_ Hiiro

The bombs had stopped raining from the sky and the enemy was running out of bodies to throw into the fray. Everything was committed on both sides, and Celio should be somewhere smack dab right in the middle of it. Fireteams of armored demigods smashed into every pocket of resistance that stood their ground; the brave dying honorably while the cowards just died under an avalanche of steel and lead and fury. The arms shipment was in shambles, littering the docks in the shattered iron bones of some pacifist's wet dream. The front half of Diego's ship was missing and the rest was burning harsh white; the other ship was simply gone, lost somewhere beyond the fog of war.

The smoke and dust drifted seawards with a sudden shift in the wind. The choppy thrum of rotorcraft flying low overhead sent me scampering for cover behind a section of fallen crane. I spotted the flyer through a gap in the smoke, eight armored mercenaries suited for war clinging to the skycrane's underbelly as they rushed to cut off the enemy's escape. A sputter of tracer fire tried to ground the flyer to little effect beyond drawing the ire of the craft's passengers. Their return fire caused the skycrane to hop in the air, and I blinked in disbelief that physics could be so easily beguiled. I thought I'd known how the world worked; men didn't fly, bullets didn't punch clean through armor, helicopters didn't do bunny-hops midair— except when each of them did.

A burly man wearing unmarked fatigues rushed to grab cover beside me. He was covered in sweat, gasping down smoke and dust as he kept his head low to scan his surroundings wide-eyed. His eyes found mine, they were a light hazel and so very wide in that moment; wide enough that I couldn't see a single trace of his eyelids and the bloodshot white spheres looked like they were about to abandon his face.

His rifle snapped up to his shoulder but my pistol was faster. I gave him a blast of shot, losing half my spread to the grid-work skeleton of the crane we were both hunkering behind. Hazel eyes went down, rifle in hand.

He was still trying to point it at me and he snatched a duo of rounds blindly into the chaos doing it. I gave him another shot and he kept moving, so I gave him another. And another after that, and another, and another.

Then I was just pulling the trigger, the hammer striking empty casings, the cylinder spinning and he was still moving. He wouldn't stop moving there on the ground as the blood poured from his mangled flesh. I wanted him to stop. He needed to stop. The hazel-eyed man wouldn't stop twitching. His legs were bucking, heels scraping at the ferrocrete road. His wrists were curling in, fingers jittering some mad typist's final instructions. His mouth was open, gurgling rich red, oxygen-filled blood with every failed breath— with every failed scream as he clung to the life denied him. His eyes begged from a flat face so akin to my own. He was lost and confused. He was scared. He was just like me.

A metal boot the size of my torso pistoned down on his head, and with one final spasm, he was still. "Hero?" The armored titan stated, voice all metallic boom and genuine surprise. "Where's Celio? Where's Malik?"

I latched onto those questions and tore my eyes away from the spreading puddle at the titan's gore-smeared boot.

"I saw Celio maybe eighty meters that way three minutes ago." I said pointing, sounding more like myself now and less like the calm stranger. "Malik's near my car over that way, banged up but alive. How do I get out of here? Where are they coming from?"

"Everywhere but we're pushing them north." The titan answered, flicking their autocannon across the street in a direction that kept the sea to the right and my crashed car to my rear.

A protracted splatter of sparks pinged off the living armor's shoulders and back. The titan pivoted at the ankles with a grace that defied their metallic bulk and returned fire. Their autocannon was fired from the hip but the titan's accuracy wasn't diminished in the slightest by that fact. Steel bullet casings the size of fat beer bottles spat from the weapon, clattering at my feet as the autocannon roared.

Across the way, a burning car had two dozen holes punched clean through both layers of armor plating and the men hunkering behind it. The titan squatted behind my cover and considered me with the lifeless eye slits of their helmet. It had all happened so fast…

"The backup car's coming in now." The titan said. "Stay behind me in the shadow of our counter-assault. That's the safest place you can be for now, Little Hero."

I nodded my understanding and reloaded my revolver with slugs. The living armor cocked its head, maybe listening to something, maybe wondering why I bothered. I'd lost my cigarette somewhere and desperately wanted to light up a replacement but there was no time for that now.

"I'll cover you." I said, pulling the line from all those movies in my long distant past. That was a soldiery thing to say at a time like this. That was how small units operated, teams covering one another. The titan cast a sidelong glance at my pistol and shrugged irreverently.

