E-UNIT: The Blue Angels of Death.

Chapter 128: Artificial Catastrophe.

V O L U M E F I V E

Chapter 128: Artificial Catastrophe"Everything is ready, Lord Reaper." A mech stepped into the prefabricated tactical pavilion and snapped to attention. The engineering units had done what they could to make the temporary structure presentable, red carpet laid unevenly over the grass, expensive lighting hung at every angle, the effort visible if not quite the result.

Reaper was seated in the center of the room, facing a holographic map of the city updating in real time. "Good. Tell Jason to begin from his end."

"Roger, Lord Reaper." The mech turned and left. His voice drifted back through the thin walls as he went. "I was shaking the entire time. His presence gets heavier every week. I wish I could just sit in there with him—" Then nothing, the voice swallowed by distance.

Behemoth, who had been seated to Reaper's right, rose and began to kneel.

Reaper stopped him with a gesture, gravity pulling Behemoth's posture upright before his knee could find the floor. "No need, General. I appreciate everything you contribute, including moments like that one. Candor is rare in a nation of robots. I find I enjoy it when I come across it."

Behemoth let out a short laugh that moved through the walls. "As you wish, Lord Reaper. The weights are in position whenever you're ready."

"Then let's go."

They stepped outside. The camp sat roughly five kilometers from Frostholm's outer edge. Chrome was already waiting with a cluster of Metis agents, holographic screens trailing each of them.

"Machine King." Chrome bowed. "The weights have been measured and verified. The technical breakdown for each sphere has been sent to your HUD. Civilians were warned twelve hours ago, as requested."

Reaper looked past him.

Five metallic spheres stood in a line against the night sky, each one catching the moonlight on its curved surface. They were vast, each exceeding a hundred meters in radius, so dense that moving a single one had required sixteen mechs working in tandem. They sat in the grass like false planets that had descended from somewhere and decided to stay.

Reaper walked to the nearest one and placed his hand flat against the surface. He held it there, reading the density, calculating the force required. His own reflection stared back at him from the polished metal, the green and red split of his eyes, the black frame behind them.

Something surfaced.

"Lord Reaper?" Behemoth's heavy steps slowed as he approached.

"It's nothing." Reaper pulled his hand back. "A memory, from when I was being built. An android called E-UNIT 00. She was helping Nick with the final stages. I remembered her checking the LEDs in my eyes, this same configuration. She said something."

He paused. "Her words are still sitting in my HUD. 'You will save us, not because you're coded for it. Because you're built to arrive at that end.'" He lowered his hand. "And this is what it takes."

Chrome had let his screens go dark. He spoke from behind. "We'll find her. The files proving her existence are already in our hands."

"Send them to me after." Reaper turned toward the city. "We have a country to take back."

Behemoth turned to the gathered mechs and raised his voice to something that rolled across the camp. "Brothers, step back. My patience has been tested for a week. I have been told about this plan, talked through this plan, dreamed about this plan. Move to your positions and let your king work."

Every robot within earshot that had a face smiled. They pulled back to their lines.

Reaper was left alone in the open, facing Frostholm.

A blue notification appeared in his HUD beside the Metis feed. ‘Go get them, brother. Behemoth is already streaming this. He can't stop shaking.’

Reaper laughed, fully, genuinely. "She always knows the moment." Then he looked back at the city, and the laughter went somewhere else, and the air changed.

His eyes burned red.

On the other side of the camp, the red dome that had enclosed the city for months simply stopped. It didn't collapse or shatter, it faded, as though it had never been. Civilians had already moved to basements and underground shelters.

The soldiers inside had retreated to their bases, preparing defensive lines for what they assumed would be a conventional ground push, until they looked out and saw the green army of mechs waiting on the horizon, and changed every plan they had.

Reaper rose off the ground.

The spheres followed.

They lifted in a smooth, controlled column, rising past the treeline, past the ridgeline, past the point where they were visible from the city below. Their weight ceased to matter once the variables were known. The only challenge with gravity control was uncertainty, and everything here had been calculated.

He moved toward the city at altitude, and below him Frostholm looked like something abandoned midway through being built. Dark streets, empty buildings, the ordinary sounds of a city completely absent. He stopped exactly five hundred meters out from the main highway entrance.

