Stat Crusher - Bovine Core Harvest and Spear Against Clouds

Asphalt gave way with a wet, splintering crunch under thirty tons of steel, but the vibration coming up through Marcus’s boots had nothing to do with the transport’s treads.

“Hold the grab-handles!” Stone barked, his cigar dropping from his teeth onto the diamond-plate floor.

A heavy, iron thud slammed into the transport’s port side. Thirty tons of armored tracked plating skidded six feet sideways, tires screaming as rebar tore through the undercarriage. Inside the troop compartment, gear bags flew off their pegs. Marcus smashed his shoulder hard against the driver’s bulkhead, cursing loudly as he wrestled with the manual steering levers.

“What hit us?” High-Guerilla High yelled down from the top hatch, his face pale behind his goggles.

Garrett didn’t ask. He scrambled toward the starboard vision block, wiping a smear of diesel soot off the glass. Out in the yellow fog of the Yilan South Highway, six hulking, golden-scaled shapes were circling back through the ruined median. They looked like prehistoric bison, but twice as wide, their backs sloped with layered plates of iron-hard bone.

Two-meter horns, thick as telegraph poles and dark as oxidized copper, curved outward from their skulls. Iron-Marrow Bulls. Rank-C pack predators whose skeletons absorbed extraterrestrial iron particulate from the soil, rendering their hides almost completely impervious to light ordnance.

“They’re targeting the drive sprockets!” Marcus yelled, his hands flying across the control panel as alarms buzzed.

“If one of those beasts wedges a horn under the left tread, we’re through. We’ll be sitting ducks in the middle of the highway.”

“Dismount!” Stone yelled, slamming his hand against the pressurized door release.

“Drive them off the chassis before they flip us!” The rear ramp dropped with a heavy, iron crash, hitting the asphalt just as the lead alpha bull lowered its cranium for another run.

Cold outland wind rushed into the compartment, carrying the stench of wet fur, ozone, and hot engine grease. Stone was the first out, his longsword already unsheathed. He landed in a low crouch, swinging a heavy overhead arc that caught a flank-bull across its shoulder plates. SPARK. The sword bounced off the beast’s overlapping scales with a blinding shower of sparks, leaving nothing more than a pale grey scratch.

The bull barely flinched, snorting a plume of black steam through its nostrils before swinging its heavy skull to gore Stone’s ribs.

“Keep moving!” Stone shouted, rolling through the roadside gravel to avoid the sweeping horns.

High-Guerilla High opened fire from the top hatch. Three thirty-millimeter armor-piercing rounds cracked through the fog, slamming directly into the lead alpha’s forehead. The impact stopped the eight-ton beast in its tracks, its front knees buckling into the broken pavement, but the heavy rounds failed to penetrate the dense marrow plate protecting its brain.

It shook its head, roared with a sound like grinding tectonic plates, and charged straight for Garrett. Garrett didn’t back up. He unhooked the Black-Dragon Spear from his back, his boots finding solid traction in a crack between two concrete slabs. His Rank-8 Peak muscles coiled. Eight hundred and eighty kilograms of raw kinetic force braced behind his stance.

He knew a direct thrust to the snout would just slide off the bone plate. He needed an opening. Blink. Four silver micro-blades slipped out from his vest sheaths under telekinetic guidance, floating invisible in the yellow mist before snapping forward in four intersecting arcs. The alpha bull didn’t even see the blades coming.

Pfft-pfft. Two silver streaks punched straight through the alpha’s left eye socket, while the other two shredded the right. Liquid vitreous humors and black blood exploded out of the beast’s eyes. Blind and maddened by the sudden, intense pain, the alpha veered wildly to the left, its hooves skidding out of control as it ploughed through a rusted guardrail.

Garrett stepped straight into its blind spot. He pivoted his hips, channeled every ounce of his reborn strength through his core, and unleashed Nine-Fold Torrent Spear: Form 1. Gale Force. A localized vortex of compressed air erupted from the tip of the Black-Dragon Spear. Garrett drove the hundred-and-fifty-pound iron shaft straight through the ruined, bleeding eye socket, pushing past the crushed optic nerve and punching deep into the skull cavity.

The spearhead severed the brainstem instantly. The eight-ton alpha collapsed mid-stride, its momentum sliding its massive, armored carcass twenty feet down the highway before it smashed into a concrete light pole, coming to a dead stop. Garrett yanked the spear free with a sharp twist, stepping over the pooling black blood as the remaining five bulls hesitated, their pack leader suddenly silent in the dust.

Flies were already swarming the yellow grease on Marcus’s combat sleeves before the last bull stopped kicking. Steam drifted up off the split bellies, carrying a rank stink of copper, semi-digested swamp grass, and hot diesel. Stone stood on top of a collapsed concrete guardrail forty feet down the road, his longsword drawn and resting against his hip while his eyes tracked the dense tree line.

“Hurry it up,” Stone barked, his voice raspy from smoke.

“Blood in open air down here is like ringing a dinner bell for every scavenger between here and the county line.” High-Guerilla High leaned over a fallen carcass with a pneumatic bone-saw, its toothy blade whining violently as it chewed through thick cranial plate.

“These horns are dense as rebar,” he grumbled, wiping sweat off his nose with the back of his shoulder.

“If we dull another carbine tip, the Quartermaster’s taking it out of my cut.”

“Shut up and saw,” Marcus grunted from the other side of the road, using a pry-bar to peel back the iron scale-plates along a flank.

“Six full Rank-C hides and five core nodules. Bio-Tech will give us twenty million credits at the gate without blinking. That’s five mil a head after transport fees.” Garrett didn’t join the squad’s banter.

