Rip his throat out before he touches the main flight console!A Syndicate flight lieutenant screamed over the bridge alarms, blasting his plasma scattergun down the tilted floor of the falling dreadnought.The huge warship plunged nose-first through a red sky, its hull glowing white-hot from atmospheric friction. Vane’s forced reactor overload dragged it straight at the land-cruiser below.Idris didn’t even flinch. He raced up the sloping deck, dodging plasma fire with almost unnatural precision. Lightning, white and purple, burst around his boots as he closed in—an instant later, his bare elbow crashed through the lieutenant’s visor. The helmet shattered in a spray of glass and wire, launching the guard back into the ship’s steering array.Boss, twenty seconds 'til impact! Rhea shouted. She kicked a heavy guard off the bridge railing and clung to the flight yoke, fighting to stay clear of the glass viewports yawning beneath her. The land-cruiser’s right under our keel! If we hit, the

They're inside the hull—kill every last one!Unit Two's shout rattled through the comms, nearly drowned by the roar of tearing metal and the brutal thumping of Syndicate scatterguns. Idris tore out of the communications spire, boots scraping fire across the scorched iron floor. Rhea was already at full sprint next to him, her Titan-Grade blade almost singing as it cut through the darkness, leaving a trail of golden light behind her. How many boarded us? Idris barked into his wrist comm, chest pounding like a war drum.Don't come back, commander! Unit Two shot back, static crackling hard as another explosion ripped through the feed. They're using the assassin's pod as a spatial anchor! Thirty Sun-Scar Reapers on the main deck—they're breaching the hostage hold! Save yourself!Then the transmission snapped off, replaced by dead static.The shock hit Idris like a hammer. He'd survived an orbital bombardment. He'd purged the rot inside him and crushed Vane’s monstrous champion. None of i

He is still breathing, blow the whole catwalk!A Syndicate security overseer shouted from the upper gantry, slamming a fist into a detonation lever as the trio of dozen crimson-armored shock troopers opened fire their heavy rotary repeatersThe metal walkway beneath Idris and Rhea's feet erupted in shrapnel and steel as gravity flickered, sent on a downward spiral with both the captured land-cruiser and Dread-Mech towards the blue tectonic fire of the Sector Five Rift.Hold my belt! Rhea shouted, kicking off of a falling steel girder as it shattered into a thousand directions from the withering plasma shots.She caught Idris by the collar in midair, her free hand slashing through three incoming tungsten rounds with a spin of her Titan-Grade blade before the recoil of impact sent her skidding across the zero-gravity hangar, the smell of copper filling her nostrils from her torn cheek. The weight of all the fighting in the void was pressing against her shoulders, threatening to snap th

Identity Override!The cold, mechanized voice in his skull didn't just speak; it shattered the last pillars of his human mind like glass under a sledgehammer. Idris collapsed into the freezing mud, his hands clawing desperately at the sides of his head as his vision violently split into a hundred thousand different glowing orange perspectives.He was everywhere. He was the jagged claws scraping against the underground hyper-steel breeding vaults. He was the rabid, starving jaws snapping in the thick, freezing fog. The Doomsday Swarm wasn't just connecting to him; it was swallowing his consciousness whole, trying to erase the man and leave only the hive king.On the massive hyper-alloy ramparts of the Quarantine Gate, Warlord Vane's laughter boomed through the public address arrays.Look at him! Vane roared, pointing a heavily armored finger down at Idris's writhing form. The great savior of the slums! The anomaly! You fought so hard to keep your humanity, Cole, and all you did was del

Dig with your bare hands if you have to, tear that door down!Captain Vance roared over the wailing sirens of the collapsed valley, his good arm driving a rusted plasma torch directly into the jagged seam of the Crimson Citadel's buried blast doors.Above them, the sky of Sector Four was no longer crimson. It had turned a sickening, bruised violet. The colossal circular rift in the upper atmosphere was widening by the second, and the lower ring of the Architect Citadel Ship cast a shadow so massive it swallowed the entire desert valley in freezing darkness.We have less than four minutes before those silver execution units drop from orbit! Unit Two shouted, bracing his remaining shoulder against a falling slab of hyper-alloy rebar. My sensors are reading thirty distinct kinetic signatures descending through the clouds!Get out of the way, Idris growled.He didn't wait for the plasma torch to cut the lock. His left eye burned with a blinding golden radiance, while his right eye flicker