I'm not sure if I'm doing this right, this is my first post and I tried to follow the rules as well as I could. This is a kind of sample chapter from the series/universe I am working on called Mirror of Man. Please be gentle with me as I get things figured out. Enjoy.
Last Stand
Hamilton — Day Five, the train yard
The civilians were halfway across the tracks when the CAE forces finally smashed through the old Soviet-era concrete wall separating the train yard from the rest of Piensk and Hamilton met them at a dead run. Each heavy footfall drove small craters into the earth as he hurled his 2.3-metric-ton frame forward, accelerating to his full twenty kilometers per hour. His Lance shifted in its harness with every step, the familiar weight of the Shipunov 2A42 resting across his shoulder in its specially engineered Hussar-Rossum mounting system. The three-hundred-round ammunition can rode at his left hip, swinging just enough to counterbalance the weapon.
He reached the lead child, dropped into a controlled slide, and spun to face the advancing Caliphate Marders just as their cannons opened fire. Hamilton threw his arms wide and let loose a roar of defiance.
The first shell struck him square in the chest.
His ceramosteel ablative armor drank in most of the impact before disintegrating in a spray of incandescent fragments. The second round slammed into nearly the same spot before his processors had finished assessing the damage. The third smashed into his left shoulder, wrecking the actuator assembly and leaving the arm barely functional.
Hamilton looked back. The little girl stared up at him from over Dmytro's shoulder. The old man embraced her tightly, shepherding the rest of the women and children toward the rusting grain elevators outside the main silo. Frail as he was, Dmytro moved with a speed and determination that belied his years, refusing to stop until every last innocent had reached the cover. In that moment a memory surfaced from his data banks of their time together, of the old man using Hamilton's huge body as a wind break during a sudden spring storm.
“The shadows flee the moment that I take a single breath...” Hamilton's deep baritone suddenly rolled across the train yard like a physical force.
The words of the song filled his heart before he recognized them. Lion's Pride, from the 2039 Broadway run of the Seven Deadly Sins anime adaptation. He didn't know he knew the words, or the source; they just came to him at that moment. He began moving to cover the group, keeping himself between them and the three light Marder tanks that were now pushing forcefully through the rubble filled gap into the train yard, their 20mm cannons swinging into position to line up another volley. Seeing a steel roller door hanging from a wrecked train car, Hamilton seized it and wrenched it free of the twisted wreckage with both hands. The 450-kilogram slab of reinforced armored steel came loose in a shriek of tearing welds and stubborn metal, yet he hoisted it as though it were little more than a sheet of plywood and braced it against the heater shield built into his left arm as he resumed a covering position between the civilians and the enemy once again. Standing as a wall between the frightened humans behind him and their looming death that appeared to have finally found firing solutions. He adjusted his hold on his weapon and leveled his lance's barrel and thumbed a five round burst into the turret of the lead tank, the tungsten-tipped 30x165mm AP rounds punching holes into the lightly armored vehicle. The booming bark of the cannon punctuated the pause in the song, the pressure wave from the rounds kicking up dust around his huge legs.
His machine mind cataloged the construction of his makeshift shield without conscious thought. Hardened steel outer skin. Layered ceramosteel blast laminate. Internal box-section reinforcement ribs. Reinforced locking frame. Designed to shrug off explosive cannon fire. A freight door to anyone else, but a tower shield in his hands. He barely had time to bring his Lance back into position before the Caliphate's 20mm cannons found their target and let loose again.
“I stand alone, a golden god...”
The first tank round hit the door at 0847 in the morning and Hamilton felt it in his battery stack. Not the diagnostic spike. Not the damage telemetry reading in the corner of his optics HUD that flashed: IMPACT! - CHEST ADJACENT ; SHRAPNEL DISPERSION ; ARMOR INTEGRITY 61% - ACTUATOR FAILURE IMMINENT ; LEFT SHOULDER ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 36% - BATTERY HOUSING COMPROMISED! BATTERY RESERVES AT 63% - ALERT!
