Jack stepped out of the Stinger mech’s cramped interior, the data-slate feeling cold and heavy in his hand. He found Sergeant Roric by the makeshift armory, the man's hands moving with the steady, meditative grace of a priest cleaning holy relics as he field-stripped his rifle.

  “Sergeant,” Jack said, his voice low. “Take a look at this sit-rep. This Tartarus Legion... what do you know about them?”

  Roric took the slate, his eyes scanning the report. He stopped, his knuckles white. “Twenty special forces battalions wiped out? Twenty?” He looked up at Jack, his usual marksman's confidence gone, replaced by a deep, primal fear. “Gods above. So the stories are true.”

  “The stories I can’t afford right now,” Jack pressed. “Based on this report, we need facts.”

  Roric let out a long, shaky breath and leaned against a crate. “It’s all stories, First Lieutenant. That's the point. They're a ghost story, a campfire tale told to scare new recruits. We all heard the legends, but when the war started, the Imperial spec ops we fought were... good, but not gods. We figured the Tartarus Legion was just propaganda to scare us. But this...” He tapped the casualty report. “This is something else.”

  He began to speak, his voice a low, haunted murmur, as if reciting a forbidden text.

  “The story goes that they weren't always a special forces unit. They started centuries ago, as a fucking armored logistics battalion. Just a bunch of glorified truck drivers. But their commander was a lunatic, a true believer in the god of war, and he trained them harder than any elite unit. They didn't have the best gear, so they just... took it. They'd finish a supply run, and then, on their own time, they'd charge the front line, hitting the enemy where they were weakest, stealing their mechs, their weapons, and retrofitting them for their own use.”

  Jack listened, a cold knot tightening in his gut.

  “They became a cult,” Roric continued. “A cult of war. They did everything. Assassination, sabotage, spreading black propaganda, poisoning water supplies... nothing was beneath them. When other special forces units got pinned down, it was the logistics boys who broke the sieges, fighting their way in without air support. The soldiers they rescued... they started requesting transfers. They wanted in. Eventually, High Command had no choice. They officially sanctioned them, gave them a new designation. Because their story was the stuff of myth, they became the Emperor's private army. And for the last two hundred years, they have been the personal, bloody right hand of the Draconian royal family.”

  He paused, looking Jack square in the eye. “In all of human history, no single military unit has been at war for so long. The best Commonwealth units have been raised, destroyed, and rebuilt a dozen times over. But the Legion... they have never been broken. They don’t just fight for the Imperium; they are the steel spine that keeps the royal family in power. They are butchers of both aliens and humans. They are born, they are trained, they live, and they die in the middle of a goddamn firefight.”

  The final, terrifying rumor was one Jack had heard whispered in the darkest corners of the data-net. “There’s a reason,” Roric said, his voice dropping to a whisper, “that conventional weapons don’t seem to work on them. They say their mechs fight with the speed and ferocity of privateer dueling machines, using close-quarters combat. They say plasma and missiles just… don’t have the same effect.”

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  Jack's mind flashed back to the lab, to the Phantom prototype, a machine designed entirely around that same, insane principle. He finally understood. The Commonwealth wasn't just catching up; it was also surpassing its competitors. They were desperately trying to build a monster to fight a monster.

  “So what are they doing here?” Jack mused, retreating into the cold comfort of his own mech, the cockpit of “Thor” a familiar womb. He brought up the holographic map of Epsilon Prime, the battle lines a chaotic, bleeding wound across the planet’s surface. A unit like that wasn’t here just to mop up a few special forces teams. Their deployment had a purpose, a grander, more terrible one. They were a scalpel, waiting to cut out the heart of the Commonwealth's new offensive. But where would they strike?

  For the next six days, the armored worm crawled through the earth, the mood in the tunnel a tense, claustrophobic silence. The geology of the eastern mountains finally forced them to a halt at the mouth of a massive, subterranean tunnel. After a careful scout, Jack decided this was as far as they could go. This was where they would make their stand, or wait for a rescue that might never come.

  The news from Rashid, relayed through the ‘Albert’ comms system, was a confusing mix of victory and dread. Operation Thunder was a resounding success. Commonwealth forces were advancing everywhere, a great tide of steel pushing the Imperials back. Cities were being liberated. The enemy was in full retreat.

  But Jack didn’t trust it. It was too easy. The victory was too clean. He sat in the cockpit of "Thor," his mind a frantic storm of calculations, running the entire battle through his own mental version of The Crucible. He plugged in every variable: the Commonwealth's advance, the Imperial's "retreats," the strange lack of any decisive, final battles in space or in the air. Nothing made sense. The Imperial losses, while significant, weren't catastrophic. They weren't fighting like a beaten army. They were fighting like fencers, giving ground and luring their opponent into a fatal overextension.

  And then, he received the final piece of the puzzle: a detailed combat loss report from Rashid. He saw the numbers, the units, the locations. He saw not just where the Imperials had fought, but where they had chosen not to fight. Where they had strategically withdrawn, sacrificing territory to preserve their forces.

  He fed the new data into his simulation, adding one last, terrible variable: the Tartarus Legion. He placed them not on the front lines, but in the quiet, undefended rear of the Commonwealth's glorious advance.

  The simulation suddenly turned from green to a catastrophic, blood-red.

  A cold sweat drenched his body. He saw it. The entire, brilliant, terrifying shape of the enemy’s plan. The Commonwealth's great offensive wasn't an invasion. It was a trap. The thirty-one divisions pouring into the breach weren't a conquering army. They were a rabbit, happily running its head into a noose.

  And the Tartarus Legion… they were the ones holding the rope.

  He saw the target. A single, vital, and almost completely undefended location two hundred kilometers west of Cadian City: the Cadian Gorge. A natural chokepoint. The key to the entire Commonwealth supply line. If the Legion could take and hold the military airfield at the head of that gorge, they could cut the Commonwealth army in half. They could sever the supply lines, establish local air superiority, and turn the great offensive into the single greatest military disaster in Commonwealth history.

  Jack’s eyes snapped open. The simulation was over. The probability had collapsed into a single, horrifying certainty.

  He leaped from his cockpit, his body moving with a desperate, frantic energy. He ran to the Stinger mech, his voice a raw, panicked scream that echoed through the entire tunnel.

  “GET ME A LINE TO RASHID! GET ME A FUCKING LINE TO HIGH COMMAND! NOW!”