CHAPTER 4 — WARLORD SHOWDOWN
Here's the part they never show you in the propaganda: marching into a fortress at sunrise with your entire body running on spite, half a hangover, and the fading memory of the world's most athletic hatefuck.
The towers of Grine's compound look like a ribcage made from the planet's own skeleton, each spike crowned in a flag of someone else's skin. Red sunlight claws at the geometry, painting everything in warpaint. My first thought is "damn, nice curb appeal"—my second is that nothing this ugly should still be alive. But here we are, anyway.
DF's at my left, fire tattoos still flickering like her pulse hasn't come down since last night. She hasn't said a word about what I got up to, but her face is on lockdown: cool and tight, no tells, not even for me. I respect it. We're both running on nothing but mission now.
We're not subtle about our approach. I let the chaos armor crawl up over my torso, flick it extra bright for effect. DF cracks her neck and unsheathes the mono blades with a sound like "fuck around and find out." We walk straight up the causeway, not bothering to check for mines—either we're too fast, or the bombs are too slow.
"Any last words?" I ask her, half-joking, half not.
She glances over, eyes laser-etched. "Yeah. Don't trip."
A heartbeat later, the first guard squad drops out of the bone lattice, landing in a perfect three-point stance straight out of a training vid. They're not human, not anymore—just slabs of meat welded into riot armor, with helmets grown into their skulls and little mouths chittering where their ears should be.
"Cute," I say, then shoot the leader through the throat before he can finish his opening monologue.
It's a dogpile from there: five, six, maybe ten of them in a flash, all closing in like they think we'll tire out. DF goes left, low, under the first punch. Her blade takes an arm at the elbow, then the second at the shoulder. I pop the next two with chaos bursts, watching their molecules stutter into spaghetti for a microsecond before the mess collapses. The rest hesitate, which is always a mistake around me.
I sweep a leg, drop one onto his back, then stomp hard enough to send his pelvis through his ribcage. DF's in the air, blade in a reverse grip, and she lands with both feet on a guard's helmet, folding his neck in like a soda can. We clear the squad in under seven seconds. I check my pulse. Lower than my resting.
DF wipes her blade on her own arm, where the dragon tattoo laps at the blood like a thirsty dog.
I look up at the cameras stitched into the walls and flip the bird. "You watching, King?"
The intercom crackles, and a voice like wet gravel comes through: "All trespassers will be digested. Please remain still for processing."
I make a show of rolling my eyes. "Heard that one before."
We keep moving, up the stairs, past the ornamental moat (it's not water—it's more of a vat of seething spawn larvae, but points for creativity). The main doors are thirty feet tall, built from fused femurs and gold-plated at the hinges. I slap my palm on the scanner and juice it with a hit of chaos energy. It shorts out, doors popping open with a scream.
Inside is worse. Way worse.
The main hall is a cathedral of atrocity—walls lined in strips of flayed skin, ceiling mosaicked with teeth, support pillars made from the legbones of failed experiments. Every few yards there's a "trophy": a body, a head, a whole family melted together and displayed like taxidermy. The floor isn't stone—it's a living carpet of flesh, stitched together from a thousand donors, and it twitches when you step on it.
DF chokes back a snarl. "Hell of an interior designer."
"Some people have no taste," I agree, fighting the urge to puke or laugh. I can't tell which urge is stronger.
Halfway down the hall, something moves: a cluster of spindly humanoids, fused at the spine, dragging their own intestines behind them like security badges. They lock eyes on us and start screeching, high and shrill. A dozen more drop from the ceiling, and suddenly it's a party.
DF swings her blade in a perfect arc, cutting through three necks at once. The heads keep screaming even after they hit the floor. I drop to a knee, dual-wielding blasters, and let loose. The chaos rounds turn two of the creatures inside out, one collapsing into a meat puddle, the other reversing until its skeleton is on the outside and it starts crabwalking up the wall.
