every drop of sweat, every locked beam, and every elevated home was a defiant middle finger to the void that had tried to claim them.
Eight kilometers to the north, the sounds of industry and hope were replaced entirely by the suffocating silence of a graveyard.
Mark's boots hit the rocky, uneven terrain of the northern foothills with a heavy crunch. Behind him, Valerius, Octavia, and Titus matched his pace perfectly, their massive frames moving through the dense alien foliage with a ghost-like silence.
Since gaining the enhancements Anahrin had done to his biology, Mark had lived his entire life confined to the corridors of space stations, the bulkheads of the Shepherd, and narrow urban alleys. He had used his raw strength to rip apart blast doors and shatter corporate assassins in close-quarters combat. But he had never actually had the open space, or the sheer necessity, to see what his legs could truly do.
As the dense canopy of emerald and burgundy leaves blurred past him, Mark slowly began to push his pace. He transitioned from a heavy jog into a full-blown sprint.
It was an exhilarating, almost intoxicating moment of pure freedom. He was tearing through the dense, uneven alien underbrush at speeds that would have left Earth's greatest Olympic sprinters gasping in the dust. And yet, his chest barely heaved. There was no burning buildup of lactic acid in his thighs, no desperate clawing for oxygen in his lungs. His heavy boots dug into the dark soil, launching his three-hundred-and-twenty-pound armored frame forward with the terrifying, predatory grace of a ballistic missile.
He bounded over massive fallen logs without breaking stride, leaped across ten-foot ravines with a single push of his calves, and scaled sheer, rocky inclines in seconds. He glanced over his shoulder, the wind roaring in his ears. Valerius, Octavia, and Titus were right there on his heels, matching his Olympic pace effortlessly.
The trek of eight kilometers, an aggressive incline that would have taken a normal human a grueling three hours to hike, took them exactly twenty minutes.
As they crested the final ridge, the exhilarating rush of the run violently evaporated. The dense canopy broke, revealing the devastating reality of the crash site.
The Horizon was gone.
The massive industrial freighter had slammed into the jagged granite peak with the force of a tactical nuke. The mountain itself looked like it had been scooped out by a massive claw.
Because the freighter had been running on absolute fumes, there had been no catastrophic fuel detonation. There were no roaring fires to light up the shadows of the foothills. There was only absolute destruction.
A sprawling, mile-wide debris field of shredded steel, pulverized composite armor, and shattered glass blanketed the valley. Thick, choking columns of acrid, dark grey smoke billowed from the superheated slag where the friction had literally melted the ship's hull upon impact. The smell of ozone, burnt wiring, and scorched earth was overwhelming.
Mark stopped at the edge of the debris field, his jaw clenched tight as he stared at the pulverized wreckage.
"Let's spread out," Mark ordered, his voice low. "Look for the bridge module. Or what's left of it."
The three Elite Guards nodded, fanning out across the smoking crater. They moved with absolute precision, their heads on a swivel, their heavy boots crunching over the twisted metal.
Mark walked alongside them, stepping over a massive, torn sheet of what used to be the Horizon's starboard thruster housing. The silence between them was heavy, stifling.
"You can all drop the rigid discipline when it's just us," Mark said suddenly, not looking back.
Valerius paused, lowering his humming K-272 Energy Rifle slightly. "Sir?"
"When we are in camp, when we are in front of the civilians, the Peacekeepers, or anyone I don't implicitly trust, you can maintain that absolute military protocol you're currently following," Mark clarified, his eyes scanning a pile of smoking rubble. "I know that you are the wall. But out here? In the shit? You don't need to act like programmed droids. Talk to me like people. Treat me casually, and I'll do the same. Who knows how long we'll be here, but one thing is for sure. You lot will be stuck with me for the rest of your lives. I need to know who's watching my back."
Titus let out a low, rumbling chuckle from inside his helmet. He hefted the massive Recoil-less Rifle higher onto his shoulder. "Copy that, boss. The stiff-neck routine was giving me a headache anyway."
Mark glanced over his shoulder. The system prompt had stated they possessed absolute loyalty, but looking at them, listening to the subtle shifts in their tone, he realized they weren't blank slates. They had personality and most likely had history.
"Where do you all come from?" Mark asked, kicking a piece of debris aside. "The system... the thing that brought you here. It didn't just build your minds from scratch, did it?"
"Would've been better if it did," Valerius answered quietly, his gold-tinted visor scanning the horizon. "I don't know about the others, but I lived. I fought. And I died. The... entity, whatever you want to call it, pulled our consciousness from the dark and gave us a second chance. Tied our existence to yours."
