Chapter 21: Gone
The word hung in the charged air between them, a fragile thing swallowed by the whine of servos and the distant, keening wind. Ren’s mind, a frantic animal, scrabbled for purchase. He saw the twitch of the Mark-III’s plasma caster, a subtle adjustment for a perfect shot. He saw Kai’s pale face, smudged with grime, staring up at the suit’s cockpit with pure, bewildered recognition. He saw Luna, her gaze calculating, as if she were already mapping the firing arcs and his vulnerabilities.
His father’s suit.His father’s legacy.A weapon pointed at him by his own side.
The AI’s voice, a private pressure behind his eyes, broke the paralysis. “Neural feedback spiking.Cortisol levels dangerous. Your vitals are compromising system stability, Cadet Ikawi.”
He had seconds.The order was clear. But his friends were in a crumbling chasm, and the fissure was still groaning, shedding pebbles and dust.
“You gonna shoot me, then?” Ren’s voice crackled over the open channel, bravado thin over the raw fear. “Do it.But they fall if I power down.”
A tense silence. The blue suit didn’t move.It was all the opening Ren needed. He slammed his will into the suit’s legs, ignoring the protocols screaming in his head. The neural interface burned, a white-hot wire in his spine. The Mk-I otowa lurched, not away, but forward, its massive hand continuing its trajectory toward the light pole.
“Ren, don’t—!” Kai’s shout was cut off as the metal fingers closed, gentle as a giant could manage, around the bent pole just below their feet. With a grinding shriek of tortured metal, he wrenched the entire structure free from the crumbling ledge.“Hang on!” he yelled.
He retracted the arm, cradling the pole and its two clinging passengers against the suit’s thick chest plating. He could feel their weight, a terrifyingly delicate addition to the sensorium flooding his mind. The suit’s balance algorithms shrieked a protest.“Unauthorized movement logged. Manual override forfeits Academy protection,” the Mark-III pilot stated, tone ice-cold. “You are now considered a rogue asset.”
Rogue.The word echoed.It meant shoot on sight.
“RENA-1, get us out of here!” Ren thought, the command internal.“Acknowledged. Diverting power from non-essentials.Brace.”
The world dropped away. Ren felt it before he saw it: a deep, resonant charge building in the suit’s thrusters mounted on its back and calves. The air around the Mk-I shimmered with heat haze. Then, with a concussive WHOMP that flattened the rubble below and sent the Mark-III staggering back a step, the otowa launched upward.
It wasn’t flight.It was a controlled, violent ballistic hop. The G-force crushed Ren into the harness, his vision tunneling. He held onto the consciousness of the suit’s arms, the imperative to keep the pole steady, as the academy spire blurred past. They cleared the Gothic parapets, the cold moon hanging huge for a moment before they arced down.
The landing was a cataclysm of another kind. He hit the rear training grounds, a wide expanse of cracked concrete behind the academy’s main keep, far from the fissure. The impact drove the suit’s knees into the ground with a sound like continents cracking.Ren’s teeth jarred together. He staggered, but stayed upright, the immense legs absorbing the shock with a series of hydraulic sighs.
He opened the hand.The light pole slid from his grasp and clattered onto the concrete. Kai and Luna spilled off, rolling onto the hard ground, gasping.The cockpit hissed open, the canopy sliding back. The cool night air rushed in, smelling of ozone and burnt metal. Ren fumbled with the harness release, his fingers clumsy, his body trembling with adrenaline and neural feedback. He half-fell out of the cockpit, catching himself on the edge before dropping the last few meters to the ground. His knees buckled. He caught himself on the suit’s massive, scarred foot, its surface still warm.“You,” Kai wheezed, pushing himself up. He stared from Ren to the towering, silent giant and back again. “You insane, glorious idiot.” He was grinning, a wild, relieved thing.
Luna was already on her feet, her eyes not on Ren, but scanning the dark periphery of the grounds.Her stillness was more alarming than Kai’s outburst. “We need to move.That pilot will have called our position in. And the breach isn’t contained.”
Ren followed her gaze.The quiet here was absolute, wrong. The usual nocturnal hum of the academy’s generators was absent.Only the wind through the dead ivy on the fortress walls made a sound.
Then RENA-1’s voice, now emanating softly from the external speaker on the suit’s chest, broke the silence.“Cadet Ikawi. I am detecting multiple attempts to manually sever my core processes from the Academy mainframe.Firewall integrity is at 67%. They are trying to shut me down.”
“What does that mean?” Ren asked, pushing off from the foot, his legs barely supporting him.“It means if they succeed, I become nine metric tons of inert metal. You will be inside.” The AI paused. “I am also detecting thirty-seven new anomalous energy signatures converging on this location. They have bypassed the perimeter through subterranean channels.”
As if summoned, the shadows at the far end of the training grounds began to move. Not just one or two, but a shifting, pooling darkness that detached from the deeper black of the walls. They seeped out onto the concrete like spilled oil, taking form—slick, elongated things with too many joints, their outlines shimmering with a cold, non-light. They moved in a skittering, silent swarm.No Stalker this time.These were smaller, faster.Piranhas made of shadow.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Kai breathed, backing toward the suit.
