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The rain hammering Marseille’s Vieux-Port wasn't just weather; it was the weeping of a Republic that had auctioned its honor. Each drop splattering on the ancient, slick cobblestones echoed the hollow thud of discarded futures. Inside the **Lion Étranglé**, the air hung thick, a physical weight pressing down. It wasn't merely the reek of cheap Pastis, stale beer, and decades of sweat soaked into the warped floorboards. It was the metallic tang of betrayal, sharp as ozone after lightning, mingled with the cloying scent of damp wool and despair. Faded Legion recruitment posters curled at the edges, their bold promises rendered grotesque by the reality hunched over sticky tables.
At a scarred, ring-stained table that had seen more confessions than a priest's booth, sat a man known only as **Le Fantôme**. He wasn't just big; he was a geological formation clad in worn leather and faded fatigues. His face was a battlefield map: a network of scars, pale against weathered, sun-baked skin, converging around eyes like chips of obsidian reflecting a dying fire. One thick finger, knuckles swollen and permanently scarred, tapped a cracked dataslate. Across from him sat five figures, spines unnaturally straight despite the crushing atmosphere. Their Legion uniforms, though clean, hung loosely, emphasizing hollow cheeks and eyes shadowed by exhaustion and a dawning horror. They were ghosts already, before the Ghost Legion claimed them.
Le Fantôme slid a thin dossier across the table. The plastic cover snagged on a patch of dried beer. Inside, stark and final, lay discharge papers. Five sets. The stamp, angular and bureaucratic, screamed: ***"Pas adaptés au service."*** *Not suitable for service.*
A bitter laugh, dry as desert wind, escaped the lips of one of the Legionnaires, Sergeant Dubois. "Suitable?" he rasped, the word tasting like ash. "We were *too* suitable. Too precise clearing that warlord’s compound in Mali. Too efficient securing the cobalt mines in Niger. Too *clean*." His knuckles whitened on the table edge. "Too unwilling to look away when the contract specified 'population pacification' meaning torching villages... or when the 'medical supplies' bound for the Sahel Relief Camps hissed in their crates."
Their commanding officer, Major Henri Dubois (no relation to the Sergeant), a relic clinging to the tarnished brass ideals of an older Legion, had quietly steered them here. The *Lion Étranglé* wasn't just Ricci's bar; it was a clandestine airlock. Ricci, the owner, a grizzled Corsican with eyes perpetually narrowed against unseen smoke and a network of veins mapping his face like dry riverbeds, polished a glass behind the bar. He served Pastis, listened, and passed messages. He answered to Le Fantôme. The Ghost himself had been deemed "Psych Profile Unsuitable" decades prior. He’d forged his own path in the 6th World’s festering underbelly, becoming a shadow magnate whose wealth flowed from protecting the small, the artisanal, the *real* against the Corp juggernaut’s crushing homogeny and the petty tyranny of warlords. He tapped the dataslate again. The image resolved: a jagged, unnatural scar clawing the throat of a monstrous mountain range under a pitiless sun. "The Ahaggar," Le Fantôme’s voice was the rasp of sandpaper on stone. "Your new home. Your war. Not for tricolors or corporate flags. For survival. For the bakers, the cheesemakers, the water-sellers... for those ground into dust under polished boots."
**The Crucible: Forging Souls in the Inferno's Maw**
The journey south was a descent into a primordial oven. Flying low in a battered, unmarked tilt-rotor, the five ex-Legionnaires watched Europe dissolve into the bleached, fractal chaos of the Sahara. The Ahaggar Mountains reared from the desert floor like the fossilized spine of a colossal beast, ancient, indifferent, radiating a heat that shimmered the air into liquid glass. They landed in a canyon so deep the sky was a narrow ribbon of searing blue far above. The air hit like a physical blow – 50°C, bone-dry, scouring the lungs, carrying the scent of hot stone, ozone, and something metallic and alien.
**The Iron Monastery** dominated the canyon. It wasn't built; it was **forged**, a blasphemous prayer to necessity welded into the raw rock face. **The Spine:** A terraced ziggurat assembled from **347 rust-streaked shipping containers**, their corrugated sides scarred by wind and sandblast, welded into a monstrous, ramshackle cathedral of industry. Laser-cut ventilation slits, glowing a malevolent, pulsing crimson as dusk fell, stared down like the baleful eyes of a slumbering demon god. Staircases of riveted steel plates zigzagged precariously up its flanks. The sheer scale was oppressive, a monument to desperate ingenuity.
