(present)

  ROOAAR.

  The sound wasn't a battle cry. It was a declaration of something older than language.

  The Enforcers opened fire instantly, blunderbusses swinging toward the new threat in unison.

  The volley that had shredded P-7 moments ago roared again with force that would have torn a man apart at the seams, yet they left only faint marks.

  It did nothing.

  P-7 stood through it. Almost as if it couldn't be bothered to dodge.

  The impacts hammered into its broadened frame and dissipated like rain against stone.

  Whatever it had become in those few seconds of reassembly, it was no longer something that buckled under iron and powder.

  The nearest Enforcer processed this in a fraction of a second and made the only logical call.

  He dropped the blunderbuss and went for his cleaver.

  The blade came up in a single fluid motion, a vertical arc disciplined and fast, the kind of swing that could split the hardest metals.

  For the first time, the cleaver roared to life, its edges carrying molten heat, something similar to the scavenger dagger but magnified a hundredfold.

  Surprisingly, the thing that had been P-7 ducked.

  Somewhere beneath the seamless flesh, beneath the wrongness of something that had died and pulled itself back together, a hint of intelligence flickered.

  Something that remembered. Something that knew what that blade could do.

  The cleaver kissed the air an inch above its skull. A clean miss, momentum carrying the blade past.

  The Enforcer was already recovering, already compensating—but P-7 didn't give him the interval. It was simply faster.

  Its two hands curled into a fist and drove downward.

  BANG.

  The impact cratered the floor where the Enforcer had been standing. The man himself was already gone, launched across the chamber like a rag doll. He hit the far wall with a crash.

  The closest amber resin began to develop cracks around its body. Something nobody noticed.

  Except Dion.

  He was still captive. Still hanging from the Enforcer's iron grip, his feet off the ground, ribs compressed by armored fingers.

  Still, his gaze remained attentive, searching for an opening despite the shrapnel still lodged around his torso.

  Surprisingly, the Chrysic armor had held. He could see that clearly from where he hung, no visible cave, no breach in the seamless grey plating.

  Whatever the armor was made of, it had absorbed a blow that should have folded the man inside it like paper.

  But held and unaffected were entirely different things. The Enforcer wasn't getting up any time soon. That left six still standing. Six sets of eyes fixed on the thing that used to be P-7.

  Dion catalogued this with the same detached precision he used for the Drain Log. He was beginning to learn that Pain was just data. Fear was just noise.

  The Enforcer holding him had shifted its grip, distracted by the new threat. A fraction of an inch. A hairline crack in its attention.

  He noted it. Stored it. Waited.

  A beat of silence passed, barely half a second, as the remaining Enforcers recalibrated.

  When was the last time an Enforcer fell in battle? Honestly, Valerius couldn't remember. It simply didn't happen. Not like this. Not to men wearing Chrysic steel.

  P-7's gaze turned to the Enforcer still holding Dion upright.

  It moved.

  Not fast. Faster. The kind of speed that made the eye useless, that registered only as a blur, as displacement, as the absence of where it had been and the arrival of where it no longer should be.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  "Brace yourselves."

  BAM.

  It was interrupted mid-motion. Valerius personally intervened, his armored fist meeting P-7's descending arm in a brutal collision that sent shockwaves through the air.

  The cleaver in his other hand roared to life, molten edge humming.

  "Get THETA out of here."

  The Enforcer holding Dion didn't hesitate. It turned, dragging the boy toward the breach, toward extraction, toward mission completion.

  P-7 released a growl of annoyance. Low. Guttural. The sound of something that had been waiting a long time and did not appreciate being made to wait longer.

  Its fingers extended, flesh darkening and hardening into obsidian claws aimed directly at Valerius.

  Unfortunately, it was interrupted.

  A second Enforcer deflected the strike with a brutal parry, the impact sparking against P-7's claws. In the same motion, the Enforcer swept its cleaver low, aiming for P-7's legs. The blade bit deep, molten edge singing through flesh.

  Valerius went high, his cleaver aimed for the neck.

  P-7 twisted, avoiding decapitation by inches, but the movement cost it. It stumbled, off-balance, with smoking wounds on both legs and the shoulder.

  A third Enforcer appeared, circling wide, cutting off any path of escape. Its cleaver hummed with hungry light, waiting for an opening.

  They moved like clockwork. Like they had practiced this exact scenario a thousand times.

  P-7's chest heaved. Its eyes found Dion again, still being dragged toward the breach, getting smaller, getting further away.

  It roared.

  Through it all, the Alchemist watched. Still encircled by two Enforcers who held him at gunpoint, their blunderbusses trained on his hooded form with unwavering precision.

  The third had already joined the others in taking down the creature.

  It should have been quite easy. Three Enforcers against one wounded thing. Numbers. Training. Chrysic steel.

  But for some reason, they felt uncomfortable. The figure clad in grey hadn't moved. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't even looked at the weapons aimed at his face.

  He simply watched the chaos unfold with the mild interest of someone observing insects through glass.

  The Enforcers tightened their grips on their triggers and tried very hard not to wonder why.