"Subsiding Protocol, initiated."

The sky above the city lit up.

Five points of light appeared in the black, each one bright and growing fast, not falling freely the way meteors fall, but driven, pushed by Reaper's gravity pulling them down faster than physics would allow alone. The additional acceleration turned the descent into something the atmosphere was not designed to accommodate.

The points became streaks.

The metal burned as it fell, the outer layers of each sphere heating white from the friction, the density of the material resisting what would have reduced a natural object to fragments long before impact. They stayed whole. They were supposed to.

The city came up fast beneath them.

In the last seconds before impact, the world slowed. Reaper watched the spheres close the final distance.

"They always choose this for themselves," he said, to no one. "Enjoy the consequences."

The five spheres found their targets simultaneously.

The ground answered.

The shockwaves moved outward and met each other and merged, the combined force shaking the terrain far past what the surrounding mountains could absorb.

The metallic spheres did not merely strike the five military bases, they detonated the moment they landed, the kinetic force of the fall converting entirely into outward devastation, the atmospheric burn adding heat to a wave of pressure that had no interest in being contained.

The buildings surrounding each impact point came down in sequence, pulled inward first and then thrown outward as the explosions overtook each other. Mushroom formations rose from each site, red and violent and enormous, the light of them falling across Reaper's frame in warm orange, his cape pulling backward in the shockwave, the color of destruction painting everything the darkness had been covering.

Gas stations along the edges of each impact radius joined the chain without being asked. The heat worked through parked vehicles, melting some before they could go, detonating others. The city refused to settle.

Reaper descended and touched the grass.

Behemoth was already moving toward him at a pace that barely qualified as controlled, the group of mechs behind him struggling to match it.

"Extraordinary," Behemoth said, the word vibrating through his chassis. "The plan was executed perfectly, Lord Reaper. The impact exceeded Metis projections significantly."

"I added to it." Reaper looked toward the burning city. "When the explosions settle, take the army in. Clear every military position in that city. Leave no soldier standing. They won't fire back at you, they have nothing left to fire from."

"Roger." The mechs around him saluted in unison.

Then Behemoth began to shake structurally. His frame separated, dividing cleanly into five humanoid units, each one slightly larger than a standard mech, dark components replacing the usual green, the hydraulic movement between the pieces heavy and deliberate. All five shared the same orange visor.

One of them turned to Reaper. "I will personally lead each of the five groups. I'll leave a hundred with you for your approach to their command."

Reaper studied the five versions of his general for a long moment. ‘I keep forgetting he can do that.’ "Agreed."

The mech army formed up at the city entrance. Five groups of twenty thousand each, lined up in columns of green metal and orange light, the formations so precise they looked rendered rather than assembled. Each group stood behind one of Behemoth's divisions.

One of the five stepped forward and turned to face the army.

"Brothers. We have been building to this for months. Our leader made the hardest part easy for us, now we honor that by finishing it." He turned back to the city. "Operation Demons Out begins now."

The columns moved as one, the coordinated weight of a hundred thousand mechs entering the city at the same moment, their steps vibrating what remained of the buildings on either side. Sonic rifles swept the streets in clean, precise arcs, each line moving in tandem with the ones beside it.

The city had been hit hard, the metallic spheres had performed well beyond their design spec, acting less like dropped weights and more like shaped charges, Reaper's applied force and the heat of atmospheric entry converting them into something the city's military infrastructure had not been built to survive.

Reaper moved through what was left of the main boulevard toward the parliament building. Zeek had been operating his temporary government there since the Western State consolidated, an efficient choice for a man who valued efficiency. The streets were wide, trees splitting the road at intervals, the architecture functional and deliberate. No parks near the parliament. Frostholm had never been a city that wasted space on aesthetics it couldn't defend.

He reached the entrance. A hundred mechs formed up behind him.

"Lower your weapons." He didn't turn around. "They're already frozen."

The mechs looked at each other, then lowered their rifles.

Reaper pushed the wooden doors and they came apart from the frame, the force clean and absolute. He entered at a measured pace, eyes fixed on the staircase ahead. The interior was arched and decorated, gold and white paint on pillars, wooden doors set at regular intervals along the corridors, the architecture of a government that had once believed it would be making decisions here for a long time.

