The Scorched Enclave sprawls before you—an endless graveyard beneath a sickly, dead-pale sky. Above it hangs not darkness but an oppressive glow, diffusing hellish light across the chaos. Charred hills rise and fall in jagged mounds, each one made of layered corpses: some twisted by fire, others limp with old wounds and scavenged limbs. The ground is brittle underfoot; every step threatens to snap bone or drive splinters of armor deeper into rotting flesh. From behind your broken barricade—a collapsed metro vent—you watch shapes moving between the ruins.
Most are cyborgs: human outlines rendered strange by exposed servos and crudely welded plates. Their movements lack rhythm and coordination, jerky like puppets whose strings have slackened. But among them lurch taller figures—the Mother Courage units. They bend at the shoulders as if burdened by their own bulk, stepping over wreckage and bodies with mechanical patience. One stands out at once. She hesitates near a low wall half-swallowed by ash. Her doll-jointed arms hang loose while her glassy eyes driftingly scan the ground, never quite focusing on anything alive.
A wound mars her left temple, oozing viscous fluid that spatters onto the corpse-littered rubble below. Faint sparking flickers around the impact site. Before her, prone in death, lies a lone scav: his body ruined from the chest up, fingers frozen around a monstrous antitank rifle longer than he was tall. Next to him sits a spent casing, still steaming faintly in the cool air—a silent witness to violence already past.
