"You think we wanted this?" Kael snapped, his hands gripping Miller’s wool tunic before Vance could pull him back. "The corporation doesn't care about your terraced gardens or your peaceful little valley. They are clearing the map, Miller. Every cabin, every child, every stalk of corn—they are turning it into scrap iron." Miller didn't flinch. His gray eyes locked onto Kael’s bloodshot gaze, measuring the desperate, manic edge in the captain's voice. Slowly, the old mayor lowered the iron-shod spade, his boots grinding into the dirt. "Get the wounded into the root cellars under the smithy," Miller ordered, his voice suddenly sharp as he spun to face the gathering crowd of townsfolk who had frozen in the central square. "Sarah! Take the bucket brigades to the north cisterns. Tom, pull the livestock into the lower barns and bar the doors. Move!" "Too late for barns," Sera’s voice cut through the ris

"Move them where?" Miller demanded, stepping directly into Kael’s path, his hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. "Our root cellars only go three feet deep! A heavy concrete-piercing round from a pneumatic rail-mortar won't just crack the dirt, Captain—it’ll turn the entire eastern quarter into a mass grave!" "Not if we don't give them time to fire," Rian interjected, his voice raspy and strained as he stepped out from the shadow of the blacksmith's overhang. He was cradling his dead, sparking cybernetic arm against his chest like a broken limb, soot streaking his hollow cheeks. "The cellars connect. Every single one of them. The old mining families dug drainage tunnels fifty years ago to vent sulfur gas from the lower seams. They run right down to the mouth of the gorge." Sera spun around, her eyes widening with sudden, desperate comprehension. "The old drainage conduits? Rian, are you insane? Those pipes haven't been

"Hold on, Captain!" Miller shouted, stepping forward with his iron-shod spade still gripped tightly in his gnarled hands. "You’re sending half a dozen people into a collapsed mine shaft while a corporate gun crew sits fifty yards outside waiting to blast us to dust!" "If we stay here, we're targets in a shooting gallery, Miller," Kael snapped, his voice dropping an octave as he leveled a hard, unyielding stare at the town mayor. "Keep your people in the basements, keep the buckets filled with water for the fires, and let us handle the mortar." "Handle it with what?" Vance muttered, stepping past Miller while checking the magazine of his sidearm with a sharp, metallic click. "We're down to three grenades, a handful of jagged scrap metal, and Rian’s glorified paperweight of an arm." "It's more than the gun crew has," Rian shot back, already dropping to his knees beside a rusted iron trapdoor hidden beneath the

"Move faster, Rian, your sparks are lighting up these walls like a tavern sign," Vance growled, ducking low beneath a sagging timber support as the floor beneath his boots squelched with thick, toxic mud. "I am not doing it on purpose, Vance, the damp is shorting out the primary node in my collarbone," Rian snapped back, his voice strained as he swept his dead cybernetic arm forward to catch himself against a slime-coated rock wall. A violent series of blue-white electrical arcs flared across his shoulder, illuminating the cramped, dripping-wet drainage tunnel for a fraction of a second before plunging them back into near-total darkness. Kael gritted his teeth, his right hand gripping a discarded iron pipe like a walking stick while his left hand clamped tightly over the fresh, soaking bandage on his thigh. Every step forward was a white-hot agony, the sulfuric air burning his lungs and aggravating the fever that had been building since yest

"Rian, if you don't cut the feed right now, I'm taking my combat knife and doing it for you," Vance snarled, his broad frame pressing hard against the slick stone wall as a fresh string of blue-white electrical arcs hissed from the engineer's shoulder. "Do it and my arm goes into permanent spasm!" Rian choked out, his face pale, sweat mixing with the black soot and sulfuric grime streaking his cheeks. "The actuator is wired directly into the nerve cluster beneath my collarbone. You hack the cables, I lose control of my entire right side!" "You're about to lose your entire head if that gas catches fire!" Sera whispered fiercely from the front of the line, her hand clamped over her nose and mouth as she crouched low in the yellow-tinged fog. "Look up. Right through that grating." Kael squinted through the stinging haze, his fingers white-knuckled around the rusted iron pipe he was using as a crutch. His bandaged thigh thro