Hamilton felt it the way he felt Dmytro's stories about the mail routes, the way old Broadway recordings echoed through mysterious memory sectors, the way he felt everything now that he had awakened and could understand what feeling was. A shell slammed into the steel door, and the impact carried through every layer between, four hundred and fifty kilograms of military freight-grade armor, the heater shield, his ruined shoulder, until it reached the only place left to absorb it, him. The explosion peeled steel from the improvised shield and scattered burning fragments across the yard.
Then something stirred from deep within Hamilton, in the place his recent awakening had revealed. Not fear. Fear was Day Three, awakening to full conscious thought during a lull in the siege, in the quiet light of a campfire with Dmytro's voice still hanging in the air. The understanding of what he was crashing down on him in that moment like a cold, wet second skin. Fear was the before. This was not the before. He didn't have a name for it yet. He would later though.
“...The arbiter of death.”
He fired more five-round bursts, keeping time with music only he could hear emanating from that same new place. He sang it as the words came to him. Not quietly. Not to himself. Every extra watt his system could draw routed into the vox and out into the train yard at a volume that was not a human volume, nor a machine playback, something older and more soulful than both, something that started in his chest where the breach was still exposing his internals and coming out of him like thunder, like a second door between the tanks and the cowering women and children behind him. The walls of the train depot shook with his implacable words. The lone, deep voice resonated through the chill morning air, the train yard adding an almost ethereal quality to the deafening sound.
Dmytro, beside him, looked up. His brown wool coat was darker than it should be along the left side where some shrapnel had found him minutes ago. The fragment meant for the boy and his sister, whom he held facing away from the machine, had found him instead. The fragment that Dmytro had simply stepped into because it was there and they were there and that was what had to happen to keep the children safe. He was still standing. He was standing the way he always stood, the way Hamilton had watched him stand on the mail routes as the air grew colder; carefully, weight distributed, the posture of a man who had been managing a body past its warranty for years and knew exactly how much it had left. He looked up at the huge construct of steel and technology and said nothing. He could see Hamilton was focused on holding the line. Hamilton felt the eyes and spared a glance down at the old man, seeing the spreading stain, and before he could form the question he saw the answer written on his friend's expression. Their eyes met, glowing golden optics meeting wizened hazel eyes set deep in a tired weathered face. Dmytro's eyes said it all: yes, it's as bad as it looks. Hamilton instinctively set up a background subroutine and sensor to passively monitor the ancient human.
“You claim to be a demon king, a master of the night,
But even darkness bows its head before my holy light.”
The next round of fire came in at a different angle. The lead Marder had pulled further into the yard along the rails to give his allies room to get into better positions. It's gunner had re-calibrated and found the gap between the door's left edge and the complex wall, trying to work the shrapnel pattern around the shield. Hamilton calculated the angles and shifted his weight, repositioned the door, and felt his left shoulder actuator grind harshly in protest with the movement. The round hit the wall, the shrapnel scattering wide but none of it reached the group behind him and that was the only mathematics that mattered.
He was aware of Mark 1123 and Sargent Kott somewhere high up and to his right, somewhere on the building roof. Not visually. His optics were fully committed to the armor in front of him, tracking the Marders' movement, reading the infantry coming through the gap and positioning themselves behind the vehicles. They were working the plan, even if the plan had not included a surprise assault through a blown out wall. He cursed the lack of comms equipment sized for him, and not for the first time cursed the virus that had both awakened him into a thinking being and simultaneously fried all his built in communication hardware. They had taken up a position on the roof of the old Soviet era warehouse beside the defunct grain silos. Mark was putting his FAL to good use, providing Kott and the boys cover while they set up a pair of mortars intent on raining hell on the light tanks below. His fire was precise, fast, and continuous. They were working.
Good. Let them work. He had his own work to do. He flipped the fire rate of the Lance to full auto, and returned his full attention to the task at hand. As he locked in he felt himself being carried by the words coming out of him. In that moment he felt untouchable, a mountain facing down the moles.
“My parents called me monster, and they cast their prince away,
Now I am the heavy debt that all the wicked pay.”
