LEAGUE OF PROTECTORS.

Saturn.

The Hollows (Saturn)

0100 hours

June 12.

The crafts knifed down through the void. Gunning for the glimmering ball of dust and regret that passed for Saturn. They dropped fast. Like bees drunk on burnfuel, cutting through the planet's upper crust with all the grace of a fistfight.

The electromagnetic field hit back. Hard. Rocked the hull like brass knuckles to the gut. Jarok felt it in his teeth. Newton's laws? Fairy tales. This was raw physics with a grudge.

He leaned forward, eyes locked on the perspex. Saturn's dusty skin smeared across the view.

Gravity got grabby. Yanking the crafts down into the brown mist. The crafts bucked. Fighting every inch of the descent.

Below, the landscape rolled out in bruised colors. Brown and blue, just like he remembered. Decades ago during the wars.

Brown: the parts they ruined and called civilization.

Blue: the parts they hadn't gotten to yet.

The pilot's comm crackled. That worn, synthetic voice of warzones long forgotten.

"Saturn to AR. Saturn to AR. Do you copy?"

Jarok didn't flinch. Just stared out the screen, as if the planet owed him something.

"AR to Saturn. Hearing you loud and clear."

"Hollow Strait cleared for touchdown. Over and out."

Click. Dead air.

The crafts banked hard. Then cut low over the Saturnian ocean. Its surface bruised with white breakers, whipped raw beneath the fire of their ejectors.

Mountains rose ahead. Black, jagged things. Like titans with attitude. Shoving their way out of the sea just to sneer at the rest of the planet.

One by one, the dozen birds cut through the wind and bled altitude. They landed. Slow and deliberate, on the dead-flat crown of the range. Below, a few Saturnian army crafts sat idle, sulking like rusted dogs. Off to the right, a lonely marquee tent flapped in the wind. Looking like a worn-out lie.

The doors hissed open. A pneumatic hiss, tired and surgical.

Jarok stepped out, jackblaster slung low on his aging frame. A recurring memory he couldn't drop. His boots hit dirt like punctuation marks. Behind him, soldiers scrambled out. They resembled ants scrambling during safety from a kicked mound.

Three operatives approached. One decked in enough medals to shame a museum. They snapped salutes. Gestures that were sharp enough to cut glass.

Jarok didn't blink. His eyes were locked on the smoke curling up in the distance. Ugly, black, and telling. Something bad was cooking, and the Imperium? They were too busy chasing stones. Stones that twisted DNA into steel and circuits.

"What've we got?" His voice was sandpaper soaked in regret.

He motioned for a proto-nocular. An officer passed him the shaft-like device.

Jarok raised it, thumbed the side. The aperture widened with a mechanical purr. Aerial feed bled through the lens. satellite view - grainy and brutal.

AI kicked in. A schematic danced along the edge of the clearview:

"Battle Location: East-West Axis

Situation: Saturnian troops pinned down. Golgian rebels pressing hard.

Rebel Loadout: Synth-grade weaponry. Classified as ASSET."

Jarok tapped again. The image zoomed. Something gleamed through the smoke. Chrome. Fast.

He squinted. Grainy image, no ID. But the tickle in his skull said one word: Machine. Ostensibly a droid or bot. But a battle machine.

He clicked off the scope, jaw set like rebar. Turned to the medal-jacket.

"Major," he rasped, "your boys are getting stomped. And I don't like getting surprised. So tell me—why the hell do they have the upper hand?"

The Major gestured to the marquee. "Might want to step inside, Marshal. Some things don't echo well out here."

Jarok grunted. Yeah. Secrets never liked the light.

Inside the marquee, the heat clung to the walls like paint. A steel workstation squatted in the middle. Cluttered with datapads, relic tech, half-dead comm and units wheezing static.

Two soldiers leaned over the mess like priests at a dying altar. They didn't look like soldiers. Not t really. More like academics who'd traded scrolls for synth-rifles.

One face hit Jarok like a faded scar.

Greta Bowie. Crisp uniform. Shoulders heavy with medals like he'd bled for every one. Jarok had seen that face before. Back when Mars burned red and the Arcane War chewed through good men like ration packs.

Beside him, a woman. Weathered. Eyes like burnt chrome. Hair silver, tucked under a cap she probably hadn't taken off since the last funeral. Her name tag: Mannie Steele. Just as decorated, just as jaded.

Too many damn medals in the Saturnian ranks. Flash without fire.

They snapped salutes sharp enough to draw blood.

Jarok barely looked up. "Stand down, soldier." His gaze drilled into Greta. "You look like a ghost I once knew."

Greta didn't blink. "You pulled me out from under a killbot on Mars. Arcane War. That knoll south of Ares Point."

And there it was. The memory. That steel bastard with jackhammer arms. It ripped through the unit like tissue. Jarok had danced with it. Clad in an exo-suit. Jackblaster in one hand, fists in the other. Left the thing sparking in the dirt before evac even blinked.

He gave a grunt that passed for approval. "Nice memory. Time to make it useful."

Greta nodded. Eyes back on the holo-display.

Jarok didn't waste time. "How'd the Golgians punch through your stratosphere?"

Greta's jaw flexed. "Still a blank. No pings from Control. No red flags. Just explosions and screaming."

Jarok didn't like blanks. Blanks meant sabotage. And sabotage meant whispers in the dark. Thank the stars he didn't smell Imperium fingers. Yet.

He leaned closer to the map. Red pulses blinked like a dying heart. "That signal. Enemy position, right?"

Mannie answered, fingers fluttering over the holo-grid. She expanded the map with a flick. "That's your target. Normally we'd mop up ourselves, but this isn't standard insurgency. That thing down there… it's not human."

Jarok stared at her. Her voice was flat, but her eyes weren't. Fear lived in those sockets. Old, familiar, bone-deep.

He'd seen that look before. Right before all hell broke loose.

"We need to know what we're dancing with," Jarok growled. The wind outside whipped the canvas walls like it had a grudge. The whole tent groaned like it knew something ugly was coming.

Mannie didn't flinch. "I'll get Lieutenant Green on the line." Her fingers slid across the holo-grid. Cold and precise.

Greta keyed a sequence. The comm crackled to life like it was coughing up blood.

A voice came through. Rough, ragged and tired as sin. "Green here. The fight's gone to hell." Explosions echoed behind him, followed by the screams of men getting chewed up by war. "There's a bot... big. Precision shelling. It's picking my boys off like pests."

Jarok exhaled through his nose, sharp and bitter. Of course. Just like the old wars, when metal nightmares roamed the field. They were dreadful gods on a bad day.

He felt the old fire surge. The buzz. The rush. The thing that never left once you danced with death and liked the rhythm.

He tapped his comm. Voice flat, eyes sharp. "Cass. I'm heading into the inferno."

"Why, sir?"

"I want to eyeball the asset. See what flavor of nightmare they've thrown at us."

A beat of silence, then Cass again. "What do you need?"

Jarok stared out at the horizon, smoke rising like twisted prayers. His knuckles itched.

"Just prepare my exo-suit," he said. "And warm up the Jackblaster. I'm done talking."

And he was prepped for a battle…