Chapter 6: Burn It Down
Gamma's fist came down before he'd fully decided to throw it.
There was no ceremony to it, no final words exchanged, no moment of hesitation for either of them to fill with meaning. Frank's skull gave way beneath armored knuckles with a sound Gamma would spend a long time not thinking about, and then Frank simply wasn't a person who could answer for anything anymore.
Gamma stood over what was left of him, breathing hard, hands still curled into fists that had nothing left to hit.
He didn't feel better. He hadn't expected to.
Boots pounded in the corridor outside — more than a few, moving fast, the particular urgent rhythm of soldiers converging on a gunshot they'd all clearly heard. Gamma didn't have time to grieve, didn't have time to feel anything at all beyond the cold, narrowing focus that two decades of war had built into him for exactly this kind of moment: the switch that flipped when there was nothing left to protect except the ability to keep moving.
The first knight came through the door already swinging.
Gamma didn't dodge. There wasn't a version of this world's steel that had earned the right to make him flinch tonight. The blade rang off his armor and did nothing, and Gamma's hand closed around the man's wrist and simply — ended the question of what came next. Bone gave way. A scream started and didn't finish, cut short by a fist to the throat that left the knight crumpling before he understood he'd already lost.
More poured in behind him.
There was a version of Gamma — the one who'd treated soldiers gently on operating tables for twenty years, who'd talked frightened cadets through their first combat drop — that some distant part of him knew was still in here somewhere, watching this happen through a haze of grief too large to process in real time. That version of him did not step forward tonight. Tonight belonged entirely to the part of him built for exactly this: efficient, absolute, without mercy to spare because there was none left in him to give.
A backhand caved in a chestplate and the lungs beneath it in the same motion. A spear thrust came in wide and clumsy with fear, and Gamma caught the shaft, turned it, and drove it home in its owner's gut before the man had time to understand his mistake. One tried to run. Gamma didn't allow it — closed the distance in a heartbeat and put him through the stone wall face-first, hard enough that the wall took the impact better than the skull did.
Six men, in the time it took most soldiers to draw a second breath.
Gamma exhaled, once, and kept moving. There was no challenge left in this castle worth the name — only obstacles between himself and the door, and the growing, cold certainty settling into his chest that obstacles were all any of them had ever really been to him tonight.
A robed figure stepped from the shadows further down the corridor — the first person all night who looked like he actually expected to survive the encounter.
A magic circle bloomed to life beneath the man's feet, runes catching torchlight as a sphere of fire gathered in his palm.
"Ignis Flamma!"
The fireball roared down the corridor and struck him full in the chest, and Gamma's armor logged the spike in temperature with the same flat indifference it logged everything else — heat climbing, then peaking well short of anything his plating hadn't already survived on three other worlds. Smoke rolled off him as it cleared. He was still standing. Still walking forward.
The wizard's confidence didn't survive the sight of that nearly as well as Gamma's armor had survived the fire.
A second spell came — a lance of flame, faster, more desperate — and Gamma simply raised a gauntlet and let it break apart against his palm like it was nothing more than a rumor of heat. By the time the wizard turned to run, the distance between them had already closed. It ended fast, and it ended without anything Gamma would call satisfaction in it.
He stepped over what remained and kept walking, because stopping meant thinking, and thinking, tonight, was not a luxury he could afford himself yet.
The outer gate held the last real resistance — archers on the walls, and in front of them a knight in armor that glowed with its own faint, holy light. A paladin, sword already alive with enchanted fire, drawing himself up with the particular righteous certainty of a man who'd never once had that certainty tested.
"Devil," the knight spat. "How dare you defile this holy ground."
Gamma looked at him for a long moment — at the sword, the glow, the absolute conviction on the man's face — and felt something in him that might have been laughter in a different life come out instead as something flat and tired.
"Get out of my way."
The paladin's eyes flared, sword blazing brighter as speed-enhancing magic blurred his charge into something almost too fast to track. Almost.
Gamma raised his pistol and put a single round through the center of the man's forehead before the blade ever closed the distance. The fire on the sword guttered out with its owner, and the body hit the ground with none of the ceremony the man's last words had promised it would deserve.
Arrows came next, a storm of them, some crackling with elemental charge — fire, lightning, the sharp cold bite of frost magic. Gamma didn't run from them. He ran at them, servo-assisted strength driving his claws into stone as he scaled the wall in seconds, the archers' shouted confusion the last coherent thing most of them managed before he was among them.
He didn't linger over what came next. He didn't let himself. One by one, and then not one at a time at all, until the parapets went quiet and stayed that way.
Not a single archer walked away from that wall.
He found his way back to the room last, moving slower now, the adrenaline finally starting to bleed out and leave behind something heavier in its place.
Gia hadn't moved, of course. Bodies didn't move on their own, no matter how much a person standing over one might will it otherwise.
Gamma knelt beside her, armored fingers finding the worn metal of her dog tag with a gentleness that felt almost obscene given everything his hands had just finished doing down the hall.
"I'll take you home, Gia," he said, to a room that couldn't answer him. "I promised you that, once. Long time ago. Guess it's overdue."
He activated the flame module built into his gauntlet — designed for field sterilization, for burning contaminated wounds clean in the field when nothing else would do — and turned it, for the first time in his career, toward something it had never been built for.
He made himself watch. It felt like the only honest thing left he could give her.
When there was nothing left but embers, he collected what remained into a small metal canister and sealed it, then fastened it to his belt with hands that were, for the first time all night, not entirely steady.
She would not be left in this place. She was going home, even if he had to carry her there himself, one battlefield at a time.
The castle's lowest level held exactly what he expected it to: barrels stacked deep, alcohol strong enough to serve as an accelerant even a medieval brewer probably hadn't intended.
He didn't hesitate. There wasn't anything left in him tonight that hesitated.
One shot. The liquid caught instantly, fire racing up through the barrels and out along the walls faster than any natural blaze had a right to move. He was already walking for the gate by the time the first support beam gave way behind him, ceiling groaning, stone cracking under its own sudden weight.
He didn't look back when the castle came down. He felt the heat of it against his back, heard the roar of collapsing stone swallow whatever was left of the screaming, and kept his eyes forward, fixed on the dark treeline beyond the gate.
Somewhere out there was Hiro. Somewhere out there was whoever else had decided that Gia's life was an acceptable price for this world's comfortable lies.
He would find every one of them.
Find Hiro. Find the traitors.
Burn them all.