"Stay behind me." They repeated.

Then we were moving. The titan simply walked through the mangled crane's wreckage, kicking the ironwork aside as one might some loose twigs. Through the curling black smoke of burning fuel, I followed in the avatar of war's vast shadow.

The docks were a mess of bodies and steel. Nothing could have prepared me for it. Burning cars boasted the charred bones of those who couldn't escape their vehicle's 'protection'. One of Celio's Vigia, a man I recognized by face though not name, was manically laughing as he ran from body to body gathering up trophies of flesh. Even the burning suns had forsaken the battlefield, both lost in the fog of war roiling overhead.

The titan was unfazed, striding through the madness unflinching. Sometimes it would talk, sometimes it would only growl or beckon with a limb. I didn't think about it, didn't try to understand what was happening. I obeyed. I slunk in their vast shadow as death reigned around me.

There were shapes in the fog, fleeing, charging, moving in all directions. They could have been men or they might have been ghosts. My iron guardian sighted on each one, permitting some to live and sentencing most to death. I saw more than shapes in those moments, the titan's weapon drilling holes of clarity through the hazy uncertainty engulfing us. For instants at a time, I saw a fraction of the slaughter taking place around me. I tried to blink whenever the titan fired— failing more often than not.

"Little Hero, stay with them." My guardian said before promptly abandoning me.

I had reached an alcove amidst the storm. One of the flatbed trailers, explosively cleared of its cargo and irreverently thrown into the fray. Men had gathered here, rallying with whatever they could salvage from the now-scattered arms shipment. Machine guns and rifles were heaped beside an open crate of ammunition and grenades. The Vigia were bristling with weaponry at every gap in the overturned trailer, hosing the oil smoke and ferrocrete dust with indiscriminate fire.

Celio was leading the counterattack, looking for all the world like a figure from myth. He was bloodied at the head, knees and hands; his informal attire lost under belts of ammunition for a machine gun he didn't have. Someone had made a flag for him with a truck's antenna and a floral print shirt; the ganglord was brandishing his colors in one hand, a glittering silver pistol in the other. He was stood atop a fallen suit of armor, Diego's disemboweled corpse in gentle repose at his feet and the dead or dying all around while those who lived fought on with zeal. The flash of an RPG threw a massive shadow off him, so huge it seemed to swallow the world for a single instant before being lost.

The painter in me couldn't have asked for a more inspiring portrait. One look at him, untouched by the shrapnel, the bullets, the fires that had cut down so many men in just these few apocalyptic minutes, and you could almost feel the divine standing beside him. For a split-second, I thought I saw his grand dream wrapping Celio like a god's sheltering hand. How could anyone who saw Celio as he was now think of him as anything but The Savior?

The curling smoke thinned, pushed towards the sea as the merc's rotorcraft strafed the battlefield again, now devoid of its armored passengers. The once orderly docks were in burning ruins: warehouses blown open, cranes toppled, vehicles shredded into pieces, and everywhere there were bodies. The armored titans had pushed forward of us in a ragged, staggering line; sweeping the battle northward into the dockside industrial and residential sectors with every bound.

Elsewhere, the battle wasn't so clearly defined. Skirmishing parties were slipping through the merc's advance, more enemies trickling into the fight from all sides, and dozens of would-be commandos using the chaos to try and make a name for themselves. I spotted a half dozen trucks circling the the docks, just outside the rubble-strewn corridor of combat, heavy weapons firing into the fray to slow the titan's grinding assault. As I watched one technical circling back to ferry more skirmishers around the mercs, movement much closer commanded my attention.

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A burly man was crawling amidst the wreckage behind Celio's fire screen. I couldn't tell what he was wearing aside from rags and garbage that merged into the blasted surroundings to the point of being near indistinguishable. If I hadn't caught him moving, I'd have never seen him or the long rifle he was pointing a Celio's back. Defiant heat welled up within of me, burning impotent rage thrashing inside my chest.

I didn't have the range or the aim to hit him. My painting work never needed me to hit a prone man in cover at seventy meters, even most professionals would struggle to match said feat with a pistol. I emptied the cylinder at him anyway, blasting metal and stone but failing to land even a glancing shot. The commando didn't even flinch. He took his shot and faded back into the chaos before the bullet landed.

A round took Celio through the back and The Savoir toppled from his perch.

