THE MEAT GRINDER
OMEGA, SECTOR 5 (THE IRON COAST)
THE BASALT SHELF
10:22 Local Time
The battle for the beachhead had devolved from a tactical engagement into a primal, suffocating brawl.
The violet ocean churned with the relentless motion of the undead. They did not stop. They did not tire. They simply rose from the surf, stumbling over the bodies of the fallen, driven by the singular, hateful will of the Mage on the cliff.
"Reloading!" Lieutenant Commander "Viper" Sterling screamed, ejecting a spent magazine from his C8 carbine. The brass casing pinged off the black rock and vanished into the rising, oily water.
He slammed a fresh mag home and brought the weapon up. A Drowned One, its face a mass of writhing sea-worms and translucent flesh, lunged at him with a rusted cutlass.
Sterling fired. Two rounds to the chest, one to the head.
The creature's skull disintegrated in a spray of black ichor, but the momentum carried its body forward. Sterling had to kick the corpse away, his boot sliding on the slick, mossy rock.
"They are pushing the flank!" Sergeant Miller yelled over the roar of the ocean. "We can't hold the perimeter!"
To their right, the Russian Spetsnaz platoon—the 313th Anti-Sabotage Forces—was fighting a different kind of war. Their APS underwater rifles were running dry. The heavy steel darts were devastating at close range, pinning the monsters to the ground, but the Russians were out of ammo.
Captain Volkov, the Russian commander, had slung his rifle. He was now wielding an entrenching tool in one hand and a combat knife in the other. He fought with the savage, terrifying efficiency of a man cornered. He parried a spear thrust, stepped inside the guard of a bloated, barnacle-covered warrior, and drove the shovel edge into its neck.
"Back!" Volkov roared in Russian. "Collapse the line! Fall back to the Foundry struts! Move!"
It was a fighting retreat, but the terrain was against them. The black basalt was uneven, sharp as glass, and slick with violet slime.
Private Demidov, the young Russian who had been mauled earlier, stumbled.
His leg, torn open by a crab-construct, gave out. He fell into a pool of tide water.
"Demidov!" Volkov screamed, lunging to grab him.
He was too late.
Three Drowned Ones surged from the water. They didn't strike him. They grabbed him.
They dragged him down.
Demidov screamed, his hands scrabbling uselessly against the smooth rock. He was pulled into a fissure in the shelf, disappearing beneath the churning violet foam. The water turned a darker shade of red.
"Man down!" Volkov roared, his voice cracking with fury. "Kill them! Kill them all!"
But the horde was endless. And behind the infantry, the heavy armor was arriving.
The massive, timber-and-bone crab construct—the "Siege Crab"—hauled its bulk onto the shelf. It stood ten feet tall, its shell made of shipwrecks. It raised a pincer the size of a hydraulic press.
"Rocket!" Sterling yelled. "Hit that crab!"
"I'm out!" Miller shouted back, tossing the empty Carl Gustaf tube aside. "We are Winchester on heavy ordinance!"
The crab stepped forward. A British SBS commando, Corporal Jenkins, was caught in its shadow. He tried to scramble back, firing his pistol at the wooden joints.
The pincer snapped shut.
It wasn't a clean cut. It was a crush.
Jenkins didn't even have time to scream. The sound of his armor and bones snapping was louder than the gunfire. The crab tossed his broken body aside like a ragdoll.
Two down.
"Pull back!" Sterling ordered, grabbing Volkov by the harness. "We can't win this here! Get inside the factory module! Seal the doors!"
THE GOD OF THE TIDES
THE CLIFF FACE
DISTANCE: 150 METERS
The Old Mage watched the slaughter with eyes like milk-white stones. He stood atop the jagged spire, the wind whipping his kelp-robes around his skeletal frame.
He was bored.
These interlopers—these creatures of metal and fire—were fragile. They broke so easily.
He looked at the Foundry modules, the ugly metal boxes defiling his coast. He decided it was time to cleanse the rock.
He raised his driftwood staff high. The glowing aquamarine crystal at its tip flared with a blinding, azure light.
He began to chant. It was a low, resonant thrum that vibrated in the teeth of every soldier on the beach.
The ocean obeyed.
The water line, which had been lapping at the soldiers' boots, suddenly receded. It rushed backward with a terrifying speed, sucking the Drowned Ones back with it, exposing hundreds of meters of the seabed—a landscape of black sand and jagged reefs.
"Tsunami," Sterling whispered, staring at the horizon. "He's calling it in."
Out in the deep water, a wall of violet liquid began to rise.
It wasn't a natural wave. It was a construct of magic. It rose higher and higher, defying gravity, stacking upon itself until it towered a hundred feet above the sea level. It was a solid, moving mountain of water, curling at the top, ready to crash down with enough force to scour the basalt shelf clean of life, metal, and hope.
"RUN!" Volkov screamed. "GET TO THE HATCH!"
The survivors scrambled toward the Foundry. But they knew the math. They wouldn't make it. Even if they got inside, the sheer kinetic mass of that wave would tear the factory modules off their anchors and crush them like soda cans.
The wave crested. The Mage lowered his staff, pointing it at the soldiers.
The execution command.
The wall of water began to fall.
THE INTERVENTION
The wave hung in the air, a suspended apocalypse.
And then, the air behind the Mage... shimmered.
It was not the wind. It was a distortion, a geometric folding of light.
Something stepped out of the vacuum.
It was The Third Faction.