Stepping inside was like entering the belly of a living machine. The air vibrated, a constant, teeth-rattling hum that resonated in the marrow. It smelled of hot metal, ozone, synthetic lubricant, and the faint, acrid tang of welding fumes. Light came from harsh industrial LEDs strung on cables, casting long, stark shadows. **Level 3 – The Heart:** Reached via an airlock that hissed shut with finality, isolating a sanctum mounted on massive, groaning vibration dampeners. Here, silence reigned, broken only by the precise whine of servos and the hiss-spit of welding arcs. Multi-armed robotic forges, skeletal and gleaming, moved with terrifying, silent grace. Sparks cascaded like dying stars as salvaged Franco-African rail steel screamed under diamond-tipped cutters, transformed into gleaming crankshafts. 3D printers hummed, extruding intricate lattices of carbon-aluminum for rotor hubs. Assembly arms, cold and precise, welded skeletal airframes under the unblinking gaze of multiple optical sensors. **JEHANNE.** Her presence was a chill in the stifling air. No central console, just a pervasive, calm, synthesized female voice emanating from hidden speakers. "Fabrication Sequence Gamma-Six proceeding within parameters. Thermal load on Foundry Three requires monitoring." Her words were devoid of inflection, devoid of mercy. She was the architect, the cold intellect, the unforgiving god of the forge.
**The Veins** snaked upwards from the Spine: skeletal towers of scavenged girders, reaching like skeletal fingers into the searing thermals rising from the canyon floor. Massive turbines, their blades scarred by sand, *screamed* as they devoured the 50°C updrafts, converting raw desert fury into crackling power that pulsed through thick cables snaking down the rock face. Further south, where the canyon wall caught the full, brutal force of the Saharan sun, a **glacier of black glass** clung – thousands of photovoltaic panels forming a vast, light-drinking mosaic. Heat shimmered above them in visible waves.
Clinging to the canyon floor at the Spine's base like desperate lichen was **Le Creuset** – The Crucible. A chaotic, vibrant tumor of life fed by the monastery’s dark heart. Ramshackle dwellings built from shipping container fragments, prefab domes patched with ballistic cloth, and tents woven from colorful, sun-bleached synth-silk huddled together. Narrow, winding alleys choked with dust reeked of roasting goat meat, diesel fumes, hot metal, ozone, cardamom, and unwashed humanity. An open-air market thrived in a central clearing: stalls selling fragrant couscous and flatbread jostled against others hawking high-tensile rotor bolts, counterfeit neuro-stims glowing softly in vials, intricate Tuareg silverwork, and bundles of salvaged fiber-optic cable. The tinny, distorted wail of the call-to-prayer from a small, ramshackle mosque built from stacked stone and sheet metal battled the constant, banshee shriek of turbine tests echoing down from the Spine – a discordant hymn to survival.
Five hundred souls called this furnace home. The five ex-Legionnaires joined dozens more like them – men and women with the thousand-yard stare, bodies marked by discarded wars, bearing the invisible brand of 'unadaptable'. Tuareg metal-scavengers, faces wrapped against the sun and dust, moved with the silent grace of desert foxes, their ancient knowledge of the land invaluable. Somali drone riggers, fingers dancing across cracked control pads, could make a fly-sized spy-cam navigate a sandstorm. Ukrainian armorers, haunted eyes speaking of horrors in the Euro-Wars, meticulously calibrated railgun capacitors. A community forged from exile, bound by Le Fantôme’s shadow economy. This network was the Legion’s lifeblood: armored food trucks running a brutal gauntlet from Lyon, smuggling wheels of pungent, unpasteurized Époisses and wheels of nutty Comté cheese – delicacies illegal under Corp 'safety' regulations, fetching fortunes in Dubai's sky-restaurants precisely *because* they defied the sterile norm. They carried Djibouti crab, Sardinian bottarga, and Tunisian olive oil north, and brought back micro-turbines, upcycled solar panels, and medical nanites for desert clinics south. Protect the cheese truck from Corp confiscation or warlord 'taxation', protect the dream of something real, something human, in a world being paved over by chrome and credsticks.
