Jacob did not realize how much he had missed the feeling of power and purpose until it all coursed through him. The flow of battle tugged him along like a golden thread through endless droves of clanking brutes. Each purposeful strike found a chink or a gap in their protection, rending flesh and shattering bone. Every kill brought a shiver of satisfaction, added another sublime layer onto the impossibly complex music strumming on his heart.

Fenris was right by his side, weaving through enemies to keep up with his master. His teeth had grown keener indeed, shearing through metal like paper, and nothing evaded his three glaring eyes.

It was the same as the Battle for Earth. It was better. It was perfect. Every problem and worry and regret melted off him like snow, and he was left as his true self, the innermost core of his being.

An urgek leveled a rifle at him, and Jacob smacked the barrel sideways. He leapt onto the alien’s shoulder and springboarded high into the air with a Dash. He came back down with both feet against the top of the urgek’s helmeted head, snapping his neck sideways and crushing his spinal column to splinters. Even after he went down, Jacob got his helmet off and tore at his face and neck until his essence finally popped . Jacob backed away and immediately ducked under a cleaver being swung at him from behind.

Fenris leapt on that one and took him down. Despite his decreased size, the impact of his body still hit just as hard, invariably driving enemies to the ground where he could easily and noisily finish them off.

Hundreds of deaths crackled across the battlefield, filling Jacob’s body with lightning that demanded to be discharged. The feather fluttered about him, and he followed, attacking any faceless bag of meat that crossed his path on pure instinct.

Winning or losing became inconsequential. He didn’t keep track of how many were left on one side or the other. He just hoped it would go on for as long as possible. And to his satisfaction, there was absolutely no shortage of enemies.

Annoyingly enough, however, as the battle wore on he found his hands getting worn down from striking metal over and over. The bones of his knuckles were exposed and bloody, and he was certain that he had suffered countless fractures in his fingers, hands, and wrists already, even though the pain didn’t bother him. The urgeks were wearing too much armor, meaning he couldn’t utilize either his grip strength or his bite.

Finding a fallen axe, he hooked a foot under the haft and kicked it into his hand, then flipped it around so that the thick spike faced forward. It proved perfect for punching through armor, and his new weapon allowed him to pick up the pace significantly. He soon found another, and was constantly swinging one while hooking and redirecting the most imminent melee attack with the other.

A series of distant flashes told him that one of the coalition force’s flanks was being overrun, urgeks smashing through the unfinished shield and pulping the feeble humans inside. It was barely a passing thought—a dispassionate observation. It wasn’t his problem, and it didn’t matter to him one way or another if every single human defender was cut to pieces.

It was Steelfeather who moved in and stabilized the line, helping the coalition forces regain their ground.

General Fairbank issued an order over the radio for all heroes to retreat. Jacob sensed others pull back around him, but he ignored it. Fenris stayed by his side. Soon, soldiers opened fire with rifles and the heavy thunk, thunk, thunk of mounted machine guns, tearing through urgeks and ricocheting off their plate in equal measure. Bullets whizzed by Jacob’s head, but it wasn’t a problem. Avoiding them just required an extra level of prediction to his actions, allowing the feather to flutter out a little further from him and adjusting his movements accordingly.

Only a few other heroes remained on the field as he did. He sensed Steelfeather somewhere off to his left, not bothering to dodge allied fire as it simply bounced harmlessly off of him. Then, on his right, there was a hero expelling an all-consuming inferno from his own body in every direction, washing over the urgeks and reducing them to burnt-out husks of heat-fatigued metal. The fire only seemed to grow in intensity as the battle raged on, expelling such a storm of death essence that it became impossible to ignore.

The man at its center was not exempt from its bite himself, burned down to the bone before his flesh rapidly swelled out, only to be burned away again, caught in an endless loop of destruction and regeneration. Enemies perished in droves wherever the attention of his flaming skull turned.

Jacob found himself drawn to the fire like a moth, getting so close that he danced about the fluttering flames to avoid getting licked by them. When it became clear that Fenris was unable to keep up, he ordered the wolf to fall back and pointed towards the bulk of the allied force. Fenris was reluctant to leave, but obeyed when Jacob repeated his command.

His fascination with the fire cost him as an urgek slug tore through his stomach, leaving a messy hole with a piece of his perforated intestine poking through. It barely slowed him, though, and the pain was only a faint poke occasionally reminding him of its existence.

An urgek stumbled free of the flames, weakly patting at his smoking cuirass as though that would help his chances of survival. Jacob put one spiked axe through the center of his chest, used that to pull himself up, and put the other under the alien’s chin, sharply dragging his head back as Jacob plunged down on the other side. Several of his comrades came for vengeance and were swiftly dispatched in similar fashion.

His wound only began to seriously hamper him as night fell and he lost enough blood to feel the effects even through his battle lust. He ducked under a tongue of flame and allowed it to swallow up the enemies closest to him, then finished off two that had remained unharmed. He lost one axe in the neck of the second.

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Only a few minutes later, he lost his remaining weapon to a stray slug, the metal haft breaking into piercing shrapnel that dug into the flesh of his arm and shoulder. Following the current, he moved to take out another approaching urgek behind him, but his legs gave out and he staggered to his knees.

