THE ASHEN CIRCLE
OMEGA SURFACE
CRATER ZERO
14:45 GST
_______________________________________
The heat was a physical weight. The air above the crater shimmered, distorting the light of the alien sun. The ground, fused into obsidian glass by the kinetic strike of the Gungnir rod, crackled and popped as it cooled.
Harris Brown walked onto this glass stage.
Fifty meters away, the Queen of the Shadow-Leaf Clan stood waiting. Her robes were gone, burned away to reveal a under-suit of white, woven spider-silk armor that clung to her frame. Her silver hair floated around her head, suspended by the static charge of the mana-shield she had just collapsed. Her face was no longer weeping. It was a mask of absolute, cold, homicidal clarity.
Harris stopped. He stood ten meters from her.
The demon and the mother.
The killer and the grieving.
In the GDI High-Command bunker in Gibraltar, the room was dead silent. General McCaffrey, Sir Malcolm Hayes, and General Dubois watched the high-resolution feed from the Tianwang satellite. They were watching a duel between two species.
"She isn't running," McCaffrey noted, his voice low. "She just took a kinetic rod to the face, and she isn't running."
"She has nothing left to run to," Hayes replied. "The coffin is gone. Her line is ended. She is a dead woman walking. She just wants company."
On the surface, Harris tilted his head. The chitinous plates of his mask shifted.
"You should have stayed down," Harris rumbled.
The Queen didn't speak. She didn't chant.
She simply looked at him. Her eyes were violet nebulas, swirling with power.
Harris blinked.
It was a microsecond. A simple, human reflex. His eyelids closed over the blue pinpricks for a fraction of a second.
When they opened, she was gone.
There was no sound. No displacement of air. Just a vacuum where she had been standing.
Harris didn't turn. He didn't panic. His instincts, honed by the artifact fused to his spine, screamed a warning.
Behind.
He started to spin, bringing the stock of his HK417 up to block.
He was too slow.
SHCHWACK.
It was a wet, shearing sound.
A blade of pure, condensed wind—invisible and sharper than a laser—sliced through the air.
It struck Harris's left hand, which was gripping the fore-end of his rifle.
The pinky finger of his left hand detached.
It fell to the black glass floor with a small, wet tap. A spray of dark, almost black blood painted the obsidian.
Harris stopped his turn. He looked down at his hand. At the stump where his finger had been.
He didn't scream. He didn't flinch. He didn't even breathe harder.
He just stared at it, as if it were a minor mechanical malfunction.
"My God," the analyst in Gibraltar whispered. "His vitals... his heart rate didn't even spike."
Harris raised his head. The Queen was standing five meters away now, her hand extended, her fingers coated in his blood. She looked disappointed. She wanted a scream. She wanted suffering.
"Missed," Harris grunted.
THE TRADE-OFF
Harris raised the rifle. He snapped the stock to his shoulder.
The scope—the expensive, high-tech Leupold Mark 5HD—came up to his eye.
It was a mistake.
The scope was set for long-range engagement. At 25x magnification, all Harris saw was a blur of white and grey. He couldn't find her. He couldn't acquire the target.
"Targeting failure!" Harris snarled internally.
He tried to point-fire, looking over the scope.
She moved again.
She was a blur. A white streak moving faster than the human eye could track. She wasn't running; she was sliding through the air, using wind magic to reduce friction to zero.
She circled him.
SLASH.
Another wind blade. This one caught his shoulder, carving a deep groove into the black GDI armor and the chitinous skin beneath.
SLASH.
A cut to the thigh.
She was dissecting him.
"Get this thing off me!" Harris roared.
He ripped the HK417 from his sling. He threw it. The heavy rifle cartwheeled through the air, useless metal.
He drew his KABAR knife.
"Come on!"
FOB BEDROCK, ELEVATOR SHAFT
"Let's go! Move! Move!" Captain Russo screamed.
The elevator reached the surface level. The doors hissed open.
Russo, Psycho, and the two Gorkhas surged out, weapons raised.
"Contact front! Suppressing fire!"
