Sera climbed the hood of the lead truck while bullets sparked off the barricade around her.

Smoke curled across her shoulders like it belonged there. When she raised her arm, the creature under her skin looked out through her eyes.

The men behind the sandbags saw it.

Some broke.

Some didn’t get the chance.

Because Elias kept shooting until there was nothing left standing between her and the center span.

Flame crawled the drum and snapped toward her like it recognized a better meal.

Sera stepped off the hood into the smoke, boots hitting hot metal and then concrete. Bullets stitched light through the dirty orange.

She didn’t duck.

She simply walked forward, letting the bullets around her fly.

A man rose behind the sandbags and dragged a shotgun up to his shoulder.

She put two bullets through his chest without adjusting her stride.

His body folded into the gap he’d just made and stopped being a problem. Another tried to grab his rifle and ended up wearing it wrong when Lachlan’s machete cleared the angle and carved the mistake out of him.

"Left gap," Elias called from behind, voice level as a metronome.

She slid left and emptied the last of her magazine into the shadow moving there.

The shadow turned into a man hitting the deck with his hands open and eyes wide.

He had armor on, but it didn’t matter. She stepped past him while he decided if breathing was worth the pain.

Zubair brought the truck to the barricade like it wasn’t burning. Heat rolled off the grill and pushed flame sideways so it drooled off the drum and puddled uselessly.

He didn’t lay on the horn. He didn’t need noise. His eyes followed her like a hand ready to catch.

Alexei’s round punched a hole through a side panel to her right. A rifle clattered out of it and went off once into the floor.

The man who owned it never finished finding where it landed.

Sera vaulted the sandbag line and dropped into a nest of bodies that hadn’t made up their minds about living.

One reached for her ankle. She broke his wrist with a short heel pivot and used the same motion to crush his throat.

Another grabbed at her hair.

She fed him the muzzle flash and kept moving.

The more she moved, the more the creature inside of her hummed in enjoyment, moving their body in a dance as old as time.

Lachlan’s laugh clipped off when a round tore a furrow across his ribs.

He grinned wider and stepped into it, blue pulsing along the tendons in his forearms as if electricity had decided he was home.

The next man who tried to meet him found out what a wall felt like from the wrong side.

Elias worked the far angle with insulting efficiency. Crack. Shift. Crack. He cut a hole in the world and let them walk through.

A Cartel flag, a black cloth with a white crown crudely painted—flapped on a length of rebar at the bridge center.

Behind it, three men tried to lift a crate onto a dolly while staying small. Sera swung the rifle and took the left one in the knee and the right one in the bicep.

The third dropped the crate and threw both hands up.

"Down," she ordered, and he listened so hard his forehead hit concrete. The crate rocked once and steadied. Stenciled on the side in red: .50 CAL—DUMMY.

Sera couldn’t hold back the bark of laughter when she saw that.

The weight told her it was real regardless of what they called it.

It was ammunition. And there was plenty of it.

The last real push on the barricade came in a clump: four rifles, one short barreled shotgun, nerves trying to be bravery.

Alexei iced the concrete under their boots in a strip so thin it only mattered when they stepped. Three went down like they’d discovered comedy.

Elias kept the fourth from teaching them lessons, and Zubair lifted a hand just enough to pour heat along a hood where a molotov splashed and thought about catching again.

It didn’t.

Silence found the bridge in pieces.

Not really quiet—fire still hissed, something creaked in the truss, wind shoved smoke and made the whole scene breathe—but the kind that meant no one left on their feet wanted to be.

Sera took it for exactly what it was: time to choose who would continue existing.

"Hands out," she told the three closest with pulses. "Fingers where I can count them. If you twitch, you lose them." 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

They obeyed. Terror did that. It didn’t make her feel anything.

Lachlan came over the barricade with blood drying across his cheekbone like war paint and a rifle someone else used to own. He kicked a gun out of reach and flicked his eyes toward her. "Boss?"

"Alive," she returned, chin indicating the man who’d put his forehead to the deck. "The other two are for parts."

"Copy," he chirped, cheerful, and hauled the two by their collars toward the guardrail without ceremony. Metal clanged. A body tried to remember how to complain and gave up.

Zubair swung the truck up to the sandbags and left it idling. He stepped out of the cab, flame glow painting the inside of his wrists where heat lived and waited.

The sight of him shut one of the wounded men up mid-sob. That was useful.

Alexei moved like fog off a pond—quiet and everywhere—kicking loose magazines into a pile with the toe of his boot, yanking radios off belts, slitting the cords and tossing the sets to Luci like he enjoyed the wolf crunching plastic.

Luci obliged.

He spat bits of antenna and watched the horizon like he expected it to apologize.

Elias had the map open on a truck hood inside of thirty seconds, measuring lines with one finger and an eye that never lied to him.

Sera knelt by the man with his forehead on concrete. He was young enough to still have soft in his cheeks under the grime and the bad mustache.

The armor barely fit him.

Sweat ran lines through soot on his neck. She put the muzzle under his jaw just enough to mark where his fear should live.

"Who runs this bridge?" she asked, holding back the creature just a bit. After all, dead men don’t talk. And she wanted answers.

He swallowed and tried too hard to look at her without really looking.

"The river branch," he blurted out at last. "We’re just a hold point. We don’t... they... the order is to take tribute and turn back anything with weight."