Chapter 328: Chapter 328

The Red was the corpse of a transit system, a dead metro vein running under Hemera’s bones.

Concrete ribs arched overhead, lined with cracked light panels that would never glow again. Rusted rails, half swallowed in mud and sludge, cut a straight black line down the center of the tunnel. Old train cars lay on their sides in the distance like gutted beasts, windows smashed, frames eaten through by Broken corrosion. The air stank of burned metal, old oil, and the rotten sweetness of too many things that had died down here and never stopped moving.

The Broken came in waves.

They poured along the tracks, hands scraping, limbs clattering, jointed in wrong directions. Some ran on all fours with reinforced spinal columns bristling like blades. Some dragged themselves along with a hundred twitching fingers where legs should have been. Others still looked almost human until you saw the metal blooming out of their faces like flowers made for cutting.

Warren stepped into them with Belthea strapped to his chest.

The armored carrier hugged his torso, plates dull against the tunnel lights, shock dampeners humming around her tiny body. The sling had saved her from more than one impact already. It would not save anything that touched him.

Belthea fussed, tiny hands batting at his jacket, a tired, angry little sound leaking from her mouth. Not a wail yet, but close. The warning edge.

“Yeah, I know,” Warren muttered, breath cool in the damp air. “I know, baby girl. Daddy’s working on it.”

The first Broken lunged.

It was fast, all jagged limbs and teeth of welded rebar. Warren swung his right truncheon in a tight arc. The axe mod was active, the edge veiled in water so fine it turned white, a cutting stream gathered along the Blacksteel.

The blow took the thing from hip to shoulder. It did not so much slice as erase. Flesh, bone, metal, all parted in a clean diagonal. Both halves dropped, steaming, nanite fluid hissing against the wet ground.

Belthea made a pleased little noise and relaxed, just slightly.

“Alright,” Warren sighed. “Nap time it is.”

More Broken flooded the tunnel. The first wave hit the Complaints Department like a tide breaking against jagged stone.

Jurpat met them in full metal war‑wolf form, a towering construct of razorplate and armored sinew. His body was a lattice of overlapping blades, interlocking metal muscles, and jointed armor that flexed like a living machine. Elbow blades snapped out in long, curved crescents. Matching blades unfolded behind his calves, letting him drop to slides that cut trenches through stone and bisected anything in his path.

His claws struck sparks with every step. Every motion sounded like a forge breathing.

When he howled, it did not sound like a beast. It sounded like pressure weaponized. The air in front of him snapped into a perfect line of force, a compressed beam that tore through multiple Broken torsos in a single, silent instant. Bodies split cleanly along the line of the howl, halves sliding apart as the beam continued down the tunnel before bursting outward in a final shock of released pressure.

Behind him, Elian and Nanuk locked into formation.

Elian’s Will flared, and this time the force did not simply thicken the air. A physical shield of compressed gravity snapped into existence on his arm, shaped like a broad tower shield made of nothing but warped weight. The surface rippled faintly, bending light as if the world struggled to understand it. Wherever Elian pointed the shield, that force projected outward in a wide cone. Broken that struck it slowed instantly, pinned as if an entire world pressed against their bodies. Limbs shook under the pressure, joints locking, spines bowing as the projected weight crushed forward from the shield’s face.

Nanuk slid into the gaps Elian created, spear thrusts wide and brutal. Each strike landed with a shock of force that spread through clustered bodies, not neat, not elegant. Broken flew off the tracks, smashed into walls, impaled on rails. The pair moved like a single thought: Elian the wall, Nanuk the spear.

Deanna stood just behind them, breathing slow and controlled. A faint green haze wreathed her lips. When a Broken pushed through the press and reached for them, she exhaled. The breath hit its face in a visible stream, a thin poison cloud that sank straight into its lungs. Its movements went sloppy first, then slow, then still.

She flicked her fingers, coating her nails with a different shade of toxin, a sharp medicinal scent under the rot. When a Broken staggered past, grazed by something else’s blow, she laid a hand on its arm in mock gentleness. Flesh around her touch cleaned, knitted, then rotted inward on itself, veins turning black. It collapsed at her feet, twitching once.

Deanna sighed. “Waste of chemistry.”

Belthea’s grumble climbed toward a cry.

Warren shifted his stance, letting the truncheons settle into the easy weight of long practice. The Rain Dancer field flexed around him. Moisture in the tunnel air tightened, aligning with his motion, a subtle ripple that bent trajectories.

A flechette, fired from somewhere behind, veered just enough to miss his shoulder by a hair and rip through a Broken skull instead.

“Thank you, Fenn,” he called.

