Military science fiction with the throttle wide open. A powered exosuit. Four combat drones. One mercenary with no one left to trust. A near future war story built to read like a movie, where the hardware feals real and every fight leaves a mark.

In Neocrest City, the corporations won the war against the aliens and kept the spoils. Tiberius Novak takes their contracts because the registry that keeps him legal is the same leash that keeps him owned. One extraction job. One scientist. Simple work, until the thing guarding that lab turns out to be wearing human skin.

Then his registration is pulled and a price goes on his head. No legal protection. No contracts. Nothing left but a battered suit, a pack of drones held together by an engineer who should have walked away, and a small salvaged machine named after a promise he could not keep.

The scientist knows what the Functionaries are really building: soldiers who feel no fear, take no orders, and never come home in a box. Bury the truth and Tiberius survives another year on corporate scraps. Expose it and he takes on an empire that owns the city, the law, and everyone breathing in it. Either way, the leash comes off. He just has to live long enough to choose which.

For readers who want powered exosuits and combat drones rendered by someone who knows how the wiring actually works. For anyone who likes a corporate dystopia with teeth, a hero who survives on grit and improvisation instead of plot armor, and the kind of partnership where the person keeping the suit alive matters as much as the one wearing it.