Stat Crusher - Forward Base and Iron-Marrow Bulls

The digital chime on Captain Stone’s wrist pad broke the silence with a flat, electronic ping. One hundred million credits transferred from Fiend Squad’s escrow ledger straight into Slayer-5’s account. Zhou’s hand was still trembling as he stowed his handheld reader, his knuckles white against his leather coat. Eighty million of that total had come out of his personal pool and the squad’s central reserve.

The remaining twenty million sat squarely on Romy and Lyra’s shoulders. Romy backed up a step, her boot heel crunching on a fragment of broken clay tile. She gripped the strap of her sniper rifle like a lifeline, her eyes darting between Garrett and the heavy iron tip of his Black-Dragon Spear.

“We need a week,” Romy spat out, her voice higher than usual.

“My liquid credits are tied up in Citadel futures. You can wait seven days for twenty million.” Garrett reached into his front vest pocket.

He didn’t pull out a blade or a contract. Instead, he dropped a heavy, brass 20mm shell casing into Romy’s open palm. The casing was crushed on one side, scorched black with heavy cordite residue.

“Wang Yuan charges a high hourly rate for rotary cannon work,” Garrett said, his tone as casual as a man discussing the weather over morning coffee.

“Pity he burns through armor-piercing rounds like cheap firewood. Next time you hire an assassin in the screening zone, pick a mercenary who doesn’t leave his brass in the dust.” Romy went pale as chalk.

Her breath hitched in her throat, the blood draining from her lips until she looked like a corpse pulled out of the marsh. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. The realization hit her like a brick to the sternum: Garrett hadn’t just dodged the ambush in the alleyway—he knew exactly who had financed the hit, and he had survived a six-barrel Gatling barrage without taking a single scratch.

Lyra Mercer stared at the scorched brass casing, then at Romy’s terrified face. The math clicked instantly in her head.

“Romy… you hired a contract killer?” Lyra whispered, stepping back from her squadmate.

“During a municipal trial?”

“He was going to ruin us!” Romy hissed under her breath, her eyes wild.

“He’s a nobody from the tenements! He wasn’t supposed to make it past the front gate!” Garrett ignored Romy’s defensive rambling.

He tapped the interface on his wrist reader and extended his arm toward Lyra.

“Twenty million. Right now. Or I walk over to the garrison lieutenant behind that fence and hand him this shell along with the dark-net transaction log I pulled off Wang Yuan’s burner pad. Municipal law is pretty straightforward about attempted murder during a military screening.” Lyra’s hands shook as she unclipped her comm-link.

She looked up at Garrett, her eyes wide, searchingly searching his face for any trace of the quiet, introverted boy who used to sit on the tenement fire escape in the North District, reading beast biology manuals while her mother stitched embroidery next door.

“Garrett… please,” Lyra said, her voice dropping to a desperate murmur.

She stepped closer, leaving Zhou and Romy behind.

“We’ve known each other since we were seven. My dad fixed your family’s water heater when the pipes froze in Year 982. We used to share flour when the ration lines were cut.”

“My father’s name is Arthur Cole,” Garrett said, his voice flat and level.

“And the last time I checked, he paid your dad forty credits for that pipe job.”

“You don’t have to be like this,” Lyra pleaded, reaching out as if to touch his arm, though her hand hovered two inches away, deterred by the cold aura radiating from his mud-caked armor.

“You’ve changed so much since you joined Tempest. You’re cold. You’re acting like these outland cutthroats. Romy made a mistake, but we’re neighbors. We’re from the same block. Can’t we just… talk about this back at the Citadel?” Garrett looked down at her hand, then up into her eyes.

There was no hatred in his gaze. That was the worst part for Lyra—there was no anger, no bitter resentment over her dumping him for corporate patrons, no thirst for petty vengeance. There was simply nothing at all. To Garrett, she was just an obstacle on a ledger sheet.

“When Liu’s thugs smashed my father’s breakfast cart and put him in Ward 3, I didn’t see any neighbors,” Garrett said smoothly.

“When Julian Drake tried to blacklist me from every guild in Fort Sterling, you were standing right next to Landon Mercer, laughing at his jokes. You chose your side a long time ago, Lyra. You wanted the Citadel elite. Don’t come crawling back to the slums now that the arithmetic doesn’t favor you.” He tapped his wrist display again.

“Ten seconds, Lyra. Or the garrison lieutenant gets the burner pad.” Lyra stood frozen, her chest heaving as tears of frustration welled in her eyes.

She bit her lower lip so hard it bled, then slapped her comm-pad against Garrett’s reader. BEEP.

“Account transfer complete,” the automated voice announced.

“Twenty million credits received.” Garrett didn’t say goodbye.

He didn’t offer a final, dramatic warning. He simply turned around, slung his heavy canvas haul bag over his shoulder, and walked away toward Slayer-5’s tracked transport, where Marcus and Captain Stone were waiting with wide, shit-talking grins. Lyra watched his tall, mud-splattered silhouette disappear into the exhaust fog of the forward base.

