While the frontline fighters pressed the attack and kept the void creatures busy, the artillery engineers scrambled to pack up their massive cannons. Great locking clamps hissed and released. Huge wheels, taller than a man, groaned as they began to turn. The ground vibrated with the strain of moving such heavy machinery across broken concrete.

Guarding these engineers was a small, battered team. Among them were Vance and Jax. By some thin thread of luck they were both still alive.

Though, to call Vance alive was generous. Calling him anything other than barely breathing would have been a lie, maybe even heresy in this dark place.

He was sprawled on his back, leaning against one of the many rotten, crumbling walls that lined the artillery position. The wall was Swiss cheese now, riddled with smoking holes punched through it by the claws and bone spikes of the void creature’s ambush. The ancient concrete, stained with decades of industrial grime and mold, crumbled against his shoulder.

Vance’s breath came in ragged, shallow gasps. His left hand was pressed hard against his ribs, and every time his chest moved, a sharp spike of pain made his vision blur. Something inside him was definitely broken.

His right hand, however, was locked tight around the grip of his standard-issue laser rifle. The metal was warm from constant firing. He held onto it like a drowning man clutching a lifeline thrown across dark water. It was the only thing in the world that felt solid and safe.

Nearby, Jax kept his head on a swivel, his own weapon raised, watching the shadows that danced between the flickering light of dying plasma fires and the distant muzzle flashes. The air was thick with the smell of ozone, burned rubber, and the strange, sour odor of void creature blood evaporating on hot metal.

Jax picked his way carefully through the wreckage toward Vance. He stepped over a fresh void creature corpse, its skin still sizzling and popping from the heat of the Aegis plasma rifles and the heavy caliber machine guns of the light tanks.

Thin trails of bitter smoke rose from the body, twisting upward into the already thick, smoggy air of the lower hive. The smell was a stomach-turning mix of burnt alien flesh and hot metal.

He stopped beside Vance and looked down, first at the wound on his side, then at his pale, sweat slicked face. The flickering light of distant fires cast long, dancing shadows across the scarred wall behind them.

"How is it?" Jax asked while pointing a finger toward the injury. That finger was a mess of old scars and fresh bruises; the skin was rough from hour after hour of pulling triggers on aging laser rifles.

Vance slowly lifted his head. His mouth twitched with every heartbeat; the pain from his wounds stabbed through him in time with his pulse. "It’s just a slight bruise," he grunted, forcing the words through clenched teeth. "Hurts like a bitch, but... I’ll survive."

Right as he finished speaking, his body betrayed him. A violent cough wracked his chest. Dark, clotted blood flew from his mouth and splattered onto the ground. The concrete was so hot from the raging battle that the blood began to hiss and steam almost instantly, evaporating into a thin red mist.

Jax raised one eyebrow. "And you call that just a bruise?" He shook his head slowly and reached for the worn-out bag he had scavenged during these brutal days of war. Over the past few cycles, he had filled it with whatever he could find, from spare energy cells for his laser rifle to a roll of dirty bandages and a few precious medical supplies stripped from the bodies of dead soldiers.

The most valuable items in the bag were two syringes. Each one was filled with a milky liquid; it was a mix of morphine to kill the pain and tiny repair nanomachines designed to stitch together minor skin and muscle tissue. Jax pulled one out, flicked the cap off with his thumb, and without giving Vance time to flinch, jammed the needle straight into his shoulder.

"Ugh... this shit hurts!" Vance shouted, his voice cracking. The sharp sting of the needle biting into his flesh was bad, but what followed was even worse; it was a cold, crawling sensation spreading under his skin as the nanomachines dispersed into his bloodstream.

Then the morphine hit. A wave of heavy, sweet relief washed over him, dulling the jagged edges of pain. Vance let out a long, shaky sigh, and his tense muscles finally loosened. He blinked and forced himself to look around, to truly take in the chaos spinning around them.

Tanks were grinding backward, engineers were shouting at each other through the smoke, and somewhere nearby a damaged Aegis unit sparked and twitched on the ground.

