Except that Kyle Powers turned away.

He actually turned his Jupiter aside, ignoring Torrent’s charge and putting up a blistering wall of particle beams and missile barrages against the AgroMech.

A warm flush of anger heated Torrent’s brow as he pulled into a full barrage of every weapon at his disposal. Lasers flashed with ruby brightness in the gray rains, a few sparks scattering off into brilliant prisms. The LRM rack dumped out another score of warheads even as he dialed his right-arm advanced tactical missile system down to short range and let go with it and his four-pack of SRMs as well. The salvo chewed and blasted into the Jupiter’s armor, demanding Kyle Powers’ attention.

For a moment, Torrent thought that he had gained it. The Jupiter half turned in his direction, and cut loose with a bright PPC beam that flashed past him on the left-hand side. He considered it a hasty shot and braced for the follow-up. Then he counted one less Elemental on his HUD. The report of the PPC’s effective blast was radioed in to him over his channel to the armored infantry even as Powers turned back to the AgroMech, pummeling it to a broken standstill.

Torrent might be victorious or he might be defeated—it was all part and parcel to a MechWarrior’s life—but he would not be ignored! The AgroMech stumbled, falling to its knees and digging its threshing blades into the ground for support. The star colonel charged forward, closing rapidly with the Jupiter and running his heat quickly into the red band as he fired again, and again.

Now Kyle Powers turned. And he blasted Torrent with everything the Jupiter had left. Two particle cannon arced brilliant scourges between the two machines, flaying away armor and rocking the Tundra Wolf back on its heels. Four ultra-class autocannons spat out long tongues of fire and longer streams of depleted-uranium slugs. Armor flew off in shards and splinters. And behind all this damage, missiles corkscrewed in to blossom two-dozen destructive fireballs that lifted the Tundra Wolf up and set it back several meters.

Hunching forward, throwing every bit of his equilibrium into fighting gravity, Torrent kept the Tundra Wolf on its feet by sheer force of will. Waves of heat slammed into him with almost physical force, and his vision swam with heat stress and the blurred ferroglass shield.

His wireframe schematic showed better than sixty percent armor loss, and the telltales on two medium lasers and one of his missile racks lit up to signify that they had been destroyed. He didn’t need to see a readout on his engine—he could tell from the rising temperature levels that Powers had cracked the reactor’s physical shielding.

Damning his heat curve, Torrent wrestled his ’Mech to a full-front profile, biting and clawing with every weapon left to him. There was no planning now, no grand strategy. His simple counterattack was brutal and effective. Lasers cut deeply into the Jupiter’s leg. His Streak Missile Rack misfired, holding back the four short-range warheads, but his ATMS locked on and managed to spend more crippling damage into an already-ruined knee joint.

The Jupiter’s right knee actuator crushed in on itself, staggering the mighty titan. It fell to one knee as if bending down in supplication. But rather than shove back, Powers threw his arms out wide and divided his weapons again. In what Torrent might have considered a spectacular display of targeting any other time—any other time when the tactic wasn’t insulting him–the Knight-Errant scoured away more of the Tundra Wolf’s armor with PPCs, gutted the engine on the rising AgroMech with his left arm autocannon, and even managed to score double-wounds against the advancing M1 Marksman with his right arm ACs.

The martyr son-of-a-Blakist was still taking on all-comers.

Grinding his teeth together, Torrent rocked his throttles forward and advanced. Drawing his targeting crosshairs in a line across the Jupiter’s shoulders, he counted his thundering heartbeats until the reticle burned the flashed a golden tone of targeting lock and then waited a second more until he could steady the shot with a confident touch on the controls.

He would show the Knight-Errant’s foolishness in disregarding Torrent as a worthy adversary. Steel Wolf or Republic Knight. One of them would die trying.

Raul Ortega caught on to the Knight-Errant’s plan from the start. By keeping Raul’s Legionnaire in close, and always dividing his fire, he acted as a lodestone, drawing Torrent in and making certain the Steel Wolf remained focused exclusively on the Jupiter even while Powers was free to whittle away at the enemy defenses.

Long-range jousting caught the enemy Maxim APC in a series of devastating scourges, left it dead or dying far in the Steel Wolf backfield. The AC-toting AgroMechs were a threat, flanking the tight Republic force, but Powers let them come, always adding a brace of missiles here, or a scouring pull from his autocannons there. Waiting. Waiting for Torrent to make his move.

And then he unleashed hell.

Too late. Raul knew it, and was certain that Powers had known it even beforehand. Powers had warned Raul, after all, that Torrent was out for blood. If the fire-gutted Jessie wasn’t proof of that, the star colonel’s pincer-charge confirmed it.

Raul bit back any further warnings, inhaled deeply against the steel-band grip around his chest, and worked his rotary autocannon in a series of long and short pulls to hammer one of the AgroMechs into submission. The surviving hovercraft missile carrier had slid around behind the Torrent’s Marksman, threatening its slightly weaker rear armor and trying to pull it away while their Saxon APC dropped Purifier infantry in a skirmish line around the AgroMech.

He was looking away when Kyle Powers’ Jupiter stumbled to one knee.

He turned back in time to watch Sir Kyle Powers die.

Not two hundred meters distant through the gray downpour, Star Colonel Torrent’s Tundra Wolf towered over the kneeling outline of Kyle Powers’ Jupiter. Raul watched as the Knight Errant divided his fire in three directions, a stunning display of BattleMech command but dangerous—so dangerous—point blank with the Tundra Wolf. Raul pulled back around his own weapons, coming to Powers’s aid despite the Knight’s earlier orders. His Legionnaire swiveled at the waist. His right-arm laser had barely acquired targeting lock when Torrent proved just how deadly he could be. Even at a distance and through the curtains of rain, Raul saw the glowing wound of a laser-cut slicing from the Jupiter’s chest up into—and through—the ferroglass canopy… which was all that stood between a MechWarrior and a closed-casket service.

Raul knew a moment of hope—a moment of denial—when the Jupiter shifted as if adjusting its weight to stand back up. A trick of the rain. The great machine twisted around on its knee, showing him the horrible, red-wealed scar that now ruined the cockpit. Then it pitched forward and slammed facedown into the desert mud. He knew that Powers was dead. Knew it in the same way he felt the Sphere Knight enter a room—down in his gut. This time it was a hollow feeling, the loss of something Raul had come to rely on in recent days. The sinking sensation as he realized that the entire battle—the expectations of a watching planet—had just settled on his own shoulders.

“Down! Jove is down!” A frantic call from the JES carrier’s crew shook Raul from his stunned lethargy. “Captain… Captain Ortega, we’ve lost Sir Powers.”

They had. But Raul would not let them lose Achernar in the same battle.

Before he had even considered a proper tactical response, the Mech Warrior pulled into his primary triggers. Medium lasers stabbed ruby knives into the Tundra Wolf’s side while his overhead rotary spent a long, lethal stream of fifty-mil slugs hammering into the Tundra Wolf. The autocannon roared out hundreds of rounds. Two hundred. Three. Four, five, six…