The yellow stripe was a faded, defiant slash of colour in a world that had forgotten what colour was. It ran along the base of a chest-high concrete barrier, a guide rope through purgatory. Jaune followed it, his every step a calculation of pain. His ribs were a cage of broken glass. His head throbbed in time with a pulse that felt too fast, too weak. Without his Aura to knit him back together, he was just a collection of aches and bruises held together by stubbornness.
He kept Crocea Mors drawn, the shield a familiar weight on his left arm. It was a flimsy comfort. The sheer scale of the destruction around him was an argument against the effectiveness of a single man with a shield. Entire city blocks were gone, reduced to fields of shattered concrete and twisted rebar. What kind of weapon did this? What kind of war?
“You’re getting close,” Anya’s voice crackled from a speaker on a nearby pole, making him jump. “The beacon is in a fortified emplacement just ahead. Look for a collapsed storefront. ‘Gilded Cage Jewelry.’”
The name was a sick joke. He found it a minute later. The sign was barely legible, the golden letters flaking away. The storefront itself was a gaping maw, its armored shutters torn open like a sardine can. And just inside, sprawled against the counter, was a body.
It was a man, or had been. He was encased in armor so massive it made Jaune’s own chest plate look like a toy. It was all heavy grey plates and thick, hardened composites, covering him from neck to boot. The helmet lay beside his head, its visor a spiderweb of cracks around a single, dark hole. The man’s face was frozen in a silent scream.
Jaune’s stomach churned. He had seen death. He had fought Grimm. But this was different. This was a soldier, killed at his post. Around the body were spent shell casings, brass glinting in the dim light. He had fought. He had lost.
“Did you know him?” Jaune asked, his voice low.
“I know of him,” Anya’s reply was clipped, devoid of emotion. “Private M. Diaz. His comms went silent three hours ago. The state of his armor suggests a high-velocity projectile. Sniper, most likely.”
She sounded like a mechanic diagnosing a broken engine. Jaune knelt, his gaze falling on the dog tags hanging from the man’s neck. *M. Diaz.* A name. A person. Not just a data point. On the floor next to the dead soldier’s hand was a truly enormous gun, a multi-barreled behemoth attached to a heavy tripod. Its ammo belt, thick as Jaune’s wrist, snaked into a large box.
Jaune felt a sudden, cold certainty. His own armor was cracked. His Aura was gone. He was fragile. This dead man’s armor was not. It was a shell. A fortress of steel and ceramic. An insult to the dead, maybe. But survival was a greater imperative.
With a muttered apology to Private Diaz, Jaune began the grim work. The COG armor was heavy, secured by magnetic clasps and pressure seals he had to struggle to understand. He stripped off his own cracked pauldrons and chest plate, the familiar blue and gold hitting the dusty floor with a muted clang. He hefted the COG chest piece. It weighed a ton. Strapping it on felt like being clamped in a vise. It was impossibly bulky, restricting his movement. But when he tapped his knuckles against it, the solid, absolute thud echoed with the promise of protection. He added the greaves and vambraces, his own limbs feeling thin and lost inside the massive shell. He looked at the helmet, at the dark hole in its visor, and left it where it lay. He needed to see.
“What are you doing, Arc?” Anya’s voice was sharp. “I’m detecting unauthorized equipment transfer.”
“I’m not dying out here,” Jaune grunted, cinching the last strap. He felt… larger. Encased. The world seemed smaller from inside the armor.
He pushed deeper into the ruined store. At the back was a small, open courtyard, and in its center, the asset. It was a thick, cylindrical pylon, about ten feet tall, its metal casing scorched and dented. Wires spilled from a ruptured access panel.
“I see it,” Jaune said, speaking to the nearest camera. “The Hammer of Dawn beacon. It’s wrecked. Looks like it took a direct hit.”
“Acknowledged. That complicates things.” The ground beneath his feet trembled. A low, grinding rumble started, growing louder, closer. It sounded like a subway train carving its way through solid rock. “Arc. What is that sound?”
“I don’t know!”