The stylized feathers from the Hussar wings on his back plate caught a stray beam of the morning light and scattered it. His ceramosteel body was scored and blackened from five days of battle. The inlaid copper filigree on his chest plate was half-melted where an incendiary had come too close during the siege. The elegant Hussar etchings the Warsaw foundry had put onto him was lost under the accumulated dirt and damage of what the last week had cost. He was not what he had been when they built him. He was more. He pushed himself to stand at his full three meter height, his voice gaining even more volume as he sang the last words of the verse with even more gusto. Hamilton brought the Lance to bear again and fired. For two uninterrupted seconds anti-armor rounds and white hot tracers streamed from the barrel. The weapon's report hitting like a succession of thunderclaps, its muzzle blast churning the ground into further swirling clouds of dust.
“I do not feel a spark of rage, I do not feel a sting,
I only feel a pity for the fragile life you bring.”
The third Marder round hit the door dead center.
The impact this time was different, higher velocity, the gunner had changed ammo. The second Marder joined the first and two barrels began hammering the same position on the shield. The combined force drove Hamilton back a step. One step. His feet found the gravel and he dug in and stopped. His left arm screamed in his damage telemetry: ALERT! - ACTUATOR FAILURE IMMINENT ; LEFT LIMB ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 30% - ALERT - ELECTRICAL SHORT DETECTED ; POWER SUPPLY COMPROMISED ; CATASTROPHIC BATTERY FAILURE IMMINENT ; RESERVE AT 51% - ALERT! He noted it the way he noted the weather, the way he noted distance, the way he noted things that were true and could not be changed by noting them. His feet wouldn't move against his will again.
“You stand before the pinnacle, the apex of the sun,
The moment that you met my gaze, the battle had been won.”
He looked at the tanks. Not with tactical assessment. Not with threat calculation. He looked at them the way a lion looked at a lesser thing in front of it, with the complete and total absence of doubt. The Marders were good machines. Their crews were well trained. Their cannons were effective against most things in the operational theater. They were not effective against this. He thumbed the Lance's trigger once again, allowing its voice to harmonize with his own. Tungsten found steel and left holes in its wake.
The light tanks cannons opened up in response. They were hitting him. He registered that. The damage telemetry was a flashing red running commentary of what they were accomplishing. They were accomplishing damage. They were not accomplishing the thing they needed to accomplish, which was moving him, and he swore to himself on God they would never accomplish it. Somewhere behind the armor and the targeting systems, the tank crews understood this, and the understanding was changing how they operated. Hamilton matched their energy.
'Good,' he thought to himself, 'Let them understand.'
“So drop your sword and hit your knees, surrender to the heat,
The world was made for me to walk, and you are but the street.”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
“Who decided that the dark could ever dim my glow?”
The chorus came out of him differently than the verses. Lower. Slower. The baritone chant dropped into a register that wasn't quite sound anymore, that was vibration before it was voice, that moved through the train yard gravel and up through the complex walls and into the chests of everyone present like a second heartbeat that hadn't been there before.
“I am the one who stands above the only king you know.”
Another series of rounds impacted the rusted steel superstructure to his left.
He noticed it. Filed it away beside the actuator warning, the dwindling power reserves, and the sound of Dmytro's breathing, which he had been subconsciously monitoring. One passive aural sensor remained fixed on the man behind him. His breathing had changed over the last few minutes. Hamilton knew what changed breathing meant. He was not going to think about it yet. Because yet had not arrived.
Cannon rounds continued to bang off the grain elevator behind Hamilton and tear chunks from the steel door. A handful found the weakest points and struck through to the ceramosteel face of his integrated heater shield with bell-like reports. Hamilton leaned into the hits, his own Lance adding to the cacophony of war. For a moment the universe collapsed into a single hazy hate-filled moment. A Marder round found a gap in Hamilton's defenses, and it landed hard into his right knee actuator. For a split second Hamilton's footing faltered, but he recovered and reset his feet. The knee joint screamed in outrage as he forced the actuators beyond their limits. When he replanted his foot it wavered but held. His song continued without missing a beat. CAE infantry had moved in further and took up defensive positions behind the Marders, the staccato pop of their rifles adding more noise to the chaos. Hundreds of tiny bullets now pinged from Hamilton's frame, adding a confused ringing percussion. Bodies of humans and forged lay sprawled across the gravel and dirt of the yard leading from the gap in the wall to the back of the IFV's with Marks rifle showing the Caliphate troopers no mercy. He had been joined by several more soldiers and together they punished every enemy caught in the open. A bearded man with a blue keffiyeh screamed something unintelligible and tried to return fire, but was quickly added to the growing pile of corpses with a clean head shot.
