"Forty-five seconds," Flint said softly.
"Rending Edge," Ariane whispered, and the Paladin lunged.
She threw Malachar into the burning wreckage of his own command platform and turned the Panzer Paladin toward the rising sun. The suit’s joints seized. Its visor flickered. Step by grinding step, it walked until it could walk no more.
In the shadow of the crumbling Orbital Gate, Squire Genn leaned on her broken halberd and watched the sky burn. Above her, the colossal war machine known as the Panzer Paladin —a suit of armor the size a cathedral—took a single, thunderous step forward. Its visor, a slit of molten gold, scanned the horizon for its next target. Panzer Paladin
The warlock-engineer stood at the rear of the Phalanx, surrounded by a rotating shield of hexed plates. He wasn’t fighting. He was observing . Recording. Ariane realized with cold horror that this wasn’t a battle—it was a field test. He was learning how the Paladin fought.
She hit Malachar’s shield at the apex of its rotation cycle. The hex plates screamed, fractured, and died. Her gauntlet punched through his chest console and lifted him off the ground.
"You deleted my squad," she said through the external speakers, her voice crackling with static and grief. "Forty-five seconds," Flint said softly
"Plenty of time," Ariane lied.
She hurled the dissolving greatsword into a third demon, pinning it to a rock face. The blade shattered into luminous fragments. Without pausing, the Paladin stomped forward and wrenched a war-pike from a fresh corpse. "Gloom Lance, class-B. Leech property. Interesting."
Deep in the Panzer Paladin’s dormant core, Flint processed that reply. Then, quietly, he began to dream of new weapons. The suit’s joints seized
The demonic horde below had a name whispered by refugees: the Black Phalanx. They were not born; they were rendered —corrupted code given iron flesh. Their leader, a warlock-engineer named Malachar, had spent decades reverse-engineering humanity’s own war-forges. Now his legions marched in perfect, silent lockstep, each carrying a blade that could shear through reinforced bunker walls.
So she did something Malachar could not predict.
"Durability 12%," Flint noted calmly. "Drop it or lose it."
"I don’t need interesting. I need an opening to Malachar."
Inside the cockpit, a cold space no larger than a coffin, Pilot Ariane pressed her palm against the neural interface. The suit’s spirit—a blunt, ancient entity named Flint—rumbled in her mind. "Left knee actuator is redlining. Shoulder cannon depleted. We have three minutes, maybe four."