The Only Gods We Know, Vol. 2 Ch 1: The Garden of Rust

The air on Othala-9 tasted like wet iron. Old rust. Something dying slow.

Shield-Captain Brynja Vingfalk stopped walking. Pressed her gauntlet against the outer wall of Moisture Farm Delta-4. The ceramite should've been cool. It wasn't. It was sweating—thick drops gathering in the scratches of her silver armor.

She looked up. The sky was bruised purple and angry grey. Heavy clouds hung low, a suffocating blanket that refused to rain. Just hovered there, threatening.

Her air recycler whirred inside the helmet. A low, grinding complaint. It fought the sulfur and the ozone but it couldn't touch the rot. That smell came from the ground itself. Fifteen years, and the planet still hadn't given up trying to push them out.

"Actual, this is Hitman Two." Sigrun's voice broke through the static. "Movement in the trellis sector. Could be wildlife. Could be the wind. Hard to tell in this soup."

Brynja tapped her helmet display. "Copy, Hitman Two. Anything moves wrong, I want to hear it."

She walked. Her boots sank an inch into the ferrocrete path—the humidity had softened it to something close to mud. Her armor used to shine. Silver and gold, the Stormbringer colors. Now it was dull, scuffed, the flat matte of occupation forces. The right knee motor hitched with every step. Three cycles she'd meant to get it fixed. Three cycles.

Behind her, Mist had her eyes on the Auspex. The device chirped erratically.

"Readings are garbage, Captain," Mist murmured. "Background radiation's spiking again. Magnetic field's unstable, or the equipment's rotting. Probably both."

"Log it," Brynja said.

They marched past a cluster of indentured workers at a moisture vaporator. Grey clothes loose on thin frames. Yellowish skin. As the squad passed, the workers stopped. They didn't bow. Didn't run. Just watched. Eyes tracking the storm-bolters. Tracking the sensors.

Brynja felt those stares on her back. Heavier than the gravity plating.

Ten years ago, the conquered looked at them with fear. Five years ago, hatred. Now the look was empty. Hollow. But calculating. The look of a predator noticing a limp.

"You feel that?" Mist asked.

"Feel what. The gratitude?"

"The silence," Mist said. "Shift change at the hydroponics bay is always loud. Today it's dead air."

Brynja stopped. Scanned the perimeter. The vaporators hummed. Beyond the fence line, the jungle pressed close. It wasn't supposed to be that close. The terraforming engines were supposed to push it back, replace it with Asgardian biology. Compliant biology.

The trees looked like they'd moved overnight.

"Hitman Element, tighten spacing," Brynja ordered. "Mist, you're with me. Foreman reported a pressure problem in Sector Four."

They moved deeper in. The architecture was brutal and efficient—sharp angles, gunmetal grey. Rust was blooming across the walls. Green mold ate the seams of every pressure door. The planet was taking the station apart, piece by piece.

The engineer, Kaelen, stood by the pipe junction with the look of a man who'd been awake too long. He wiped his hands on an oil-soaked rag. His eyes couldn't stay still.

"Report," Brynja said.

He jumped. Dropped the rag. "Shield-Captain—the flow regulator. Pressure dropped forty percent in an hour. I thought it was a seal. Maybe a gasket."

"And?"

He pointed at the access panel. His finger was shaking.

Brynja gripped the locking lever and yanked. The hinges shrieked. The panel swung open.

It wasn't mechanical.

Inside the pipe—where coolant should have been moving—was a knot of roots. Pale, with veins that pulsed violet. They'd grown directly into the plastic-steel, fused with it, become one with the metal. They were pumping something black through the system. Slow. Rhythmic. Like a throat swallowing.

Brynja leaned in. Her helmet lights cut through. Tiny silica thorns had chewed through hardened alloy like it was nothing.

"This grew overnight?" she asked.

"Less." Kaelen looked sick. "I checked at 0600. It was clear. The growth rate is—this shouldn't be possible."

Mist ran her scanner over the mass. "Captain. Look at the weave."

The roots didn't grow randomly. They spiraled. Interlocking geometric shapes, methodical and deliberate, choking the machine.