The paving stones ten yards in front of him suddenly cracked. Dirt and debris spewed upwards as a dark hole tore itself open in the ground. The noise was deafening. A shape, pale and brutishly muscled, hauled itself out of the darkness. It was humanoid, but monstrously so, with thick, greyish skin and a flat, snarling face. It wore crude armor and carried a rifle that looked jagged and cruel.
Then another clawed its way out. And another.
“Hostile contact!” Jaune yelled, his training kicking in. He raised Crocea Mors, the shield feeling impossibly small and inadequate. “What are they?!”
“Local fauna,” Anya’s voice was tight, the professional calm finally cracking. “Locust. Emergence Hole is coordinates-positive with your position. They’re drawn to the beacon’s energy signature.”
The first Locust let out a guttural roar and raised its rifle. The weapon coughed, spitting a burst of projectiles. Jaune caught them on his shield, the impacts staggering him. *Thump-thump-thump.* Not bullets. Something bigger. They hit like hammers. His arm screamed in protest, the vibrations running straight to his bones.
Another two were firing now. He was pinned. His shield could block one, but not three. Not from different angles. He grunted as a round skipped off the pavement and slammed into his new leg armor. The plate held, but the force nearly buckled his knee. This wasn't a Grimm fight. Grimm didn't use suppressive fire.
He was going to die. He was going to die in this grey, nameless hell, torn apart by monsters while a disembodied voice narrated his demise.
Then he remembered the gun. Private Diaz’s gun.
He sprinted back into the store, Locust rounds chewing up the wall behind him. The monsters roared and started to advance. He reached the tripod. The gun was labeled *‘MULCHER.’* He grabbed the handles. It was bolted down. He pulled, straining, every muscle screaming. With a shriek of tearing metal, the tripod’s legs ripped free from the floor.
It was the heaviest thing he had ever lifted. He could barely stand, staggering under the combined weight of the gun and its ammo box. He pivoted, planting his feet, the new armor a solid anchor. One of the Locust filled the shattered doorway.
Jaune squeezed the trigger.
The world dissolved into sound and fury. The Mulcher didn’t fire, it erupted. A torrent of high-caliber rounds poured from the spinning barrels with a noise that was more chainsaw than gunshot. The recoil was a physical blow, a jackhammer trying to shove him through the back wall. He leaned into it, roaring, fighting to control the torrent of destruction.
The Locust in the doorway vanished in a red mist. The wall behind it, the street beyond, all of it was shredded, pulverized by the sheer volume of fire. He swung the barrel, a firehose of hypersonic death, and swept it across the courtyard. The other Locust were torn to pieces before they could even register what was happening. Their bodies came apart, chunks of flesh and armor flung through the air.
He kept firing, the deafening roar blotting out all thought. He stitched lines of devastation across the Emergence Hole, chewing up the earth, daring anything else to show its face. The ammo belt went slack. The roaring stopped. An impossible silence crashed down, broken only by the frantic clicking of the cooling barrels and the ringing in his ears.
He stood there, panting, arms trembling from the strain. The courtyard was a charnel house. The air was thick with the coppery-ozone smell of blood and cordite. He had done that. He had… erased them. This wasn’t like killing a Grimm, a creature of darkness that dissolved into smoke. This was messy. This was final.
He let the Mulcher drop. It hit the floor with a cataclysmic crash that shook the whole building. He looked at his hands, encased in the bulky, blood-spattered gauntlets of a dead man. He had survived. But the reflection he’d seen in the glass earlier—the gaunt, haunted stranger—felt closer now. Like he was growing into its skin.
“Arc. Report,” Anya’s voice, sharp and steady, cut through the haze. “Telemetry indicates a massive expenditure of ordnance and the termination of all hostile signals. Confirm your status.”
Jaune opened his mouth, but no words came out. He just stared at the carnage he had wrought.
“Arc,” she repeated, a new note in her voice. Not impatience. Something else. Analysis. “Your combat effectiveness… is noted.”
The boy from Beacon was gone. The liar, the cheater, the wannabe hero—he’d been vaporized in the Dust explosion. The person left standing was just a survivor, clad in borrowed armor, holding a weapon of indiscriminate slaughter. And for the first time, in this terrible new world, he felt a sliver of something that wasn’t fear. It was the ice-cold realization of what it would take to live another day.