"How did you go out?" Mark asked, genuinely curious about the caliber of warriors the system had bound to him.
Titus snorted, a dark, cynical sound. "I got taken out by an artillery strike. We were holding a trench line on a mud-ball of a planet that didn't even have a name. I was reloading a heavy emplacement when boom, a flash of white washed over me, and then I woke up in that hallway half an hour ago. Didn't even hear the whistle."
"I was the rearguard for the 104th Drop Infantry," Valerius added, his voice devoid of any boastfulness, just stating cold facts. "Our extraction point was compromised. I held a subterranean choke point for six hours so the battalion could board the lifters. I ran out of ammunition in the fifth hour. Used a trench knife for the rest of it. Eventually... I also ran out of blood."
Mark nodded slowly in profound respect. These weren't just test-tube creations. They were hardened martyrs. He turned his gaze to the right, where Octavia was silently navigating a treacherous pile of jagged steel, her massive Railgun held effortlessly in one hand.
"What about you, Octavia?" Mark asked.
Octavia paused. The female Elite Guard stood at six-foot-seven. She turned her gold-tinted visor toward Mark.
"I wasn't infantry," Octavia said, her voice a sharp, clinical alto. "I was a heavy mechanized pilot. A war mech operator for an independent colonial defense force."
Mark stopped walking entirely. He stared at her, his brow furrowing in genuine shock. In the IUC and across all the known fringes of this universe, mechs weren't weapons of war. They were slow, lumbering, highly inefficient pieces of industrial equipment. The idea of weaponizing a bipedal walker and fielding it effectively against modern armored vehicles was considered a complete logistical joke because, unlike fantasy worlds, no one really knew how to make one that would move fluidly. The bigger something was, the more sluggish it became. It was almost the rule of law.
"A war mech?" Titus blurted out, completely breaking his own hardened composure. He looked at Octavia as if she had just grown a second head. "You fought in giant, walking robots? Where I'm from, those were only in comic books and games."
"Same here," Valerius muttered, shaking his helmeted head in disbelief. "Tanks, gunships, orbital rail-platforms, sure. But mechs?"
Octavia looked between the two men, her visor reflecting the smoking debris of the valley. "In my timeline, they were the apex of terrestrial warfare."
Mark's mind reeled. The system hadn't just pulled from different planets. It had pulled these warriors from completely different realities, or at least wildly divergent evolutionary timelines.
"What happened to you?" Mark asked, fascinated.
"I was sold out to some corporate pigs trying to seize our planetary mining rights," Octavia stated, her grip tightening slightly on the heavy chassis of her Railgun. "They dropped an overwhelming force on our capital. My squadron was wiped out in the first ten minutes. I had managed to set up camp in the destroyed urban sector when I was ambushed by a twenty-mech assault package."
Titus let out a low whistle over the comms. "Twenty to one. Nasty odds."
"I took out thirteen of them," Octavia said, her tone absolutely matter-of-fact. "I utilized the collapsing infrastructure to isolate their firing lanes and engaged them in close-quarters brawling. But a hyper-velocity sabot round eventually severed my primary gyro-stabilizer, and a missile cooked off my reactor core. I was forced to eject."
"I was then captured on the ground by their infantry," Octavia continued, a cold, dark fury bleeding into her voice. "They chained me to the chassis of my downed mech. They wanted a public execution to break the colony's morale. I headbutted the executioner, cracking his skull, and bit the throat out of the guard holding my chains before they finally filled me with holes. As I lay bleeding out and losing consciousness, one of the bastards started sawing my head off."
She looked at Mark, her posture rigid, her aura practically radiating lethal intent. "It is my belief that I was chosen and brought back to kill the things that prey on the weak, Sir. You point me at a target, and I'll make sure it dies."
Mark stared at her, letting the brutal reality of her past wash over him. He didn't just have a super soldier, he had a tactical genius who specialized in a form of heavy armor combat that this universe didn't even comprehend. More importantly, he had someone who fought with her bare teeth when the guns ran dry.
"I'll make sure to point you in the right direction," Mark said, a slow smile spreading across his face.
"Commander," Valerius's voice suddenly cut through the comms, instantly dropping the casual tone and shifting back to absolute military professionalism. "I have located the primary bridge module."
Mark turned, sprinting up a steep embankment of churned earth.