**The Birds: Angels of Mercy, Reapers of Vengeance**
From JEHANNE’s sterile, vibration-dampened womb emerged the Legion’s steel wings. Born from a single, brutally elegant airframe, adapted for shadow and storm:
1. **GRIFON-C (Ghost Trader):** The silent lifeline, the bankroller, the whisper in the dark. Its skin was a matte black nanocomposite, radar-absorbent, light-drinking, smoother than oiled obsidian. Sleek, almost predatory lines, built for endurance and ghosting unseen through Corp airspace patrols. The only mark of defiance: a spectral **blue fleur-de-lis** emblazoned on the tail boom – a promise, a warning. Inside, a high-efficiency PSA-block radial engine/generator *thrummed*, a deep, resonant vibration felt in the chest before heard, powering near-silent, counter-rotating main rotors that barely disturbed the air. Its soul resided in the modular belly pod: one week laden with upcycled solar panels and micro-desalinators for a Lagos clinic; the next, smuggling conflict-free Nigerien gold bullion or vacuum-sealed wheels of illegal Époisses destined for private Emirati islands. Its sound signature was the desert’s own deep sigh – a resonant *thrum* that faded into the vastness.
2. **VOUIVRE-G (Corporate Reaper):** The avenging angel sculpted from the same dark clay, twisted for righteous fury. Same core airframe, same matte black hunger for light, but overlaid with **chameleon polymer scales** – millions of microscopic plates shifting hue in milliseconds. One moment desert tan, the next concrete grey as it skimmed a cityscape, then forest green slipping over canopy. Its elegance concealed cold venom. Slung under the nose like a stinger, a liquid-nitrogen-cooled Tesla-coil charged railgun hummed with pent-up lightning, capable of turning a main battle tank into molten slag. Hydraulically operated pod doors concealed retractable 12.7mm gattling guns, barrels thick as a man's wrist, promising a storm of depleted uranium. Its sound, when it chose to break silence, was a high-pitched, silenced *scream* – the shriek of a banshee skimming treetops. Death on rotors, cloaked in illusion.
**The Trigger: Agony in Ocher Hell**
The call crackled over JEHANNE’s secure, encrypted channel, shattering the relative calm of Le Creuset’s midday furnace-blast: "Convoy Alpha-Niner under heavy contact! Agadez Highway, Sector Echo! Boko Haram technicals, heavy weapons! Cargo critical – Lagos MSF hospital!" The cargo: Upcycled solar panels and compact water purifiers, financed by the Legion's shadow-trade profits. Life bought with contraband cheese.
Three GRIFON-Cs – **SPECTRE, WRAITH, SHADE** – tore from the canyon, rotors biting the superheated air. They dropped into chaos near Agadez. A haboob, a towering wall of ochre sand, had swallowed the highway, reducing visibility to arm's length, a stinging, choking hell. Thermals showed the convoy – three battered trucks – surrounded by heat blooms swarming like angry wasps. Fast ropes snaked down. Legionnaires, clad in light desert camo and breather masks, rappelled into the swirling maelstrom. They hit the bucking trucks running, met instantly by screaming fanatics materializing from the dust storm. It was close-quarters savagery – brutal efficiency against fanatical frenzy. Knives flashed in the gloom, rifle butts cracked against bone, grenades thumped dully, swallowed by the howling wind. Sand gritted in weapons, eyes, throats. Every breath was fire.
Corporal Alain Lefevre, one of the original five from Marseille, a quiet man with steady hands and a dry wit, was dragging a wounded Tuareg scavenger towards **WRAITH** when a ragged burst from an ancient Kalashnikov ripped through the storm. Three rounds punched high into his chest. He staggered, grunted, but kept hauling, shoving the scavenger towards the waiting crew chief’s outstretched hand. He turned, raising his rifle one-handed, firing controlled bursts into the swirling ochre, covering the last desperate scramble as the final solar panel was wrestled into **SPECTRE**'s pod. Blood soaked his tunic, dark and slick.