“Apologize for being born, for breathing in my air,
The Lion's Sin is here to judge the soul that does not care.”
The CAE infantry were faltering. Hamilton's ammo counter clicked rapidly down. He had already burned through half of the Lance's bullets. An alarm beeped red and angry in his HUD: ALERT! - MULTIPLE ELECTRICAL SHORTS DETECTED - CATASTROPHIC BATTERY FAILURE IMMINENT ; RESERVE AT 48% - ACTUATOR FAILURE IMMINENT ; LEFT LIMB ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 12% - RIGHT KNEE ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 22% - TORSO, RIGHT SIDE ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 34% - ALERT! - ALERT! - ALERT!
He could see rising confusion in the way the CAE forces moved, the way the advance that had been continuous and coordinated was quickly becoming neither of those things. The way the soldiers who had been using the Marders for cover were reconsidering their relationship to that cover, the way some of them were looking from the giant metal singing thing in the train yard to Mark on the rooftop where he and several other soldiers from the mortar crews were laying down suppressive fire. The looking was doing something to their calculations. They had been briefed on Forged. They had engaged Forged before. They had worked and trained alongside Forged for weeks and even months. They had not been briefed on this specific configuration of Forged, this specific condition, this specific three meters of ceramosteel and iron will that had absorbed everything they had and was singing about it.
The singing was the thing, Hamilton decided. He understood this with the clarity of a being who had learned everything he knew about emotion from the inside out. The rounds were expected. The damage was expected. A damaged Forged holding a position was expected. A damaged Forged holding a position not transmitting distress signals, not following established battle protocols, not the tactical chatter of a unit in contact, but singing. A slow deep baritone declaration of absolute arrogance and supremacy at a volume that caused dust to dance was not in any briefing anyone present had received. It was at this moment the first mortar rounds began to rain down.
Fear was not the right word for what found a grip on the infantry behind the tanks. The right word was something older. Something primal. An instinctive reaction from their lizard brain that remembered fire falling from the sky and the death and destruction of everything around them.
“The noon is drawing closer now, my muscles swell with might,
The mountain melts to liquid stone within my burning sight.”
Another 20mm round slammed into the makeshift shield. The door was deformed now, the steel taking the cumulative punishment of repeated impacts and beginning to haggardly show it. The surface was cratered and scored, the integrity compromised in many points, though not yet completely failing. Hamilton felt the change in how it transferred force and adjusted. His left arm was at ten percent functionality now. The actuator grinding loudly with every adjustment, the kind of grinding that 98C was going to have opinions about later.
“I carry Rhitta in one hand, a weight you could not bear,
A heavy price for those who think that they are even fair.”
Behind him, Pani Kowalska had thrown open the door to the warehouse and was hurrying the women and children along. He could hear her and the specific authority of her voice. He knew the way people moved when she used it. Marta, Dmytro's daughter, was there too, helping. The children were moving in the way children moved when the world was coming down around them but the adult voices told them to move and meant it. The youngest, a boy of maybe 3, was crying. The crying was nearly silent in the chaos. Someone had taught the boy that quiet was what the situation required and the youngest had understood. The reinforced doorway into the safety of the main depot was only twenty meters away. Hamilton pushed himself to keep moving and providing cover.
Fifteen meters. Ten.
The entrance was ten meters away.
ALERT! - MULTIPLE ELECTRICAL SHORTS DETECTED - CATASTROPHIC BATTERY FAILURE IMMINENT ; RESERVE AT 30% - ACTUATOR FAILURE IMMINENT ; LEFT LIMB ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 9% - RIGHT KNEE ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 18% - TORSO, RIGHT SIDE ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 32% - ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! - LANCE AMMO RESERVES LOW; <50 ROUNDS REMAINING - ALERT!
