"Get over here," Vendral muttered, voice low. "You need to see this."
The surviving fireteam gathered in silence around the cracked terminal in the back of the comms room, its screen flickering as the file loaded. Labeled in cold, alien numerics, the video feed had been recovered from an Upyr dropship, deep-encoded and barely decrypted. The image clicked to life. A static-riddled recording of what had once been their comrade.
And the interrogation began.
The checkpoint bunker stank of cooked flesh and plastic. It's walls, once bare concrete, were now cratered by plasma and pockmarked by shrapnel. Light flickered from a single cracked overhead fixture, throwing jittering shadows across the blood splattered floor.
A woman sat bound to a bolted chair, wrists zip tied, uniform scorched and torn. Her face was bruised, one eye nearly swollen shut, and a makeshift split wrapped her broken forearm in still, grimy bandages.
She didn't scream anymore. She'd passed that threshold hours ago. Perhaps days. Time was hard to track underground with no sun, no comms, no hope.
Then came the hum.
It was a low and mechanical hum. Not the groan of wind or shifting metal, but the steady purr of servos and processing cores running a silent loop. Her head lifted.
He stepped from the shadows.
Tall. Straight-backed. Limbs too smooth. Plates of synthetic musculature rippled with a quiet hydraulic hiss beneath a seamless black carapace. His eyes, if they could be called that, glowed faintly violet. Like the lights of a distant ship you couldn't quite convince yourself it was real.
When he spoke, his voice was low, flat, and almost gentle.
"Designation: Sarina Lehn. Political overseer officer, commonwealth platoon epsilon-7. Confirm."
She paid no heed to it.
"Designation: Sarina Lehn. Political overseer officer, commonwealth platoon epsilon-7. Confirm."
Sarina, having had enough, spat a thread of blood at the floor between them. It was a pathetic show of defiance, but it was all she could manage.
"You think i'll give you anything, you Upyr fuck?" her voice was cracked, dry. "I don't confirm anything to you abominations."
The creature's head tilted slightly, as if it were amused, like a dog studying a unfamiliar sound.
"Incorrect," he said mechanically. "I am not a corpse. I am continuity. One iteration replaced by a better one."
He circled around her slowly. His footsteps were soft, purposeful, precise. Careful of any wasted motion. There was no breathing. No emotion. Only machinery wearing a man's skin.
"You maintained ideological cohesion. Oversaw morale. Discipline enforcement. Yes?"
Sarina met his gaze with all the hatred she could summon. "You butchered sixty-three soldiers."
She grinned despite the pain. "There's nothing left for you to extract. Burn in hell."
The thing didn't blink. Didn't move. It simply tilted its head again, voice almost curious. "I cannot. My neural matrix does not recognize theological constructs."
He leaned forward, just enough to make her flinched.
"But I still recognize fear." This sentence differed from the rest. The previous sentences were mechanical, as if programmed, but this one sentence was laced with malice.
She tried not to react. Failed. He could read it anyway.
"Your platoon broke discipline six days prior. Five unauthorized broadcasts. 2 unsanctioned withdrawals. Signs of morale decay. You failed. So they died."
"My soldiers were dying," she hissed. "Bleeding out in the goddamn dirt while you monsters floated overhead waiting to pick them off."
"Noncompliance is not fatigue," he replied. "It is failure. Failure is purged."
He stood straight again, arms folded behind his back like some inverted parody of a solider.
She stared up at him. Her voice lowered. Shaking.
"I saw your file," she whispered. "I know who you were."
"You were just a grunt. A pathfinder. A name, once. You buried your parents when the upyr attacked."
"That designation is obsolete," the machine said. "The man you remember is deceased."
His voice was steady, but there was a flicker, something she could not name. Not of weakness, nor hesitation. But the ghost of a pattern not quite overwritten.
"Now… now I am an apparition. The blade of the Upyr's will."
He stepped closer. The light caught his shoulder, where commonwealth armor had once been. Now reforged. Alien. Gleaming black with faint purple lines etched in fractal geometry. She could see herself reflected in it, pale and shaking.
"You will now tell me who you contacted before extermination. Names. Frequencies. Safehouse codes."
Sarina didn't answer.
He reached forward.
His fingers were not fingers. Sleek segmented metallic digits moved with horrifying grace, his hands morphed materialized into a blade which he put to her legs.
"You will answer," he said softly. "Or i will begin removing parts that do not impair speech."
"You think you're righteous…" she managed. "But you're just their dog. You follow orders like a good little drone."
He stared at her.
And then he said something that made her blood run cold.
"All weapons are righteous in the hands of victors."
"Three seconds," he said without turning. "Then we begin."
She clenched her jaw.
"No."
He said nothing.
The blade hissed to life.
And as he stepped back toward her, the Political Warrant Officer of Platoon Epsilon-Seven did something she swore she never would.
She started to weep.
Right before the machine started cutting, the video stopped.
The feed ended on the image of her face: tear-streaked, bloodied, jaw trembling not with rage, but raw terror. The quiet hum of the terminal filled the room in its absence.
No one moved.
The room grew smaller with every second of footage.
They watched the torture interrogation of a captured Political Warrant Officer, and with it, the precise, efficient horror carried out by a monster wrapped in a body that moved like his. Spoke like his.
Soundless, Jex's name flickered at the edge of every memory. But Jex was dead. And now, so was he.
"No," Vecht muttered. A whisper, hoarse and brittle. "That's not him. That's some Upyr mimic. A copy. Some fucking mimic."
"No…" Rorke shook his head, eyes wide but unblinking. "No, Vecht, look at his posture. His left shoulder always rolled before a strike. He used to bitch about it in training. That's not a copy. That's him."
Marik backed away from the terminal like it had burned him. "No. No, no, that's not. He wouldn't. He couldn't. He hated this kind of shit. Remember? Remember that civvie checkpoint in Chedra? He punched a lieutenant for threatening an old man."
"He called torture coward shit," Rorke added, voice low. "He said we had to be better than the bastards we fought."
Vecht turned slowly to face the others, face pale and rigid. "Stop talking like it's him," he barked. "That thing's got his skin. That's all. The man we knew? He died on that street when the Upyr took him. This thing? It's a puppet."
Rorke stared at the floor. "He said something," he murmured. "That last line."
Vendral's voice dropped. "'All weapons are righteous in the hands of victors.'"
For a heartbeat, no one moved.
And then Vecht struck the terminal, sending sparks out from its side. "Then we put him down. That's the plan. No retrieval. No redemption. If that thing is what's left.