The Red Vulture skidded to a smoking halt under the crimson targeting beams, its tracks digging furrows in the ancient ferrocrete. Eighty meters from the dome's main gate, the vehicle shuddered as its failing anti-grav engine finally gave up, belching a plume of acrid white smoke that hung in the acid rain like a funeral shroud.

  Hundreds of electromagnetic railgun turrets—two-and-a-half centuries old but still lethally precise—swiveled in perfect synchrony on their rusted mounts. A single, unbroken tone filled the cockpit comms, a mechanical death knell counting down the seconds until their Adamantine hull would be reduced to a cloud of molten shrapnel.

  Flora Rosenkrantz sucked in a ragged breath, her fingers flying across the cracked console interface. "I can hack them... our EW suite is far ahead of this late-22nd century antique!" Her synthesized voice betrayed a tremor neither protocol nor programming could suppress. She browsed through the standard military malware demons and pushed "Cerberus-9" with a desperate stab of her finger.

  A red progress bar flickered to life on the screen: [Initiating Breach Protocol, standby.]

  "Hurry!" Alina snarled, her knuckles white on the control yoke. "We're entering their firing solution window—they will—"

  Every turret light across the dome's massive exterior flipped from red to green in perfect unison. A synthetic corporate-female voice, preserved in crystalline clarity despite the centuries of silence, filled their comms in pre-collapse English:

  "Whitelist corporate asset detected—residual Armatech-Luccess International Armaments clearance key confirmed. Welcome home, senior employee."

  The twelve-meter-thick alloy gate thundered open like the jaws of a steel leviathan awakening from slumber. Alina slammed the accelerator as the Red Vulture's tracks bit into the ground. They plunged through the yawning maw of the dome just as the gate crashed shut behind them with a seismic finality that rattled the vehicle's frame and vibrated through their bones.

  The interior was impossibly vast. A two-hundred-meter-high dome stretched overhead. On the first glance, Alina Ludwig believed it is an administrative-military enclave of the First Magacorp. Only ten percent of the ancient lighting systems still functioned, casting a sickly, flickering white glow over the immense space. The smell of dust and decayed polymers filled the air, thick enough to taste.

  Every surface—walls, pillars, the vaulted ceiling—was emblazoned with corporate slogans in Old English, the language of the 20th-22nd centuries rather than the Neo-English of today.

  WAR IS PEACE

  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  OBEDIENCE IS STRENGTH.

  The words felt like ghosts pressing against their helmets.

  Dozens of corporate-era vehicles stood frozen on the central plaza like steel dinosaurs preserved in tar—armored transports, mobile command centers, even a few pre-Collapse tanks, all coated in two century and a half of undisturbed dust.

  Alina killed the engines. She turned her helmet lamp to maximum as she peeked out of the cupola, the beam cutting through the gloom. Her voice was unusually quiet, stripped of its usual fire.

  "...A First Magacorp relic. If the History Department eggheads saw this, they'd pitch tents and live here forever." A bitter smile touched her lips. "We might be the first living souls to walk in here in at least two hundred and fifty years."

  The Red Vulture limped to a stop in the central plaza, its engines hissing their death rattle like a wounded beast. Alina jumped out immediately, opening the tool kit with practiced efficiency. As she began field-welding the damaged left road-wheel assembly, sparks flared in the darkness, illuminating her exhausted face.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Flora sat hunched on the track of an antique tank nearby, her G-12 “Toga” still streaked with dried blood from her beating in the “Red Vulture”. Her visor was open, revealing pale, perfect features frozen in vacancy. Her lips trembled almost imperceptibly.

  From the depths of the enclave came a low, mournful groan of metal fatigue, as if the entire structure was sighing after centuries of silence.

  Alina didn't look up from her work, her voice tight with exhaustion. "Stop spacing out. Bring the med-kit—I need to see what's wrong with Old China."

  Inside the Red Vulture's infantry bay, Chen Feng jerked awake from a nightmare so vivid it felt more real than the cold Adamantine beneath him.

  Chen gasped, his heart hammering against his ribs. The nightmare clung to him like a second skin, the phantom sensation of the child's hand still gripping his ankle. He wiped his face with a trembling hand, the taste of copper in his mouth.

  Alina finished welding the last plate, the spark shower dying to a faint glow. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her gauntlet and looked up—only to freeze.

  Flora stood at the rear hatch of the , staring at Chen's face on the makeshift cot. Her expression was unreadable behind the open visor, but her posture betrayed something raw and unfamiliar—confusion, perhaps guilt, a recognition that the monster she'd seen might be something else entirely.

  The air was so quiet one could hear blood moving in their ears.

  Suddenly the enclave PA system crackled to life in 250-year-old corporate English, the female voice ice-cold and devoid of mercy: "External containment net complete. Hostile units: 217 personnel, 31 armored vehicles. Heavy weapons locked. Projected blockade duration: 97 hours."

  The few remaining lights died, only emergency red lamps flickered on one by one, casting the vast space in bloody shadows that made the frozen vehicles look like dormant beasts.

  Alina dropped the welding torch. It clangs like a death knell against the ferrocrete. Her voice was barely above a whisper, hollow with the weight of finality: "Welcome to the museum, ladies. The exhibit is us."

  Outside the rust-red titan, Erebus stood atop his command vehicle, his tattooed face turned up toward the dome's massive silhouette. The rising sun caught the polished plates of his exosuit, glistening like oil on water. Slowly, deliberately, his lips split into a smile that held no warmth, only the satisfaction of a predator who had finally cornered his prey.

  Inside the Red Vulture, three helmet lamps flickered on in absolute darkness—three tiny points of light in an ocean of shadows. Three candles about to be snuffed.

  And in the void between realities, where dreams bled into waking, a pale text floated like an epitaph: 95 days.

  The countdown had begun.