Chapter 15: The King’s Domain

Commander Darwin’s command tent was little more than a tarp strung between two trucks, but the seven recruits stood inside it like children called to the principal’s office.

Lloyd placed the yellowed folder and the data drives on the folding table. "Sir. We found this in the facility’s safe. It’s... a research log. Dated before the first impact... allegedly."

Gio watched Darwin’s face closely, braced for shock, for denial, for anger. But none of it came.

Darwin picked up the folder, flipped through the pages with his flesh hand, and his expression never changed. Not surprise. Not fear. Just the flat, tired calmness of a man reading a report he had already memorized... Apparently.

That was the problem. He read it like he had read it before.

"Where exactly did you find this?" Darwin asked at last.

"A reinforced safe in the sub-level lab," Kojiro said. "Only intact thing down there."

Darwin nodded slowly. Then he swept the folder and the drives into a locked metal case at his feet.

"What you read in that facility never happened," he said. "The log is a forgery. Pre-collapse paranoia. You will speak of it to no one. Not the other recruits. Not each other. Forget it."

"A forgery?" Lloyd’s voice rose. "Sir, the letterhead, the dates, the—"

"That is an order, Recruit Vanworth." Darwin’s gaze swept over them, cold and heavy. "The wasteland plays tricks on the mind. Old paper with old lies on it. The mission hasn’t changed: we push deep, we find actualanswers, we bring them home. Anything else is noise. Dismissed."

They filed out in silence. Only when they were back in the open did Melody finally speak, her voice low. "He didn’t even blink."

"He knew..." Gio said quietly. "Or he was ordered to keep it hidden. Either way, that log wasn’t news to him."

’Which means the city knows too,’ he thought. ’Or at least, the people above Darwin do.’

The first seed of distrust took root in his chest, quiet and cold.

---

That night, Gio couldn’t sleep.

The camp was a scatter of low fires and snoring bodies beneath the bruised sky. He lay on his thin mat for an hour, the director’s words circling in his head—the asteroid is not an accident. It is a catalyst—until he gave up and sat up for air.

That was when he saw the light.

A faint green glow, pulsing between two trucks at the edge of camp. Gio slipped off his mat and crossed the dirt quietly, boots silent.

Kojiro crouched in the shadows, the F-Rank worm core cradled in his palm. But he wasn’t just holding it. He was pressing it against his communication bracelet, turning it slowly, watching the scanner light sweep across the core’s surface again and again. His lips moved. Not quite a whisper. Almost... counting.

Or reciting something.

"You know," Gio said softly, "most people just sleep at night."

Kojiro didn’t jump. He just closed his fist around the core, cutting off the glow, and glanced over his shoulder with that lazy grin. "Kid. You’re up late."

"What are you doing with it?"

"Admiring it." Kojiro stood, stretched, and let the grin widen into something deliberately unhelpful. "Pretty little thing, isn’t it? Told you it might come in handy."

"Kojiro..."

"Relax." He clapped Gio’s shoulder and walked past him toward the fires, the purple veins at his temple faint in the dark. "A man’s allowed to have hobbies. Go to sleep, Gio. Tomorrow’s a long ride."

Gio watched him go, the joke landing flat. Whatever Kojiro was doing with that core, it probably wasn’t just a hobby.

But he let it go. For now.

---

The convoy rolled out at dawn, and by mid-morning Gio noticed the route had changed.

The lead truck had swung wide around a ridge that the old map marked as the direct path, carving a long detour through a dry riverbed instead. When Gio asked a soldier about it, he got a shrug and a "commander’s orders." No explanation. And on the holographic map from Darwin’s tent, an entire sector of the continent had simply been crossed out in red.

Beyond the ridge, the wasteland changed its skin.

The twisted forests gave way to fields of waist-high red grass that hissed as the trucks passed, blades flexing toward the heat of the engines like flowers toward sun. The air turned thick and sour; recruits donned filter masks on the soldiers’ orders, and even through the filters Gio could taste metal. Something in this zone was alive in a way the ruins had never been, alert, hostile, hungry.

"Bracelets on scan," a soldier called down the line. "This sector’s never been cleared."

Then the lead truck slammed to a halt.