Somewhere back in the press, Fenn laughed, breathless. “That one was on purpose, I swear!”

The bow he carried now had a body, a visible curve of strange material that did not quite catch the light right. No string, at least not that anyone else could see, but his hands knew where it was. Each pull conjured an arrow of compressed air, invisible and lethal. When they hit, they did not just punch through; they imploded, crushing inward from the point of impact. Broken chests folded like cans. Heads vanished in sudden concavities.

“Warren,” Wren called, voice sharp over the chaos. “She’s getting cranky.”

“I noticed,” he muttered.

Belthea had that pre-cry shudder, a hiccuping frustration that said she had reached her limit. Which meant everyone else was about to reach theirs.

Broken clawed up walls, dropped from ceiling struts, hurled themselves under the spinning teeth of Rokhan’s flail, under Carla’s spreading ice, under Grix’s ricocheting path. The tunnel had become a killing ground full of flashing metal and wet impacts, and somehow none of that soothed the baby enough.

If violence helped, they would give her violence and a lullaby.

Warren took a breath.

His throat opened with the ease of long habit, the way it had in the pits, the way it had under stars and in storms and over fields of corpses. His Soul Skill backed him, lungs filled with more air than any normal chest could hold, control fine enough to shape the air even under strain.

His voice rolled down the tunnel in a smooth, operatic line that did not belong in a place .

“Rock-a-bye baby, here in the Red…”

The notes wrapped around concrete and rust, echoing off dead advertisement boards, filling the space above the shrieks.

“Shadows are crawling, wanting you dead…”

A Broken with too many legs leapt for his head. Warren pivoted, one foot sliding in the thin film of water that always seemed to gather where he needed it, and the right truncheon came up in a tight, economical arc. The white water edge kissed its throat.

Its head separated cleanly. Its body took three more steps before it understood it was dead.

“Daddy will hold you, steady and warm…”

The field around the axe heads swelled, water thickening, pressure building. Every swing left a screaming white line in the air, a cut so sharp the world took a second to remember where it had been.

“Quiet the cavern…” He corrected himself without breaking tempo. “Quiet the tunnel, quiet the storm.”

Belthea sighed, the first easy breath she had taken in hours, cheek pressed against his chest plate.

The squad adjusted around the song automatically.

Chime moved on his left; bare hands wreathed in translucent sound claws. Each swipe carved ripples in the air, narrow crescents that sliced through limbs and armor alike. She danced between Broken, expression half wild, half deliriously happy, as if the music itself had climbed under her skin.

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On Warren’s right, Sylen flowed past like a shadow given purpose. The halo of starbursts spun above her, bright points of light that spat narrow beams in a circling pattern whenever a target came close. Each beam drilled holes through heads and torsos, clean and bloodless around the entry point, catastrophic and molten on the way out.

Her plasma blade flared in her hand, a black steel sword sheathed in white-blue flame that cut without resistance. Broken parts hit the mud in neat segments. Sylen’s eyes never left the next threat.

“Sylen,” Warren sang between lines. “Do not step in front of me when I am hitting rhythm, please.”

She smirked, even while severing a neck. “Then keep up.”

Behind the front line, Wren planted her feet, hands pressed into the mud. Her skill, that broken miracle of plants and stone, turned the floor of the tunnel into something alive.

Vines erupted from cracks, thorned and thick, weaving into walls, snapping around Broken ankles. Stone rose in ridges and jagged orbs, catching feet, smashing knees. In some places, green pushed up through the grime, leaves unfurling in the light from Styll’s vest lamps. Wren called something wordless, and the plants tightened in response.

Over all of it, two halos spun above her head: one gold, one sickly grey. The gold reached out in thin beams, washing over her allies, knitting wounds, clearing lungs. The grey lashed into the densest packs of Broken, and wherever it touched them, metal corroded, flesh shrank, movement slowed as if time had turned spiteful.

“Hey,” Warren called, voice dropping to a growl on the next verse. “Careful with the withering.”

“Do not complain,” Wren shot back. “Focus on the song.”

“When the Broken rise, snarling and wild…”

A pack of them charged up the tracks, larger than the rest, limbs swollen, eyes lit with the cold glimmer of active nanites. One of them opened its mouth and a spray of shrapnel spat out, a storm of razor fragments.

Invisible shields bloomed in front of Warren, hexagonal panes bending light as they snapped into existence.