They saw Harris in the center of the crater, bleeding, surrounded by the white blur of the Queen.
"Light her up!" Psycho yelled, raising his SAW.
The Queen didn't even look at them. She raised her left hand, palm open, toward the elevator doors.
She clenched her fist.
CRUMP.
It wasn't an explosion. It was gravity.
The air pressure around the elevator shaft increased by five hundred percent in an instant.
Russo, Psycho, Rakesh, and Rahul were slammed into the ground as if a giant, invisible hand had swatted them.
They didn't die. Their bones creaked, their armor groaned under the stress, but they weren't crushed. They were simply pinned.
They gasped for air, unable to lift their rifles, unable to move.
The Queen was making a statement: This is not your fight.
CRATER ZERO
Harris ignored them. He couldn't help them.
He looked at his left hand.
The stump of his pinky was bubbling.
Black, tar-like ichor oozed from the wound. Then, white bone spurred out, knitting together with a sickening crack-snap sound. Muscle fibers wove themselves over the bone in seconds. Finally, the black, chitinous skin grew over it.
In ten seconds, the finger was back.
The regeneration was instant. Miraculous.
But there was a price.
Harris blinked.
His vision... swam.
The blue targeting reticle in his mind, the sharp, high-definition view of the world... it blurred.
Static filled the edges of his sight. The center of his vision went gray.
"No," Harris hissed.
He stumbled back. He rubbed his eyes with his armored knuckles.
It got worse. The regeneration was drawing power from his sensory nerves. The mask was eating his sight to feed his flesh.
"Damn you," Harris cursed the artifact fused to his skull. "You take my eyes? Now?"
He was going blind.
The Queen saw him stumble. She saw him rub his eyes.
She smiled. A cruel, predatory baring of teeth.
She stopped moving. She stood perfectly still, ten meters away.
She knew.
She raised both hands. The air around her began to shimmer with heat. She wasn't summoning wind anymore. She was pulling the residual heat from the molten crater, concentrating it into a lance of fire.
THE DARKNESS AND THE PULSE
Harris stood in the gray fog of his failing vision.
He couldn't see her. He could only see vague shapes, shadows against the light.
He was blind.
"I can't see," he whispered.
The panic rose. The human part of him—the Harris Brown who used to be a Ranger—wanted to scream.
But the Other part... the Demon... woke up.
You do not need eyes, the Mask whispered into his brain stem. Eyes are for the weak. Use the blood.
Harris closed his eyes behind the faceplate. He stopped trying to look.
He started to feel.
He felt the vibration of the ground.
He felt the heat signature of the magma.
And he felt her.
He felt the massive, swirling vortex of mana gathering in her hands. It felt like a pressure in his skull, a high-pitched whine in his teeth.
He knew exactly where she was.
The Queen unleashed the lance.
A beam of concentrated plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun, screamed toward him.
Harris didn't see it.
He felt the air ionize.
He moved.
He didn't dodge away. He dodged into it.
He slid under the beam, the heat singing the top of his mask. He moved with a speed that matched hers—not human speed, but the jerky, terrifying speed of the artifact.
He closed the distance. Ten meters. Five meters.
She was shocked. She tried to teleport again.
Harris felt the mana spike as she prepared the spell.
No.
He lunged.
He didn't tackle her. He punched the air where she wasn't yet.
He anticipated the blink.
She materialized three feet to his left—right into the path of his swinging, chitin-armored fist.
CRACK.
His fist connected with her jaw.
The impact was seismic. It lifted the Queen off her feet. Her spider-silk armor absorbed some of it, but the kinetic force was undeniable. She spun in the air and crashed onto the obsidian glass.
Harris was on her instantly.
He pinned her. He straddled her chest, his knees pinning her arms to the ground.
His vision was still a gray blur, but he could feel her breathing beneath him. He could smell the ozone and the blood.
She screamed—a sound of pure, magical rage—and tried to blast him off.
Purple lightning erupted from her chest.
Harris took it.
He roared, the sound tearing from his throat like a chainsaw. The lightning arced over his black armor, burning him, cooking his flesh, but the mask poured regeneration into him as fast as she damaged him.
