It took them no more than five minutes to reach the edge of the desert. The transition was immediate, disturbingly so.

  Here, the air was sapless. Not just dry, but utterly devoid of moisture, stripped clean of anything living.

  Gravel exhaled, then stopped his exhalation midway. His breath felt thinner, and his lips were already beginning to chap.

  The ground beneath their feet gave a deceptive softness at first, but each step pressed against compacted mineral layers just beneath the surface. There was no wind, no real movement, save for the occasional drifting of sand when their boots disturbed it.

  “Smells like rust,” Hunter muttered, adjusting the fit of her gloves. “Wonder what kind of metal is beneath the surface. They might as well open an iron ore here.”

  “High iron concentration in the sand,” Priest replied. “Oxidation from the airborne particulates, carried from the ocean winds. That’s where the scent comes from. But would be hard to extract.”

  “Why?” She asked.

  “Why do you ask if you’re just going to ask again the next time?” Gravel spoke with an unnatural tightness, a result of keeping his mouth barely open to avoid letting the air in.

  “I don’t ask things twice, Gravel. I only do so if the surrounding circumstances change.”

  “Are you going to ask why there’s no wind current too?” He grinned.

  “Now that you mentioned it . . .”

  Priest provided the immediate answer she wanted, “The atmosphere retains heat but doesn’t circulate it well. Everything here happens on a geological scale.”

  “Don’t you love it when you have a walking thesaurus next to you?” Gravel shrugged.

  “Void-forsaken planet.” Hunter scrunched her nose. “What do you think Xaxx is doing here? We’ve never asked why his crew tagged along.”

  “Maybe he just thinks we’re a fun bunch to be around.” Gravel’s lips broke into a silly grin. “But yeah, we should ask him.”

  “We should reach shelter before nightfall,” Priest noted, checking his readings. “Temperature drops fast.”

  The skeletal structures of M’mara jutted from the sand like broken teeth. The surfaces of twisting spires were either stained with streaks of bronze rust, pockmarked, or otherwise hollowed like bones picked clean, and a few before them crumbled from the simple vibration force of them stepping by.

  “Hard to believe these were once livable buildings. Fortresses,” Hunter looked up, then around.

  A whisper of movement glinted in the corner of Gravel’s vision. He turned instinctively.

  Hunter pulled her laser gun free, though she didn’t raise it yet. “Tell me you saw that.”

  “I didn’t see anything, but. . .” His posture tensed as Morkanium took over his fingers.

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  Something gleamed. The air was cooling, and heat distortion didn’t explain the faint, rhythmic ripple that followed.

  Priest adjusted his scanner. A moment later, his gaze sharpened. “Water.”

  Gravel exhaled, his breath thin and dry. “What?”

  “There’s an oasis behind these ruins,” Priest confirmed. “And it is a real one. Something has touched the water.”

  “If there’s an oasis, there’s likely people,” Hunter looked to Priest then to Gravel, awaiting signals.

  Gravel signaled with a quick hand motion, and the three of them moved forward in a staggered formation, keeping low and using the jagged remains of M’mara’s ruins as cover. Gravel took point, Hunter flanked to the right, and Priest stayed slightly behind with his scanner held close.

  Still nothing. No voices. No sign of human habitation.

  But there were still movements. Not ripples of water this time.

  Gravel dropped behind a crumbling wall. The Morkanium-infused finger had already formed, and he recalled how he shot Morkanium needles out of his fingertips. Last time he’d done that was four years ago, around the same time he’d learned about the true nature of the horrible accident that had caused this mutation.

  Morkanium wasn’t a metal in the conventional sense. It wasn’t mined, smelted, or shaped by hand. It was a reactive, semi-organic material that bonded with living tissue, adapting to its host’s physiology. For Gravel, it had integrated into his skeletal structure, responding to nerve impulses like an extension of his own body. Morkanium in his fingers could shift, liquefy, and reform in an instant. But to be able to manipulate this property to such extent, the host had to survive the process of integration. The more forceful the integration, the higher the chance of compatibility.

  Hunter slipped between the ruined spires, her gun steady at her side. Priest crouched near what remained of an archway and switched his visor to low-light mode.

  Gravel signaled forward. They advanced into the damp, overgrown terrain of the oasis, and Gravel could taste a tinge of humidity on the tip of his tongue.

  Then he tasted blood.

  Corpses.

  Bodies lay scattered across the clearing, slumped over tree roots or half-buried in the undergrowth. Some were fresh—too fresh. One man’s face had been stripped down to the bone, the remaining half frozen in a final grimace. Another’s torso had been ripped open, ribs cracked apart, but some organs still remained, partial and bloodied. The blood trail hadn’t dried.

  Hunter grimaced. “Well, that answers whether there were people here.”

  Priest swept his visor across the scene. “Some of these wounds match a big cat attack patterns.” He stopped at another corpse. The body was still intact, but with burn marks along the collarbone. “Others… do not.”

  “Burns?” Gravel frowned, stepping closer. The wound was too precise to be random fire damage. “Concentrated energy blast. No shell casings, no scorch marks from repeat fire.”

  This was execution-style. One shot per target.

  “Cover me,” Gravel whispered as he crouched beside one of the bodies. His gloved fingers brushed against a metal tag, half-buried in the damp earth. He pulled it free and wiped the grime off with his thumb.

  Kaede ‘Viper’ Tanaka.

  One of their targets.

  He exhaled through his nose, tucking the tag away. “One down.”

  Artificial light hit his eyes. It was coming from the dead woman’s wristband. Its cracked screen was still active with a half-loaded display. A notification hovered in the air, stuck mid-playback.

  A holo-note.

  Gravel reached out, tapping the interface with two fingers. The screen stuttered, then stabilized, revealing a fragmented message in blue text:

  WE WEREN’T THE HUNTERS.

  WE WERE THE TEST.

  He froze, but then immediately got ahold of himself. Gravel checked the sender, but there was no name. No timestamp.

  He swore under his breath. This wasn’t just a botched mission.

  The bushes rustled.

  Something exploded out of the undergrowth. Gravel threw himself back as a massive shape lunged fangs snapping shut inches from his throat. Hunter spun, gun raised. Another one of such creature slammed into her, bulldozing her out of Gravel’s view. The plates of armor refracted in his eyes with a sharp, prismatic luster.

  Diamond.

  Sabertooth tigers.