Anza stood behind him, hands raised. Her barriers thickened, not walls but layers of focused intention made real. Heat shimmer folded into itself, forming translucent panes that caught everything the Broken hurled. Acid mist hit and spread flat against the surface without passing through. Gas clouds stopped cold, pooling harmlessly like they had slammed into glass. Barbs, bone spurs, metal shards, even the full force of a charging limb struck the shield and froze as if a giant hand had closed around them. For a heartbeat the caught attacks hung suspended, then every last bit of it slid downward in a clean sheet, dropping to the ground as if gravity had selectively claimed only the enemies’ violence.

“Do not let any of them touch Belle,” she said.

“Working on it,” Warren replied.

“Hush now, my baby, sleep, little child…”

A smaller Broken scrambled up the wall behind them, skittering toward their flank. Before it could drop, a thread looped around its neck and yanked.

Torman stood twenty paces away, fingers steepled. The wire that connected him to the struggling creature shone with thin reflected light, too fine to see until it cut. He twitched his hand, just a little.

The Broken fell in three sliding pieces.

More threads whipped out, crisscrossing the tunnel, lines of invisible death that the squad had already learned to step around. Anything that hit them came apart.

“Down in the darkness, monsters may crawl…”

Ramis sank his hands into the mud and laughed like he was finally in his element. The ground around the Broken changed. What had been wet sludge turned to bubbling, boiling mud, churning and thick. Hands reached up from it, not separate bodies, just sculpted mud twisted into fingers, grabbing ankles, dragging things down.

The heat hit Warren’s face in a wave. He stepped clear of the worst of it, letting the Rain Dancer field keep the steam off his lungs.

“When bones start breaking, the Broken will fall…”

He hit the next cluster like a storm in a bottle.

Every swing of his truncheons carried more than muscle. Water at the edges compressed tighter than steel, turning the axe heads into cutting jets that parted reinforced bone like wet paper. Limbs flew. Torsos split. Heads spun off and bounced along the rails.

Instantaneous Vector let him shift from stillness to full speed in a breath. One heartbeat he stood with shoulders square, singing into the chaos. The next, he occupied five new points in the tunnel, each step a blur, each strike leaving a wake of powdered concrete and shredded flesh.

Belle’s breathing smoothed out, slow and steady.

Behind Warren, Varnai slipped into and out of shadows like they were alive and hungry. One moment she was gone, swallowed by a darkness that should not have existed under the harsh utility lights. The next, a mass of shadow tendrils erupted from a crack of darkness at the Broken’s feet, coiling around its limbs. The tendrils yanked it downward with impossible strength, dragging the creature screaming into the shadow beneath it. There was no sound of struggle. No impact. No spray. The darkness closed, and the Broken was simply gone.

Varnai stepped out of another patch of shadow ten meters away, blades wet.

Xera stood near the rear, arm outstretched, flinging globs of almost solid acid. Each projectile left her hand as a wobbling orb, the surface gleaming. When they struck, they burst apart in splashing sheets that clung, eating through bone and flesh, oozing down walls in smoking trails. The Broken that moved through it left pieces of themselves behind.

Lessa planted herself firmly and fired. Every blast from her cannon‑arms unleashed a pressure wave like an invisible avalanche. A mass of compressed intent rolling outward, heavy and unstoppable, slamming through Broken bodies and scattering them as if they had been caught in a collapsing mountainside.

Then she shifted the flow. The avalanche inverted, dragging everything nearby toward her in a violent, collapsing pull. When the stunned Broken reached her, she snapped the force forward again, and the wave blew them apart instantly, a crushing break of momentum they had never had a chance to counter.

When she needed defense instead of devastation, she changed the shape again. A broad, dispersed wave rolled out in front of her, a softer avalanche, one that moved as a shifting wall of pressure. Strikes hit it and stopped cold. Claws, limbs, debris, anything thrown or swung against her collided with that moving wall and lost all momentum, held for a heartbeat before being pushed back. She shaped it effortlessly, angling it to cover allies or block attacks long enough for someone else to finish the kill.

Farther back, something new rose beside Wesley, its form dragging itself upright as if it had been sculpted from hunger and flame. A Candleman was a shambling figure of half-melted muscle shaped like wax poured over a living frame. The melted look was only appearance, not heat; its body was solid, dense, and unnervingly strong beneath the sagging contours. Candles jutted from its shoulders, arms, and spine, each flame burning low and guttering with each movement.

A Broken struck it with a jagged limb, the blow sinking into its waxlike musculature and vanishing up to the elbow. The Candleman absorbed the hit entirely, its surface rippling but not tearing. The flame on its shoulder flared once.

Wesley lifted two fingers.

The Candleman released the stored blow in a rebounding shock that slammed outward, the force magnified through its dense, waxlike body. The attacker folded backward, chest collapsing inward as the redirected impact tore through it. More strikes hit the Candleman from all angles, each one absorbed into its layers and banked like coals waiting to be stoked.

