The war table hummed beneath their gauntlets, maps glitching and flickering under the strain of the data feed. Red blips marked every fallen beast. The screen struggled to hold them all.
There were too many.
Valkar stood with his arms crossed, eyes locked on the flickering swarm still being counted. "One million."
Mitus sat hunched forward, elbows on the table, bruised and bandaged. "No. That can't be right."
Candren tapped a sequence. "It is. The telemetry's clean. Satellite heat maps confirm it. We killed one million creatures. Give or take a few thousand."
Fitus let out a long breath and dragged a gloved hand down his face. "That was a million?"
Riven leaned back, hands on his hips, jaw flexing. "And we're still breathing…"
The room fell quiet.
Then Maverick spoke, low and final.
"Which means he has more."
Every head turned.
Maverick stepped closer to the table, the faint whir of his servos the only sound for a moment. His eyes scanned the sea of crimson dots.
"This was a warning. A flood. And we held."
Valkar nodded slowly. "But it wasn't his army."
"No," Maverick said. "It was the first wave."
He tapped the table, hard enough that the image glitched again. "The fact that we're still standing means this wasn't everything. He's showing us that we're outnumbered. That if one million doesn't break us—he'll send ten. Or twenty."
Mitus's voice cracked. "We barely survived that…"
Fitus growled. "But we did. And we'll do it again."
Candren stepped back from the table. "We've always known he was preparing. But if those beasts were crafted from just moon-dust and blood—"
Riven finished it for him. "Then the moon's not just his lair. It's his forge."
Maverick turned to the Primortals standing silently nearby.
"You knew this was possible."
Primortal Sovel met his gaze, unblinking. "We estimated a million at most."
"You estimated wrong," Maverick said coldly. "If that was a million, then our enemy is not preparing for battle. He's preparing for extinction."
Sovel did not reply.
Another Primortal spoke up. "Your next mission is clear. The moon must be purged. The forge must be shattered. Armatus must fall."
Fitus cracked his neck. "We're going up there, aren't we?"
Maverick looked at the others. One by one, they gave him the look he needed.
No words.
Just fire in their eyes.
He turned back to the Primortals.
"Send every ship. Every tool. Every ounce of power Earth can spare."
He paused.
"And tell the moon to prepare."
___________________________________
The war-table pulsed with grim illumination.
Scans of the battlefield flickered on its surface—burning craters, broken shields, and the trails of ash where beasts had fallen. But no one was looking at the dead.
They were staring at the numbers.
"One million," Valkar repeated, his voice low. "And we killed them all."
"No," Riven said, arms crossed. "We killed what we thought was all of them."
A silence followed.
Candren flicked a display forward with a motion of his armored gauntlet. The holographic battlefield zoomed out, revealing just how many lives had been extinguished within the city perimeter.
"Based on the crater readings and impact trails…" he began, tapping through the data, "…that wasn't the whole army. That was a fragment. Maybe the first of several waves."
Fitus looked down, exhaling slowly. "Then our count was wrong."
"Badly wrong," Candren confirmed.
Mitus stood near the edge of the table, arms resting on its steel frame. He was healing—but slowly. The bruises on his face had faded, but the tremble in his voice remained. "What are we looking at, then? Two million? Three?"
"No," said Maverick.
They turned.
He spoke without raising his voice. "We're looking at a moon. Entirely weaponized. Every breath of dust is a soldier waiting to form. There is no army count."
The words hit like a slow avalanche. Unstoppable. Cold.
Valkar leaned forward. "So we go anyway."
Candren raised a brow. "You say that like it's just another march."
"It is," Valkar replied. "We don't wait for wars to come to us. We bring them to their knees."
Riven smirked. "A proper welcoming party."
Fitus was less amused. "We're not ready. Not for him. Armatus doesn't just build armies—he feeds on them. Every death on that field made him stronger. You saw it. I felt it."
"He's a god now," Mitus muttered. "A monster made of moons and vengeance."
Maverick remained silent.
Then he looked at Sovel.
"Pull all orbital blueprints of Vornex Prime. I want scans from before and after we lost contact. We need terrain analysis, lunar fracture patterns, magnetic field breakdowns—anything that tells us where he's building from."
Sovel nodded once and activated the temple's archive feed. Ancient data streams poured onto the war-table like molten light.
"Before the corruption," Sovel said, "Vornex was a dead moon. Hollowed by tectonic convulsions, riddled with obsidian canyons. After Armatus… it became something else. These scans are from three cycles ago."
He projected a section of the moon's surface.
Claw marks.
Not small ones. Planetary. Entire mountain ranges scraped into symbols. Crater formations reshaped into spirals too massive to decipher. Caverns dug like tunnels for worms the size of cities.
Candren narrowed his gaze. "Those aren't fortresses."
"They're birthing pits," Riven said darkly.
Mitus clenched a fist. "So what's the plan? Just land in the middle of that hell and hope we get lucky?"
"No," Maverick said. "We don't get lucky. We make our outcome."
He pointed at the deepest canyon—a place the scans had marked Black Silence.
"He's there."
Fitus stepped forward. "And we just go?"
"Not without a plan," Valkar interjected. "We divide fire teams. Three and three. Entry and suppression. Staggered drop pods. We make the monsters come to us—limit the swarm. Candren, I want seismic charges placed along any climbable ridges. Mitus, you're support. Riven and I breach. Fitus, stay flexible."
Maverick added: "I lead both teams."
Of course he did.
Sovel's voice cut in. "You'll need clearance for relic-class weaponry. We've already begun thawing the vault."
Fitus blinked. "You mean the vault?"
"The one sealed during the extinction wars," Sovel confirmed.
"Relics forged before the rise of the Primortals," Candren whispered.
Valkar looked toward the sealed doors beyond the war chamber.
"Then let's get armed."
They turned without another word.
⸻
⸻ THE VAULT ⸻
The doors opened with a sound like collapsing stars.
Steam rolled across the ground as the interior lit with faint, ancient light. Each Warmachine stepped forward into history.
Walls lined with weapons unseen for millennia. Twin-bladed plasma glaives. Ion-surge maces. Cannons forged with living metal coils that hissed with breath.
A weapon had already been placed at each soldier's nameplate. Their names weren't spoken—but they were etched in light above the stone brackets.
Valkar's hammer. Riven's twin shatterblades. Fitus's magnetic rail-pike. Candren's war-surge pack. Mitus's dual glaive-staves—now reforged in volcanic alloy.
They stepped up one by one.
Each reached out, not as men—but as titans preparing for a war that would outlive galaxies.
And in the center…
A single dais.
Black stone. Edgeless. Waiting.
Maverick approached it alone.
The weapon didn't glow.
It pulsed.
Not with energy.
With memory.
It was the first weapon ever forged for a Warmachine—his. A shard-hammer made of void alloy and sun-blood, its hilt fused with the tech of forgotten ages.
He lifted it.
No flash. No explosion.
Only silence.
Then—
Maverick turned to face the others.
His voice cut through the vault:
"If war stands before us."
They stood still, weapons in hand.
He raised the hammer.
"We will bring annihilation"