🔥 Chapter 6: The Gearheart Rebellion 🔥
432 Words
The rain over District Blackwall didn’t fall like water anymore.
It hissed—thin streams of metallic dust drifting through the fog, coating steel roofs and human lungs with the same taste of rusted fear.
Kaito tightened the strap of his mechanical forearm. The Blood Engine inside it pulsed faintly, like a heart trying to remember how to beat. He’d pushed it too hard in the last battle. The veins of crimson light running along the metal dimmed, flickering the way dying stars do just before collapsing.
“Not now,” he muttered.
But the Engine didn’t care about timing. It only cared about fuel—his blood.
He stepped into the abandoned rail station beneath Blackwall. The underground tunnels stretched into darkness, humming with dormant machinery and half-dead echoes. This was where the rebellion said they would meet him.
Or where they would kill him.
A faint click behind him.
Then a voice.
“Turn around slowly, Gearblade.”
Kaito raised his hands. Three silhouettes emerged from the archway, their mechanical limbs wrapped in scavenged armor plates, their eyes glowing with modded optic lenses. Rebels—but not the friendly kind.
“You’re late,” the tallest one said, adjusting a rusted shoulder actuator. “And you brought trouble to our doorstep.”
Kaito smirked. “I bring trouble everywhere. It’s part of the charm.”
The leader didn’t laugh.
He stepped forward and pressed a spinning gear-knife against Kaito’s throat. The weapon’s teeth whirred, hungry.
“Why should the Gearheart Rebellion trust you?”
Kaito didn’t move. “Because we want the same thing. The Spire must fall.”
A murmur rippled through the three rebels. The tallest lowered his weapon, optics narrowing.
“…You know about Spire Protocol 09?”
“I know enough,” Kaito replied. “I know they’re building something that shouldn’t exist. And I know I can break it.”
Silence thickened.
The rebels exchanged glances. Finally—finally—the leader extended a hand.
“Welcome to the Gearheart Rebellion, Gearblade.”
Kaito took it.
A klaxon erupted. Red lights blossomed across the tunnel ceiling.
Kaito’s arm engine flared to life.
“Damn it,” one rebel cursed. “They tracked him!”
From the tunnel’s far end, steel boots pounded rhythmically—soldiers of the Spire, marching with their mechanical exosuits, visors blank and merciless.
The leader shouted, “FORM UP!”
Kaito grinned, blood singing, gears spinning.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s make some noise.”
And with a burst of crimson sparks, the Mechanized Blood Blade roared awake.
- Writer