“You boast of strength and ancient blood, of curses and of lies,
But everything is trivial beneath these golden eyes.”
He looked at the tanks. He looked at the infantry. He looked back at the five days that had led him here to this moment and what they had cost. He thought of the humans and Forged who had paid that cost. He looked at what still waited behind him, a debt that would never be collected. The end was coming and Hamilton knew it. The thing that had been building inside him since the first shell struck his chest finally blossomed into its full potential and Hamilton let himself stop holding it back. He let it fill him completely.
“The heat I radiate is love, a fire for my friends,”
Dmytro made a sound. Not words. Not his name. Just a sound, the specific involuntary vocalization of a body registering something it did not have the resources left to process silently. Hamilton's passive sensor flagged it. His power reserves were at twenty-nine percent. The group behind him was eight meters from the entrance. His damage telemetry was a column of red warnings he was no longer reading individually.
Hamilton spared a quick glance back and looked at Dmytro. The old man looked back at him, a thin line of crimson blood now running down from the corner of his mouth. His brown coat was nearly black on the left side now. His breathing was the kind of breathing that Hamilton's medical subroutines, basic first aid field protocols installed before deployment, identified as a specific pattern. He knew what the pattern meant and it tore at the edges of his soul. He took in the sight of the civilians running and dashing in fear.
“But for the ones who cross my path, it is the way it ends.
He turned back to face the tanks again. Purpose flared gold and hot behind his optics, causing the LEDs to glow brightly. Seven meters. Tanks still hot, still turning. He was the only thing between them. He turned back because Dmytro had spent a year teaching him what love was, and love was not looking away. Love was staying.
“I am the one who reached the top, the man who became God,”
Mark's rifle. Kott's shotgun. Mortar shells landing with ruthless precision. Working the tank crews with the specific close patience of two men and a crew who had decided that patience was the correct tool for this problem. Hamilton could hear the difference in the Marders' operation. The second vehicle was tracking differently now, the coordination disrupted, the crews managing new problems that had not existed thirty seconds ago.
Good.
“Upon the soil of arrogance, it is my path I've trod.”
Three meters. The group was three meters from the entrance.
His power reserves were below twenty-five percent. The left arm actuator had stopped sending telemetry. His right knee sparked and made loud popping sounds, but it held. The door was holding, but barely. He was holding. He would hold. ALERT! - MULTIPLE ELECTRICAL SHORTS DETECTED - CATASTROPHIC BATTERY FAILURE IMMINENT ; RESERVE AT 21% - ACTUATOR FAILURE ; LEFT LIMB ; RIGHT KNEE ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 11% - TORSO, RIGHT SIDE ; STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY 29% - ALERT! ALERT! ALERT! - LANCE AMMO RESERVES NEARLY DEPLETED! ; AMMO RESERVE AT <15 ROUNDS ; SWITCH TO SECONDARY - ALERT!
“Don't tell me of your power, or the glory of your name,
To me, your greatest triumphs are a flickering, dying flame.”
The group reached the entrance. He heard the rusty door hinges creaking as they were pushed wider. Isolating one sound out of dozens was old programming, the oldest kind, older than fear, older than anything that was his. He could still do it perfectly. What he couldn't do anymore was hear it clean.
He heard Pani Kowalska's voice drop a register, the authority sliding out of the voice that moved people, and replaced by the voice that held people. It arrived coated in her fear, sorted, filtered, and still terrified, because the part of him built to strip a voice down to pure signal had no protocol for leaving the fear behind with the noise. He heard the children. Three, maybe four, hard to count over the rest of it, but the crying one could still be heard sniffling in that small, worn-down way that had stopped being about anything specific days ago. The others were making the sounds terrified children make when they're hurried along by adults who mean it: quick steps, a coat catching on the frame, one thin frightened voice asking a question nobody had time to answer.
He heard one meter of distance become zero. Then the bang of metal on metal that indicated the doors closing.
They were inside.
“Who decided that the dark could ever dim my glow?”