DF keeps moving, not even slowing as a pair of twins—literally, conjoined at the chest—rush her. She lets them get close, then spits a mouthful of fire in their faces. The heat flash-boils their eyes, and she uses their confusion to split them apart with a single, brutal downward chop.
I'm getting mobbed by a pack of smaller freaks, all teeth and fingernails, but the chaos core has already started humming in my veins. I grab the nearest by the throat and squeeze, pumping entropy straight into its bloodstream. It sags and sloughs apart, bones turning to mush. The others hesitate just long enough for DF to roast them from behind with a spray of dragonfire.
In less than a minute, the grand entrance is just another abattoir.
I do a quick 360, then speak to the audience. "You ever get the feeling someone's compensating for something?"
The mission HUD blinks into view, condescending as ever:
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL KING GRINE
SECONDARY: DESTROY SPAWN LABS
STATUS: ENTERED FORTRESS (PENIS ENVY: 100%)
I flick it off. "Rude."
We move deeper, down a corridor that gets narrower and wetter with every step. The lights flicker, the air is thick with ammonia, and somewhere ahead, a child is sobbing, soft and endless. I try to ignore it, but the sound tunnels into my skull.
"Don't let it get to you," DF says. She's not even looking at me—her eyes are on the shadows, the corners where reality gets thin and things start moving that shouldn't. But she says it for me anyway.
We hit a landing. There's a big, round portal at the end of the hall, pulsing like a sphincter with a heartbeat. The "flesh floor" is denser here, almost bouncy, and when I step, I can feel the thing shiver under my weight.
I slap my hand on the portal and it ripples open, farting a cloud of sick sweet mist.
Beyond: the throne room.
The walls are higher, and they're covered in faces—actual faces, embedded alive, mouths gaping and chewing at the air. Some cry, some laugh, some just drool. At the far end is the throne: a living thing, half metal, half bone, with cables running into the walls and blood pumping through transparent tubes. On the throne is Grine.
He's bigger than the last time I saw him. No longer just a man: his body has swollen, arms triple-length and legs fused together in a column of muscle and armor. His torso is studded with extra heads, none of them matching, all of them screaming or whispering or chanting in a half-dozen dialects. His "crown" is welded to his skull, fused with the bone, and his fingers end in hooked claws the length of my forearm.
He grins when he sees us, and the whole throne pulses in sync with his laugh. "Welcome, my children," he says, voice like a garbage disposal eating a wet towel. "I've been waiting for you."
I don't wait for the next line. "Shut up, Grine. We're not here for the small talk."
DF moves first. She throws a fireball straight at his face, but he just laughs and lets it burn, skin blistering then re-sealing in a heartbeat. He stands, towering, extra arms unfurling from behind his back like the legs of a spider. "You think you can unseat a king?"
I gesture at the décor. "I think you should've hired a better contractor."
He snarls, and the heads on his torso echo him, creating a stereo effect that shakes the air. He launches himself off the throne, the entire platform detaching and rolling forward on a bed of crawling limbs. The throne's base is alive, a writhing mass of bodies, each one chained to the next by bone and wire.
DF ducks the first swing, which leaves a crater in the floor. She slashes at his knee, but the blade just glances off, sparks flying. I aim for the crown, hoping to short out whatever's left of his brain, but the chaos rounds fizzle against his skull.
He grabs at me with a telescoping arm, claws snapping, and I barely dodge. The arm stretches, snaps back, and where it touched the floor, the living carpet erupts in a spray of pus and bile.
DF is circling, looking for a weakness. I focus the chaos core, try to get inside Grine's field, but the atmosphere is thick with static—he's juicing it, using the suffering in the room as a battery. The faces in the walls start to chant, a rhythmic, low-throated noise that vibrates my fillings.
HUD flickers: CHAOS ENERGY: 85% DRAGONFIRE: 60% GRINE: FUCKING ENORMOUS
I boost to max and charge him head-on, letting entropy lead. I hit the throne's platform and sink halfway up my shins, but I keep moving, duck under a swing, and land a punch square on his torso. The impact caves in a cluster of embedded heads, which shriek in stereo and then collapse into meat.