She stood there in the red dirt of the Outlands, feeling smaller and colder than she ever had in her life.

Diesel exhaust hung like a greasy blanket over the Forward Base supply depot, thick enough to coat the back of Garrett’s throat with the taste of unrefined kerosene. Captain Stone spat a wad of brown tobacco juice onto the tread of a thirty-ton Tracked Armored Transport.

“Two hundred thousand credits a day? For a decommissioned municipal rig with rust on the skirts? Quartermaster, you’re out of your mind.” The depot master didn’t even look up from his digital clipboard.

He was a bald guy with a missing left ear and a mechanical prosthetic arm that whirred like a hand mixer every time his fingers twitched.

“Take it or walk into Sector One on foot, Captain. Four hours ago, three squads went into the county line without heavy iron. Two of them came back in body bags, and the third is currently digesting inside a pack of Iron-Marrow Bulls. You want thirty-millimeter reinforced plating and an NBC filtration unit? Two hundred grand. Cash or guild credit.” Marcus Cross muttered a curse, kicking a loose rivet across the concrete.

“Pay the man, Stone. My boots still smell like viper guts from the marsh. I’m not walking ten miles through outland muck.” Garrett didn’t weigh in on the argument.

He hauled his canvas gear bag over the steel lip of the rear troop compartment and tossed it onto the diamond-plate floor. The Black-Dragon Spear went into the overhead locking rack with a heavy, satisfying snapping thud. His pockets were heavier now—thirty-five million credits richer from the screening trial bets and token turn-ins—but out here, cash was just numbers on a screen until you traded it for tungsten armor and high-density fuel.

Stone swiped his Tempest Guild card across the depot terminal, grimacing as the balance dropped.

“Twenty-four hours. If we’re not back by dawn tomorrow, don’t send a tow truck. Just keep the deposit.” Five minutes later, the transport’s V12 diesel engine roared to life with a bone-rattling shudder that vibrated straight through Garrett’s spine.

The heavy rear ramp swung shut with a pressurized hiss, sealing out the noise of the staging yard. High-Guerilla High climbed into the top gunner’s cupola, unspooling his anti-materiel rifle’s tripod, while Marcus slid into the driver’s seat and yanked the heavy steering levers. The tracks ground over the asphalt, clattering across the Blue River pontoon bridge that separated the military perimeter from the dead zones of central Fort Yilan.

“Look at this junk,” High-Guerilla High called down from the hatch, his voice muffled by his respirator mask.

He was staring at his comm-pad while the rig swayed over the river’s black, churning currents.

“Net forum’s blowing up again. Some rich kid back in Fort Sterling just logged an eighty-five percent custom gene optimization.” Marcus didn’t turn his head from the viewport.

“Who?”

“Landon Mercer. The heir to Mercer Conglomerate,” High-Guerilla High said, tapping the screen.

“Both his parents are Rank-7 Martial Deities, so the Bio-Tech division basically tailor-made the serum to match his bloodline. Kid hit Rank-7 Junior Operator in one sitting.” Marcus let out a dry, hacking laugh.

“Must be nice. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth and two Martial Deities paying for his custom cocktail. Put that corporate soft-boy out here in Sector One for twenty minutes, though. A single Rank-D viper would have him weeping for his nanny.”

“He won’t come outlands,” Stone grunted, leaning back against a row of ammo crates and lighting a fresh cigar.

“Corporate heirs don’t hunt beasts. They sit in air-conditioned Citadel towers and buy outland materials from guys like us for pennies on the dollar. Let him flaunt his eighty-five percent. Once I clear my pension fund off this bear hunt, I’m buying a small hydroponic farm near West Gate and never looking at a mutated beast again.” Garrett sat quietly near the side vision block, his elbow resting against the vibration-dampening pad.

Outside, the concrete highway dissolved into ash-grey soil. A thick, yellowish fog—dense with atmospheric Aether-Gas—rolled off the surrounding pine ridges, swallowing the horizon until only the jagged, hollowed-out skeletons of pre-Calamity high-rises poked through the gloom like broken ribs. He knew what Mercer’s money was worth.

In his past life, he’d seen corporate heirs flex their wealth right up until the sky tore open and the orbital frontier collapsed. Out here, bloodlines meant nothing. Muscle, reflex, and cold-blooded timing were the only currencies that held value. His eyes narrowed as he peered through the thick reinforced glass toward the dark silhouette of Yilan’s central county ruins.

The injured B-Rank Giant Paw Bear was hiding in the collapsed county gymnasium—he knew that much from Stone’s intelligence reports. But what the rest of the squad didn’t know, what no operator on the continent yet realized, was what lay buried twenty feet underneath the gymnasium’s basketball court. A primary Dark-Matter meteorite core, untouched since the Leonid surge dropped it sixty years ago.

If he could kill the bear and absorb that core before the other guild squads tracked the beast down, his physical kinetic strike force would cross the one-thousand-kilogram threshold, shattering the Warrior ceiling entirely. The armored transport slammed over a collapsed concrete overpass, its tracks grinding through a pile of rusted sedan frames as it plunged headlong into the central fog.