The emergency klaxons of Nova's pioneer datapad continued to shriek, casting a harsh violet glow over the blood-stained ferro-crete."Shut it off, Nova," I rasped, my voice raw from the superheated steam of the World-Eater’s womb.Nova touched the screen, disabling the alarm. The quiet that filled the plaza was profound. There were fifty Vanguard veterans in battered condition, and a hundred surrendered Iron Vipers, looking at me in the soot. They waited for the king to do the calculation.Maya came to my side and said, “Five thousand mechanized infantry. She didn't sheathe her dark-forged trench knives. She gazed out towards the walls on the south side of the house, where the sky looked bruised and dark. Since the tectonic tap the Machina Wastes haven't put together a horde this big. Why now?"I replied "Because they felt the heat," and my golden blue eyes fixed on the distant, ruined gates. The wastes have been cold for 10 years and when the Caretakers' vents opened, Sector Alpha di

For a long time, I had walked the finalized world as an anvil. I had grown accustomed to the brutal math of my own biology—the absolute certainty that no matter what struck me, the universe would break before my bones did.I was now crawling through the toxic, flooded drainage pipe under the Machina armada, a mere piece of meat.The frequency disruptor was working its way through the atomic glue that was holding my Omniversal-baked skeleton together. Each motion brought a hollow, sickening ache to my marrow, as my bones ground themselves into fine gray sand. I was light. I was fragile.I burst through the corroded grate, and found myself in the swirling ash and the loud noise of the enemy siege lines."Stay low!" The dozen Iron Vipers poured out behind us, and Vargas roared, racking a shell into his shotgun.We were out in the thick of the armada's heavy treads. Siege crawlers towering over us, belching diesel fumes, rolled through the mud around us, their gigantic rotary cannons aime

A throne is just a chair until someone bleeds to keep it. But when the blood belongs to the people you swore to protect, the throne becomes a tomb.I was in the dim, flickering emergency light of the Vanguard's second command bunker. The Aegis Citadel was being ripped apart outside the reinforced blast doors. The heat from Sector Alpha was helping to sustain the civilian sectors but not the quiet. The chanting could be heard in the ferro-crete corridors.Murderers.They were weeping for the four hundred souls who were buried under Maya's tactical avalanche in Sector Three. They didn't pay attention to the harsh numbers of the Machina armada. They simply knew that the new gods of the Cold Apocalypse were the same as the old gods in that they were oppressing people.Nova stood over a heavy tactical table with her hands shaking as she scanned the rusted, pre-Omniversal cylinder the Caretaker envoy had dropped at my boots with her pioneer datapad.The cylinder opened with a loud hissing s

It's been five years since you last breathed.In the finalized world, seasons were not used to measure time. It was characterized by rhythmic, heavy thrumming of the Caretakers' furnace which reverberated through the ferro-crete foundation of the Aegis Citadel. Each vibration was a reminder of what had been paid for in the darkest of darkness.I was at the reinforced viewport of the High Council spire, gazing down at Sector Four. Not a slum, no longer. It was a heavily fortified, ruthlessly efficient paradise of iron and steam. The old riots were over, and now there was a rigid system of compulsory work rotations and limited supplies of synthetic grain. The Citadel Guards had been replaced by Warlord Vargas's Iron Vipers, who were now my brutal cybernetic enforcers of my localized law.I had created a dictatorship with absolute zero discipline. I had to. The only thing that kept the Chimera together was fear and the heat of the deep crust, without Kaelen's Omniversal-baked gravity to k

A localized EMP doesn't explode with fire. It detonates with a shockwave of absolute, suffocating silence.The pure white exterior of the Cult's sanctuary was bathed in a pulse of electromagnetic energy. The tall pillars of sterile white energy violently flickered. The Cathedral's great hard-light doors creaked and crackled with analog interference as the perfect mathematical algorithms of the hard-light doors failed in real-time before shattering into a billion harmless photons that vanished into the freezing ash.The silver shields were down."Carve 'em up!" Warlord Vargas roared, his heavy boots crunching over the frozen ground as he charged the breach.The fifty Iron Vipers swarmed through the broken doorway behind him, their kinetic shotguns sounding like analog thunder in the pure courtyard. The Cult's followers, deprived of their local hard-light protection, lifted their rusted weapons and fired back.However, when the fight broke out, Maya didn't only encounter scavengers. She