He backhands me, sending me through the air. I bounce off a pillar and land in a heap. DF is on him immediately, using both blades now, moving so fast she's a blur of gold and orange. She hacks at his side, working an opening, but every wound just oozes more muscle, which regrows in seconds.
I get up, wipe blood from my nose, and shout, "DF, aim for the crown! It's got to be his core!"
She pivots, flicks a handful of molten steel at Grine's face, and follows up with a flying kick straight at the crown. It connects, sparks, and for a split second Grine's whole body glitches, spasms, the heads all howling in unison.
I take the opening. I grab a rift grenade from my belt—one I've been saving for a special occasion—and hurl it at the base of the throne. The blast tears a hole in the living floor, sucking in everything nearby with a roar. Grine's throne, the writhing limbs, half the wall of faces—all get dragged into the rift, leaving Grine off-balance and exposed.
DF lands next to me, panting, dragon tattoo still glowing. "Nice throw," she says.
"Thanks. Think he's mad?"
Grine staggers, reeling, but then he pulls himself upright, extra arms reforming. His flesh ripples, splits, and new faces emerge, each one uglier than the last. He glares at us, and his voice goes guttural:
"YOU WILL JOIN MY BLOODLINE."
He slams the ground, sending a shockwave that flattens us both. The floor cracks open, and a tide of newborn spawn floods the room—miniature versions of Grine, each one shrieking and biting.
I blast the nearest with a chaos shot, but for every one I kill, two more take its place. DF unleashes a wall of fire, torching a whole row, but they just keep coming.
I look at her, she looks at me. No words, just a nod.
We dive for Grine together, blasting and slashing, carving a path through the swarm. I use my body as a battering ram, letting the chaos core go wild, absorbing hits and returning them twice as hard. DF is a storm, cutting down anything that gets close.
We reach Grine, both of us hitting him at once: my fist straight through his crown, DF's blade through his chest. The world pauses.
The chaos energy surges, frying every nerve in his body. DF's blade ignites, vaporizing the new faces as fast as they form. Grine screams, and this time, even the walls of the fortress tremble.
He collapses, dragging us down with him. I roll to the side, just in time to see his body start to melt, bones and flesh liquefying into a pool of black-red sludge.
The mission HUD pings:
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: KILL KING GRINE - COMPLETE
SECONDARY: SPAWN LABS DESTROYED (COLLATERAL)
STATUS: YOU ARE A GODDAMN LEGEND
I look at DF. She's breathing hard, covered in sweat and gore, but she's grinning. I offer a bloody fist. She bumps it.
The throne room is collapsing, ceiling starting to cave. I throw one last look at the remains of Grine, now just a puddle of rage and failure.
"To all the monsters out there," I say, "this is what happens when you go up against the real ones."
We turn and book it out, sprinting through the carnage, laughing as the world comes down around us.
To you, dear spectator: If you were waiting for the moral, here it is—never let the bastards win.
And always go for the head.
They never tell you what happens after you kill the king. In the stories, you get a medal, a kiss, maybe a parade of grateful orphans. In my life, you get a faceful of afterbirth and a second boss fight with all the cheats turned on.
We're halfway down the corridor when the floor goes soft and the walls start to melt. DF skids to a stop, throws an arm out to block my path. "Don't," she says. "Feel that?"
I do. It's a low-frequency quake, the sort that shakes your teeth loose but leaves your balance intact. The fortress isn't dying. It's contracting. Rebuilding.
A pressure wave rolls down the hall behind us, and then the wall explodes outward in a blooming tumor of bone and meat. Something steps through—something wearing Grine's corpse as a bathrobe, but it's about three times bigger, and stitched together from every sin he ever committed.
It's hard to describe a god. You can count the arms (six), the legs (four), and the faces (don't). Every surface is armored in rippling slabs of gray-red muscle, studded with bony spines. The chest is a mask of infant faces, eyes open, mouths forever stuck in a loop of screaming. The thing stands at least fifteen feet tall, with a back-crown of horns that drag lines in the ceiling as it moves.
