"Kill the boy, let the man be born." - Unknown.
Kali reached the final landing, the door to the rooftop just ahead, slightly ajar, swaying faintly in the wind. The old hinges creaked with each gust, a soft, eerie invitation.
He didn't move yet.
He pressed his back to the wall beside the doorframe, controlling his breathing. The scent of smoke and gunmetal filtered in from the roof, mingled with the distant buzz of city power grids and hovercraft hum far below. But louder than all of that was the silence—intentional silence. Colt was waiting.
Kali's fingers flexed around the grip of his weapon. He pictured the rooftop layout, estimated angles. Colt had a clear view, likely prone or crouched behind a reinforced barrier near the northeast corner.
Kali muttered under his breath, "It's now or never."
He moved. A blur of motion, he pivoted through the doorway, his body low and angled, just as the sniper round cracked past. The shot tore through the rusted wall behind him with explosive force, pulverizing concrete and sending a spray of dust and shrapnel across the rooftop.
But he was already inside. Kali sprinted across the rooftop in a calculated arc, closing the gap between them before Colt could cycle another round. The sniper, to his credit, didn't even try. He tossed the rifle aside and rose to meet Kali.
The man was massive up close—covered head to toe in sleek, matte-black plating that shimmered subtly under the moonlight. For a heartbeat, Kali thought he was facing another droid—one of the more advanced, untagged models. But no. There was a human core beneath that armor. The movements were too fluid, the posture too grounded in instinct.
An exosuit? Kali wondered. Or something deeper—cybernetics? Full-bodily reinforcement?
Colt said nothing. He didn't need to.
They closed on each other like twin bullets on intersecting trajectories. Kali fired once, center mass but the round sparked off Colt's chest plate like a pebble flicked at a tank. Colt responded with a crushing swing of his gauntleted arm, forcing Kali into a backward roll that barely avoided a shattered ribcage.
Kali came up quick, flicked his sidearm into his off-hand, and fired twice more, aiming for the joints. One shot grazed, the other ricocheted off reinforced plating at the elbow. Colt advanced like a machine, expression unreadable beneath a visor that mirrored the city lights.
Then he struck again—fast.
A spinning backhand that Kali ducked under by inches, followed by a knee that caught him square in the shoulder, sending him skidding across the rooftop. Pain bloomed, but Kali gritted his teeth and twisted into a slide, catching himself against a crate and springing back up, gun drawn again.
This was going to be harder than Kali had anticipated. Colt was faster than any person he had yet fought, stronger too. The armor didn't slow him, it enabled him, turned his every motion into something unnatural. And yet, it wasn't the speed or the strength that gave Kali pause.
It was the calm.
Colt fought with the brutal precision of someone who had done this too many times, who knew how it would end, and didn't care if it broke him getting there.
Kali lowered his center of gravity, shoulders rising with a breath he drew from someplace deeper than lungs. Then he let go. He let the grief take him.
The sorrow he carried, hollow ache of those he couldn't save, the bleeding wound of battles lost, friends buried, truths silenced. The fire that had scorched his past and the smoke that still clung to his every breath. The city, rotten to its bones. The war, unwinnable. The rot, inescapable.
He let it in. And with it came the edge.
His pupils dilated, senses sharpening. The world slowed, not in time, but in meaning. Sound curled like molasses. Light bent oddly around motion. Pain ceased to register as interruption. Every stimulus fed a singular rhythm now, entropy's rhythm, the discordant music of unraveling order.
And it sang in his veins.
Colt took a half-step back, a subtle motion but telling. He felt the shift. He couldn't understand it, not fully, being unawakened, but instinctively, he sensed the storm had turned.
Kali moved.
He launched forward with a blur of momentum, holstering his main weapon in a fluid motion only to draw a short-barrel magnetic repeater from beneath his coat. He fired from the hip in quick bursts, three shots ricocheted like razor-edged echoes off Colt's upper armor plating, sparking magnesium-bright in the gloom.
Colt countered instantly, rolling behind a ventilation unit and returning fire with a wrist-mounted microcannon. The shots exploded against the rooftop, one narrowly missing Kali's head, leaving a crater in the concrete behind him.
Kali dove into cover, rolled, sprang off the edge of a pipe structure, and returned fire while inverted midair. His shots found Colt's left shoulder joint, metal hissed, servos buckled. Colt grunted, stumbling half a step, but regained balance almost immediately.