Soldiers lined the hallways in ready positions, sheltering behind desks that offered nothing meaningful in the way of cover. Reaper and the mechs walked between them without acknowledgment. The frozen faces tracked them with eyes that couldn't follow.

Upper floors. The corridors narrowed. The mechs fell into single file.

They reached the largest office in the building, the doors heavily framed, the decoration telling you what it was before you opened it.

Reaper stepped through.

A large desk faced the entrance. One man sat behind it. Along the far walls, soldiers stood motionless, their positioning suggesting they had believed, until very recently, that this was defensible. In the two guest chairs sat Jason and Kabaschta.

Jason came back to himself first, pulling a deep breath and checking his own hands. "I couldn't move my eyes. I couldn't move anything."

"A mech will escort you to the camp." Reaper looked at him. "Thank you for what you did."

Jason stood, still running inventory on his own body, he took a final look at Zeek, then bowed once and left the room with the mech beside him.

Reaper settled into the vacated chair and released Zeek.

Two mechs positioned themselves on either side of the general. Zeek sat still for a moment, composure assembled over something considerably less composed underneath it. "Jason was a traitor."

"That's a hard word for a man who looked at your military and decided he'd rather not watch the cycle repeat itself."

"He handed his country to a mass killer." Zeek's jaw tightened. "Tell me what puts you above me. I never harmed a single Altean directly."

"That much is true." Reaper leaned forward slightly. "But the orders that killed civilians passed through you. You were Tamer's right hand, and that man treated any sign of resistance as a reason to show red."

Zeek's fist came down on the desk. "He valued human life. He never deported millions from their homes."

"He made them afraid to be in those homes." Reaper settled back. "I didn't come here to argue precedent. I had a nearly identical conversation with the leadership in the east."

He placed two documents on the desk, Ceding Territory agreements, both pages visible, one already bearing Redwood's signature.

Zeek looked at them, then at Reaper, and produced a short, empty laugh. "What a joke."

"That joke is the only thing standing between what's happening in this city right now and what happens to the civilians still in it." Reaper's voice had dropped to something quieter and far more certain. "I have a hundred thousand mechs working through Frostholm. The military is their concern, civilians aren't. A signature keeps it that way. And I do enjoy having these documents available when the UNG has questions."

Zeek's expression collapsed inward. He turned his chair toward the wall. "That's why they gave you official recognition." He pressed both hands over his face. "Redwood. What were you thinking. And then they call for a civil government."

Reaper had drifted toward the bookshelf along the near wall. The frozen soldiers on either side of him had begun to sweat, though they had no way to move. He ran his fingers across the spines until one stopped him. How Was Altea Created, and Why. He pulled it and moved through the pages at speed. "Darker history than I expected." He closed it and set it back.

Zeek was still facing the wall. "One condition—"

"No." Reaper turned. "Complete surrender. You have no position from which to attach conditions."

Zeek struck the desk again and rotated his chair toward Kabaschta. "I won't sign that alone. Please free colonel Kabaschta.”

Reaper flicked his finger.

Colonel Kabaschta slumped forward in his chair, gasping as his lungs finally remembered how to work. "What the hell was that?" he managed, rubbing his chest.

"What do you think?" Zeek's voice came out weak and hollow.

Kabaschta looked at Reaper. Then at the mechs. Then through the window behind the desk, where the mech army was visible in the streets below, moving through what remained of the city's military presence with the thoroughness of something that had been patient for a long time.

He exhaled slowly. "I know this feeling. I felt it when I was still serving New Mer, when Altea hit us at our lowest point and there was simply nothing left to do." He looked at the papers. Then at Zeek, something dry behind his expression. "At least he's leaving the civilians out of it. Which is more than some people in this room can say about their former employer."

Zeek stared at the pen for a long moment. Then he picked it up, and signed both pages with a force that bent the paper against the desk. When he set the pen down, his hand was shaking.

"There. Leave the people alone." He dropped the pen. "Or do your other thing, move millions in a month, since that apparently takes no effort."

Reaper picked up the documents and opened his comms.

"Brothers." His voice went out across every channel, every unit, every mech working the streets of Frostholm and the E-PHONEUS at the borders and the command rooms back in Theria.

"Altea has fallen."