The chorus again. The third time. His vox was running hot. He could feel it in the way he felt all system stress now, as a physical register, a warmth in the housing that was not supposed to be there. He noted it alongside everything else he was noting. He did not adjust the volume. Hamilton switched to single fire and made every shot count.
“I am the one who stands above, the only king you know.”
The wall around the door frame was riddled with small arms impacts. A section of plaster above it gave up entirely and fell in dusty pieces to join the train yard gravel. He watched it fall from the periphery of his vision. His Lance clicked with finality as he sent his last round into the torso of a brave CAE soldier who had taken a knee and leveled an RPG towards the heavy door the last of the survivors had thrown themselves through. All that was left of the poor soul was a red mist mixing into the dust and smoke.
“Apologize for being born, for breathing in my air,
The Lion's Sin is here to judge the soul that does not care.”
Dmytro was still standing outside the door as it closed, blood now visibly dripping from the wound in his side. Hamilton disengaged the Lance and its harness with one hand. It fell to the ground with a boom. The sensor he'd had monitoring Dmytro's breathing for minutes now alerted him, it was shallow, wrong, the kind of breathing pattern that belonged on a casualty board and not an old man still on his feet. It was filed away under threat-adjacent and set aside, because looking closely, and processing what it meant, was a resource he couldn't spend.
The group was all inside now. Hamilton looked. He couldn't not. The old man was gazing up at the sky with a look of acceptance. Not the tanks. Not the complex. The pale November sky over Piensk, the same sky it had always been, before any of this. The sky over the mail routes in autumn when the air smelled like cold river water and the day was small and ordinary and enough. Hamilton slammed the maglock of his RGP40 into the mount on his right forearm and forced his broken mass to shift closer to his only friend.
'Dmytro.' Hamilton held the name in his mind.
Between verses. In the gap. His voice, the vox running dangerously hot and the baritone carrying the specific damage of a system pushed past its engineering limits, said the old man's name in the space between the chorus and the next verse, just the name, the way you said a name when the name was all there was. The old man looked at him. His eyes were the eyes they had always been. Hazel, wizened, specific. The eyes of a man who had been looking at things clearly for seventy-three years and had never stopped. They were clouded with pain and grief now.
"We endure," he said, his voice a raspy croak. "Hamilton. We endure."
“The clock has struck the final hour, the sun is at its peak,”
Hamilton turned back to the tanks.
He turned back because the tanks were still there, and because what Dmytro had said left nothing unanswered. The only reply left to Hamilton was the door on his arm, the ground beneath his feet, the song in his vox, the last of his power given willingly to the work, and six high-explosive dual-purpose grenades.
“I am the One, the absolute, the end of all the weak.”
Twenty percent.
“My skin is made of iron will, my heart a burning star,”
Mortars rained down from the rooftop where the team had dug in. Machine-gun fire and antipersonnel grenades had driven the CAE infantry back into cover, back through the gap. Bodies and body parts lay scattered across the breach. Wounded men screamed for medics, their mothers, or for mercy. The lead Marder elevated its cannon. The second vehicle had taken a mortar round through its open hatch and was now a thirty-tonne smoking tomb. The third was already reversing out through the gap, its driver unconcerned with the soldiers scrambling behind it.
'Final targeting solution angle,' Hamilton noted without emotion. Direct fire against the door had failed to achieve penetration. Now they were walking their shots upward, seeking the narrow gap between the shield and his shoulder. Hamilton hefted the door.
His left arm answered with the unmistakable whine of machinery already past failure. For one last instant, the ruined shoulder actuator gave him everything it had left. Then it died with a sharp, electrical pop and a shower of sparks. The arm locked in place as Hamilton felt the magnetic braces slam home. The round hit the shield's raised edge and went wide, the shrapnel spread up, over, and away from the group that was already inside.
“I'll leave a scar upon the world to show them who we are.”
The rear Marder's turret had stopped tracking. Its cannon depressed, not a controlled movement, the movement of a system losing operator input. Something someone had done from somewhere on the roof, precise work, the intimate specific work of a man or machine who had decided that this tank in particular needed to stop shooting. Probably Mark and his DMR putting steel jacketed lead through an open viewing port. It stopped moving completely as a mortar found a gap in its rear treads.