"Runes," Brynja said. The word tasted like ash.

"Nature doesn't grow in hexagrams," Mist said. Her voice had gone tight. "I'm picking up heat spikes. And a resonant frequency."

Brynja held her gauntlet close without touching. She could feel it through the feedback in her fingertips—a low thrumming. Not a plant. A heartbeat.

"Cut it," she told Kaelen.

"Captain, if I cut the intake, the back pressure could—"

"Cut. It."

He grabbed the laser cutter. His hand shook. The blue beam hit the thickest root.

The plant screamed.

High and thin, like escaping steam, but with something underneath—a musical tone that made Brynja's teeth ache. The root convulsed. Black fluid sprayed outward. It hit Kaelen's faceplate. He yelped. The acid burned cloudy scars into the plastic instantly.

"Hitman, perimeter!" Sigrun moved fast, shield up.

Nothing else came. The root withered. Turned grey. The scream faded to a wet gurgle.

Brynja steadied Kaelen. "You good?"

"I think so." He wiped uselessly at his ruined visor.

Mist stared at the dead root. "That wasn't a mutation," she said quietly. "That was a weapon."

Brynja looked at the jungle through the grime-streaked window. She thought about the workers' empty eyes. The accelerated decay. The hexagrams in the roots.

"Squad's moving," she said. "Storm-Singer's hot. We're going into the Rust-Works."

"Captain." Sigrun's voice was heavy. "Without armor support, the Rust-Works is an ambush waiting to happen."

"We're already in the ambush, Sigrun," Brynja said, stepping over the puddle of black fluid. "We just haven't heard the shot yet."

***

The Rust-Works lay three kilometers north. A graveyard of failed ambitions—collapsed cooling towers, half-built refineries, skeletal walkways. The jungle had swallowed it decades ago. Now it was a maze of oily vines and iron bones sticking out of the mud like the ribs of something enormous and dead.

Hitman Element moved staggered. Wide spacing. The mud here was oil and wet earth, sucking at their boots. The canopy above was so thick it killed the sky—replaced it with shifting dark green shadow.

Brynja took point. Storm-Singer low and ready. The air smelled different here. Sharp. Metallic. A blade being ground on stone.

"Auspex is blind," Mist reported. "Ghost returns every three meters. Bio-signs, heat blooms, then nothing."

"Eyes and ears," Brynja said. "Off comms unless you've got a target."

They passed the wreckage of a heavy cargo lifter. A tree had crushed the cockpit—a tree shaped like a constrictor snake. Vines hung from the beams like hanged men. They swayed in a wind Brynja couldn't feel.

Then the pressure dropped.

One second, thick and wet. The next, her ears popped hard. The humidity didn't fade—it condensed.

"Fog!" Hrist called from rear guard. "Six o'clock, rolling fast!"

Yellow vapor spilled over the refinery rim like water breaking a dam. It curled around the rusted pillars and moved toward them.

"Check masks," Sigrun snapped. "Seals tight."

The fog hit Brynja's visor and her temperature gauge spiked. ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARD. ARMOR INTEGRITY DEGRADING. Amber warnings stacked in the corner of her display.

"Contact—" Valgard hesitated. "Movement. Up in the walkway."

Brynja snapped her weapon up. Shadows moved in the vapor.

"Hold fire. Positive ID."

A pod dropped from the canopy. Melon-sized. Glowing sick. It hit the mud ten meters ahead of Valgard.

It didn't explode. It burst.

A cloud of glittering gold spores erupted and expanded fast. Valgard stepped back and raised his arm. The spores hit his leg armor.

A sound like bacon sizzling.

"Breach! Breach!" Valgard screamed. "My leg—" He fell, thrashing.

"Medic!" Sigrun moved. Shield up over the downed trooper.

The jungle opened up.

No bolter fire. No plasma crack. Just a hiss of displaced air and then thorns—dagger-long, black as glass—volleying out of the treeline. One punched three inches into Sigrun's energy field before it shattered. Another caught a trooper through the shoulder, through his sensor suite.

"Contact right! Suppressing fire!"

