The radio crackled alive through the barrage.
"Oi—mind the splash, lads," Dision's voice cut in, rough beneath the static. "My bird's lost her feathers and she's hunting for a place to die. If you see a fallin' star—that'd be me."
The signal wavered. Held.
High above the refinery, the sky tore open.
Caelestis broke through the smoke trailing fire she no longer bothered to fight. One engine burned clean. Another coughed, flared, died. The rest fired in short, ugly bursts.
Inside the cockpit, no one sat. No one breathed. Dision was the cockpit—was the dying thrusters, the failing gyros, the hull that screamed as it tore. He felt the ground rising and he shaped what little remained of Caelestis toward the one open space that wouldn't kill anyone but him. Just small corrections. Code steady where the hull wasn't, algorithms precise as the systems executing them died.
Thruster three: gone. Route through five. Five failing. Compensate with seven.
Each choice narrower than the last.
The ship rolled. Leveled. Rolled again.
The refinery slid past beneath her, too close. Too crowded.
Caelestis cleared the outer wall by meters she no longer had. Her shadow crossed rubble, broken pipe, abandoned armor. The ground rose fast now—fast enough that panic would have mattered.
None came.
The last thruster fired once. Just enough.
Caelestis hit hard without explosions.
Metal screamed. Stone jumped. Fire rolled outward in a dirty ring as the ship tore a scar through the debris and ground itself to a halt.
Silence followed—thick, ringing, wrong.
Smoke climbed where a piece of the sky had fallen.
And the battle didn't stop.
Montoya did not look up.
He was slumped against a slab of concrete that used to be a wall, one shoulder blackened, one sleeve stiff with dried blood. Three drones were still alive on his display, jittering, blind in one quadrant, running on automation and failing slowly. His fingers worked them automatically, trimming altitude, collapsing arcs, trying to keep something—anything—watching the sky.
The howl deepened.
Montoya closed his eyes for half a second. Then he drove his fist into the concrete beside him.
Once.
The impact sent dust sliding down the slab. He didn't shout. Didn't swear. His knuckles came back split, bleeding fresh over dried blood, and went straight to the controls. Two drones winked out. The third steadied.
Caelestis missed the refinery.
Barely.
The ground jumped when she hit, in a long, grinding concussion. The sound followed. Low, heavy, final.
Yoon didn't watch the smoke.
She had already turned.
Her hand came up. Two fingers. A flat palm. Then motion—sharp. Her squad responded instantly, breaking from cover in staggered pairs, moving low, moving fast. No one asked why. No one looked back.
They were relocating.
Loss of air cover meant the ceiling was no longer theoretical. It meant angles changed. It meant staying put was an invitation.
Yoon knew this. She didn't hesitate.
Weapons shifted. Fields of fire redrew themselves. Adeoye moved last, backing, rifle sweeping angles that had been safe thirty seconds ago.
The refinery floor opened.
Just for a moment.
Assyrian had been there the entire time. In the dead ground behind the collapsed gantry, in the angles no one was watching because watching everything meant watching nothing. He did not advance when the sky burned. He did not react when Caelestis fell. Those were variables collapsing on their own.
He waited for motion, for vectors to lengthen, sightlines to break, for human units to do what training demanded and create the opening he needed.
When Yoon's squad shifted, the space they left behind didn't look like much. A sliver of altered geometry. A corridor of uncertainty measured in meters and milliseconds.
Assyrian stepped into it.
No sound announced him. No charge. No flourish.
Just absence where cover had been. Pressure where none had been a heartbeat before.
The battlefield did not realize it had changed.
Not yet.
Above them, smoke from a fallen ship curled upward, thick and black, hiding nothing that mattered anymore.
Assyrian did not press.
That was the first tell.
He stopped advancing and let the space between them exist. Three meters of torn concrete and drifting ash. And in that pause Fiona felt it... Measurement. His silhouette steadied. His blade lowered by a degree that meant nothing to anyone who hadn't trained until angles became language.
She adjusted her stance. A fraction too late.
He moved.
Steel rang. The impact traveled, from bone to shoulder to jaw, and stayed there. She held. Barely. Her feet skidded a handspan through grit. Breath burned. Her vision tunneled, then widened again with a pulse she couldn't control.
He tested her again. Same line. Same timing.
She parried. Slower.
The third strike came altered by less than a centimeter. That was enough. The blade kissed her guard instead of meeting it, slid, bit into the sleeve at her ribs. Pain flared—hot, immediate. She didn't cry out.
Assyrian adjusted.
She felt it in the air, in the way his mass redistributed, in the silence between impacts shrinking. He wasn't guessing anymore. He was confirming.
Fiona shifted to keep him between herself and the squad. That cost her. He noticed. The next exchange came angled. Not at her centerline, but past it. A feint that wasn't meant to land. She chased it on instinct and paid with a shock through her wrist that numbed two fingers.
Her grip held anyway.
