Olympus Diver Justice Pt.2

Part II: Ashes of Tarsh

The warp rip cracked reality open, and the Sovereign Divine emerged above Tarsh like a god descending into judgment. No planetary welcome. No automated beacon. Only the cold static of silence and the faint ping of radiation burns still lingering in the ionosphere.

High King Titus Octavius Kingsley VIII stood at the loading ramp in full battleplate, eyes fixed on the wounded horizon. Beside him stood Trigger—Dante Jackson, the firewalker, the last survivor of Furnace Ridge. Clad in scorched steel and silence, Trigger had volunteered for this drop the moment he heard the news. Titus hadn’t needed to ask.

When the ramp lowered, the dust met them like breath from a corpse. The wind carried the scent of scorched flesh, burned circuitry, and the oil-rich stench of automated death. What once was Outpost 14 was now an open grave.

The bots had left nothing intact.

Steel beams jutted upward like snapped bones. The command bunker had caved in on itself. Shattered optics flickered weakly among the rubble. The blast crater at the center was still warm.

They walked in silence.

Titus moved with slow, heavy steps. Trigger followed, hand resting on his signature rotary flamer but not drawn—not yet. They passed a collapsed pillbox. Inside, five Helldiver corpses were piled together, their armor half-melted from laser fire. One of them clutched a flare tube—never fired.

Trigger stopped. “They never even hit the distress beacon.”

Titus said nothing.

They moved further into the base, stepping over spent shell casings, fried circuits, and scorch marks in the dirt where men had tried to crawl away. Trigger crouched near a fallen sniper turret.

“I trained one of these kids,” he said quietly. “Saw him fire through a wall once—nailed a bot through the eye. Said he wanted to make his name here.”

He brushed ash from the boy’s helmet. “Guess he did.”

Titus didn’t respond. Instead, he reached into his coat and removed a small tablet. With a touch, he activated the Olympus Battlefield Memorial Protocol. As he walked, his voice echoed through the ruins, steady and low:

“You were not weak. You were abandoned.

You were not forgotten. You were remembered.”

Trigger bowed his head.

They reached the outer courtyard—now a cratered scar. The bodies here had burned into the ferrocrete. Some were charred beyond recognition, armor fused to bone. A few had managed to make a last stand at the gate, forming a crude wall of corpses around the automated cannon.

All had fallen.

Titus sat in the dust, directly among them. Trigger sat beside him, the only sound the distant howl of metal scraping in the wind.

They stared for a long time.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” Trigger said.

“Like what?”

“Still.”

Titus finally turned to him, the flicker of firelight dancing in his eyes.

“I’m remembering.”

He placed his palm on a fallen soldier’s chest plate. “They fought. They stayed. They believed.”

Trigger looked back toward the ridgeline, where the bots had vanished hours earlier. “And the ones who left?”

Titus stood. “They will believe, too.”

He turned to the transport squad behind them. “I want all the names carved. All of them. The weak don’t get remembered. The loyal do.”

He ignited the flare at the edge of the command post. Red light flared into the ash-laced sky.

“Mark the graves,” he said. “Every one.”

Trigger finally reached for his weapon. “And what do we do now?”

Titus looked toward the stars. Somewhere, the deserters were running. Somewhere, they thought they could hide.

“We light the pyre,” he said. “And then we chase the flame.”

The flare lit the ruins red.

Tarsh had burned.

Now it was time to burn back.