For a long second, no one noticed but me. Celio fell face-first into the rubble and filth; he did so with a weary smile on his face, like a man who had finally dropped a heavy burden. One of his Vigia turned, discarding an empty rifle for a loaded replacement from the heap behind him. He blinked, struggling to see what was right in front of his eyes, and his words carried through the din of combat.

"Oh God, not him. Not Celio!"

Paralysis spread like a plague. In a split-second the Vigia firebase was silenced, all heads turned from the fight. From up ahead, the enemy poured their own fire into the sudden lull. The air became so thick with incoming bullets that the whole world went fuzzy and blurred.

The circling trucks lunged at the opening, spearing towards the mercs and giving as savagely as they got for those crucial seconds to halt the coordinated assault. The armored demi-gods faltered, staggering under the sheer weight of fire pouring into them. Some of the titans took what scant cover they could, others charged into the enemy for what safety or glory that offered. The forward line sagged and tore, more skirmishers slipping though under covering fire to encircle us.

"We're losing." I tried to find the speaker, but only found shocked faces turning to me.

My mouth had made the assertion on its own, and it was right. They were coming, the mercs were pinned down and we were surrounded. Incoming bullets had finally found the fluid reserves for the overturned trailer's hydraulic brakes and I could smell the oily runoff burning. We couldn't stay here and we couldn't move. No one was coming to help us, there was no one who could. Everything had been committed already.

We weren't losing, we'd lost. We just didn't know it yet.

My head started swiveling, eyes flicking for something I'd missed. There had to be some crucial element I just hadn't seen yet. Shoulder-fired rockets blasted jagged craters all around, machine guns spat one glowing tracer round for every nine I could only hear zipping past, and the oily flames licking at our overturned flatbed trailer were spreading. There was too much going on! Everywhere I looked I could only take in a fraction of what I was seeing and hearing and even smelling. Cacophony, that was the word. Hundreds of instruments all playing their own tune until there was no semblance of order, no composer to group the like sounds, and no way to know what was happening just meters away.

It was maddening. In that raging insanity I panicked and screamed because that was the only thing I could do. One more manic instrument desperate to be heard over the unending thunder of guns. I couldn't even hear myself.

A trio of Celio's men had their nerve pushed too far. They broke. They ran out into the open, to what end I couldn't tell. Were they escaping the growing flames? Or had they thought there was an opening, a better place to shelter from the storm? Whatever they been attempting, they failed. The three of them were cut down before they'd gone four meters. Despite the twitching corpses just beyond arms reach, others were getting ready to abandon the fight too.

A roar shattered the din.

Twenty, no thirty iron throats loosing their battle-cries as one. A single moment of defiant order amidst the chaos. The titans were charging. I couldn't see it but I could feel them, hundreds of tonnes of steel thundering towards the enemy in an avalanche of death.

The storm of lead threatening to consume us pivoted. I couldn't believe it. In the blink of an eye certain death had decided it had better places to be. Men ran, some to new cover, others to wounded friends, and some simply ran. A stocky man I thought I recognized bowled me over with a shove on his flight to anywhere but here. The mercs were fighting for them and they were running.

"We have to help them." I could barely hear my own stunned words.

No one else seemed to hear me. I got up and started back to our burning sanctuary, the killing heat inside was ten times hotter than the oily flames surrounding me.

"Cover them!" I roared. "If they die, we all die!"

They weren't listening. They'd stood all they could and now they were done fighting for a dead man's dream. I loaded a cylinder of black-and-red tipped bullets into my revolver, forcing my way to Celio and his fallen flag. A flash of headlights beckoned to my left but I kept my eyes locked forward toward the enemy. I clambered up onto the burning trailer, flag in hand, my pistol in the other. I went up in flames, but damned if standing in that inferno didn't feel like home though. I drank in the heat, the unbridled power of it, standing twenty feet tall in an instant.

I stood there wreathed in oily black smoke and lapping orange flames, the wrong man in the right place. I drew up a deep breath, acrid choking smoke doing its level best to kill me then and there, but I didn't care. The flames felt invigorating, nuzzling up against my legs with all the affection of a life-long pet.

Suddenly the cacophony wasn't so loud, the battlefield wasn't such a chaotic mystery. Things didn't make sense, but I saw what needed doing and I knew how to go about it. The air around me was charged with heat, sparks and flames and that was a good thing. I hefted my revolver and set to connecting the dots.