The squad opened up. Storm-bolters thundered. Muzzle flashes strobed through the acid fog. Explosive rounds tore into the jungle. Vines shredded. Wood shattered.

No screams. Nothing fell.

"Can't see them!" Hrist yelled. "Thermal's whiteout!"

Brynja scanned. Enemy fire was increasing. Kinetic slugs mixing with the organic thorns. But the angles were wrong. They were taking fire from the ridge to their left—a position she'd swept ten seconds ago. It had been empty.

"Move! Cooling tower! Go!" She grabbed Valgard by his harness and dragged. She fired Storm-Singer one-handed into the fog, blue lightning punching through vapor.

The squad broke. Brynja shoved Valgard behind the rusted bulk of a collapsed cooling unit.

"Base of fire! Watch the flanks!"

She looked over the edge. A bullet sparked off the metal an inch from her faceplate. She dropped back.

"Mist. Solution."

"I can't track them." Mist's datapad was glowing behind a pile of rubble. "They're not fighting normally. Look at the impact pattern."

Brynja looked at the mud. The craters weren't random. They were clustered exactly where her troopers had been about to step.

"Valgard took his hit before he cleared the gap," Sigrun said, slapping sealant on his ruined leg. "They knew he was going left."

Brynja risked another look. A figure in the fog—humanoid, vine-woven armor. It raised a long rifle.

She ducked before she'd made the decision to move. The slug punched through metal where her head had been.

Not suppression. Execution.

"They're reading our tactical net," Hrist said. Panic cracking through. "They have our comms!"

"No." Brynja watched a volley of thorns cut off the only retreat route—half a second before she'd been about to call it. "They don't have our comms." She said it slowly. "They have the timeline."

They weren't reacting. They were firing at the future.

"They're predicting us," Brynja said. "Every standard maneuver. Every doctrine response. They know it before we do."

"Foresight," Mist breathed. "High-level divination. Captain, you can't outfight math that knows the future."

"Then we change the variables." Brynja looked at the unstable refinery structure looming over the treeline. "Get me the Hammer."

"Danger close?" Sigrun stared at her. "Brynja. That's suicide. We're in the splash zone."

"Standard retreat gets us killed in the open. Standard flank walks us into a trap." She gripped Storm-Singer until her knuckles cracked inside the gauntlet. "The only thing they can't predict is insanity."

She keyed the fleet channel.

"Fire mission. Grid Zero-Zero-Alpha. Danger close. Airburst."

"Captain." The voice from Gungnir's Vengeance hesitated. "Confirm. That puts the impact on your helmet."

"Fire the damn mission."

She looked at her squad. Dirt-caked, pinned, fighting ghosts in acid fog.

"Heads down!" she roared. "Embrace the fucking suck!"

The sky tore open.

It started as pressure. Not sound—pressure, turning their insides to liquid. The clouds vaporized. The acid fog burned away in a millisecond. The kinetic penetrator from low orbit detonated fifty meters above the canopy. Airburst. Shrapnel across a wide area.

The shockwave hit like a fist from God.

It slammed Brynja face-first into the mud. Her display died. Rebooted red. The ground heaved beneath her. Superheated metal rain scythed through the Rust-Works. Trees exploded into splinters. Walkways sheared off in cascades of screaming metal.

Ten seconds of nothing but noise and violence.

Then ringing silence.

Brynja pushed herself up. Armor groaning. Motors straining against debris.

"Sound off."

"Two up." Sigrun. Steady as a wall.

"Three up. Armor's breached, but I'm mobile." Mist. Shaky.

"Four up." Hrist. From the mud somewhere.

The jungle line was gone. Burning stumps. Craters. And the predictive fire had stopped.

"Now!" Brynja surged over the debris. "Push the line! Move!"

They hit the treeline. Among the craters, figures rose—woven bark armor, metal mesh, bone masks painted with swirling organic patterns. One insurgent came up directly in Brynja's path, raising a long rifle.

She didn't use a form. She drove her shoulder into his chest. The power armor's weight crushed the air out of him. They went down in the mud together.