Resting at the bottom of a deep, smoking trench was the unrecognizable husk of the Horizon's command bridge. The massive, reinforced block of steel had been ripped violently from the ship's spine. It had tumbled down the mountain, crushing itself into a deformed, flattened trapezoid of shattered super-reinforced glass and mangled electronics.
Mark stopped at the edge of the trench, his stomach sinking.
There was no structural integrity left. The roof of the bridge had been crushed completely downward, meeting the floor plates in a twisted sandwich of solid steel. Nothing organic could have possibly survived that level of kinetic compression.
He stepped slowly down into the crater, the heat of the superheated slag radiating through the heavy soles of his boots. As he approached the shattered remnants of the forward viewing port, a splash of dark, wet crimson caught his eye amidst the jagged grey steel.
Tucked within the mangled wreckage of what used to be the pilot's station was the twisted body of one of the flight crew.
The sheer violence of the impact had been entirely merciless. Her bottom half had been ripped to shreds, completely pulverized beneath a collapsed structural beam that had sheared through the deck plating. Her chest was brutally caved in and impaled by sheared support rods, the reinforced pressure suit having done absolutely nothing to stop the crushing weight of the navigational console that had slammed backward into her torso.
Her head was tilted back at a sickening angle against the shattered glass, almost meeting her back. One of the rods that impaled her chest also went through her skull, painting her golden hair a dark red. Her eyes were locked wide open, the pupils fully dilated in frozen, final terror. Drying, darkening blood also coated the left side of her pale face, tracking down her cheek and pooling thickly into one of her unblinking eyes. Apart from the rod, just above her brow, her skull had been cracked violently open upon impact, the jagged bone giving way to a visceral, protruding glimpse of brain matter.
Mark stopped a few feet away, the heavy silence of the alien forest pressing in around him.
He had seen death before. But looking at the shattered, mangled remains of a woman who had willingly ridden a dying ship into the dirt just to give his daughter and his people a chance to live... it carried a suffocating weight.
Valerius, Titus, and Octavia stepped up to the edge of the wreckage beside him. They didn't speak. They simply lowered their weapons, bowing their helmeted heads in silent, absolute respect for the dead.
The price of their new home had been collected in full.
"We can't leave her like this," Mark said, his voice a low, gravelly whisper that barely carried over the hiss of cooling metal.
Valerius nodded once. Without needing further instruction, he and Titus slung their rifles over their backs. With their strength and armor, they didn't need shovels. They moved to a quiet, shaded patch of dark soil just outside the immediate burn zone of the crater. Using their gauntleted hands, they dug into the rocky, churned earth, easily moving heavy stones and dense roots until a proper, respectful grave was hollowed out.
Meanwhile, Mark and Octavia approached the mangled corpse. With agonizing care, Mark gripped the collapsed structural beam that had pinned the pilot. His enhanced muscles flared, the black and red nanite armor humming as he ripped the tons of twisted steel upward and tossed it aside. Together, he and Octavia gently extracted the woman's broken body, carefully sliding her free from the impaling steel before lifting her from the wreckage, laying her to rest in the cooling dirt.
Mark found a sheared, rectangular piece of hull plating and drove it deep into the soil at the head of the grave, a silent, nameless marker for a hero of the frontier.
Valerius stood at the foot of the grave, his gold-tinted visor reflecting the three setting red suns. "Every empire I've ever read about, Commander... every colony I've ever fought for or defended. They all start the exact same way."
The Elite Guard looked at Mark, his voice carrying the heavy, weary wisdom of a soldier who had lived multiple lifetimes of war. "New beginnings are always paid in blood, some way, somehow. It is the price of freedom."
Mark stared at the makeshift headstone, his jaw locked so tight his teeth ached. Valerius was right. The universe demanded a toll for every inch of progress. But as he looked up at the vast, sprawling indigo sky above the alien canopy, a cold, unyielding fury settled into his bones.
He swore a silent, absolute vow to himself, right there in the dirt.
Never again would one of his people die on a landing. When he finally built his fleet, when the shipyards of the Imperium Rubrarum Solium roared to life, he would forge vessels that conquered gravity itself. His ships would glide in and out of atmospheres flawlessly, touching down and taking off with absolute impunity. No citizen of his empire would ever be forced to ride a dying, aerodynamic brick into the dirt just to survive.
"Rest easy," Mark whispered to the grave. "Your sacrifice was not in vain."
He turned his back on the wreckage, his eyes hardening as he looked back toward the south, toward the camp. "There's nothing left for us to find here. Let's return to camp."
---
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