Apocalypse: The Strongest Weapon

The words hung in the air of the throne room, colder and more terrifying than the perpetual damp. Bane's body… it's gone. Fred's face was a mask of primal fear, the kind reserved for ghosts and things that defied the natural, brutal order of their world. For a moment, the rhythmic pounding from outside faded into the background, replaced by a roaring silence in Damien's mind. A dozen logical impossibilities warred for dominance. Had he not been truly dead? Had one of his loyalists managed to spirit the body away from a sealed room? Or was this something else, something that belonged to the arcane, unexplained rules of this world that he was only beginning to comprehend?

He felt a flicker of something profoundly irritating—not fear, but the sharp annoyance of a critical unknown variable inserted into a precarious equation. He crushed the disorienting cascade of questions with an iron will forged in the boardrooms of a dead world. A mystery, however unsettling, was a passive problem. The immediate, active threat was the five-ton beast systematically trying to demolish his primary fortification.

"Seal the pit room," Damien's voice was ice, cutting through Fred's panic and grounding him back in reality. "Post two of your most reliable guards. They are to speak to no one. No one enters or leaves that room until I personally rescind the order. The last thing we need is a ghost story spreading through this shelter right now. Panic is an infection, Fred. And you will be its quarantine. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Lord," Fred stammered, the clear, strategic command a welcome antidote to his superstitious terror.

"Good," Damien said, rising from the bone throne. He was already moving on, his mind compartmentalizing the mystery of the missing corpse. It was a problem for later. "Summon the council. Now. It is time we removed the unwelcome visitor from our doorstep."

A few minutes later, they were assembled again. The tension in the room was a palpable force, thick with the shared anxiety of the coming confrontation. The monotonous thump-crunch from the garage was a constant, grim backdrop to their proceedings.

"Kenji," Damien began, forgoing any preamble. "Give me your report on the beast. I want every detail. Its strengths, its observed behaviors, its weaknesses—if any."

The wiry scout took a deep breath, his eyes darting nervously as if seeing a ghost. "Lord, it's a Muscle Maw. They're walking siege engines. I saw one take on a trade caravan from the Rust Canyons once. The caravan had a heavy slug thrower mounted on their lead vehicle, a proper piece of hardware. They landed a direct hit on the Maw's shoulder." Kenji shook his head in disbelief. "The slug, big as my fist, just flattened against its hide and fell to the ground. The beast just stumbled, got angry, and tore the front of the vehicle off with one swipe. It's not just armored; it's a solid block of force."

He continued, his voice dropping lower. "But it's not mindless. It's efficient. I saw it catch one of the guards. It didn't just bite him. It grabbed him, put its free hand on his helmet, and just… pulled. The sound of his spine separating from his skull… I heard it from two hundred meters away. It tore him in half like he was made of wet paper. Then it started to eat. It doesn't waste energy."

Zola, the tanner, shuddered. "I've tried to work a piece of Maw-hide once. A trader brought a scrap. My sharpest flensing knives couldn't score it. It's like trying to skin a rock."

Damien listened, his face an impassive mask. He absorbed their reports, not as horror stories, but as data points for a complex tactical problem. Their technology was clearly insufficient. Bane, for all his physical power, had also deemed the creature not worth the effort. But Bane had lacked the single greatest asset Damien possessed: a mind forged in a world of advanced engineering and military theory, coupled with the power to make those theories manifest.

He went silent, his eyes half-lidded as he stared into the middle distance. The council watched him, holding their breath. In the quiet theater of his mind, he discarded their world's solutions. Smelter paste was crude. A direct assault was an inefficient waste of manpower. A wide-area explosive, even if he could conjure one, risked catastrophic structural damage to the shelter—an unacceptable risk to his core asset.

The solution had to be surgical. The beast's primary strength, its nigh-impenetrable hide, had to be rendered irrelevant. That meant heat. Not just fire, but extreme, localized, inescapable heat. A chemical weapon. He recalled the schematics and chemical compositions from his Old World knowledge. Thermite was effective, but he needed something that would adhere to the target, to guarantee a complete thermal transfer. A gel. A vicious, clinging, napalm-thermite gel that would burn through hide, bone, and brain tissue with equal, terrifying efficiency.

The delivery system was the next logical step. It had to be a weapon he could create from scratch, a complete system. He envisioned a design he'd once seen in a shareholder presentation for a defense contractor: the M141 Bunker Defeat Munition. A single-shot, disposable recoilless launcher. Simple, elegant, and designed for precisely this kind of hard-target penetration. The plan was complete.

His eyes snapped open, his focus returning to the room, his decision made. "The beast will be eliminated," he announced, his voice ringing with absolute finality. He offered no details of the weapon. They did not need to understand the 'how'. They only needed to execute their parts of the 'when' and 'where'.

"Jonas," his gaze pinned the mechanic. "The rubble wall. I require a stable firing port, sixty centimeters in diameter, cleared at the coordinates I will provide. It must be reinforced with steel beams and packed earth to withstand significant backblast. I want no risk of a secondary collapse."

"Aye, Lord. I can do that," Jonas replied, his mind already turning over the engineering problem.

"Kenji. The service vents in the garage ceiling. You will position yourself directly above the designated kill zone. I will provide the signal. When you receive it, you will first make two sharp, metallic clicks to get the beast's attention. Immediately following that, you will produce a single, high-pitched, piercing whistle to draw its head upwards and hold it steady."

Kenji gave a sharp, terrified nod.