No time.
Kali surged forward, close now, too close for rifles or cannons. His repeater emptied, and he let it fall, fingers drawing twin shock-blades from the sheaths at his sides. With a burst of kinetic fury, he slashed, one blade scraping across Colt's armored ribs, the other jabbing for a gap near the neck seal.
Colt blocked the second strike with his forearm, metal clanging on metal, and retaliated with a punishing headbutt that snapped Kali's head back. Blood sprayed from his nose, and he staggered but didn't fall.
Instead, he spun, pivoting on his heel, and slammed his elbow into Colt's midsection. The strike landed with a thunderous crack, Kali had channeled it with more than brute strength. It was grief made manifest, despair wielded as a weapon.
Colt stumbled.
Kali pressed the advantage, driving him back with a hail of short, precise strikes, blade, boot, fist, knee. The rooftop was a blur of movement and clashing steel, sparks cascading like fireflies in a storm. Each blow landed like a drumbeat in a funeral march, echoing into the night sky.
Then Colt grabbed Kali by the throat and lifted him. A fatal mistake.
Kali grabbed the head of his assailant, reached deep into the recesses of his mind, yanked out his trauma and forced him to watch.
He dove past the metal and bone, bypassing the cranium's natural defenses, and plunged headlong into the chaos behind Colt's consciousness. His fingers tightened around the man's skull, but the true violence was elsewhere, inward.
Kali tore open the hidden vaults of memory like a man ripping nails from coffin wood. He didn't extract thoughts, he exhumed them. Shattered recollections, raw and unreconciled, spilled out in a storm of sensation.
He forced Colt to see. The past came screaming.
Operating tables in underground medical theaters, faces masked in gold-lined Medri fashion, laughing as they sliced into a screaming man's abdomen. Blood pooled like ink. Organs—livers, lungs, kidneys—were tagged and packed away like merchandise. Colt—no, Gillian Meyer—strapped to cold steel, reduced to a trembling resource.
The pain wasn't physical anymore. It was existential. He was reborn in that moment, again and again, as prey.
Colt's scream wasn't a scream. It was a soul unmaking itself—a soundless shriek that echoed in the walls of Kali's own mind, too deep and vast for air to carry. A resonance of despair.
Kali let go.
Colt stumbled backward, eyes wide behind the visor. The scream still lived in his throat, silent but endless. He staggered once, then again, then grabbed his rifle and ran. Arms twitching, voice broken into mutters, weeping with a child's helplessness. Words tumbled from his lips like cracked glass.
Kali didn't chase him. Not immediately.
Instead, he watched—watched the man who had tried to kill him collapse under the weight of his own buried agony. Watched a war machine revert into a broken survivor. He had touched worse minds before, many of them numb to their own rot, but this pain was something rare, high-quality, unprocessed, potent.
Kali breathed slowly. That particular resonance, the one that undid Colt, was the core of what earned him his whispered name among the underground: Evangelist.
It didn't always work. Many were too far gone, their trauma calloused over by rage or doctrine. But Colt—Gillian—was different. His wounds had never healed.
Kali's boots echoed lightly as he followed, a quiet sentinel in the wake of emotional devastation.
Colt was no longer fighting. Just fleeing.
The streets narrowed as they descended deeper into the crumbling underbelly of Kirel, down rusted stairs and past flickering lights that gave the air a dying neon glow. The rain had begun again, soft and silver, streaking across ancient ducts and concrete beams like the world itself was sighing.
Eventually, Colt's broken form disappeared behind a rust-bitten door. His hideout.
Kali didn't rush. He stood across from the door, hand resting calmly on the hilt of his sidearm, listening to the panicked mutterings echoing inside. Then he entered.
Gillian was on his knees, armor dented and trembling, sobbing with the raw, unfiltered grief of a child lost in the wreckage of memory. His hands clutched at his face, as if he could physically peel the visions away, but the past clung like oil in his mind. When he looked up and saw Kali, his eyes were wide, not with fear but with need.
A silent plea lived in that gaze. "Make it stop," he whispered, voice frayed to the edge of ruin.
Kali held his eyes. No words. Just understanding. Then, with a solemn nod, he drew his pistol and stepped forward. The shot rang out, sharp, final, and merciful.
Gillian Meyer collapsed without a sound, released at last from the machinery of his pain.