The smell hit them first.
It was the kind of smell that didn't leave a man — thick, copper-heavy, sitting at the back of the throat like a warning. Lieutenant Hargrove had been in conflict zones, had walked through the aftermath of bombings and ambushes, had seen what war did to a human body. None of it had prepared him for this.
Bodies were strewn across the ground like broken dolls, twisted in positions that suggested they hadn't seen it coming. Some still had their hands raised, mid-gesture of either surrender or panic — it didn't matter which anymore. The lanky man stood in the centre of it all like he belonged there, like the carnage was a garden he had carefully tended. Blood soaked through his clothes, dripped from his fingers, painted his face in streaks. And he was smiling.
"Jesus..." Private Ryan muttered beside Hargrove, and Hargrove heard the wet sound of the young man swallowing hard against whatever was rising in his stomach.
Hargrove didn't blame him. He felt it too.
Terry stepped forward.
The crowd of soldiers and DARC agents parted instinctively as he moved through them, the way people move away from something they don't fully understand. Even the agents that are familiar with him moved — that unconscious half-step back when Terry moved with purpose. He didn't take it personally anymore.
His skin was already shifting, the hide thickening across his body like armour settling into place, that familiar pressure wrapping around him from his jaw down to his shins. His body knew danger before his mind caught up.
He stopped at the front of the line and got his first real look at the man.
Lanky. Almost absurdly so — like someone had taken a regular man and stretched him an inch too far in every direction. His clothes hung off him, soaked dark. His eyes were wrong. Not the colour, not the shape, but the quality of them — the way they moved, slow and satisfied, scanning the soldiers the way a man at a buffet scans the options.
Terry kept his voice level.
"It's over," he said. "Whatever you needed out here, whatever this was — it's done. Put yourself on the ground and we walk away from this without anyone else getting hurt."
The lanky man tilted his head. A strand of wet hair fell across his forehead and he didn't bother to move it.
"More," he said.
His voice was quiet. That was the thing that unsettled Terry most — not the bodies, not the blood, not the smile. The quietness of the voice. Like a man ordering food.
"More what?" Terry asked, though some part of him already knew.
The lanky man looked around slowly, gesturing at the carnage with something almost like affection.
"Blood." He met Terry's eyes and the smile widened. "I need more."
Terry opened his mouth.
He never got the words out.
Hargrove's brain processed it in fragments.
The man — moving. Not running, not charging, moving, the way a thrown object moves, no wind-up, no warning, just suddenly in motion at a speed that made Hargrove's eyes struggle to track it.
"FIREEEEEEE!!!!"
The word tore out of his throat before the thought fully formed, pure instinct, twenty years of training collapsing into a single syllable. His men responded the same way — the crack and thunder of gunfire erupted down the line, muzzle flashes strobing white in the dim light.
Bullets found the man. Hargrove could see them landing, could see the impacts punch through flesh, the way the lanky body stuttered and jerked with each hit. The man slowed. Staggered. His legs gave and he went down hard onto one knee, then fully to the ground, face down in the blood-soaked dirt.
"Hold your fire!"
Silence crashed back in, ringing and absolute.
Hargrove's ears were screaming. He exhaled slowly through his nose and signalled without speaking — three fingers, pointed forward. Three soldiers, Chen, Vasquez, Ryan. They moved up, weapons trained, moving the way they'd drilled a thousand times.
Hargrove watched.
He didn't know why his stomach hadn't settled. The man was down. The man had taken enough rounds to drop a small vehicle. The man was—
The man's hand shot out.
Chen didn't even make a sound. One moment he was there, the next the lanky man's fingers were wrapped around his throat and Chen was gone, a wet crack cutting through the ringing silence.
Vasquez got off one shot before the hand found her too.
Ryan put a bullet clean through the man's skull. Hargrove saw it — saw the entry, saw the exit, saw the lanky man's head snap sideways from the impact.
Ryan didn't run. That was the tragedy of it. He was still standing there, still processing what his eyes had just shown him, when the hand closed around him.
Three seconds. All three of them, in three seconds.
The line of soldiers behind Hargrove had gone absolutely silent.
The lanky man rose.
He looked like something pulled from a nightmare — gunshot wounds dotting his torso, clothes in tatters, a hole through his head that should have been the end of the conversation. He moved slowly now, sluggishly, like a machine running hot. His chin was still dropping toward his chest when Terry hit him.
Terry didn't think. He crossed the distance in two strides and threw everything he had into the first punch.
The impact was enormous. He felt it travel up his arm, through his shoulder, into his back — the lanky man's head snapped sideways, his feet left the ground for half a second, and he crashed down. Terry was on him before he landed, hauling him up by the collar and hitting him again. And again. And again.
He was aware, distantly, of the soldiers watching. Of Hargrove's voice somewhere behind him, low and controlled, keeping his men in place. Terry didn't stop. He worked methodically, like how he was taught back then in the military. He hit the lanky man until the man's face was unrecognizable beneath the damage, until every surface of him was broken and bleeding and still.
He stepped back. His knuckles ached through the hide. His breathing was hard.
The lanky man lay there.
And then, slowly, he started to laugh.
It began low, almost a wheeze, bubbling up through the ruin of his face. Then it grew, rich and genuine, the laugh of a man who had just heard the funniest joke of his life. He laughed at the sky. He laughed at the soldiers. He laughed at Terry standing over him with bleeding knuckles and a look on his face that Terry himself couldn't have named.
Terry stared.
He's healing, some cold part of his mind noted. He's been healing this whole time.
He cocked his fist back for another strike.
The lanky man's hand moved faster than sight.
It didn't feel like a punch. It felt like being hit by a vehicle — the kind of impact that bypassed pain entirely and went straight to wrongness, the body's alarm system screaming that something fundamental had just occurred. Terry was airborne. He was aware of that much. He was aware of the ground disappearing beneath him and the sky tilting and then the world hit him from behind with catastrophic force and he skidded, rolled, came to a stop against something solid.
He lay there for a moment, looking up.
His chest. The hide had held everywhere else but his chest — the impact had blown straight through it, and beneath the cracked plating he could feel something deep and wrong, a pain that breathed with him, sharp on the inhale.
Cracked rib. Maybe two. Maybe worse.
He'd had worse.
He started getting up.
Hargrove didn't see Terry land. His eyes had gone to the lanky man the moment the hand moved, some survival instinct overriding everything else, and now the lanky man was rising again and Terry was somewhere behind him and Hargrove was doing the math and the math was very, very bad.
He heard the footsteps before he registered the movement.
And then the man was there. Right there. Six inches away, close enough that Hargrove could smell the blood on him, could see the wounds on his face knitting closed with obscene slowness, could see the hole in his skull beginning — beginning — to fill.
The man's eyes found his.
"I need more," he whispered.
Hargrove had been afraid before. He knew what fear felt like — the cold sweat, the tunnel vision, the legs that wanted to move but couldn't decide where. This was different. This was the specific terror of a man who understood, with perfect clarity, that he was out of options.
His hand tightened on his weapon.
Behind the lanky man, maybe forty metres back, he saw Terry rise from the ground.
Get up, Hargrove thought, not to himself, but outward, desperate. Get up. Get up. Get—
The lanky man smiled, slow and wide, like a man settling in for the evening.
And somewhere behind him, Terry started running.