Training answered where strength failed. Her body remembered shapes her mind couldn't afford to name. Block. Yield. Recover. Every motion stripped of excess, pared down to what still worked when oxygen didn't.
Assyrian stepped inside her range.
That was new.
The world compressed. No room for footwork. No distance to trade. Just steel and timing and her pulse hammering too loud in her ears.
He struck again. She stopped it. He struck lower. She turned it aside. Each exchange shaved something off her. Speed, balance, the edges of thought. While he grew quieter, more certain.
Then a pause.
Half a second.
He didn't attack.
He watched.
Fiona felt the weight of it then: every stagger, every delayed response feeding him data. The pauses weren't breathing room. They were processing time.
Her heart hammered, out of rhythm now, slamming against her ribs like it was trying to escape the work she was forcing it to do. Light leaked at the edges of her sight. Sound smeared. Somewhere distant, something exploded. It meant nothing.
She took one more step to block his line of advance.
He shifted his shoulders.
Not toward her.
Past her.
Toward the people behind.
Fiona moved without thought, without permission from pain or reason. She cut the space, forced herself back into his path, blade up, stance raw and imperfect and there.
Assyrian stopped again.
Recalculated.
The margin was closing. They both knew it now.
If she held this—three seconds more—something in her chest would tear and not come back together.
If he waited—two seconds more—he would have her.
The air between them vibrated with what was coming.
But not yet.
Not this beat.
Not until the last thing she had left was the only thing that could still move.
The duel continued.
And the clock did not favor her.
The air shuddered.
Assyrian stepped in.
The movement was flawless. No wasted arc, no telegraph. His blade tracked the only future left: The one where she collapsed before she could complete the motion. Calculations collapsed into certainty. Angles resolved. Probability hardened.
He committed.
Fiona didn't speed up.
She took one step.
The edges of the world softened and fell away. Her vision narrowed to him and stayed there, she felt everything: the broken ground beneath her boots, the sky pressing down, the smoke moving between them. She felt the distance without measuring it. She felt the people behind her without turning.
She felt him.
His weight. The direction of his attention. The precise moment his intent shifted from calculation to commitment.
Her heartbeat had stopped being sound. It lived in her ribs now, in her teeth, in the bones of her arm holding the blade. About to go quiet. Each one spending something that would not be replaced.
Purple light drifted at the edges of what she could see. Like stars that had followed her here.
She did not decide to move.
Then she became movement.
Distance thinned like breath pressed between two palms. The space between them folded inward, pulled toward Assyrian as if he had suddenly become heavier than the world allowed. His sensors screamed. No alarms, no warnings.
Contradictions.
Clean data, overlapping. Correct answers canceling each other out.
Light bent.
Wrong.
Purple seeped into the air, not cast outward but dragged, stretched toward him, clinging to his outline the way gravity clings to mass. It had no temperature. No spectrum his systems could isolate. Only interference. Noise blooming where none should exist.
Assyrian adjusted.
Once.
Twice.
Too much information. Too little time.
Fiona's blade rose.
In its truest form.
Her body screamed. Muscle tore against intent. Blood leaked from places she could no longer feel. Her heart stuttered, stumbled, found one last rhythm and spent it all at once.
She crossed the distance that wasn't there.
Assyrian met her.
Steel touched steel.
At the point of contact the world folded inward. Sound bent first. A thin, unbearable pressure crept into teeth, into bone, a note too high to be heard and too heavy to ignore.
The parry was perfect.
Off by less than a thought.
A nanometer.
Her anima curved toward the lock, drawn as if by mass. It bled from her body, thin and luminous, threading through tears and blood alike. The air around the blades shimmered, sparks crawling backward along the metal as if trying to escape the point of contact and failing.
The sound deepened. Like continents grinding beneath everything.
Assyrian pushed.
The sound came later.
A dry, brittle crack. Like ice giving up the idea of being whole.
The parry slipped. Not visibly, not to any human measure. The resistance vanished.
There was no explosion.
Just that dry sound.
The forward section of Assyrian's blade separated and fell, striking concrete once before skittering to stillness.
Clean. Final.
Fiona staggered past him.
Her hands failed. The grip collapsed into powder, fragments raining softly against the concrete. She took another step out of habit, then her knees folded. She hit the ground hard, face-first, the world smearing into smoke and noise.
Behind her, Assyrian stood still.
For a moment.
Then the line appeared. Thin, precise, glowing faintly along his frame. Sparks crawled through the seam, confused, searching for instructions that no longer applied.
His agile goliath separated.
Two halves drifting apart, systems dying mid-thought, light bleeding out into the dust.
But the battlefield didn't stop.
Artillery thundered in the distance. Smoke rolled. Shouts cut through the haze.
But around Fiona, there was a pocket of quiet. Earned, fragile, and already fading.
She tried to breathe.
Failed.
And fell still.
Tears and blood spilled from her eyes together, carving lines down her face.
While above it all, the sky kept falling.