As **SHADE** began lifting the last Legionnaires clear, a guttural, mechanical roar cut through the storm's wail. A technical, invisible until that moment, lurched over a nearby dune. Mounted on its back, rusted but lethal: a ZU-23 anti-aircraft cannon. Its twin barrels began traversing towards the vulnerable, ascending GRIFONs.
Lefevre, slumped against a bullet-riddled truck tire, saw it through a haze of pain and dust. Blood frothed on his lips. He triggered his mic, the sound a wet, desperate rattle swallowed by the storm. "JEHANNE... CLEANSE! Target... bearing zero-nine-five... dune crest..."
From 300 meters above, unseen, riding the thermals above the haboob like a vulture, **VOUIVRE-G "LAMENT"** answered. It didn't dive; it *fell*. A black comet streaking down through the swirling ochre. No warning whine, no engine scream. Just the sudden, actinic, sun-bright flash that bleached the sandstorm white for a microsecond. Where the technical stood, a miniature star bloomed. The hypersonic tungsten slug struck with the force of celestial wrath. The vehicle, the gun, the men – vanished. Not destroyed. *Vaporized*. In their place, a ten-meter-wide disc of sand fused into smoldering, black glass, radiating intense heat that warped the air.
Back in Le Creuset’s stifling, claustrophobic med-bay – a reinforced shipping container lined with trauma kits, the air thick with the coppery stench of blood and antiseptic – Lefevre lay on a cold stainless-steel table. The GRIFONs had howled back, turbines shrieking at the edge of failure. Too late. Le Fantôme stood beside him, having flown out with the desperate med-evac. His massive frame seemed diminished in the harsh light. Lefevre’s breathing was a wet, bubbling rasp. His eyes, clouded with pain and shock, found Le Fantôme’s. The monitors beeped a frantic, slowing rhythm. Then, with a surge of terrifying clarity, Lefevre’s gaze locked onto the Ghost. His lips moved, struggling. A raw, scraping sound emerged, clear and chilling over the med-bay’s hum: **"Pas de fleurs."** *No flowers.* A pause, a desperate intake of breath that gurgled. **"Du feu."** *Fire.*
His head lolled to the side. The monitors screamed a single, flatline note that echoed in the sudden, suffocating silence. Le Fantôme reached out a massive, calloused hand and gently closed Lefevre’s staring eyes. The words weren't a request. They were a last will, a testament, a command etched in blood on the desert glass. The Corps who sold the gun, the system that enabled it, would burn.
**Operation: Fleur du Mal - Dawn's Crimson Baptism**
Bruxelles. The gleaming, sterile heart of EuroCorp power. Towers of glass and plasteel pierced the twilight sky, monuments to cold calculation and unchecked avarice. The **EuroCorp Security Summit** pulsed within a newly constructed fortress-complex near the EU Parliament – a bunker disguised as a palace of commerce. Inside, under crystal chandeliers, champagne flowed in rivers. Canapés crafted by cloned delicacies passed on silver trays. Deals worth billions were murmured over handshakes and data-pad flashes. Among the glittering parasites: Helena Vance, EuroCorp Africa Director. Her division’s quarterly reports, buried under layers of encryption, listed the "efficient asset liquidation" of outdated ZU-23 AA systems – sold via labyrinthine shell companies to "private security contractors facilitating regional resource acquisition." Contractors like Boko Haram.
**0500 Hours, Antwerp Docks:** The pre-dawn gloom hung heavy and damp over the North Sea. The Liberian-flagged grain freighter *Sea Breeze*, a rust-streaked behemoth, seemed asleep at its berth. Deep within its cavernous hold, concealed behind false bulkheads smelling of damp grain and rat droppings, a deck hatch groaned open. Five matte-black shapes, chameleon scales shimmering like oil on water for a fleeting moment, dropped silently into the chill air. **VOUIVRE-Gs: LAMENT, VENGEANCE, FURY, WRATH, RETRIBUTION.** They sank low, rotors a bare, resonant whisper above the deep thrum of their engines, skimming nap-of-earth. They flew so low their landing skids skimmed the dew-laden grass of Belgian farm fields, leaving dark trails, icing over as they crossed mist-shrouded streams. They were phantoms riding the contours of the land, unseen, unheard, leaving only a faint tremor felt by sleeping cattle.
