The sky above the Fortress of Doom bled a low, rumbling gray—clouds swollen with ash and lightning, casting the land in a pallid half-light. Rain didn’t fall here. Only cinders.

He limped across the shattered causeway, one boot dragging with a sharp scrape against fractured obsidian. Each step left a print of blood that smoked on contact with the scorched metal plating. His right arm hung low, slack from a dislocated shoulder. The armor on that side had been torn open, revealing flesh underneath—torn, bruised, red. Vulnerable.

The wind howled through the broken ribs of the station's exterior towers, whistling through rusted iron and shattered relics that still bore the mark of the Sentinels. He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to see them to feel what had been lost.

His breath came slow and ragged. Inside the helmet, condensation fogged the cracked HUD display. Red warnings pulsed across his vision—heartbeat erratic, blood pressure dropping, system integrity failing. It didn’t matter. None of it ever did.

What mattered was that he was still walking.

The sword on his back trembled faintly, responding to something deep within the ruined core of the ship ahead, but he didn’t reach for it. His hands were clenched too tightly around his pain. He wasn’t thinking about the fight. Not yet. He was thinking about them—the ones who had fallen. The ones who followed him into war and never walked back out.

A sharp breath escaped his throat. Not a cry. Not a growl. Just… breath. Like a man. Like a man who still remembered what it meant to feel.

His knee buckled. He caught himself against a broken column, gauntlet scraping metal. Blood dripped from beneath the armor, pattering softly like rain on hollow steel. He didn’t stop. He didn’t rest. He wouldn’t. The pain was the only thing still tethering him to himself.

Ahead, the fractured gates of the Fortress loomed—dark, sealed, waiting.

He kept moving.

Alone. Bleeding.

But not broken. Not yet.