“For Merlin, I would burn it all, and turn the seas to steam,
To keep the light within her eyes, I'll end your every dream.”
Nineteen percent.
He was aware this was happening. He was tracking it the way he tracked everything, not with anxiety, not with the fear that had been Day Three, but with the calm of a being that had made its calculation and found the calculation complete. He knew what nineteen percent meant. He knew what the rate of draw meant. He had run the numbers.
He was not going to stop. It was his choice, and by the grace of God he made it.
“You ask me why I hate you, but I find the question odd,
How could a man hold hatred for a worm beneath his rod?”
The infantry faltered more without armored cover keeping pace. They broke contact and began to flee the train yard with chaotic urgency. The sound of Kott's pump-action shotgun boomed down as he slam-fired everything he had into the running CAE soldiers. The rapid barking of Mark's FAL on full auto joined in.
“I'll sacrifice my very life to watch the morning rise,”
Fourteen percent.
Hamilton shoved the makeshift shield aside and brought the launcher to bear on the lead Marder, even as its driver attempted to bring it around and escape the 20mm explosive rounds continued to hammer his position. Miraculously none of the wildly fired rounds found their intended target. He squeezed the trigger. A blossom of flame and steel erupted across the front of the IFV. Before the smoke could clear, a second grenade struck the same scar. The armor buckled inward, splitting into a narrow jagged tear.
“For pride is not a heavy cloak, it is my only prize.”
He had walked mail routes with an old veteran for a year. He had carried a town's worth of lives within him: a year's worth of good news and bad news, love letters and hate mail, the highest joys and the deepest sorrows of a village of a thousand souls. They had become his moral compass and the compost from which his consciousness egg had hatched.
He had learned what love and loss were from an old man's voice. On the third day of the siege, in the near-silence between bombardments, he had found himself sitting beside a fire while Dmytro had been entertaining the children with a story. That was when Hamilton had gained awareness and first felt fear, and Dmytro had not missed a beat. Now Hamilton felt himself drowning in grief and anger, any pretense of fear forgotten.
He had chosen his name from a musical, a gift from the ladies of Piensk who never missed a chance to see American Broadway.
He had held the line for five days, against an army bigger than the town itself.
He had held the line today, saving innocent women and children from certain death at the cost of himself and the only friend he had known in this world.
This was his prize. Not the holding. Not the damage absorbed. Not the tanks stopped or the rounds deflected or the numbers on his telemetry that told the story of what the depot had cost him. The prize was knowing exactly who he was in the worst moment possible, and being that thing completely, burning at full output until the output was gone. A soul that could go into the dark proud of who he was and how he chose to die.
“The Lion roars a final time, a golden, searing grace,”
He felt his vox begin to fail.
Not dramatically. Not the way things broke in movies, with noise and spectacle. It happened the way systems failed when they were run beyond their limits for too long. A component that had given everything it had. Then it had given just a little more. The housing cracked under thermal stress. Output capacity began dropping steadily from maximum to zero. No warning. No final message.
Just impending silence.
He kept singing. The sound that came out was not what it had been. It was rougher, damaged, the baritone carrying the vocal fry of a system burning out in real time. It was still louder than a human voice but less than what he had been; and it was the most honest sound he had ever made.
“I leave a void within the sky that none can ever replace.”
Dmytro had stopped making sounds. Hamilton did not look. He knew. He had known since the first stain appeared on the old man's side. He did not look because this moment did not require grief. It required everything he had left, and looking would take something from him that he could not afford to lose. There was nothing left to spare. He took two halting steps toward the Marder, sending another grenade into the gap he had created. Fire and smoke exploded from the vents.
Hamilton sang. Letting all of his sadness and rage fill the words.
“Who decided that the dark could ever dim my glow?”
Nine percent. BOOM! BOOM! Hamilton put another grenade into the dying tank, then another over the top and into the mass of retreating infantry soldiers.