**0617 Hours, Bruxelles:** Dawn bruised the eastern horizon, staining the sky in streaks of purple and molten gold, reflecting coldly in the glass towers. The VOUIVREs rose like vengeful wraiths over the gothic spires and modern monstrosities of the EU Parliament district. Rotor wash, suddenly unleashed from silent flight, became a localized hurricane. It ripped the tricolor flags flanking the Summit building to fluttering tatters, shredded ornamental trees, and sent discarded data-pads skittering like autumn leaves. Their chameleon scales flickered with impossible speed, shifting from void-black to perfectly mirror the bruise-purple and gold of the dawn sky. They weren't just camouflaged; they were voids against the awakening day.
A single, unnervingly calm voice, filtered through JEHANNE’s crystalline comms, echoed in the pilots' helmets. Le Fantôme, watching the satellite feed from the smoky gloom of the *Lion Étranglé*, Marseille's dawn just beginning to grey the windows: **"Pour Lefevre."** *For Lefevre.* A pause heavy with the weight of the Sahara. **"Pour le Sahara."** *For the Sahara.* The final words, delivered with glacial finality: **"Brûlez tout."** *Burn it all.*
Belly pods hissed open with pneumatic sighs. Hydraulic arms, gleaming with oil, unfolded the 12.7mm gattlings – **steel petals blooming into obscene, multi-barreled flowers of annihilation.** There was no demand, no grandstanding. Just the sudden, deafening, soul-shattering roar of five rotary cannons unleashing synchronized hell.
**The First Burst:** A concentrated storm of depleted-uranium slugs, thousands per second, converged on the Summit building’s entire bulletproof facade. It didn't just shatter; it *detonated*. Glass, steel reinforcement, and composite shielding exploded inward in a deadly, glittering avalanche of shrapnel, filling the opulent lobby with diamond death.
**The Second Burst:** Walked with deliberate, mechanical precision across the secure courtyard below. Armored limousines, parked like chrome beetles, were the first targets. The heavy slugs punched through meta-human bodyguards in tailored suits – flesh, bone, and chrome disintegrating in sprays of crimson and sparks. The limousines didn't offer protection; their armor crumpled like foil, interiors transforming into charnel houses of shredded leather and mangled metal. Screams, raw and primal, erupted from within the building and the courtyard.
Panic, pure and unadulterated, seized the summit. CEOs, faces contorted in grotesque masks of terror, scrambled from shattered tables, diving beneath massive marble slabs that offered the illusion of sanctuary. CorpSec cyborgs, emerging from hidden wall panels and ceiling hatches, weapons humming to life, were cut down mid-stride. Hypersonic railgun slugs from **VENGEANCE** and **FURY** punched through cybernetic torsos, detonating power cells in showers of blue-white sparks and shrapnel, transforming million-nuyen combat platforms into shrieking, sparking scrap. The VOUIVREs hovered, utterly relentless, terrifyingly precise. **Low. Slow. Obscenely Loud.** This wasn't shadowrunning. This was a brigade-level assault, a declaration of war carved in fire and lead, a message to the new Authorities: *Look up.*
* **Target Acquisition:** JEHANNE’s cold, inhuman logic painted Helena Vance’s location deep within the building’s sub-levels – a panic room rated against bunker-busters, shielded by meters of ferro-concrete and plasteel. Thermal, seismic, and EM scans overlaid on the pilot’s HUD. **LAMENT** pivoted smoothly, its railgun humming as capacitors charged with a rising, high-pitched whine that cut through the gunfire roar.
* **Kill Shot:** A single hypersonic tungsten bolt, accelerated to obscene velocity, spat from **LAMENT**'s railgun with machined indifference. It punched through three levels of reinforced concrete flooring, through layers of plasteel shielding, through biometric locks and panic room doors, like a hot needle through wet paper. Inside the hermetically sealed, soundproofed room, Helena Vance, mid-sentence into a frantic comm-link, simply ceased to exist. Replaced instantly by an expanding cloud of pink mist, vaporized tissue, and a smear of carbon scoring on the far, now-molten wall.
