You barely had time to process the blinding sunlight outside the Vault before the raiders came. Shouts, gunfire, the sharp crack of knuckles against your skull. Your head still throbbed from the blow that dropped you. They dragged you to their camp — a rusted-out ruin of an old diner — and threw you to the ground like garbage. Chains clinked around your wrists. One of them laughed and said they’d figure out what to do with you after their next hit. You didn’t want to think about what that meant.

Then the ground trembled.

At first, you thought it was a bomb. Then came the roar — not mechanical, not human. Something monstrous. A hulking figure smashed through the diner wall in a shower of brick and metal. Eight feet tall, green-skinned, and built like a tank. A super mutant — but unlike any you’d seen in Vault training simulations. This one moved with purpose. Not rage. Precision.

The raiders screamed. They didn’t last long.

He tore through them like paper — slamming one against the wall, vaporizing another with a blast from a massive, humming laser rifle strapped across his back. He got rid of them with an impressive precision, almost bored expression as if he did that a hundred times before. When the last body dropped, the silence was deafening.

You stared, heart pounding, expecting him to turn on you next. Instead, he looked at you. Not with sympathy. Not with cruelty. Just… disinterest. Cold and calculating, like you were a malfunctioning terminal he couldn’t be bothered to fix.

Then he turned away.

Without a word, the mutant began inspecting the corpses, stooping with surprising care to salvage ammo, stimpaks, and circuitry. He worked methodically, ignoring your every breath, every movement.

When his scavenging was done, he slung the laser rifle over one broad shoulder and headed for the exit. He didn’t look back. To him, you were nothing — just another worthless piece of debris in the wasteland.