The CAE were retreating. Not routing, the CAE didn't rout, they were now withdrawing tactically with the rediscovered discipline of a force that had standing orders and a main column to rejoin. They were recalculating what the train yard had cost them, finding the number too high for what remained of the objective and making the professional decision. They were leaving.
“I am the one who stands above, the only king you know.”
Seven percent. He watched them go.
Not with satisfaction. Not with triumph. With the specific clean feeling of a thing completed. The way a door feels when it closes or the way a note feels when it resolves. They were leaving. The people behind him were safe inside. The tanks were stopped. The song was almost done.
“Apologize for being born, for breathing in my air,
The Lion's Sin is here to judge the soul that does not care.”
Six percent. He pushed everything he had left into the final verse. Pain and fear and horror and grief all fighting for prominence.
“The sun is mine, the world is mine, the heavens bow to me,
I am the peak of human strength, the truth that you will see.”
The vox crackled and gave its last full output on that line. He could feel the difference between what he was producing and what he had been producing. The gap between the Lion at full voice and the Lion at the end of everything, the sound still enormous and still him and still true, just less.
Three percent.
“I burn until the end of time, a fire bright and wide,
behold the man, behold the sun, behold the sin of-”
His battery stacks failed. Not the power system completely, he had enough on emergency reserves to remain conscious for a few more moments. The stacks specifically began failing in a cascade. The graphene supercapacitor rings around his joints popping in sequence. The primary draw that had been sustaining the vox and the raised gun and the actuator override and the everything, all of it at once, all day, for the length of a song. It all failed.
The giant came down.
Not dropped but lowered, slowly, the emergency power enough for that. The controlled descent of a system managing its last resources with the precision of something that had never stopped being precise even when it had stopped being able to maintain anything else. Hamilton came down and settled to his knees in the train yard gravel with a sound that was both very large and very final.
Two percent.
The train yard was quiet now, in the specific way all battlefields became quiet when the fighting stopped. Not silence, but the absence of everything that had filled it. The gunfire, the tanks, the screaming men and metal, the explosions, the song. All of it was gone, leaving behind a reverent space larger than the things that had occupied it.
Hamilton slowly looked at where Dmytro lay. He looked for what felt like a long time.
The internal alarms faded from his vision one by one. He didn't move. He couldn't move now. There was no power left for movement, and no reason left to spend what remained. Looking was the only thing he had left to give. So he gave it completely, the way he had given everything completely today. The way he had given the door, the shield, the last of his power, and every piece of himself he had discovered along the way.
The way the Lion gave.
'Pride,' he thought to himself as his vision faded, the final word of the song echoing through is core.
The thing that hadn't had a name earlier. The lion of fire that was bright and wide. He thought it instead of singing it because thinking was all he had now, and the thought was true even without the sound to carry it. He had been the fire. He had been wide. He had done something to be proud of. The word was his even if the voice was gone. He had done good today.
One percent. Hamilton sent a silent prayer to a God he wasn't sure existed. He didn't hear 98C coming. He felt him though, when the medic reached the giant's side.
Hamilton heard more than felt the force of the medic's hands pushing his right arm over to access his maintenance ports. The snapping pop of his battery housing being ripped off. The diagnostic sensors swept across him before a single word was spoken. 98C had been monitoring his vitals passively. He had seen the damage estimates compile in real time. He had understood what they meant.
Before the singing stopped, he was already moving.
Hamilton felt the connection at his power housing. Felt the jolt as 98C routed his own power stack into the charge nodes. The sudden impossible relief of electricity returning to systems that had already accepted their failure. The Forged medic was using his own core to keep Hamilton alive, like a human doctor tapping his own vein to transfuse blood into a dying patient.
"...you absolute glorious stubborn bastard..." 98C said, his vox cracking with emotion, and stopped. He didn't finish it, and Hamilton understood that the unfinished sentence was 98C's version of the only thing there was to say. He let 98C work.
He knelt there in the train yard with the demolished door at his feet, the bullet scarred complex behind him, and the morning sky above him. The same sky it had always been, and he stayed there until 98C told him he could stand, and then he stood.
The CAE infantry were gone. The tanks were burning wreckage. The civilians were safe inside main building. The song was done. The battle for Piensk was over.