"Zola. You will provide Jonas with your best fire-retardant blankets, made from tanned beast-hide, to shield the firing port. Fred. You will secure the perimeter. No one approaches the firing zone. No one panics." He looked at them all. "Bane may have considered this beast a bad investment. I consider it an unacceptable variable threatening the stability of my domain. It will be removed. Now go."

As they scrambled to obey, Damien remained on the throne, gathering his focus. He would create the ammunition first; it was the more complex component. He closed his eyes, drawing on the reservoir of power within him—the very essence of his awakening. He built the weapon in his mind—a perfect, three-dimensional blueprint.

The air in front of him shimmered. A low hum filled the chamber as motes of light, drawn from an unseen source, coalesced. They wove themselves together, following the intricate design in his mind. The process was arduous and mentally taxing. After a full, grueling minute of intense concentration, a sleek, olive-drab rocket, nearly a meter long, clattered onto the stone floor with a heavy, solid thud. It was a perfect, seamless object in a world of rust and scrap.

The moment it was complete, Damien slumped back into the throne, a profound exhaustion washing over him. It was a deep, hollowing drain of his core energy, a mental fog that made the world seem distant and muted, as if a light inside his soul had been dimmed.

While he recovered, Fred approached, holding a small leather pouch. "Lord. The beast cores from the dead Ratamons."

Damien took the pouch. Inside were half a dozen small, crystalline stones, each pulsing with a faint, internal light. He could feel the familiar thrum of origin energy radiating from them. Batteries of some kind. An asset to be appraised later. He set them aside just as Elara appeared.

She moved with the silent, fluid grace of a cat, a wooden platter held in her hands. "I thought my Lord might require sustenance," she murmured, her voice a low, intimate counterpoint to the distant sounds of labor. As she placed the platter on a table beside him, her fingers brushed the bone armrest, a touch that lingered a fraction of a second too long. "Roasted Ratamon and steamed Glimmer Root, to restore your strength."

As Damien ate, Fred returned, his expression grim. "Lord, while doing a full sweep of the command level, we found Bane's private chambers were sealed. Inside are the other three captives. The women who were part of your group."

Damien paused. The image flashed in his mind: the women being dragged away to an unknown but easily imagined fate. It was a brief, unwelcome flicker of a shared ordeal. He methodically crushed the feeling. Sentiment was rust. They were survivors. Their previous status was irrelevant. Their future status was as potential assets.

"They are survivors, not prisoners," he said, his voice flat. "Their ordeal is over. See that Elara speaks with them. Find them quarters among the other women. Once they are settled, they will be processed into the labor pool like everyone else."

"At once, Lord," Fred said.

Having finished his meal and feeling his internal energy slowly replenish, Damien stood. He focused again, the drain less severe this time but still significant, and conjured the launcher—a simple, shoulder-fired tube with a rudimentary targeting sight. The weapon system was now complete. There was one last piece of old business to attend to.

"Fred," Damien's voice echoed in the now-quiet chamber. "The pit. Where I was held. I want it cleaned. Scrub the blood from the walls. Get rid of the bodies. That room will be repurposed."

An hour passed. The firing port was ready. The team was in position. The shelter held its collective breath. The rhythmic pounding from the Muscle Maw was the only constant.

Damien strode to the firing port, the weapon feeling impossibly light and perfectly balanced on his shoulder. He peered through the opening. The beast was there, a mountain of rage and hunger.

"Kenji," Damien spoke into the comm device. "Signal on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark."

From the garage ceiling, two sharp, metallic sounds echoed. CLICK. CLICK. The Muscle Maw froze mid-swing. Then, a high-pitched, piercing whistle cut through the air. The beast's head snapped upwards, its face tilting towards the source of the noise, its tiny eyes searching. It was perfectly still.

Damien's world narrowed to the targeting sight. He squeezed the trigger.

A deep, gut-wrenching WHOOSH erupted from the tube, the backblast slamming into Zola's blankets. A streak of fire shot through the firing port. The rocket struck the Muscle Maw square in the face, the hardened tip punching through the plate of bone and muscle.

For a heartbeat, there was silence.

Then, a flash of incandescent white light erupted from within the monster's skull. There was no roar of agony. There couldn't be. Its brain and brainstem were instantly vaporized. But its body, a mountain of meat and rage, did not know it was dead. It began to thrash, a horrifying, silent dance of death. Its powerful limbs smashed against the concrete pillars, bringing down chunks of the ceiling. It stumbled blindly, its own head melting and running down its chest in glowing, sizzling channels, before finally, mercifully, crashing to the ground with a ground-shaking thud.

Silence descended, broken only by the aggressive, viscous sizzle of the burning gel.

Inside the shelter, no one cheered. A collective, shuddering sigh of relief went through the five hundred survivors. Hardened warriors slumped against the walls, their knees weak. They exchanged wide-eyed, disbelieving looks. Then, as one, their gaze turned to the man at the firing port. A quiet, intense wave of murmurs washed over the crowd, and slowly, not from pressure but from sheer, unadulterated awe, they began to bow their heads. They had witnessed not a battle, but an execution. An act of god-like power.

Damien ignored the silent reverence. It was an expected outcome. He turned from the port. "Jonas, assess the structural damage. Zola, once the fire dies down, see if any of its hide is salvageable."

The immediate problem was solved. But as the survivors looked upon him as their savior, their god-king, Damien's mind had already moved on. He walked away from them, his steps purposeful, heading back towards the sealed-off pit room. The external threat was gone, but the internal one, the impossible mystery of the missing corpse, now demanded his full attention.