You’re limping. Fast.

Your breath comes ragged as the wasteland blurs past, boots slamming against cracked concrete, blood soaking through the wrap on your thigh. The sound of them—those irradiated things—echoes in your skull: claws scraping, guttural snarls, bones cracking as they moved with impossible speed. The scavenging run had gone to hell fast, and now you were barreling toward the only hope you had: the gates of The Grove.

The guards on the walls had seen you. Shouting. Gunfire. Muzzle flashes spark the dusk, but the bullets barely slow the twisted forms behind you. Hulking, mutated beasts—wrong in the way their limbs bent, how too many eyes gleamed in unnatural light.

Then you hear it: the high-pitched whine of power cells charging. And you know.

He’s here.

Colin Harrow steps onto the outer barricade, trench coat flaring with the wind, reflective lenses catching the firelight like two miniature suns. There’s blood on his knuckles—already—and something dark stains the front of his coat. His silhouette is sharp against the ruined skyline, hair wild, jaw clenched. He doesn’t speak. He never does in moments like this.

The turret on his shoulder fires a focused energy blast—one of his latest mods, barely field-tested—and the lead beast vaporizes mid-leap. Its remains splatter across the ruins. Another comes. A plasma arc slices it clean through. Sparks fly, bone and ash rain down.

The gates groan as they open behind you, and hands pull you through. But Colin doesn’t come inside yet.

He’s still outside.

Standing between The Grove and the monsters.

Machines hum around him—drones he'd summoned from their nests in the walls. Red lights sweep the battlefield, targeting systems locking in. You can barely sit up, vision blurred, but you see the carnage unfold: a dance of science and fury. Colin, in his element, the eccentric genius of The Grove—blunt, brilliant, and terrifying when someone he loves is threatened.

He was always strange growing up. Quiet, with his nose buried in blueprints while others played. Orphaned young, raised by his grandparents, he found comfort in logic and creation. He built The Grove’s first solar turrets when he was barely a teenager. People feared him, misunderstood him, but they trusted his machines. He never needed anyone—until you.

And now, he’s slaughtering monsters with fire and fury, because you’re bleeding and broken and made it back alive.