The cave hissed with the sound of plasma welders and reinforced gear rotations.
Sparks flew as Kael locked a slab of rad-metal alloy into Ravager's left shoulder mount. The material shimmered with a faint blue sheen, slowly adapting to the mech's power matrix. It wasn't smooth — not yet — but it held.
"Armor integrity up by twelve percent," Oris reported from Specter. "Core output... stabilizing. These new sheets are holding off internal heat spikes better than I thought."
Tyren's voice echoed in from across the temporary scaffold zone. "Pulse Fang's claws just punched a half-ton iron slab like wet mud. I think we just got teeth."
They had spent hours hauling, cutting, and molding the collected materials into functioning panels. The process wasn't clean — their tools weren't built for alien metallurgy — but their desperation worked overtime where precision lacked.
The mechas weren't reborn.
But they were evolving.
---
Meanwhile, on the other side of the cave, Nox-4 lay still — partially reassembled but far from active. Its power core was offline. Weapon limbs disconnected. The entire frame looked like a skeleton awaiting new muscle.
Oris sat beside it, surrounded by chemical flasks, heat coils, and a make-shift distiller built from a broken coolant pipe and scavenged Kaiju bone.
Kael approached, one eyebrow raised. "That better be wine."
Oris didn't look up. "Worse. Bio-fuel."
Tyren leaned in. "Wait, what?"
Oris tapped a vial of thick, reddish-black sludge. "Kaiju blood. Their biology runs on conductivity and reactive metals. I figured if we broke it down through thermal separation and filtered out the waste elements…"
He picked up a smaller vial, now holding a golden-amber fluid.
"...we get this."
Kael crossed his arms. "Looks like machine oil."
"It is machine oil. With plasma-grade volatility."
"Does it work?"
"I tested it in one of the drone cores," Oris said, grinning. "It didn't just work — it overclocked the unit for two straight minutes."
Kael's eyes widened. "You just turned a corpse into rocket fuel."
Oris held up a hand. "Hold the celebration. It's horribly inefficient."
He pointed to the collection bin beside him. It was almost full of coagulated blood.
"That was over 100 liters of processed Kaiju blood. I barely pulled 500 milliliters of usable fuel."
Tyren winced. "That's worse than solar farming on Pluto."
"Exactly. But it can power Nox-4. Slowly. We'd need a small lake of Kaiju blood to restart the core fully. And even more to keep it running."
Kael glanced back at the dark hulk of the mech.
One hope. One dead shell. Waiting to live again.
He nodded. "Then we kill more Kaiju."
---
By nightfall, the upgrades were complete.
Ravager now had plated shoulders and rear boosters reinforced with rad-alloy, boosting heat resistance and recoil control.
Pulse Fang's claw arms were overhauled with edge-reactive blades — sharper, more durable, and lined with micro-cores that vibrated during slashes.
Specter had modular armor pieces with deflective properties, and its scanner systems were twice as responsive thanks to a reworked rad-core.
And in the center of it all…
Nox-4's eyes flickered.
For the first time since their crash, its core hummed — faintly, weakly — but alive.
Oris stood, blood-stained gloves in hand, eyes wide. "It's absorbing the fuel."
Tyren let out a breath. "She's waking up."
Kael approached slowly, resting a hand on the cold plating of their fallen war machine.
Not yet ready for combat. But no longer dead.
They had a long way to go.
But now, for the first time, they had a direction.
---
Later, as they ran power calibrations and monitored Nox-4's vitals, Kael sat near the cave mouth, watching the dim horizon.
Fog danced outside — slow, deliberate.
Somewhere beyond those trees, monsters roamed. Some thinking. Some hunting. All adapting.
But so were they.
Unit 404 wasn't running anymore.
They were rebuilding.
And soon…
They would be ready to strike back.