Only when Wesley gestured again did those stored strikes detonate outward, each release a violent echo of what had been taken in. The Candleman did not attack on its own. It acted as a reservoir, a living conduit of borrowed force, holding every hit until Wesley commanded it to unleash them.

Cassian loosed careful shots with his hand lance, flechettes whispering through the air. Wherever they struck and buried themselves, he lifted a hand and pointed directly at the wound. The moment his finger aligned with the injury, the Broken’s body convulsed as a dull, internal blast erupted outward from that exact point. It did not detonate like flame or heat, but as a focused rupture, a pressure bloom that tore the creature apart from within. Each shot became a delayed kill, every flechette a trigger he could activate with a gesture, turning the battlefield into a map of waiting explosions.

“Rest on my shoulder, safe through the fight…”

Jurpat barreled past Warren, fur matted with oil and blood. He shoulder-checked something twice his size and sent it tumbling through one of Wren’s grown stone ridges. Elian and Nanuk pivoted with him, the phalanx flowing to meet the next wave.

“The next group is heavier!” Elian called. “Stone-skins on the right.”

“Leron, Vexa, that is you,” Warren sang.

The twins were laughing.

They stood slightly elevated on an old maintenance platform, Hellion lances braced against the railing. Their synchronized grins were identical and wrong. When they fired, their flechettes tore the air in two colors.

Vexa’s were too bright to look at, each flechette a streak of concentrated light that burned straight through whatever they touched, leaving limbs cleaved and torsos opened by radiant force. Leron’s were the opposite, so dark they looked like void given shape. Wherever his flechettes struck, matter did not tear or break, it vanished in quiet, perfect erasure. Together, the twins swept the lane in synchronized bursts of light and void, carving through armored Brutes before they reached the gravity wall.

They swept the lane in long, controlled bursts, cutting down armored Brutes before they hit the gravity wall.

“Daddy will sing you into the night…”

Calra flicked her wrists, and shards of ice launched through the steam, hitting Broken like slow-moving sludge. Wherever they struck, they stuck, then spread inward, growing spines through joints and organs. Creatures tried to move and snapped themselves apart.

Grix ricocheted from wall to ceiling to rail, clatterfangs remade in Blacksteel a blur in her hands. She no longer needed to touch anything to bounce. Every direction change ignored physics and used intent instead. When she wanted speed, she took it. When she wanted something else to slow, she took that too. A leaper, launching with all its force, and suddenly hung in the air for a second too long, momentum stolen. Grix landed in its chest with both blades, rode it down, then launched again, using a nearby wall that she did not actually touch as a pivot point.

“Let all of their screaming fade into rest…”

Belle yawned against Warren’s chest, the sound tiny and obscene in a tunnel full of dying monsters.

“Close your eyes, and sleep on my chest.” For origınal chapters go to N()velFire.net

Warren held the last note longer than necessary, letting it carry through the tunnel and under the flicker of emergency strips. His voice filled every crack and broken bracket. For a moment, even the Broken seemed slower, as if the weight of sound had settled over them.

Then the last of that wave was gone.

The tunnel ahead was a churned mess of limbs, metal fragments, steaming mud, and plant roots strangling corpses. The old rails showed through in places, bent and twisted. Water dripped from overhead pipes, beading on Warren’s jacket before Rain Dancer pulled it into his motion.

Behind them, the tunnel stretch back to the campsite had already cleared was guarded by Roundy floating in lazy circles spinning a knife in a practiced motion then violently stabbing the air. The Murderbot floated over to its dock. There would be other waves.

Silence fell in a jagged way, cut by distant echoes of Broken further down the line.

Warren looked up and down the tunnel, breathing hard, truncheons dripping a mixture of water and other things. His armor was scuffed, plates dented, but the storm inside him felt calm.

“Alright,” he said, voice normal again, not singing. “That was better. She is out.”

Chime blew out a breath, flicking residual sound claws from her fingers. “It was kind of cute she likes going to sleep mid fight, though. Horrifying, but cute.”

Wren stepped close, checking the carrier seals, brushing a knuckle over Belthea’s hair. Her face was drawn and tired, but there was a small, soft smile there that no one else would ever get. “She really does like fights. That is worrying.”

“She was born in Mara, and is being raised by the Complaints Department,” Xera said dryly. “Liking fights is the least worrying thing about her future.”

Warren looked down at the sleeping weight on his chest. “Nap time, Belle. We are going to keep it quiet. I promise.”

He took a deep breath, feeling her weight settle against his chest.

He smiled, just a little, baring his teeth at the dark.