But this was not like the slender, graceful scouts that Captain Park had fought in the Amazon.
This entity was a Heavy.
It stood eight feet tall, encased in armor that was impossibly bulky yet seamless. It was a walking tank of white ceramic plates and polished chrome, glowing with aggressive, angular orange circuit-lines instead of the calming blue of the scouts.
It had no head. Instead, a sensor cluster sat low between massive, hunched pauldrons. Its arms were thick, hydraulic pistons, ending not in hands, but in multifaceted weapon manipulators.
The Mage felt the disturbance.
He spun around, his milky eyes widening in genuine shock. He opened his mouth to chant a defense spell.
He was too slow.
The Titan didn't hesitate. It didn't speak.
It raised one of its massive arms. A mechanism on its wrist snapped forward—a pile-bunker, crackling with sonic energy.
TH-OOM.
The sound was a localized sonic boom.
The pile-bunker extended three feet in a millisecond. It struck the Mage directly in the face.
There was no resistance. The Mage's shield didn't trigger. His magic didn't save him.
His head simply... ceased to exist.
It vaporized into a red mist.
The body of the Tidecaller stood for a second, the staff falling from his limp fingers, clattering onto the rock.
Then the body toppled over the edge of the cliff, tumbling down into the receding surf.
THE BEACH
The wave collapsed.
Without the Mage's will to hold it together, the magic failed. Gravity reclaimed the water.
The hundred-foot wall didn't crash forward; it simply fell straight down into the ocean basin.
The impact created a massive splash, a chaotic churning of foam that washed over the basalt shelf, knocking the soldiers off their feet, but it lacked the destructive, crushing force of the tsunami.
It was just water.
Sterling spat out a mouthful of brine, pushing himself up. "What... what just happened?"
"Look!" Volkov yelled, pointing to the cliff.
The Titan stood on the spire where the Mage had been.
It was looking down at them.
Its sensor cluster—a single, vertical, glowing orange slit—scanned the beach. It analyzed the humans. It analyzed the dead Drowned Ones. It analyzed the Foundry.
"New contact!" Miller shouted. "Hostile! High ridge!"
Every surviving soldier—twelve of them—raised their weapons. C8 carbines, APS rifles, pistols. They were terrified, exhausted, and running on pure instinct.
They aimed at the white-and-orange giant.
"Hold fire!" Sterling ordered, his mind racing. "It killed the Mage! Maybe it's..."
The Titan moved.
It didn't take cover. It didn't deploy a shield.
It simply activated its secondary systems.
Two small, turreted pods on its massive shoulders tracked downwards. They swiveled with machine precision, locking onto the twelve humans.
A high-pitched, electronic whine filled the air. The sound of capacitors charging.
"It's targeting us!" Volkov roared. "FIRE!"
Before a single finger could squeeze a trigger, the Titan fired.
It wasn't a bullet. It wasn't a plasma bolt.
It was a Pulse-Laser.
ZIP-ZIP-ZIP-ZIP-ZIP-ZIP.
Twelve beams of coherent red light lashed out from the shoulder cannons in a fraction of a second.
They didn't hit the soldiers' heads. They didn't hit their chests.
They hit the receivers of their weapons.
Sterling felt a sharp, stinging heat in his hands. His C8 carbine exploded. The receiver was melted, fused into a useless lump of hot slag.
Next to him, Volkov shouted in pain as his APS rifle was sliced in half by the laser, the heated metal searing his gloves.
Every single soldier dropped their weapon.
Twelve men. Twelve guns destroyed.
Zero casualties.
The silence that followed was absolute.
The soldiers stood there, shaking their stinging hands, staring at the smoking ruins of their rifles lying on the black rock.
They looked up at the cliff.
The Titan regarded them for one second longer. The orange eye pulsed once.
It seemed to assess them: Threat Level: Zero.
It turned away.
The air around it shimmered, folding in on itself.
The massive, white-and-orange hulk simply... vanished.
Cloaked. Gone.
THE AFTERMATH
Sterling fell to his knees, staring at his melted rifle. The precision required to do that... from 150 meters away... in less than a second...
"It disarmed us," Sterling whispered, his voice trembling. "It didn't want to kill us. It just... took our toys away."
Volkov picked up the front half of his APS rifle. The cut was cauterized, perfectly smooth.
"It saved us," Volkov muttered, his face pale. "Why?"
"I don't think it saved us, Captain," Sterling said, looking at the empty cliff. "I think it just... cleaned up the mess. We weren't the enemy. We were just... bystanders."
"Control," Sterling keyed his mic, his voice shaking. "Control... sitrep. Mage is KIA. Tsunami neutralized. We have... a Third Faction sighting. A Heavy. And... Control... we are combat ineffective. All weapons... destroyed."
"Copy, Viper," the voice from Earth sounded stunned. "We saw the feed. We are analyzing. Get inside the Foundry. Reinforcements are inbound. Just... stay alive."
Sterling looked at the violet ocean, now calming. He looked at the dead bodies of Jenkins and Demidov. He looked at the melted gun in his hand.
This wasn't a war they were fighting.
They were toddlers wandering through a battlefield of giants.
And one of the giants had just swatted the gun out of their hand and told them to go home.
"Let's move," Sterling said, standing up. "Get inside. Before it changes its mind."
The surviving humans limped toward the safety of the automated factory, leaving the Iron Coast to the ghosts and the invisible monsters watching from the cliffs.