He was an anchor. He was an immoveable object.
He raised his left hand. The KABAR knife was gone, lost in the grapple.
He didn't need it.
He extended his fingers. The chitinous claws lengthened, sharpening into black needles.
He held the claws to her throat.
"Yield," Harris growled, his face inches from hers. The blue lights of his eyes were dim, flickering, but the menace was absolute.
The Queen stared up at him.
She saw the monster. She saw the thing that had killed her daughter.
She stopped struggling. The lightning died.
She went limp.
Not in surrender. In apathy.
She looked past him, at the sky.
> "Kill me," she whispered in English, her voice thick with blood. > "Send me to her."
Harris hesitated.
His claws were touching the skin of her neck. One push. Just one push and the head comes off. The mission is complete. The Shogun is dead. The Queen is dead.
The voices in his head—Miller, Diaz—were screaming. DO IT! KILL HER! SHE'S THE ENEMY!
But the Mask... the Mask was silent.
And Harris... Harris saw the tears returning to her eyes.
He saw a mother who had lost her child.
He remembered the photo of Katya, Dimitri's daughter, lying in the mud.
He remembered the grief.
He realized, with a jolt of horror, that he and this Queen... were the same thing. Monsters made of grief.
Harris slowly, agonizingly, pulled his hand back.
He didn't kill her.
He grabbed her by the throat, not to crush, but to hold.
He leaned in, his voice a low, grinding rasp.
"No," he said. "Death is easy. You... are coming with us."
THE AFTERMATH
Harris stood up, hauling the Queen with him. She hung limp in his grip, broken, her magic spent.
The gravity spell on the others broke.
Russo, Psycho, and the Gorkhas scrambled to their feet, coughing, their weapons raised.
"Shoot her!" Psycho yelled. "Shoot the witch!"
Harris turned his head. The blind grayness was fading, the blue reticle returning as the regeneration finished.
"Hold fire," Harris ordered.
"She's a hostile!" Russo shouted, aiming his rifle. "Asset-1, execute the target!"
"She is intel," Harris said. He dragged the Queen toward them. "She knows the Architects. She knows the 'Prime Gene'. She is worth more than a corpse."
He threw the Queen at Rakesh's feet. The Gorkha flinched, then leveled his Tavor at her head.
She didn't move. She just lay on the black glass, staring at nothing.
Harris walked past them. He was limping. The regeneration had healed the tissue, but the phantom pain of the severed finger still throbbed.
He walked to the edge of the elevator shaft.
"Secure her," Harris said. "Restrain her. We are leaving."
Rakesh looked at the Queen, then at Harris. He nodded. He pulled a set of GDI-issue Magic-Dampening Cuffs—heavy iron shackles inscribed with runes reverse-engineered from the captured elven gear.
He snapped them onto her wrists.
"Target secured," Rakesh said into his comms. "Asset-1 has... subdued... the High Value Target."
In the Gibraltar SCIF, General Dubois let out a breath he didn't know he was holding.
"He didn't kill her," Dubois whispered. "He disobeyed the kill-order... to capture an asset."
"He made a tactical decision," Hayes said, a smile spreading across his face. "A brilliant one. A dead Queen is a martyr. A live Queen... is a library."
Hayes looked at the screen, at the black figure of Harris standing against the smoke.
"He isn't a rabid dog, General," Hayes murmured. "He's a soldier. A terrifying, disobedient, monstrous soldier... but a soldier."
OMEGA SURFACE
Harris watched them load the Queen into the elevator.
He looked back at the crater. At the destruction.
He felt the mask pulsing on his face. It was hungry. It wanted more.
He touched the spot where his finger had been cut off.
He had almost died. He had gone blind.
He realized he wasn't invincible.
Next time, the Mask whispered, we take the eyes first.
Harris lowered his hand.
"Next time," he agreed.
He stepped onto the elevator. The doors closed, sealing out the alien sun, descending back into the concrete womb of the FOB.
The battle for the crater was over.
But the war for the secrets of the Architects had just begun.