Murder Machine Novels & Stories

"The archivist didn't come to start a war; he came because he knows the machine won't open for a warlord. If you lock me in this room while the keys to the continental grid are sitting at my gates, you are fracturing the very empire we built last night." "The machine wants the version of you that didn't have a mate, Coral!" Clyde bellows back, his large hands flying up to capture my jaw with a grip that is tight, desperate, and entirely unyielding. The friction between our auras sends a blinding ripple of lilac and gold static crackling across the ceiling. "If that datapad triggers the final pulse because you are carrying my blood—"

"Stop asking stupid questions! what were you thinking you dummy, that I'm doing this without a gain from it? apart from my lust on those women's body, I have investors who are interested on the videos and pictures of all the ladies I abused!" "What!" Alice and Powell exclaims in unison with wide eyes. "It must be him who killed my daughter. Son of a bitch!" Powell gave a manly growl and gritted his teeth with his fist clenched to the floor he grabbed his gun and shot at the door and that triggered Dark Blood anger and he shoots steadily on the door.

Enraged, they hurled stones and dirty water at me. "Officer, execute him as soon as possible! We won't feel safe otherwise!" "Damn it–this kind of monster kills, dumps the body, cheats on his wife, and still tries to frame her? He deserves to die!" "He must be a psychopath–who else would murder someone and dump the body in broad daylight?" Suddenly, a thought struck me. I struggled again and shouted, "Officer–after all this, who exactly are you saying I killed?"

“You are killing them. You are turning them into parts of a machine.” ​“We were always parts of a machine, Winnie!” Kael roared, the obsidian plates on his chest shifting with his anger. “Silas’s machine was made of cold iron and calculations. This machine is made of blood and shared dreams. We are no longer individuals struggling for a scrap of heat. We are the Grove. We are the ending that the First Architects intended.” ​I raised my rifle, my finger hovering over the trigger. “You’re a parasite, Kael. And I’m the exterminator.”

The moldy scent of the cellar filled my lungs, but I forced my breathing to slow, matching the steady, mechanical beat of a heart that had already accepted the possibility of death. I had to be a machine. A machine doesn't feel pain. A machine doesn't fear the muzzle of a gun. It just executes. The door groaned on its hinges. A sliver of light from the hallway above sliced through the darkness, a golden blade cutting the gloom. "Hey, wake up, sunshine," a voice called out. It was a man’s voice, thick with boredom. He sounded like a farmer checking on cattle, indifferent to the suffering he was overseeing.

Stephanos slipped inside, keeping low, a mouse that knew the hawks by name. To the left, soldiers stripped and cleaned rifles, stacked ammunition in patient towers. A corporal cursed a jam in clipped Saxon syllables; a private answered with a joke that didn’t quite land. Tin cups steamed beside a drum of bitter coffee that had forgotten the word bean. At the chamber’s centre—raised on a crate like an altar—sat the machine. APG MARK I.

I asked looking around. "That's what I was telling Amy. My toys are here." He replied casually like it wasn't one of the strangest thing he ever said. Carlos noticed my blank expression that's why he continued. "Well these 'Toys' are used to give someone a brutal death. Thier are so many ways you can kill someone brutally. We have different levels of machines depending on person's deed. Starting from basic to horrendous ways of dying. Like have you heard about peeling of human skin and putting the body on fire, cutting the head, electrocuting someone, inserting pins in the whole body-"

I was once the Pythia, an oracle of Apollo. After marrying the late king, I became known as the Oracle Priestess. When my husband died in battle, I faked my death and returned to the temple. From then on, I devoted myself to protecting the capital with the gods' blessing. Then one day, they brought my daughter's body into the temple. She was covered in raw, unhealed wounds, and her eyes were still open. The attendants tossed her body, wrapped in nothing but a straw mat, onto the floor. Then they stood nearby whispering. "Poor princess. The king cared more about the Rose of Highcourt than his own sister. He let her suffer until her wounds became infected and she died in agony. "King Theron wa

"I don't want to murder someone unless I have to. Bullets were squandered. But she's a lot more helpful to me living than she is deceased. You have my word on it." "Regrettably, your word is worthless. I've met guys like you, John. You may act out emotions, even regret and affection, however, you don't really mean them, we all know that and will never have. It's all just a show, a ruse to achieve what you really intend. You may act as if you have any sense of integrity, however, that doesn't make it real. You're bereft of everything that constitutes someone humanely. You're nothing other than a machine."

Luca POV The board looked impossible, it didn't look difficult or complicated. Impossible. Kai had taken over the main screen, pulling together everything we had—Matteo’s data, Hartwell’s internal access, Isabella’s structural insight—and turned it into something we could actually see. And what I saw…Was a machine. Not an organization, not a network. A machine. Cold, precise, self-sustaining built to survive anything. “Jesus…” Marcus muttered under his breath.