Gio craned through the slitted window. Across the road ahead stood a barricade: overturned old-world cars welded together, crowned with sharpened rebar spikes, laced with tripwires and rusted canisters that looked horribly like crude explosives. It stretched from the red grass on one side to a collapsed overpass on the other. Someone had built this deliberately. Someone had built it to stop exactly them.

"Hold position!" Darwin’s voice crackled over the bracelets. "Engineering, forward. Clear those wires, slowly."

The noise of the convoy dying—the engines’ rumble, the hissing grass—left a silence that didn’t last.

From the grass on both sides of the road came a sound like wet leather stretching. Then another. Then a dozen.

Skinny shapes rose from the red grassy field. Dogs... or things that had once been dogs... they were now the size of bicycles, ribs standing out under hairless, glistening hides, jaws dripping a fluid that smoked where it touched the earth.

Every bracelet on the line flashed red at once.

"D-Rank!" Reuben shouted, staring at his wrist. "Scanner says D-Rank! All of them!"

D-Rank. A full tier above every recruit in the convoy.

"Form up!" Darwin roared. "Soldiers, free fire! Recruits, center—"

The pack hit them like a tide.

A plasma bolt took the first dog’s head off, but two more were under the rifles’ arc before the soldiers could cycle, leaping onto the second truck’s hood. Their bites didn’t tear metal, they melted it, acid sizzling through the hull as the dogs chewed their way toward the screaming recruits inside.

Blaze’s fire washed over one and it simply ran through the flames, jaws open. Grom grew and swung a fist that sent one flying, but three more streamed around him. Melody’s claws opened a dog’s flank and its snapping bite came within an inch of her throat, acid spattering the ground where she’d stood a heartbeat before.

They were too fast. Too many. Too strong.

Gio felt the math click into place in his head, cold and clear. One bear wasn’t enough. One bear and a wasp wasn’t enough. The storage held blueprints... and blueprints could be copied.

’If the pattern is stored,’ he thought, ’then the only limit is me.’

he stretched out both hands at once and commanded.

"Come!"

White light erupted from his palms in twin columns. The Iron-Boned Bear materialized on the left side, and a second bear, identical down to the scarred iron plates, roared into being on the right. Above them, four wasp constructs snapped into existence, wings humming.

[Bioenergy: 130%... 100%... 80%...]

Fifty percent, gone in a breath. It didn’t matter.

’Bears, front line! Wasps, eyes and jaws, blind them, keep them off the trucks!’

The command left him not as words but as intent, and his legion obeyed. The bears slammed into the pack like twin avalanches, iron shoulders crushing ribs, jaws snapping spines. The wasps dove into the dogs’ faces, stingers driving into eyes, forcing the acid jaws to snap at empty air.

The battle turned into a butcher’s rhythm. Recruits rallied behind the bears’ bulk: Reuben’s stone mace caved in a skull, Tabitha’s whip wrapped a dog’s leg and dragged it into Blaze’s fire, Grom’s giant fists finished what the flames started, and Lloyd... Lloyd, of all people stood his ground beside Melody, rifle braced, putting bolt after bolt into any dog that lunged for her blind side.

A dog broke through and took a wasp in its jaws, teeth grinding the construct into mist.

[Construct destroyed. Reconstructing. 1%]

The wasp reformed above it instantly, stinger first, straight into its eye. A second wasp burst under a snapping jaw and reformed a heartbeat later, unbothered, immortal.

It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t easy. By the time the last dog fell twitching to the earth, two soldiers were down with acid burns, Grom was on his knees spent, and Gio’s vision swam with the strain of six constructs held in his head at once.

[Bioenergy: 78%]

The bears and wasps dissolved into light. Gio swayed, and Kojiro’s hand caught his elbow.

"Six at once," the older man murmured, eyes wide. "Kid... how many more can you make at a go?"

Gio didn’t answer. He was staring past the dead dogs, at the barricade the engineers had finally reached.

Someone had carved words into the welded hood of an overturned car, letters crude and deep and old:

TURN BACK. THE KING’S DOMAIN.

Darwin stood before it for a long moment, his bionic hand resting on the rusted metal. When he finally spoke, his voice carried to every bracelet on the line, flat and final.

"Photograph into your memory, we could die at any point."

He turned to face the road ahead, into the red grass and the sour air and whatever waited beyond.

"We move forward."