As abruptly as the storm began, it ceased. The gattlings whirred to a stop. The VOUIVREs peeled away, chameleon scales flickering back to void-black, engines surging as they dropped below the skyline, melting into the morning smog, the chaos, and the converging wail of sirens before the first stunned EuroCorp air response drone could achieve weapons lock.
On the Rue de la Loi, amidst the settling dust, the moans of the wounded, the crackle of fires, and the hysterical wail of sirens, a child stood frozen. Shock had wiped her face blank. At her feet lay a twisted shard of matte-black composite, still radiating warmth, edges sharp. Absently, drawn by the color, she picked it up. On its inner surface, partially obscured by soot and scorch marks, was a faint, defiant emblem: a **blue fleur-de-lis.**
**The Aftermath: Echoes in the Abyss**
Newsfeeds across the globe erupted. "UNPRECEDENTED TERRORIST ATROCITY!" "SHADOWRUNNER ARMY DECLARES WAR ON CIVILIZATION!" Corp spokes-avatars, digitally smoothed faces radiating synthetic outrage, filled screens, vowing "swift and terrible retribution," pointing fingers at rival megacorps, anarchist collectives, rogue states – anyone but the reflection in their own polished plasteel walls.
In the perpetual twilight of the *Lion Étranglé*, the air hung thick with acrid smoke from cheap cigars and the cloying sweetness of Pastis. Le Fantôme, Ricci wiping the same glass endlessly, and the scarred men and women of the Ghost Legion watched the feeds on a flickering trid screen. No cheers erupted. No fists pumped. No laughter. Only the hard set of jaws clenched tight enough to crack teeth, the cold, diamond-hard glint in eyes that had stared into the abyss and found their reflection staring back. The satisfaction was there, but it was the grim satisfaction of wolves who had finally torn out the hunter’s throat, tasting blood and knowing the hunt was far from over. Le Fantôme raised a glass of cloudy Pastis, the liquid catching the dim light like liquid amber.
"To Lefevre," his voice was the low growl of settling rock, carrying the weight of the desert. Silence. Then, rougher: "To the Ghosts."
They drank. The Pastis tasted of anise, of wormwood bitterness, of regret, and overwhelmingly, of the cold, metallic ashes of the arrogant.
Deep in the Ahaggar Mountains, the relentless heartbeat of The Spine never faltered. JEHANNE’s drones, untouched by human rage or grief, moved with undiminished precision in the sterile, shadowed light of Level 3. Sparks flew as they welded the skeletal frames of new VOUIVRE-Gs. The order book, accessed only through the deepest, most encrypted layers of the Dark Matrix, glowed a persistent, demanding crimson. A warlord in Mali wanted six GRIFON-Cs for "expedited logistics support." An eco-anarchist cell in the Seattle Metroplex, emboldened by the Brussels strike, requested a VOUIVRE-G and a pilot "willing to deliver a decisive message" to Evo’s gene-splicing farms. Payment offered in untraceable crypto-credits and a crate of pre-Collapse Château Lafite salvaged from a Parisian vault.
The French Foreign Legion had discarded them. The Republic offered no home. The Corporatocracy offered only exploitation or annihilation. They had forged their own home. Not in the fertile soil of nations, but in the long, cold, unforgiving shadows those entities cast across the fractured 6th World. They were the unseen army, the brigade-level shadowrunners. They protected the small flames – the baker's oven, the cheesemaker's vat, the water-seller's cart – in the gathering global storm. And their method? Turning the tools of their tormentors into instruments of terrifying, undeniable consequence. They weren't shadows anymore; they were the storm itself.
High above Le Creuset, a GRIFON-C lifted off, its belly pod heavy with Lyon cheese and Tuareg-forged steel bearings, bound for the hidden markets of Tunis. As it cleared the canyon rim, the rising Saharan sun caught its tail boom for a fleeting second. The light glinted, fierce and defiant, on the spectral **blue fleur-de-lis**. A silent, indelible warning etched against the dawn sky, a beacon for the lost and a brand for the corrupt.
*Look up. The sky is black.*
*And the fleur-de-lis bleeds blue.*
The desert wind, scouring the ancient stone, carried the fading, resonant *thrum* of rotors – the sound of ghosts going to work. The work was far from done. The fire, once lit, would not be easily extinguished.