“Agari,” he breathed on instinct, putting his hands together in a sign with his fingers spread like wings. The lightning he’d bottled up rushed out of him all at once, escaping into the world through his hands and his mouth.

To the Nethersight, his perception remained unchanged, but he knew that the attacking urgek was affected. His axe went wide, burying itself in the dirt. Jacob fought his way back up, wheeled around, and shattered the attacker’s elbow with a front kick directly to the joint. He used the creature’s own axe to cut his head down the middle.

The battle raged on. He was greatly diminished, but managed to stay in it. His gruesome wound had caked up with dirt and coagulated blood, leaving him largely stable.

There came another order to retreat, General Fairbank saying that a section of the orbital fleet had broken free of enemy attack and was ready to commence another ground bombardment. This time, Steelfeather really did fall back.

Jacob didn’t. Neither did the man in the flames. They fought on. When bombs exploded around them and they were hit with wet body parts and chunks of sharpened metal, they fought on.

The man in the flames laughed. He cried out his contempt for the world in a hoarse war cry, and Jacob joined him.

The urgeks were decimated by the bombardment, but they, too, refused to break. Several warships glided in as the night wore on to reinforce them, dropping thousands of fresh warriors along with chanting fat ones on the backs of enormous hogs. These alien clerics raised demons from the earth, waves of fodder along with larger soldier demons and airborne, winged nuisances that harassed with harpoon guns from the air.

The warships fired on the bubble shield raised around the coalition forces, but the glimmering surface held with only some cracks. Steelfeather emerged back out and tore into one ship, followed by numerous explosions before he leapt back out as it tilted and careened towards the ground. He repeated the process numerous times, backed up by rocket fire from the ground, until the ships were dealt with and he could fall back once again.

Jacob began to feel the fatigue in earnest, not only in his body but also in his strained extra sense, which had not been rested even at the start. He kept going despite it. He didn’t want to stop.

The urgek demon summoners weren’t stopping, so Jacob wove his way through the crowds to silence them. He dismounted one from his odious steed and bashed his face in, then the next, then the next. Overexerted, he collapsed on his way to the fourth, and an enemy warrior stood on his back to pin him down for a kill shot.

A dazzling spear of flame vaporized the alien's entire torso and sent his appendages flying every which way with a satisfying burst of fatal energy. Jacob pushed a dismembered leg off himself and found the strength to stand. More of them closed in.

“Agari,” Jacob uttered once more, squeezing electricity from his veins and out around him. Forming false targets, he knew, though he himself couldn’t perceive them.

The distraction bought him enough time to scramble away, but the magic had exerted him more than he had expected. He soon stuck his foot into a shallow crater and fell face-first. Scrabbling at the dirt, he rose back up with a growl. A disarmed urgek came at him with his bare hands, and Jacob rewarded that by snapping first one arm, then the other, and kicking out his knee for good measure. He worked the alien’s helmet off and bit a chunk out of his face, his teeth cutting through bone and coming free with a slippery eyeball. He spat it out and pounded the urgek’s head against the ground until it was a messy dough of brains and dirt and blood.

One of the flying ones fired at him, and he sidestepped the serrated harpoon with a lazy swaying of his torso, then yanked on the cable attached to it to bring the demon low. He met the creature halfway in Dash and burst its head open with a flying knee.

Eventually, the heroes surged back out for another offensive, and the attacking force was overwhelmed. The rest of the summoners were cut down, and the soldier demons were overwhelmed, facing off against two or three heroes at a time.

The urgeks refused to retreat. They fought until the very last one hit the dirt with a final whine of escaping death amid the encroaching silence. It was morning by then, and Jacob was long spent, propped up against the broad back of a fallen urgek, his breathing slowed to a shallow wheeze.

His Nethersight finally gave out, and he was forced to open his bleary, gummy eyes. The dawning sky on Rust was surprisingly pretty, an orangey bloody red with thin, swirling clouds.

The urgeks were all dead or dying; their plated, dust-covered bodies packed tight in every direction.

Jacob heard a hoarse, tired laugh. Looking over, he found the man in the flames sitting maybe twenty meters off atop a fallen enemy. He was completely naked, his scar-covered skin still heavy with smoke and jumping sparks.

Jacob found enough strength to crawl over there. The man made space on his improvised seat and helped pull Jacob up by the back of his shirt. They sat there together for a while, watching the sunrise.

Didn’t die this time. That’s nice.

Eventually, he pulled out his cigarette pack and tapped one out. They were badly squished, but he reached it out towards the man anyway.

“Light,” he croaked.

The man gripped the end of his cigarette between thumb and forefinger and sparked it to life. Jacob pulled out another one, lit it against the first, and handed one to the man in the flames.

They smoked in silence. It took Jacob a while to realize that the man in the flames was actually a woman. Her hair and eyebrows were all burnt off, leaving only a dirty fuzz, and more than half her muscled body was covered in thick, ugly scarring, including her badly burnt nipples and mutilated genitals. Her lip was pulled back in a permanent sneer from the tight scar tissue that covered the entire left side of her face.

She was truly ugly. Not that it mattered.

After a long reluctance born from fatigue that was catching up with them all at once, they began to drag their broken, sorry selves back towards the fortifications.

He hadn’t cared for a while, but winning did feel damn good.