Crouched under the gloom of the dead alpha bull’s massive ribcage, he drove his tungsten skinning knife through the ventral belly seam. Black, mineral-rich blood poured out over the cracked asphalt. He reached deep past the diaphragm, shoving his forearm directly into the beast’s primary digestive sac. Most operators ignored the guts entirely, focusing only on the spinal core and the armored scale-plates.

But Garrett remembered from his past life. Alpha bulls grazing near dark-matter impact zones frequently formed rare internal mineral deposits—a Bovine Bio-Calculus, or outland bezoar. His fingers caught on a solid, heavy lump embedded near the bile duct. He worked his wrist around the slippery tissue, popping a smooth, fist-sized sphere free from the organ lining.

It glinted with a dull, oily sheen under the autumn sun. On the Citadel black market, medical research labs paid fifteen million credits liquid for a calculus stone like this to synthesize high-tier nerve-stabilizing reagents. Keeping his body angled away from High-Guerilla High’s line of sight, Garrett wrapped the Calculus in an oiled rag and slipped it straight into his inner vest pocket.

Marcus hauled the last slab of iron-marrow hide into the transport’s rear cargo bay with a heavy, iron thump.

“Twenty million in hides and cores,” Marcus said, slapping the iron latch shut and wiping his slick hands on his trousers.

“Not a bad twenty minutes of work.” Garrett wiped the black grease off his palms with a clump of dead roadside weeds, picked up his Black-Dragon Spear, and climbed back into the dark interior of the tracked rig.

Tristan Rhodes leaned back against the warm iron skirt of the transport, tapping his comm-pad with a grease-stained thumb to upload high-res footage of the harvested bull hides directly onto the Tempest Lodge internal forum. Garrett glanced at the digital telemetry popping up on the dash console.

“You’re broadcasting a geotagged signal across an unencrypted guild frequency, Tristan. Out here in Sector 3, any scrap-mercenary with a ninety-credit receiver can pinpoint our grid coordinates within ten yards.”

“Give it a rest, rookie,” Tristan grumbled, not bothering to look up from the screen as he watched his merit-view count tick upward.

“The screening trial is over. Military patrols sweep the Sector 3 perimeter twice a month to clear out bird roosts. Stop reciting the High School No. 6 textbook and let me post.” Captain Stone stepped down from the cab, his boots crunching on crushed glass as he surveyed their surroundings.

Night was falling fast over Sector 3. The sun had dipped behind the jagged spine of the Khingan ridge, casting long, bruised-purple glooms across a ruined boulevard choked with rusted vehicle frames and collapsed sky-bridges. Directly ahead stood their designated camp for the night: the Ancient Hotel, a hollowed-out five-story pre-Calamit

structure whose reinforced concrete frame had somehow survived decades of artillery shelling and weather rot. Two hundred yards across the cracked intersection, however, loomed a far more ominous sight—a fourteen-story residential high-rise, its glass-less window frames stacked on top of one another like thousands of empty, black eye sockets in a giant concrete honeycomb.

Garrett paused at the edge of the transport’s loading ramp, his nostrils flaring slightly. The wind had shifted, blowing out of the north. Underneath the familiar stench of diesel fuel and damp concrete, there was something else floating on the cool evening breeze—a faint, sour odor of dry guano, ammonia, and old feathers.

“Move the rig under the hotel overhang and get inside,” Garrett said quietly, his hand coming to rest on the shaft of his Black-Dragon Spear.

“That high-rise across the street is an active roost. We shouldn’t be standing in the open.” Tristan let out a short, scoffing snort, shoving his comm-pad into his combat belt.

“An active roost? It’s dusk, Cole. Even if there are a few stray mutated pigeons in there, birds don’t hunt at night unless they’re owls, and owls don’t nest in concrete blocks. You survived a few swamp snakes and suddenly you think you’re an Outland tracker.”

“Garrett’s right about getting under cover,” Stone interjected, his voice low as his eyes swept the upper ledges of the fourteen-story ruin.

“Pack the gear. We sleep inside.” Before Marcus could grab the supply crates from the rear bed, a dull, iron THUMP echoed through the dead silence of the ruined boulevard three blocks north.

It was the unmistakable sound of a compressed-gas mortar tube. A solitary red trail streaked across the dark velvet sky, arcing gracefully over the intersection before slamming straight into the top floor of the fourteen-story residential high-rise. BOOM. The warhead didn’t detonate with high explosives. Instead, it burst into a dense, oily cloud of blood-red mist that coated the entire upper facade of the high-rise.

A sickening, sweet odor—the heavy, iron stench of synthetic mammal blood and concentrated beast-attractant pheromones—instantly washed down into the street below. Inside the honeycombed concrete tower, the silence shattered. A low, buzzing vibration started deep within the darkened window frames, rapidly escalating into a deafening, iron screech that sounded like thousands of iron blades grinding together.

High-Guerilla High swung his anti-materiel rifle toward the high-rise, his face draining of color behind his tactical goggles.

“Movement in the upper floors! Millions of thermal signatures!” Black clouds erupted from every single window opening on the upper nine stories.

Rank-F Blood-Swallows—mutated avians the size of red-tailed hawks, equipped with serrated iron beaks designed to bore straight through human skulls to devour cerebral tissue—poured out of the concrete structure in a swirling, shrieking tornado of feathers and talons. Drawn by the intoxicating scent of the dark red pheromone mist coating the hotel roof, the massive avian cloud turned in mid-air, its red, glowing eyes catching the fading twilight as the entire flock swooped downward toward the street.

“Form up on the entryway!” Captain Stone roared, unsheathing his heavy longsword as the sky above them turned completely black.

“Protect the sniper!”