A technical was trying to deliver fresh troops to a flagging squad. I put a round against its passenger door and the bullet stuck like jellied napalm, engulfing the up-gunned truck in seconds.

One of the mercs was limping towards the blasted carcass of a gunship, being harried at every step by an entrenched machine gun. I missed my target entirely, but the gluttonous flames billowed rapidly, forcing the gunners to abandon their defenses or be consumed.

A team of men were frantically loading one of the self-propelled howitzers with a massive shell. I sighted in on the scattered spread of ordinance they were looting and pulled the trigger. The explosive shells took in an instant, detonating a chain reaction that took the mobile gun's turret a hundred meters into the air and then into the sea. The massive detonation was the final blow needed to shatter the enemy's morale, whole squads of men threw down their arms and ran for their lives.

There was a car beside me, honking its horn. I reflexively flicked my revolver to it, but stayed my hand. It was one of ours, Tony sitting goggle-eyed in the driver's seat with a tiny girl I didn't recognize sitting beside him, her weapon at a low ready in my general direction but not quite pointed at me.

I saw something reflected in the windscreen. It was hard to make out around the oily black smoke shrouding everything, but it looked like a burning man lost in the smoke with two great wings of pure flame. There was a flag raised in one hand, the floral shirt standing proud like the ancient familial crest of some bygone noble house.

In that tiny reflection half-lost in the fog of war, I saw a vengeful angel standing where the Savior had fallen.

The fires engulfing me balked, suddenly ashamed of our association now that there were prying witnesses. With the flames' recession, my own reserves of murderous heat flickered and faltered. The car's back door opened, Treu climbing out from the vehicle that seemed to have barely contained him.

The giant of a man had none of his usual contempt or hatred about him. His reptilian eyes swiveled this way and that independent of each other or his line of advance as he strode the battlefield for his quarry. His movements were inhumanly lithe and for a man of his hulking stature, completely wrong; he seemed to glide over the ground rather than walk upon it. He moved like a byakkai on the hunt, all murderous elegance and effortless predation.

I staggered from my elevated station, exhaustion threatening to drag me down amidst the dead and dying. One of Treu's eyes met mine and a creeping cold dread cut me through to the core. I spotted a spark of something in that reptilian blue-grey orb, not quite pride or respect but maybe acknowledgment. Treu knelt over Celio's body and I met him there.

"At least he's not dead this time." Treu stated vacantly, hovering his plate-sized hands over Celio's body as if he was feeling for heat off a stove.

"What does that mean?" I asked.

Treu didn't deign to answer. Treu started puffing for breath, locking his chest and working his abdomen like some mad blacksmith's bellows. The chill around me grew to a biting intensity but the air around Treu was alive with heat shimmer. Exhaustion hammered me to the verge of blacking out; my vision tunneling while my ears could hear nothing save for the slow, lurching beat of my heart as it fought to keep me alive. I wanted to put my revolver to Treu's temple and pull the trigger, but it was all I could do to avoid collapsing.

Then suddenly that drain was gone. Vertigo crashed into me and I lost my battle with gravity, toppling to the rubble-strewn, blood-splattered ground. Treu pressed one hand to Celio's chest and cupped his back with the other. Celio drew a breath and coughed up a lungful of crusty, bloody phlegm.

"What… What did you-" I asked weakly, my own voice so far away.

"I rebuilt his right lung and mended three ribs." Treu stated. "The rest he'll have to heal on his own."

"…How?"

"A trivial matter. Even your pet Devil should be able to manage the feat— bound as she is."

I was too weak to demand any more answers. Even if I wasn't, I knew Treu wouldn't supply them readily. He stood and surveyed our surroundings, almost as if he'd forgotten we were in the middle of a warzone. The shooting had started barely twenty minutes ago but the dock's violent transformation would not be denied. As an afterthought, he grabbed me and Celio and threw us both in the car bodily. The rough handling stirred something resembling consciousness in Celio and he whispered with all the strength he could.

"Brother… Diego?"

I could only shake my head in such minute degrees anyone else would have missed it. Celio closed his eyes for a long moment and I almost thought I could see the burden forced onto him growing that little bit heavier. He carried it well, but no man could endure the weight of the world on his shoulders forever. When his eyes opened, I was expecting to find steel.

Instead, Celio privately wept for the brother he had sacrificed in the name of his dream.