Chapter 18: Toll Bridge Rustborns

The road ended at the edge of a massive gorge.

It wasn’t natural. The cut in the earth was too straight and too deep, with clean edges as if something enormous had sliced through the land.

At the bottom, a river of thick, glowing green liquid moved slowly. Toxic fumes rose from it, curling upward like reaching fingers.

And spanning that gorge was a bridge.

It was a monstrous thing, cobbled together from old-world highway segments, reinforced with steel girders torn from skyscrapers, and anchored by massive concrete pylons driven deep into the gorge’s walls. Blast doors flanked each end, currently raised. Watchtowers constructed from shipping containers bristled with crude but functional weapon emplacements.

"Who built that?" Reuben whispered, pressing his face against the slitted window.

No one answered. But Gio noticed something.

The recruits were staring in awe. Melody’s mouth was slightly open. Lloyd looked pale. Even Blaze, who rarely showed fear, was leaning forward with a mixture of horror and fascination.

But the soldiers?

They didn’t even glance at it. They checked their weapons. Adjusted their masks. Prepared for disembarkment like this was just another routine stop.

And Darwin? He was studying a map on a datapad with a bored expression.

’They act like they already knew about this,’ Gio realized.

"All trucks, halt," Darwin’s voice crackled over the bracelets. "Recruits, stay inside. Soldiers, on me."

The convoy stopped fifty meters from the bridge’s entrance. Darwin and six soldiers disembarked, approaching the fortified gate with a casual professionalism.

They didn’t have to wait long.

Figures emerged from the watchtowers and behind the blast doors. Humans. But unlike anyone from the Sector Cities.

They were heavily scarred, their skin dark and marked with burns, mutations, and crude tattoos. They wore armor scavenged from mutated beasts—chitinous plates, leathery hides, bone reinforcements—mixed with rusted metal plating. Their weapons were brutal and simple: spears tipped with bone or scrap metal, crude crossbows, blades forged from rebar.

And they moved with confidence, like they owned this place.

One of them, a woman with half her face covered in scale-like growths, stepped forward. She raised a hand, and the soldiers stopped.

"City-people," she called out, her voice rough, her English broken but understandable. "You walk King’s Road. You pay toll."

Darwin didn’t flinch. He just stood there, his bionic arm hanging loose at his side, his expression flat.

"We’re Expedition Sixty-Seven," he said. "Military convoy. Authorized under World Government Alliance emergency protocols."

The woman laughed, like a hyena’s bark.

"No Alliance here. No government. Just Rustborn." She tapped the crude spear in her hand against the ground. "You cross, you pay. Rule’s simple. Real simple. Pay now... or die."

Inside the second truck, the recruits pressed against the windows.

"Rustborn?" Melody whispered. "What are they?"

"Survivors," Kojiro said quietly, his usual grin absent. "Descendants of people who didn’t make it into the cities when the walls went up. Or chose not to. Eighty-seven years out here... they adapted." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

"But how?" Lloyd’s voice was shaky. "The mutations, the toxicity, the monsters... normal humans can’t survive out here!"

"Apparently they can," Gio muttered.

He watched the woman—this Rustborn—more closely. She wasn’t mutated like the creatures they’d been fighting. Her changes were controlled. Purposeful. The scales on her face weren’t random growths. They were symmetrical. Deliberate.

Like she’d chosen them.

Or like her people had learned how to control the apocalypse instead of just surviving it.

Darwin was still negotiating. Or rather, the Rustborn woman was dictating terms.

"Plasma batteries. Ten. Or twenty ration packs. Or cores..." Her eyes gleamed. "Cores are better. E-Rank minimum. D-Rank... we can talk discount."

"You’re asking us to hand military resources to unauthorized civilians," Darwin said flatly.

"I’m demanding you pay the toll," she corrected. "Or you don’t cross."

For a moment, Darwin was silent. Gio could see the calculation in his posture. The way his bionic hand twitched, just slightly. The way the soldiers behind him shifted their stances, weapons ready.

Darwin could order the soldiers to open fire. They had plasma rifles. The Rustborn had spears and crude crossbows. It wouldn’t be a fight. It would be a slaughter.

But then what? The bridge was fortified. Even if they killed these Rustborn, there were probably more in the towers who could destroy the bridge controls and trap the convoy on the wrong side of the gorge.

