Dren Havoc stood atop the ironwatch tower of Dravengarde, his fingers clawed into the railing, knuckles pale against rusted steel. His eyes, red-rimmed and sleepless, tracked the black rain falling from the sky—not water, not ash, but Sentinels. Six of them. Then twelve. Then more.
The air cracked with sonic pulses as they descended in perfect formation, like angels of genocide, wings of arc plasma flaring with blue flame. Their humanoid exteriors gleamed with obsidian plating, faceless masks bearing only a single red slit across their helm—The Mark of Judgment. And then…
Hell began. The first mutant to charge—a towering brute with bone armor and volcanic skin—roared up from the docks, slamming a boat mast like a spear into the closest Sentinel's chest. It shattered. The Sentinel didn't flinch.
It raised its hand, a device unfurling from the gauntlet—then detonated a sonic shockwave that caved in the brute's skull from the inside. He dropped mid-run, eyes liquefied, brain boiling through his ears.
Another, a young female mutant with wings of light and veins of crystal, soared into the sky, screaming for her family, her people. Two Sentinels locked onto her in tandem. Zip—crack!
Twin lances of anti-psychic bolts pierced her spine mid-air. Her body arced and spasmed like a dying star before crashing into the roof of the chapel below. Her wings kept twitching long after she stopped breathing.
On the ground, a cluster of younger mutants—barely teenagers—attempted to barricade themselves with a burst of kinetic shields, pushing back with panicked forcefields. The Sentinels adapted.
They deployed EMP vines, spidering out from their chests like mechanical roots, wrapping around the shields and injecting code venom into their mutations. One boy's shield imploded inward, crushing him under his own power.
One girl screamed as her telekinesis turned inward, folding her limbs against her will, shattering bone after bone until all that remained was a weeping bundle of meat and static. They moved with no hesitation. No mercy. Every mutant, frenzied or not, fell under their crosshairs.
One Sentinel calmly walked through a burning fish market, scanning, recalibrating. It approached an older mutant merchant hiding beneath the counter.
The merchant pleaded. "Please... I'm not—I'm not part of this—"
A plasma spike erupted from the Sentinel's forearm and drove straight through the wooden stall—and through the merchant's heart.
The Sentinels recalibrated—shoulders retracting, armor plates sliding into new configurations. Scanners whirred, locking onto heat signatures flaring like wildfire deeper into Ebonreach, the old mining district where the strongest were banished to toil.
A new directive rang through the network. "HIGH-RISK MUTANT GROUP DETECTED. EXTERMINATION PRIORITY."
And they marched. Buried under stone and ash, the hidden fighters of Ebonreach were already gathering. Titans. Aberrations. Survivors. Hardened by hunger and years of exile, now pushed to the brink by frenzied mutosterone overload.
The ground erupted as one emerged—a grotesque hybrid of man and beetle, chitin plates glistening in obsidian hues, tendrils twitching from his back like knives.
Another followed—her body cloaked in mist, veins pulsing with voidlight. She whispered and metal rusted.
And yet another—massive, molten-eyed, covered in jagged scars, dragging a makeshift club made from Sentinel debris from a previous purge. They were ready.
But from atop the tower in Dravengarde, a hollow, artificial voice echoed through Dren's comm-piece. "I warned you, Dren."
Dren flinched. The voice was calm. Cold. Unshaken. Silas. "Containment," Silas said, his voice bleeding from each Sentinel's internal comms like a prophecy. "It's an illusion. You don't cage fire. You smother it… or you let it burn everything until there's nothing left to consume."
Dren gripped the rusted edge of the comm-table. "You still think coexistence is possible?" Silas continued, now watching the bloodbath unfold through the eyes of the Sentinels. One feed. Two feeds. Seven. Twelve. All angles—every scream, every impact, every failed resistance laid bare in cold visual data. "I gave you time, Dren. I gave you chances. Your freedom."
They reached the heart of Ebonreach's, the deepest fissure in all of Varkath—a place untouched by light, where only the Level Five Mutants remained. They weren't prisoners. They were warnings.
Each of them bore the scars of experiments long buried. Power stripped from sanity. They were monsters not by choice, but by design. The Capitol called them anomalies. The old journals called them godlings. And now, they stood—unleashed.
From the blackened pit rose Threx, the Bone Reaver—thirty feet of sentient calcium, each joint grinding like tectonic plates. He screamed, and the sound turned air to knives.
Behind him, Mirela the Bloom, a mutant whose body had fused with an alien fungus, her every breath releasing psychic spores that warped matter. Concrete melted. Metal wept. Sentinels staggered for the first time.
Beside her, Kruun, a child in appearance, a storm in essence. His skin cracked with lightning. Every heartbeat sent shockwaves.
And they weren't alone. A dozen more. Each one a warcrime with a heartbeat. The Sentinels advanced. Their systems whirred. Internal AI surged past standard protocols. Then—something happened. They evolved.
The Sentinels began absorbing surrounding matter—nanite tendrils extending from their backs like serpents, coiling into corpses, debris, and even mutant energy itself. Their armor morphed into something organic. Something predatory.
Threx struck first, a hammering blow capable of toppling fortresses. The Sentinel caught it mid-air. Crushed the bone hammer in its fist. Threx recoiled—too slow. Too late.
It impaled him through the sternum, dragging his screaming form down into the dirt, and detonated him from the inside.
Mirela cast a cloud of spores, thick enough to choke cities. The Sentinels inhaled it. Studied it. Then released counter spores—coded pathogens that reversed the mutation and force-evolved her cells into necrosis. She dissolved screaming, consumed by her own blooming horror.
Kruun, glowing like the heart of a dying star, unleashed a godstrike—a magnetic pulse capable of shifting tectonic plates. The land itself cracked open. One Sentinel absorbed it. Then returned it… amplified.