"So... the rumors I’ve been hearing from the others," Vance said, his voice still weak but steadier now. He took deep, deliberate breaths, readying himself to stand and move. "Is any of it true?"

Jax glanced up from checking the charge level on his laser rifle. A small display on the weapon’s side glowed faintly yellow, indicating that only less than half power remained. "Rumors? Oh, you mean about us abandoning the hive city entirely?" He nodded as his expression turned grim. "Seems so... at least the order’s real. We’re pulling back."

Vance let out another deep sigh. This one came easier, slower. The morphine had spread through him now, wrapping his pain in a warm, heavy blanket. Deep inside, he could feel a faint, crawling tingle as the tiny nanomachines set to work, stitching the torn tissue and sealing the worst of the internal bleeding.

The repairs wouldn’t last forever since the microscopic machines would burn out in a few hours once their tiny power reserves ran dry, but it was better than bleeding out slowly on a heap of broken concrete.

He grunted and shifted his weight. "Going outside the hive city, huh?" He looked past Jax, toward the massive, rust-streaked outer walls that kept the lower levels sealed off from the planet’s surface.

"Wasn’t this planet crawling with Category 3 dangerous wildlife? I’m actually surprised none of them came sniffing around after the barrier went down."

The old city barrier, a shimmering dome of crackling blue energy, had been the only thing keeping the outside world at bay. Now it was dead. A dead shield meant a wide open door.

Vance reached for his rifle, checked the power cell, and saw the indicator blinking a dull, dying red. Almost spent. He popped the old cell out and, just like Jax was doing nearby, crouched beside a fallen soldier to scavenge fresh ones.

His fingers brushed cold armor and sticky blood-soaked cloth, but he did what he had to. He clicked a new cell into place, and the rifle hummed softly back to life.

Jax shrugged at the question, still rummaging through a dead trooper’s belt pouches. "Beats me. I don’t even know what ’Category 3’ means. You know I never had any kind of schooling. I’m just a lower hive worker, a grunt from the bottom levels. So... what is it?"

If the old hive city government were still standing, this kind of looting would be seen as theft, a crime punished by public execution or even worse. Before the fall, society would have called it immoral.

But the government was long gone. All that remained of the hive’s original population was the ragged defense army and a few civilians the Kaelzar forces had evacuated in the first wave. Here, among the dead, the only law was survival.

Vance found a half-crushed protein bar in one of the soldier’s packs and broke it in two. He handed half to Jax. "Honestly, it’s not hard to understand; Category 3 wildlife means creatures that are dangerous even to heavily augmented combat cyborgs, the Tier 3 ones, the top of the line killing machines."

"To anyone below that tier? Completely lethal." He took a bite of the dry, chalky bar and spoke through the mouthful. "So for people like us, just common folk with no fancy body mods, stepping outside the hive city is basically a death sentence."

He chewed and swallowed, then added, "Well, at least we’re not going out there alone. We’ve got the regular defense army with us. And those robots from earlier."

Jax paused mid-bite, his jaw freezing. He had been eating with the desperate, frantic hunger of a man who hadn’t tasted food in two days. Now his eyes narrowed.

"Do you trust those pieces of metal?" He spoke with his mouth still full, crumbs falling onto his grimy vest. "Not long ago, we were their target! They were hunting us! And now you just... accept their help, just like that!?"

His last words came out as a shout, raw and sharp, cutting through the low murmur of the nearby soldiers. Heads turned. Some faces showed anger, others a tired, quiet understanding. But any sudden noise on a battlefield was dangerous. Attention was a magnet for trouble.

Vance opened his mouth to respond, but the words never came.

A sound rolled over them; it was the heavy and rhythmic sound of metallic footsteps, each one a deep, ringing thud that vibrated up through the rubble. Not the quick clank of an Aegis unit. Something much bigger. The sound echoed off the broken walls and made puddles of oily water shiver.

Every head turned toward the direction of the noise. Even the wounded stopped groaning for a moment. In the flickering, smoke-choked half-light, a massive silhouette began to take shape, moving slowly toward them through the haze.