Metal clanged below the canyon's lip, not rhythmic, not erratic either. It echoed in sync with a dull tremor, pressure shifting beneath Cain's boots. The roars were guttural, not wild.
Controlled.
Measured.
He closed his eyes, filtered the frequencies.
Too light for a stone creature and too heavy for a beast.
'Definitely giants.'
Cain stepped back from the ridge. No time for redundancy. He unslung the drone pack and tapped the internal plate.
The metal case cracked open with a hiss. Wasp-class probes hissed out, each the size of a thumb bone. They hovered, pulsing faintly, wings beating without sound.
Their launch path snapped into grid formation immediately.
He crouched, eyes on the upward drift.
'No sensor interference yet.'
The micro-drives wasps aligned with wind vectors and began scanning.
Perimeter security was secondary. Their prime protocol mask all electronic signatures, disable passive trace, jam loose scry signals.
The wasps operated off an old battlefield espionage suite.
Roberta's design. Not corporate-grade, not even legal, and definitely effective on all terrain.
Cain flicked through the display.
Movement radii. Particle density. Residual heat.
They mapped the battlefield like bloodless spiders, relaying quietly through bone-anchored feedback.
'Calm and stay focus, that what I need.'
The sky pulsed faintly in grid-lattice blue. The wasps had locked formation.
Every node shifted, each micro-wingbeat synchronizing signal disruption and visual cross-scan.
No errors. No hostile redirect. Yet.
Cain tracked their feed, overlaying markers over a wide stretch of terrain.
Shardlings were beginning to breach the lower ravines.
Metallic, modular, spindly. Unnatural speed. His scan passed over them and anchored instead on the giants.
Soul-bound movement cores. Elemental ignitions stitched into every limb rotation. Power governed by spiritual load rather than mechanical form.
He studied the ripple of energy across their limbs.
As Cain's vision scanned the area, he frowned.
'It had been years since giants fought openly, and now they marched beside beastmen?'
Giants did not take orders. They did not suffer wires or walk beside meat-eaters. They rejected human tech, cast down the old ways, and regarded beastmen as farm stock that learned how to scream.
'This alliance made no sense.'
Cain's fingers tapped his belt once. Then again. Coordination logic cracked and reformed in his head.
A giant next to a lion, pacing together?
That could only mean one thing, something else had arranged this.
Cain shifted weight to his toes and began the descent. Loose gravel under his boots scattered into silence. The battlefield opened below, no banners, no command lines, just momentum and impact.
He adjusted his stance to absorb silhouette breaks.
The shardlings moved fast. No fluid, no recoil compensation. Pure metal constructs, but not factory-built.
Their edges were too raw. Their gait suggested testbed-grade balancing logic.
To the left, a lion beastman argued mid-combat.
Voice coarse but controlled.
"Five percent! Take it or leave it!"
The offer was for Cain. He was not part of the bid.
Still, he heard the tone. He marked it as a ritual demand masking a planned margin cut.
The lion was not just fighting. He was calculating.
Cain glanced up. Four giants formed a partial crescent. One of them stood taller, rust-colored with deep ridges over the shoulders.
Above, one of his wasps shattered mid-flight. No warning. No projectile. Just deletion.
Cain's eyes sharpened. The loss of the wasp was not a random event. The prana signature of the lead giant had flared precisely one second before the breach.
'What should I say? Five's pretty low now isn't it? That one had field-level sensory adaptation. Possibly passive field harmonics or atmospheric displacement tracking.'
Cain updated threat priority.
He activated his right-hand ring, channeled three sigils, and sent a low-output Flash Beam into the shardling formation. The spell pulsed in a tight cone.
It emitted rapid strobe bursts within the visual disruption range. Non-lethal. Not meant to damage. Just blind, test, and watch.
The shardlings scattered and adapted. Some staggered. Some dropped. Two merged. Cain logged their reaction curves, noting cognitive bypass or rudimentary predictive syncing.
Behind them, a cluster of beastmen advanced. He mapped the team configuration.
'Three rats. Two wolves. One rhino. Each moved on distinct logic paths. Rat types moved first. Light armor, short burst mobility. The first deployed fire. The second used poison mist from belt canisters. The third hurled metal charges. Fragmentation grade.'
No discipline, but high utility.
They were not frontliners. They were disruption units. Fast bleed damage, sensory confusion, then fallback.
Cain's breath leveled. Data was forming a shape.
The wolves moved next. Clean, precise, with mirrored arcs.
They flanked without signal. One took the left channel, the other advanced under cover from the rats' fire trails. They struck together.
Target, the shardling's primary vision node.
Cain observed the convergence and recorded the impact logic. Not random aggression. Sensory targeting. Muscle memory embedded with anatomical prioritization.
He respected that. Quietly.
Then the ground shook.
The rhino was slower. Heavy torso, fortified hide, triple-reinforced leg mass. Not agile, but absolute. It charged straight through the wreckage, shoulder-first, and the shardlings scattered.
Not from the force alone, but from the inevitability. It had the mass of a kinetic boulder and the pathing to match.
Each step cratered soft earth into concave plates. One of the shardlings tried to counter with a rotational slice.
It failed.
The rhino's shoulder tore through metal and carried forward without pause.
Cain blinked once and recalibrated.
None of this matched the original records.
These units were undocumented.
Not in Syndicate logs.
He paused, filtering names, callsigns, registry codes.
Nothing matched.
Cain stepped back three paces and adjusted his mental slate. A recheck of watchlists returned no alignment.
None of the beastmen squads present matched authorized mercenary rosters or blacklisted insurgent cells.
No tattoo markers, no syndicate logs, no recorded formations. Their gear was modular but inconsistent.
"These guys were not in the verified list at all."
Their movement patterns were clean but untrained.
This battlefield was wrong.
The shardlings alone would have warranted attention. But with beastmen executing strategic role separation and giants forming command arcs, the composition had shifted into an unnatural hybrid.
Not a random skirmish. Not a scouting ambush. Something coordinated.
Cain shifted his stance, fingers resting over the left wrist seal. His back straightened. No breath waver.
Another drone flickered as it retreated to its relay height. The remaining swarm pivoted from wide scan to vertical containment.
It was no longer about observing. It was now about feeding full-spectrum data to his uplink. The fight was not going to resolve cleanly. Not with these variables.
Cain's boots adjusted grip on the canyon floor.
Wind shifted across the surface. His voice did not break as he whispered the recorder on his terminal.
"Terminal, let's see what we these folks are really up to."