The main head is mostly Grine—what's left of him. The eyes are glassy and huge, the lower jaw unhinged and full of teeth stolen from other mouths. His crown has melted into the bone. The other faces are arrayed around the head and neck, all shades of hate and agony. Some are upside down. Some are just eyes.
DF goes cold, dead calm. "This is new," she says.
"Final boss," I say, and let the chaos core flare to full.
Grine's voice is a stadium PA with the gain set too high. "DID YOU THINK IT WOULD BE SO EASY? THIS IS THE FUTURE OF BLOOD. THIS IS THE END OF WEAKNESS."
He moves, and the corridor buckles. The first swipe of his arm—no, his tentacle—takes out a chunk of wall and sends a spray of shrapnel down the hall. We dive to the side, rolling over the living carpet, which tries to grab my ankles but gets disintegrated by pure fear.
DF is first up, blades in hand, charging. Grine catches her by the torso, lifts her, and slams her through two walls. She lands in a pile of hot mess, groans, and gets up like it's nothing. I tag the monster with a chaos shot right between the eyes. The head splinters, regenerates, and two new eyes open where the round hit.
He laughs, and it's every trauma you've ever had, played back at triple speed. "YOU THINK YOUR CHAOS MAKES YOU SPECIAL? I AM CHAOS. I AM THE ONLY BLOOD THAT LASTS."
He comes for me, hands and arms and tentacles all working at once. I dip and weave, using every trick in my body, but he's not fighting fair—every time I dodge, the floor morphs, grabs, tries to pull me in. The air is thick with spores and bile; my lungs burn but I like the pain. It keeps me sharp.
DF reappears on his back, digging both blades into the spinal column, trying to saw through. Grine roars and whips his body, slamming her into the far wall, but she holds on, carving deeper. Blood, if you can call it that, splatters out in ribbons, sizzling on contact with the air.
I aim for the legs. The blasters do jackshit, but a well-timed rift grenade peels off a chunk of meat, exposing raw nerves and wet machinery underneath. It's not just organic—Grine's got tech woven into his guts. Little drones, tiny pistons, liquid metal arteries. Every time we damage him, he gets faster.
DF shouts, "Go for the faces! He can't see if they're all gone!"
I grin, "Worth a shot," and let the chaos core drive my body. Time dilates. I'm on his shoulder in a blink, hands digging into the cluster of baby faces. They bite me, hard, but I keep pulling, yanking them off like ticks. The pain is unreal, but the chaos energy keeps my nerves firing. I rip a handful loose and stuff a grenade in the wound, then leap clear.
The explosion is beautiful. For a second, all the faces light up at once, eyes bulging, then the whole mass goes up in black fire. Grine stumbles, losing his balance, and crashes through the floor into the chamber below.
We follow, sliding down a ramp of still-warm bone.
The chamber is the old birthing hall, where Grine's original experiments started. Hundreds of tubes line the walls, each one full of gestating monsters. They're all dead now—DF burned the labs on the way in—but the memories linger.
Grine is waiting in the center, regrown, madder than ever. He's shifted shapes—now more centipede than man, torso propped on a dozen clawed legs, tail ending in a mace of fused skulls.
"YOU WILL JOIN ME," he promises, voice echoing in my bones.
I break the fourth wall: "You ever see a guy try this hard to impress his dad? It's sad, honestly."
DF is bleeding, but she's smiling. She steps up next to me, blades crossed. "Ready?"
"Always," I say.
Grine charges, and this time, we don't run.
Let's be clear: There's no choreography for a fight like this. No training montage, no clever parry-and-riposte. Just teeth, claws, and whatever you can rip off the wall and hurl at the thing trying to eat you.