He was fast. Faster than human. He twisted, got a glowing knife toward her throat.

She caught his wrist. The servo in her gauntlet screamed.

She headbutted him. Ceramite on bone mask. The mask cracked.

Again. Again. Ugly, grinding violence. The knife dropped.

She pinned him. Knee on his chest. Grabbed the broken mask and ripped it away.

She stopped.

The face beneath it was beautiful. Terrifyingly so. High cheekbones. Skin the color of polished wood. Eyes lit from within, feral gold. But what stopped her was his skin.

Runes—Asgardian runes, twisted and flowing like vines—pulsed beneath the surface. They moved with his heartbeat. Green and gold, reactive, alive.

He looked up at her. Blood leaking from his nose. He wasn't afraid.

He looked ecstatic.

"The root," he wheezed. Bubbles of blood on his lips. "The root drinks the iron."

"Who commands you?" Brynja put Storm-Singer's tip to his throat. "Who is the Architect?"

He smiled. Teeth filed to points.

"He sees the rot in your foundation," he whispered. "He sees... the fall."

He surged upward. Not attacking. He grabbed the shaft of her spear and pulled the blade into his own neck. The lightning discharged. His eyes rolled back. The gold light died to grey. The runes on his skin blazed—bright enough to leave afterimages—then burned out. Black char in the shape of leaves.

Brynja stood. Chest heaving. Looking at the body.

Around her, the firefight ended. The remaining insurgents vanished into the ruined jungle like smoke. They left their dead behind.

"Clear," Sigrun called. Tight. "What's left of the perimeter is secure."

***

The medevac shuttle came in low and hot, downdraft kicking up ash and pulverized leaves.

Brynja stood at the extraction point. Watched the medics work on Valgard. He was screaming. They'd cut away the leg armor.

The flesh underneath wasn't burned. It was blooming.

Tiny white flowers sprouted from the dead tissue. Their roots were visible through blistered, translucent skin, knitting into his muscle fibers. Feeding on his blood.

"Sedate him!" A medic's professional voice cracking. "Get the stasis field on that limb before it spreads to the artery!"

Brynja turned away. Bile at the back of her throat.

Mist was kneeling by a pile of scavenged enemy gear. She'd taken apart one of the long rifles. Her hands were trembling.

"Tell me," Brynja said.

Mist held up the core. "Hybrid. Standard Asgardian magnetic rails—we made these parts." She pointed to the power cell. "But this isn't a cell. It's a bio-matrix. It draws energy from ambient moisture. It's photosynthesizing power."

"Targeting system?"

"There isn't one." Mist tapped her own temple. "Direct neural link. But the interface isn't cybernetic." She swallowed. "Captain, the targeting algorithm—it wasn't math. It was Seidr."

The word landed like a stone.

The Aesir built their empire on steel and fire and the rigid order of technology. The Vanir built theirs on nature, growth, the fluid chaos of magic. The Treaty of Vanaheim had stood for eons: the Aesir ruled the stars, the Vanir tended the worlds. The Aesir didn't touch the roots. The Vanir didn't touch the forge.

"High-ranking Vanir have Foresight," Brynja said. Her voice was hollow. "Battle-computation that reads like prophecy. That's how they knew our positions."

"This wasn't a militia," Mist said. She stood up. "Special operations. Heritage-level Vanir tech. This shouldn't exist outside the Royal armory on Vanaheim."

Brynja looked at the dead man with the runic skin. The golden eyes. The ecstasy.

"Secure the gear. Tag it classified. Nothing leaves this site."

"Captain." Sigrun had a shrapnel cut across her face, blood drying on her jaw. "If we report this—if Tyr finds out the Vanir are arming rebels—he burns Vanaheim to bedrock. That's a civil war."

"I know."

Brynja activated her long-range radio. Linked to Gungnir's Vengeance.

"Command, this is Shield-Captain Vingfalk. Operation Rust-Garden is complete. Ambush neutralized."

"Copy, Captain. Status of hostile forces?"

She looked at Valgard's flowers. At the runes charred into the dead man's skin. At the bio-matrix power cell in Mist's hands.

