Jack watched the lone figure emerge from the jungle and let out a slow, weary sigh.

  He knew that silhouette. He remembered the honest, pleading face from hours earlier, caught in the harsh glare of the base’s searchlights.

  Ensign Kael.

  Now, the man’s expression was a pale, empty mask—no rage, no sorrow—just a soul-deep numbness. Jack recognized that look. Kael wasn’t fighting to live. He was already dead inside.

  The moment he’d opened that gate and let six disguised Wraiths through, his fate had been sealed.

  This wasn’t an attack. It was a statement. A final, solitary act of defiance against a system that had already chosen his end.

  “Surrender, Ensign!” a Recon pilot’s voice boomed from his mech’s external speaker. “You can live!”

  Kael didn’t slow. Didn’t even look up. His rifle spat useless plasma into the dark as he advanced with the jerky inevitability of a machine.

  A tight, disciplined burst from a Paladin’s heavy gun struck him in the center of his mass. The kinetic impact lifted him off his feet. His weapon fell with a hollow clatter. His face never changed—no flinch, no pain—only a red froth spilling from his mouth before his body stilled.

  Sergeant Roric lowered the smoking barrel. “In the goddamn Imperium,” he said over the comms, voice stripped of anything human, “surrender is a privilege for the pure-bloods. For a grunt like him, capture means his family swings from the gallows. I gave him the better death.”

  He turned his Paladin toward the base, walking away with the slow, deliberate tread of someone promising violence to the future.

  “And I will die,” he added, “before I let that system take root in our soil.”

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  Silence swallowed the battlefield, broken only by the hiss of flames. Kael lay in the dirt, small and still—one last punctuation mark at the end of a brutal chapter.

  His only shots had been at a Wraith. A symbol of the master class that had chained him all his life. First and last act of rebellion.

  …

  As if on cue, the clouds fractured, and morning light bled across the ruined earth. Then, like a vision from another world, golden-hulled transports descended, spilling hundreds of Commonwealth mechs into the smoke.

  They were saved.

  Inside the shadowed cockpit of Thor, Jack felt the steel in his spine finally melt. Tears came hot and unrestrained. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “I’m going to live.”

  But somewhere deeper—where Loki lived—was the sting of a strange disappointment. A king without a kingdom again. Back to being just a fat Lieutenant.

  He dropped from his mech into Captain Rashid’s crushing bear hug.

  Then Nya and Meadow clung to him like shipwreck survivors, their hands digging into his sides—not in flirtation, but in the desperate need to feel something solid, something alive.

  Medics moved in, prying them apart, bundling the women toward a transport. Protests went unheard. The survivors were swept aboard with mechanical efficiency.

  Thirty minutes later, the transport lifted.

  …

  In the medbay, a young nurse leaned over the soldier beside Jack, her hair falling forward, her uniform collar slightly open.

  Jack’s gaze shifted, and some of the soldiers nearby saw it—rolled their eyes and turned away, muttering about the most inappropriate hero in the Commonwealth.

  But this time, the truth was stranger.

  While his eyes were on her, his mind wasn’t.

  He was replaying the last hours in relentless detail—the impossible acrobatics of the Wraiths, the lethal arc of the ion blade, the split-second feints and angles.

  Breaking it all down. Frame by frame.

  He knew he’d survived on luck, trickery, and timing. But he had seen the real thing now—pure, weaponized skill—and it had burned itself into him.

  The nurse, sensing his stare, glanced down at her open collar—anger rising—

  And froze.

  His eyes weren’t glassy with lust. They were sharp, dilated, flickering with phantom light, as though reflecting a HUD only he could see.

  She felt a cold ripple down her spine.

  This wasn’t a drooling idiot.

  This was something dangerous.

  Something learning.

  She backed away, flustered for reasons she couldn’t name.

  Jack leaned back, letting the hum of the medbay fade into a private silence. His body was exhausted.

  But his mind—

  His mind was already on the next fight.