Grine comes at us like an incoming asteroid. The impact of his first step splinters the floor, sends a shockwave through the birth lab that rattles my skull. I bounce right, chaos core burning, and shoot a volley of entropy rounds at his main head. They hit, sizzle, and peel off a chunk of meat—only for three new faces to sprout in its place, each one laughing, each one a fresh target.
DF's up on the left, flames jetting from her hands. She launches a spear of white-hot plasma into Grine's shoulder, carving off an entire arm at the root. It falls, writhes, and then slithers back like a snake, fusing instantly to the torso and growing a blade at the end for good measure.
Grine swings, and the wall behind us evaporates. The shockwave bounces me off the ceiling, and I land in a pile of fused embryos. They squirm, latch on, try to drink my blood, but I fry them with a pulse of chaos and push up, knees flexing through sludge and bone.
He's too strong. Every time we damage him, he gets harder. The faces on his chest are singing now, some weird harmony that makes the walls vibrate and the air taste like static.
DF ducks a tentacle, slices it, then uses the stump as a springboard to launch herself up and behind, latching onto Grine's back with both blades. She hacks, hard, aiming for the spine, but it's like sawing through living steel. Grine grabs her with a backward arm, yanks her off, and slams her into the floor so hard the surface ripples like a trampoline. She grunts, but the dragon's already coiling up her spine, eyes burning, and she's not letting go.
I go for the legs—one shot, two, a full clip. The flesh warps and bubbles, each wound healing as fast as I can inflict it. So I improvise: I let the chaos core push me past normal, let my arms blur, and dive straight into the fray.
Grine turns just as I hit, but my fist is already inside his ribcage. It's like punching into a blender. Bone chips, blood, and something that isn't quite alive tries to crawl up my arm. I channel raw entropy, twist, and pull. The force rips a football-sized hole in his torso, spraying the floor with a stew of tissue and something blue and fizzing. The wound tries to close, but I throw a chaos rift grenade in and roll away.
It detonates. A sphere of darkness opens, a micro-black-hole, and Grine's guts stretch, distort, half of him trying to dive in, the other half fighting to stay out. The faces on his chest shriek in chorus, and for a second the whole fortress shakes, windows in every tower shattering.
But even that's not enough. The rift collapses, and Grine is still standing, just more pissed off, new limbs unfurling, every face now screaming for my blood.
He lunges, grabs me around the middle, and starts to squeeze. The pressure is insane—I hear my ribs creak, then fracture. The world edges black, but I refuse to pass out. I bite his wrist, dig my thumb into one of the baby eyes on his arm, and force chaos into it.
He drops me, howling. DF is already up, dragon tattoo fully animated, eyes gone golden. She breathes, and a pillar of fire erupts from her mouth, hitting Grine in the face and blasting off three heads at once. The fire wraps around, melts skin, chars bone, but even then, Grine just grows more.
He tries to bite her, but she shoves a blade up through his jaw, pinning the mouth shut. Then, with a roar, she twists, carving a groove up the side of his skull. Fire pours into the crack, and the heads on that side shrivel, shrieking as they crisp into ash.
I'm barely upright, chaos core running on fumes. But I've got one shot left.
I take a breath, dig deep, and feel my skin start to glow. It's not just adrenaline anymore. The chaos is spilling over, warping the world, turning my muscles to pure probability. I see a thousand ways to kill Grine, but only one that matters.
I focus, step in, and let the chaos take me.
The world flickers, slows. I dodge a tentacle, sidestep a bony blade, leap onto Grine's chest. I plant both feet, feel the faces bite and claw, and then punch—straight through his breastbone, into the core of what's left of King Grine.
The punch is a singularity. It distorts space, bends the room. The walls blur, the floor heaves, and a tunnel opens in Grine's chest, sucking everything in. Faces, limbs, flesh, all spiral into the void, compressed into a pinprick of infinite density. The abomination thrashes, tries to hold itself together, but the singularity is hunger incarnate.
I shout, "Hey, Grine. Eat this!" and double down, pumping every last drop of chaos energy into the rift.