"Hostiles were well-equipped," she said. Her voice didn't waver. "Mercenaries. Scavenged experimental tech. No identities confirmed. Scrubbing the site and returning to base."

She cut the link.

Sigrun stared. "You're burying it."

"Buying time," Brynja said. She slung Storm-Singer across her back. "This wasn't a riot. It was a ritual. If we don't find out who the high priest is before Tyr does, the whole galaxy chokes on the weeds."

She walked toward the shuttle. Behind her, the silence of the jungle settled back in. Patient. Watching. Waiting for the harvest.

Glossary

Military & Tactical Jargon

• Actual: A radio callsign modifier used to specify that the speaker is the commanding officer of the unit, rather than a radioman or subordinate (e.g., "Actual, this is Hitman Two").

• Base of Fire: A tactical technique where one part of a unit lays down continuous fire on an enemy position to keep them pinned down, allowing the rest of the unit to maneuver or retreat safely.

• Breach: A critical warning indicating that a soldier’s environmentally sealed power armor has been punctured, exposing them to outside hazards (like toxic atmosphere or biological weapons).

• Danger Close: A call for artillery or orbital fire where the targeted coordinates are dangerously close to friendly forces, carrying a high risk of friendly fire casualties.

• Embrace the Suck: Common military slang for consciously accepting and enduring a miserable, dangerous, or seemingly impossible situation without complaint.

• Fire Mission: A formal request over the radio for heavy support fire—such as orbital strikes or artillery—on specific coordinates.

• Flank: The left or right side of a military formation. "Flanking" is the tactical maneuver of moving around to attack the enemy from the side or rear.

• Grid Zero-Zero-Alpha: A specific tactical map coordinate. In the context of the story, Brynja uses it to designate her own squad's exact location to call a strike on top of themselves.

• Positive ID (PID): Positive Identification. Visually or mechanically confirming exactly what a target is before opening fire, preventing friendly fire or civilian casualties.

• Scrubbing the site: Sanitizing an area of operations by hiding, destroying, or removing classified evidence before extraction.

• Suppressing Fire: Heavy, continuous weapons fire directed at an enemy position. The goal isn't necessarily to kill, but to force the enemy to take cover so they cannot shoot back or move.

• Tactical Net: The localized, encrypted communications and sensor network shared by a squad or fleet.

• [Number] Up: A rapid roll-call method used immediately after an explosion or heavy attack. Squad members call out their designated number (e.g., "Two up," "Three up") to quickly confirm they are alive and combat-ready.

Sci-Fi & Universe-Specific Technology

• Airburst: A munitions setting where a bomb or projectile is programmed to detonate mid-air rather than upon hitting the ground, maximizing the spread of the shockwave and shrapnel over a wide area.

• Auspex: A handheld or armor-integrated multispectrum scanner used to detect heat blooms, biological signs, magnetic fields, and background radiation.

• Ceramite: An ultra-durable, heat-resistant composite material used to forge Asgardian power armor.

• Hitman Element: The tactical callsign used to identify Shield-Captain Brynja’s specific infantry squad.

• Kinetic Penetrator: A devastating orbital weapon. Instead of using explosives, a heavy, dense metal rod is dropped from orbit. Gravity and velocity generate immense kinetic energy, acting like a localized meteor strike upon impact.

• Medevac: Medical Evacuation. A designated shuttle or vehicle used to rapidly extract critically wounded personnel from a hot combat zone.

• Seidr: The Vanir term for high-level magic, specifically referencing divination, foresight, and the manipulation of nature and reality (contrasted against Asgardian technology).

• Stasis Field: Advanced medical technology that generates a localized field to freeze or drastically slow biological processes, used by medics to stop the spread of bleeding, venom, or rapid infections in severed/injured limbs.

• Storm-bolter: A heavy, large-caliber, rapid-fire weapon that shoots explosive, armor-piercing kinetic rounds rather than traditional bullets.

• Thermal's Whiteout: A sensor blinding effect where thermal/heat-vision cameras are completely washed out by ambient environmental heat, explosions, or countermeasures, rendering them useless.