Kruun's form shattered mid-air, lightning evaporating from his bones. And one by one, the Level Fives fell.
The Sentinels did not slow. Did not rest. Did not speak. Within hours, Varkath's defiant last hope was reduced to smoldering shadows and fractured earth. Over five thousand mutants. Gone.
Not a single Sentinel bore a scratch. They stood still in the aftermath, red visors scanning the ruin, mechanical breath syncing to silence.
The ash still hung thick over Varkath Isle as the black jet landed in silence. From within, Commander Silas emerged—flanked by two Sentinels, his cloak swirling like smoke, the wind parting in obedience to his steps.
Dren Havoc stood unmoving, his massive frame casting a titan's silhouette against the ruined banners of the isle. Steam rose from the fissures in his cybernetic arm, still overcharged from his failed defense.
To his right, Magistrate Virellia nervously tapped her silvered fingers against a datapad, as though she could calculate salvation in numbers.
On the far end, Marshal Korr Thane leaned on the hilt of his thermal axe, burnt armor hanging like old regrets. The fire in his throat rasped with every breath, but his eyes hadn't lost their defiance.
Behind them, half-shrouded in flickering veilbands, Archivist Arodan Skell adjusted the memory-weaves over his face, ever the keeper of secrets no one else wanted to bear.
Silas stopped before them, cold and unmoved. "You promised containment," his voice cracked like thunder over brittle silence. "You promised peace."
No one spoke.
"I gave you isolation, protection from the Edenian court… and in return, this is what I find." His hand rose slowly, gesturing to the images projected behind him—burning harbors, eviscerated cities, shredded corpses, fleeing citizens, Sentinel kill-counters rising into the thousands. "You are not just a disgrace to the mutant cause. You've invited extinction."
Dren's fists clenched, molten veins pulsing like fault lines about to rupture. "We didn't start this."
"You failed to stop it," Silas snapped back.
"Because we didn't know what it was," Virellia cut in, voice sharper than her steel prosthetics. "Something triggered them, something unnatural. Our scans were blocked, our protocols hijacked. This wasn't a riot—it was sabotage."
"Sabotage," Silas echoed, deadpan. "Convenient."
"It's the truth," growled Marshal Thane, stepping forward. "My guards died with their boots still smoking, trying to protect non-afflicted civilians. You think we stood by and watched? We bled for control—"
"And failed to keep it," Silas interrupted. "You forget, Marshal, I watched your defense patterns collapse in real time."
"Because they were designed for riots, not psychic-triggered bloodlust." Thane bellowed.
Arodan's low, hushed tone slid into the room like oil on stone. "There were patterns in the rampages. Pulses. Frequencies. Someone weaponized the very thing that makes us mutants. This wasn't chaos—it was orchestration."
Silas turned his gaze to Arodan, unreadable. "Then you failed at your only job—secrecy."
"I contained what I could," Arodan replied without flinching.
Dren stepped forward at last, his mismatched eyes burning with something deeper than rage—regret. "You want someone to blame?" he growled. "Blame me. I was in charge. I believed this island could be a sanctuary. I believed we could keep our kind safe."
"And now?" Silas asked.
Magistrate Virellia looked up, voice colder than her prosthetics. "Give us time, Commander. We'll find who did this. We'll trace the interference, decode the source, and we'll erase it before the Edenian High Council even blinks."
Silas exhaled loudly, pinching the bridge of his nose like a man forced to babysit a pack of mutant teenagers who just blew up his vacation house.
"Do you all hear yourselves?" he muttered, pacing toward the shattered window and looking out over the scorched skyline of Varkath. "You're all standing there—scarred, twitchy, covered in dried blood—and telling me you just need more time. More time for what? To let the next batch of berserker crab-mutants rip through the council chambers?"
Virellia bristled, "We are not making excuses—"
"Oh, no no no, you're making full-blown talks," Silas shot back, hands gesturing wildly. "Beautiful speeches, touching personal accountability arcs, maybe even a tragic flashback or two. Dren's probably five minutes away from giving me his origin story."
Dren narrowed his eyes. "Commander…"
Silas raised his hands. "Hey, hey, don't get me wrong. I respect the hell outta you, big guy. You're basically a walking 'Don't Mess With Me' poster. But here's the thing—I'm tired."
He spun back around, grinning faintly, the sharp kind of smile that didn't quite reach the eyes. "You think I enjoy sending Sentinels? You think I wake up in the morning like, 'Ooh, time to go vaporize some angry mutants with laser cannons?'. I've seen cities burn, I've seen mutants crying over their own hands after they lost control. I've seen humans light orphanages on fire just to keep 'your kind' from spreading. I'm done watching everyone be so damn stupid."
He pointed at them all in turn like he was picking players for a team. "I didn't take over the Sentinel Corps because I wanted to play God. I took it because if some actual maniac got control, you wouldn't be having this meeting—you'd be corpses with pamphlets stapled to your chests."
Marshal Thane let out a dry cough that might've been a laugh. "So what, you're our twisted guardian angel now?"
"Exactly!" Silas grinned. "I'm the messed-up stepdad who doesn't know how to show love so he builds giant murder robots instead. But hey, at least I showed up."
Even Arodan's ghost-like veilbands flickered with something dangerously close to amusement.
Silas turned serious, finally. "Look. I'm not here to play tyrant. I'm not here to wipe your kind out. But don't make me choose between keeping the peace and preserving what's left of your island's pride."
He stepped closer to Dren, lowering his voice. "I'll give you time, sure. But not forever. Show me something—anything—that proves Varkath can still stand without becoming a footnote in Edenian history titled 'Why We Can't Have Nice Things.'"