Darwin’s jaw tightened.

"Wait here," he said to the woman.

He turned and walked back to the convoy. When he reached the lead truck, he didn’t address the recruits. He spoke to the soldiers in low tones.

But Gio caught fragments.

"...not worth the casualties..."

"...bridge is the only crossing for eighty kilometers..."

"...just pay the toll..."

The recruits watched in stunned silence as Darwin returned to the Rustborn woman.

"Fine. We’ll pay," he said. "Ten plasma batteries. But we want safe passage—and information."

The woman grinned, revealing teeth filed to points. "Information costs extra."

Before Darwin could respond, movement from the third truck caught everyone’s attention.

One of the prisoners jumped out, a burly man named Rask with jagged bone spikes protruding from his forearms as part of his mutation abilities. He had grown tired of waiting. He disembarked without orders and was striding toward the Rustborn guards, his spikes extended, his expression sneering.

"Listen up, you mutated freaks!" Rask snarled, his voice carrying across the chasm wind. "We’re from the Sector Cities. We’re military. You don’t get to shake us down. Lower the damn bridge, or I’ll—"

He never finished.

The nearest Rustborn guard moved faster than anyone expected. The spear flashed out, not to kill, but to disable. The tip struck a pressure point in Rask’s thigh with sharp precision.

Rask’s leg buckled instantly. He crashed to the ground, screaming.

Before he could recover, two more Rustborn were on him. They didn’t use their spears. They used crude cord, wrapping it around his wrists and ankles. One of them pressed a boot against Rask’s throat, not hard enough to crush, but hard enough to remind him who was in control.

Rask struggled, his spikes flaring, but the Rustborn simply adjusted their grip, using his own momentum against him. It was almost... easy. Like they’d done this a hundred times before.

"Spike generation," the scale-faced woman observed, walking over to examine Rask with clinical interest. "Low-level. Probably hurts him more than us. We’ll take him. Breed him. Maybe improve him."

"He’s not yours," Darwin said sharply.

"He attacked my people. That makes him mine." She crouched beside Rask, tilting his head up with the tip of her spear. "City-people think walls make ’em strong. Walls make you soft. Out here, we learn to be hard. Like the beasts."

She stood and gestured to her guards. They hauled Rask to his feet, still bound, and dragged him back toward the bridge’s fortifications.

"He stays with us till the toll’s paid," the woman called over her shoulder. "You want him back? Ten plasma batteries. Or one E-Rank core. Your call."

Darwin’s expression didn’t change, but Gio saw his bionic hand clench into a fist.

For a long moment, no one moved.

Then Darwin turned back to the convoy.

"Unload ten plasma batteries from the supply truck," he ordered. "And somebody get that idiot under control before he gets us all killed."

The recruits stared at him in disbelief.

They were paying tribute. To wasteland scavengers. To people who shouldn’t even exist.

But as the soldiers moved to comply, Gio noticed something else.

The Rustborn weren’t just feral scavengers. They were organized. Disciplined. They had a command structure, an economy, territory. They had built a fortress on a gorge that should have been impassable.

And they had done it without the resources of the Sector Cities. Without the protection of the walls.

They had done it with nothing but survival instinct and eighty-seven years of adaptation.

’Who really are these people?’ Gio thought.

The scale-faced woman watched the soldiers unloading the batteries with a satisfied expression. Then she glanced at the convoy, at the recruits pressed against the windows with shocked pale faces.

She raised her hand and spoke to her guards in a language Gio didn’t recognize. Harsh, guttural sounds that nothing in the Sector Cities had ever taught him.

The guards laughed.

Then she turned back to Darwin.

"Bridge lowers in five minutes," she said. "You cross fast. King’s Road ahead..."

She paused, and for the first time, her expression shifted. Not mockery for the foolish city-people. Not greed for more plasma batteries. Something almost like warning.

"...is death. We’re telling you for free. Next time, it costs you."

Darwin nodded once.

As the convoy prepared to move, Gio caught one last glimpse of the Rustborn fortress.

The watchtowers. The fortified walls. The people moving with purpose behind the defenses.

These weren’t survivors hiding from the apocalypse.

They were something else entirely.

And for the first time since leaving the Sector Cities, Gio wondered if the people behind the walls were the ones who had gotten it wrong.