  A blade descended. P-7 caught it mid-swing. The molten edge bit into its palm, smoking, sizzling.

  It released a grunt, but it still didn't let go. It yanked with force, causing them to stumble forward.

  P-7's fist met his helmet with a sound that echoed through the shed.

  Valerius' blade came down at an impossible angle. P-7 twisted, taking it across the ribs instead of the neck.

  It kept moving, slamming its forearm into the man's throat with enough force to lift him off his feet.

  The third Enforcer tackled it mid-motion. They hit the ground hard, rolled, came up with P-7 on bottom, the Enforcer on top, armored elbows driving down toward its face.

  The Enforcer reached for its blunderbuss.

  It was a mistake.

  P-7 caught the elbows, holding them together. Slowly, impossibly, it began to push up.

  The Enforcer's eyes behind the visor went wide for a fraction of a second. Then P-7 roared and threw him off like he weighed nothing.

  Valerius was already there. He caught the man without breaking his own stance, absorbed the weight, and had him back on his feet.

  He surveyed the shed quickly.

  Two Enforcers down, the target was secure at least for now, and the beast, this thing, was losing blood and fast. Dark ichor pooled beneath it with every labored breath.

  Yet through it all, the figure in grey robes remained still, still guarded by two Enforcers with blunderbusses trained on his hood.

  By all rights, they were winning. The numbers were on their side. The mission parameters were being met.

  But deep down, an uncomfortable feeling Valerius couldn't kill since the first moment he stepped into this place was rising with everything he had.

  A weight in his chest that had nothing to do with armor or exertion. Something ancient and patient and deeply, deeply wrong.

  They needed to end this fast.

  Yet in the next second, something impossible occurred.

  The creature stood still as its wounds stopped bleeding. The gashes across its palms, its ribs, its legs sealed themselves, flesh knitting together with a sound like wet leather stretched over fire.

  A hint of pain flickered across its face as it bore through it, there and gone in an instant.

  It didn't charge.

  It waited.

  Let them come.

  Both Enforcers exchanged the barest glance.

  This wasn't over.

  …

  The world reduced itself to motion and noise.

  The Enforcer's arm was clamped around his torso like a vice, carrying him through the undergrowth without slowing, without effort, without any acknowledgment that he was a person rather than a package.

  The fragments still buried in his flesh reminded him with every step that he was.

  Just when he had begun to feel something close to comfortable, or as comfortable as one could feel in a place like this, he was back here.

  Captive.

  Dragged through the dark by something that hadn't needed to break a sweat to take him.

  Prey. Again.

  The urge to scream was there, building pressure behind his teeth. He swallowed it. What good would it do?

  What surprised him was what rose in its place.

  Not rage. Embarrassment.

  He was embarrassed at how little he mattered in this equation. At how easily he'd been lifted, handled, transported.

  A prince of Lavos, reduced to cargo for the second time in the same year, by two entirely different sets of people who hadn't considered him worth the dignity of a struggle.

  The thought sat in his chest like a coal.

  The Enforcer came to a sudden halt.

  Dion's body registered the stop before his mind did. Then he heard it — the faintest shift in the undergrowth ahead. The kind of sound that didn't belong to wind or fauna. Deliberate.

  Humans.

  He blinked.

  A figure emerged from the treeline.

  Young. Wearing the layered, oil-stained leather of a Ferro-Locus scavenger, grilled mask pushed up onto his forehead, eyes wide with the particular look of someone who had been surviving on borrowed time and knew exactly how thin that margin had become.

  Dion's gaze moved across him in a single, practiced sweep.

  The conclusion arrived before the thought did.

  Scavenger.

  Meanwhile, Aeron stared. He hadn't moved since the Enforcer emerged from the undergrowth with the figure clamped under its arm.

  He wasn't sure he could.

  The boy, and he was a boy, that was the first thing that registered, hung from the Enforcer's grip like something the Locus had already finished with.

  His head lolled at an angle that suggested the only thing keeping him upright was the armored fist bunched in his collar.

  His face was wrong. Too pale, the color of old wax, stretched tight over the architecture of his features. His hair, blond and matted dark at the roots, clung to his forehead in strips.

  His lips were slightly parted, the breath moving through them shallow and too fast.

  But it was the rest of him that made Aeron's stomach turn.

  Metal. Embedded in flesh.

  Not wounds, exactly. Not the clean cuts, a blade left, or the ragged tears of a beast's claws. These were fragments, dozens of them, driven into the boy's torso, his arms, the ridge of one shoulder. Each one had gone in and stayed.

  The skin around them had sealed, pulling tight and dark at the edges the way flesh did when it couldn't decide whether to reject something or absorb it.

  And yet.

  Hardly any blood. A few dried tracks across his jaw, a dark smear below his collarbone. Nothing matched the inventory of damage his body was carrying.

  Aeron had seen men die from less. He had helped carry them out of the Locus on boards.

  This person was still breathing. He found himself staring, more than usual.

  Wait…was this the ‘human’

  The boy, by all accounts, looked like the Locus had eaten him halfway and spat him back out.

  "Plot the best path back to the Residuum."