“Life is risk,” I say. It sounds trite and small, but it is true. Life is whether you rise or you stay flat and let the dark take you.
The Badlands are a thing of teeth and weather. They will not be friendly. But the Hulk is a stubborn beast and I—garokk who has been too long alone in the dark—am stubborn in a different way. I will fight. For rusted metal and a drone with a loyalty complex, and for a woman whose laugh used to cut through my world like a bright knife.
You'd think nearly dying would take the fire out of a man.
Turns out, it just burns the fat off and leaves behind the steel.
I wake each cycle beneath the wreckage of what used to be the most feared battle-hulk in this side of the galaxy, skin blistered and thick with scar, muscles twitching from half-healed nerve endings. Pain has become a background hum—like the ship herself, creaking and muttering and somehow refusing to die.
Every time I close my eyes, I see her.
Not the Hulk.
Her.
Isolde.
That damn look she gave me—fire in her throat, fists against the glass, her mouth shaping a promise she thought was a curse.
Don’t you dare die on me.
Too late, little light.
You already did.
Not with a bang. Not with the pod blast. But with the echo of her voice fading from the comm and the heat leaving my side. That’s when I died. Everything since has just been muscle memory.
I make myself useful.Or I die. There’s not a lot of in-between.
The Hulk limps through the Badlands like a war veteran too stubborn to fall. No nav, no AI, just my fists and Reflector’s broken bird-rig of wires and salvaged circuits. We scavenge from our own ribs—stripped plating, burst fuel cells, half-alive drones crawling out of collapsed vent shafts like they’ve been dreaming of sunlight and hate.
I weld with my left hand. My right’s too raw, knuckles split and regrown over the same breaks. I bind what’s left of the rations into edible bricks, wash with the drip system behind medbay, sleep in the old cryo-hold that smells like ozone and lost memories.
Reflector talks less now.
He’s deteriorating. Every day a few more files corrupt. Every cycle he forgets something—an access code, a phrase, a joke he used to tell about my snoring.
But he stays.
Stupid, loyal bolt heap.
“Garokk,” he says one night, his voice static-laced. “What is the plan?”
I don’t answer at first. I’m mid-strike, beating a vent panel flat to forge into a secondary heat shield. My breath comes in grunts, sweat pooling between my scales.
When I do speak, my voice is quieter than I expect.
“Live,” I say. “That’s the plan.”
Reflector bobs once, his light dimming. “Uninspired. But statistically sound.”
I grunt. “I’m not done yet.”
The grief cuts deeperthan the burns.
It’s not loud. Not theatrical.
It’s in the way I check every corridor twice, listening for footsteps I know won’t come. It’s in the way I hoard food like I’m waiting for someone else to show up, like I canshareit.