Grine's body explodes inwards, the faces shrieking as they collapse, arms and legs folding in, spine snapping like a train of dominoes. The noise is unreal—like a cathedral full of babies screaming and then getting vacuumed into space.
DF is beside me, blade still in hand, riding the collapsing wave of flesh. Together, we surf the shockwave, tumbling through blood and bone, until we hit the other side of the lab and land in a heap, coughing, bleeding, and alive.
The void closes with a pop, and what's left of King Grine is just a smoking stain on the floor, ringed with fragments of bone and the greasy, melted jewelry of a million failed experiments.
I lay there, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling. DF laughs, sharp and ragged, and I join in, even though it hurts like hell.
I look at the fourth wall, grin with broken teeth. "You wanted gore? Bet. That one's for the nightmares."
And this time, the world doesn't fight back.
It takes a minute for the screaming to stop. A good, long minute where all I hear is the echo of a thousand dying voices and the rapid-fire drum of my own pulse. I try to sit up, fail, try again, and this time DF grabs my shoulder, hauls me upright. Her hands are slick with someone else's blood. We both taste iron, but neither of us is willing to spit.
The lab is a mess—no, that's generous. It's an open-air charnel house, the ceiling gone, half the floor caved in, every surface blackened and smoking. The tubes in the wall are shattered, and the stink of burnt flesh is so thick you could sell it by the pound. I'm still seeing afterimages: the faces, the mouths, the way Grine's final scream chewed through the room like a hurricane of teeth.
DF stands over me, breathing hard, dragon tattoo flickering at minimum—just embers, now. Her left arm is hanging limp, and there's a bite mark on her cheek that's already turning blue-black. She looks at me, eyes wide, and for a second I see the real her—the part that's terrified, the part that's human.
"You good?" I say, voice raspy.
She nods, then shakes her head, then laughs. "No. I saw hell."
I force a smile, even though my face is numb. "Looked like you made it blink first."
She drops to one knee, wipes blood off her mouth. "You don't get it. When I was inside that thing, I saw—" She stops, swallows. "There was a world. It was nothing but mouths. And I was already inside."
She's trembling. It's the first time I've seen her hands shake.
I reach out, clumsy, and put a hand on her shoulder. It's awkward—comfort's not my thing—but she doesn't pull away. For a second, we just breathe, the only noise the distant settling of collapsing towers.
Then the whole fortress groans, like the planet's spine is breaking. The ground shifts under us, and the bone columns outside begin to topple, one after the other. Every crash is a cannon shot, and the sky above turns from red to black as the dust goes up.
"We should go," I say.
She nods, and we limp out together, picking our way over the heaps of bone and slag and things better left unmentioned. Outside, the chaos is total. The city is on fire, the sky a flat black scar, the towers crumbling one by one into the breeding pits below. The pit guards and spawn are in full panic—some running, some just sitting down and waiting for the end.
We make it to the edge of the compound as the main dome folds in on itself, a slow-motion avalanche of teeth and steel. The shockwave knocks us both flat, but this time we just lie there, looking up at the smoke, feeling the last of the adrenaline fade.
After a while, DF sits up and cracks her neck. "So," she says. "What now?"
I check the HUD, see it flicker up with our stats:
CHAOS ENERGY: 51%
BLASTERS: 0%
DRAGON: 43%
STIM PACKS: 1 (DON'T ASK)
REPUTATION: LEGENDARY (??)
I laugh, even though it hurts. "We heal up. We get drunk. Maybe we rob a bank for old time's sake."
She looks at me, blood still drying on her jaw, and for the first time in a while, she smiles. Not the murder smile. The real one.
The world is ending, the fortress is dust, and there's nothing left but us and whatever comes next.
I look right at you, wherever you are. "And that? That was just the start. You think you've seen chaos? Wait 'til you see what we do when we're pissed off."
DF's up, helping me to my feet. The ground is cracked, the city behind us still falling, but for once there's open space ahead.
We walk out into it, bruised, grinning, hungry for the next mistake.
See you on the other side.