Ren’s heart hammered against his ribs. The euphoria of piloting, of saving his friends, evaporated.He was just a cadet again, small and inadequate. The bullies from his neighborhood flashed in his mind, their laughter echoing the silent advance of these things.Weak. Frail.Uselose.The anger came, hot and desperate. It burned away the fear, left only a sharp, crystalline focus.He wasn’t that kid anymore.He was in the otowa.
He turned to the open cockpit.“RENA-1, lock the canopy. We’re not done.”
“The system firewalls are failing.I will lose primary weapon systems first. You will have physical actuators only.”
“Then that’s what we use.”
He climbed. His muscles screamed in protest, but he hauled himself back into the seat.The harness snicked closed around him. The canopy slid shut, sealing him once more in the bioluminescent womb. The world outside became a high-definition nightmare through the optics.
The swarm was halfway across the grounds, flowing with terrifying speed.
“Get behind the suit’s legs!” Ren yelled through the external speakers, his voice booming across the concrete.Kai and Luna didn’t need telling twice. They scrambled to position themselves between the otowa massive calves, a pathetic fortress of flesh against the tide.
Ren planted the suit’s feet, settling into a low stance. He raised the arms, the giant’s fists clenching with a sound of grinding steel.The first of the shadows reached him. It leapt, a black dart.He swatted it.It exploded into vapor against his knuckles. Another came from the low left.A kick sent it smearing across the ground. Two more scrambled up the leg, clawing at the armor, their touch leaving frost and deep, hairline cracks in the composite. He grabbed one, crushed it in his hand—a sensation like crushing a bag of ice and writhing eels—and slammed the other against his own hip plating.
He was holding.Barely.But they were endless. A wave of them surged under his guard, heading straight for Kai and Luna.He couldn’t move his feet without risking crushing them. He dropped one hand like a hammer, pulverizing three, but two more slipped past.
A flash of silver.Luna had a combat knife, its edge glowing with a faint, actinic blue. She moved with shocking economy, severing a shadowy limb as it reached for Kai. The thing recoiled, dissipating.Kai grabbed a broken piece of conduit, swinging it wildly.Ren was losing focus. The suit’s responses grew sluggish. Warning glyphs flashed: SYSTEM FIREWALL BREACH.MANUAL OVERRIDE UNSTABLE.
A cluster of anomalies leapt together, a coordinated attack, aiming for the cockpit.Ren brought both arms up in a cross-guard. The impact shuddered through the frame. He was driven back a step, a screech of metal on concrete.The step was too far.He was leaving Kai and Luna exposed.
From the side, a larger, slower shape emerged—another Stalker, drawn by the fray. It ignored Ren, its hollow gaze fixed on the two cadets.It lunged.
Ren tried to pivot, to intercept, but his systems lagged.The world seemed to slow. He saw Kai shove Luna behind him, raising his pathetic piece of metal.He saw the Stalker’s claws rise.
A sound tore the night apart. Not the whine of plasma, but the deep, visceral CRACK of high-caliber ballistics.
The Stalker’s upper body disintegrated in a spray of void-black mist.The remaining torso stumbled and collapsed.
Headlights sliced the darkness, twin suns roaring across the training ground. A vehicle, all rusted armor and exposed rivets, a relic from the border wars, skidded to a halt between the swarm and the suit. Its top-mounted turret rotated with a hydraulic whine. On its side, hand-painted in flaking white, was the emblem of a cracked bell being swept clean.Cleaners.
The turret fired again, a staccato thunder that deafened Ren even inside the cockpit. Shells tore through the swarm, blasting them into drifting smoke. A figure leaned out of the vehicle’s hatch, a man with a grizzled beard and goggles, clutching a massive, drum-fed rivet gun.“Cadets!To the truck! Now!” he bellowed, his voice raw.Kai didn’t hesitate. He grabbed Luna’s arm and they sprinted, weaving as the cleaner’s fire covered them.
Ren, still reeling, tried to take a step to follow.A searing pain lanced through his skull. The optic display fizzed, distorted.“RENA-1!”
“Core process separation imminent.They have cut the tethers. I am… losing cohesion.”
The suit’s right arm went dead, hanging limp at its side. The left knee actuator locked.Ren was trapped in a leaning, partially paralyzed giant.
The remaining anomalies, sensing a faltering god, renewed their assault. They swarmed over the inert legs, clawing towards the cockpit. The cleaner vehicle revved its engine, surging forward to intercept, but it was outnumbered.
Through the static in his vision and the pounding in his head, Ren saw two new shapes drop from the sky on pillars of jetfire. They landed with earth-shaking precision, one on each side of the crippled otowa. A sleek, green Mark-II with katana-like vibro-blades unsheathing from its forearms, and a bulky, gray Mark-IV with shoulders mounted with heavy rotary cannons that began to spin with a building, electric whine.
The lead cleaner’s voice crackled on a newly opened, secure channel. “Took you pretty-boys long enough. "
(Author note: next chapter reveal Luna being a secretly higher up member, leaving ren at a lost for word and confusion of her betrayal.)
(context: Ren has “stolen” mark 1)