Fallout 4: Rebirth At Vault 81

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Drenner's men tried to fall back, but now the angles were working against them. From both the front and rear, Sanctuary's troops surged forward. Kara and MacCready took the left flank, driving hard. The XO fired again and again, blood staining his coat, but his shots were wilder now—less disciplined. He was cornered, and he knew it.

The chaos inside the Vault's command chamber was beginning to thin, but only because the battle had turned. The tide wasn't turning—it had already crashed down. Robert's platoon, led by six armored titans in Power Armor, pushed through Drenner's dug-in men like wolves tearing into a cornered pack. Red lights flickered across the chamber. Smoke curled from sparking terminals and shattered ceiling panels. The stale, metallic scent of ozone clung to the air, joined by the sharper coppery tang of blood.

And in the center of it all, MacCready moved.

The momentary rush of adrenaline had given way to something sharper, colder. His side ached from where he'd slammed into the console during his fight. Kara limped beside him, her right knee stiff and swollen from a piece of shrapnel that had glanced off her thigh plate, but she didn't complain.

Across the scorched tile floor, Drenner's second-in-command was down—barely.

The man was bleeding from the shoulder where MacCready had hit him, and from a brutal strike Kara had landed across his temple. He knelt now, one hand pressed to the floor, the other bound at the wrist by Kara's zip cuffs. His battle rifle lay shattered near the wall. His dark eyes—piercing, intelligent—were the only parts of him that didn't seem bruised or broken.

"You're lucky we don't do summary executions," Kara spat, panting as she shoved him hard against a cracked steel cabinet. "You'd already be meat."

The XO coughed, blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. Still, he grinned. "You assume you've won."

MacCready crouched beside him, setting the butt of his rifle gently on the ground. He wasn't in a hurry. Not with the way things were unraveling now. "Name," he said calmly.

The XO didn't answer.

"Where's Drenner?" MacCready asked next, his voice still measured but edged in steel. "He's not here. I know it. You're covering for something—buying time. Why?"

The XO's lips curled again. "You think I'm scared of you? You're a merc in a borrowed uniform. You don't even know what you're standing on."

Kara stepped forward, teeth gritted. "Say that again and I'll make sure you don't stand on anything again."

"Easy," MacCready said, raising a hand. His eyes stayed locked with the man's. "You don't need to be scared. Just smart. Because in about five minutes, Robert's gonna level every corridor in this Vault whether you're tied to a chair or not. And I don't think you're the kind of guy who wants to die for someone else's throne."

The XO's jaw tightened. He said nothing, but the flicker in his eyes gave him away. Doubt. Calculation.

MacCready leaned in. "You want to know what Drenner's done? He send spies into Sanctuary. Disturb our water shipment. You think that's loyalty? You think that's leadership?"

He paused.

"No," MacCready said, voice quieter now. "That's a coward who sends other men to die while he hides in a hole."

The man's breath hitched—barely—but it was enough.

Kara saw it too. "He's here, isn't he?" she said. "Still deeper. What's down there?"

The XO looked away.

But MacCready wasn't done.

"I've seen this before," he said, standing. "A warlord with delusions of grandeur and a private army who thinks he's smarter than the world. You probably believed him, didn't you? Thought he was gonna make the world new. Clean. Fair. All it took was following orders. All it took was fire."

The XO glared at him. But the fire behind his stare was weakening, buried beneath layers of exhaustion and blood loss.

"Where is he?" MacCready asked again.

Silence.

Then—quietly, bitterly—came the answer.

"Sub-level three. South reactor wing."

Kara blinked. "What's down there?"

The XO's eyes flicked toward her. "Everything he couldn't let go."

Meanwhile, in the heart of the Vault, Robert was a god of war.

His Power Armor's hydraulic limbs hissed and groaned with every step, floor plates buckling beneath his weight. His minigun spun up, the barrels a blur as it mowed down the last cluster of Drenner's entrenched riflemen trying to hold a barricade near the medical sector.

Behind him, soldiers moved with ruthless efficiency—room by room, corridor by corridor. Sanctuary's training program, refined over months under Sico's command, was now showing its true worth. These weren't just raiders with better guns—they were soldiers. Disciplined. Focused. Fearless.

"Clear!" someone shouted from a side room.

"Secure!" came another.

Robert raised his visor and stepped into a wide hall, pausing only to survey the ruined defenses.

"We're wrapping this up," he said into his comms. "Sweep the labs, secure engineering. No one gets out. No one hides."

He waited for the double click of confirmation from the other squad leads before moving on. His mind was already on the next step: linking up with MacCready and pressing further down.

If Drenner had a last card to play, it would be in the bowels of this place.

MacCready and Kara moved fast, using the main elevator shaft to descend toward Sub-Level Three. The lift was nonfunctional, but the maintenance ladder ran all the way down. Kara grimaced as she climbed, her injured leg slowing her, but she refused help.

"This is the last stop, huh?" she muttered between breaths.

MacCready grunted. "Feels like it."

The ladder shaft was lit by emergency glow strips, casting their shadows like specters along the metal walls. Echo squad was thinned out—half of them wounded or securing upper levels—but they weren't alone.

Three soldiers from Robert's main line had linked up with them, including Sergeant Ellison, a quiet man with a shotgun strapped to his back and a burn scar across half his cheek.

"We've got your six," Ellison said when they reached the bottom.

Sub-Level Three was different. It didn't look like the rest of the Vault.

There were signs of rapid excavation. Walls half-torn, foundations reinforced with scavenged metal beams. Fusion-powered lights buzzed overhead, jury-rigged to old Vault circuits. Whatever this place had once been—storage? research?—it had been transformed into something darker. A sanctum. A lab. A fortress.

And it was quiet.

Too quiet.

"Eyes open," MacCready whispered.

Sub-Level Three exhaled cold metal breath with every step they took. The deeper they moved, the more it felt like walking into a grave someone had tried to dress up as a throne room. The halls were too wide for comfort, and the lighting overhead stuttered as though even the old Vault-Tec wiring didn't want to see what waited at the end.

MacCready led the way, rifle tight in his grip, Kara limping beside him, teeth clenched, pushing through the pain with each step. Behind them came Sergeant Ellison and the two soldiers from Robert's company—Duke and Harper—both quiet, alert, watching every vent, every junction, every sound.

Their boots echoed on the polished floor—too clean for this deep in the Wasteland. Too clean for the kind of rot they knew was waiting.

The corridor opened gradually into a vast chamber, like the belly of some long-dead machine. And there he was.

Drenner.

He stood beneath a glowing overhead projector, surrounded by flickering holotapes and cracked screens, the floor beneath his feet polished black steel, reinforced with scavenged plating and Vault-Tec alloys. He was encased in full Power Armor—not just cobbled together pieces, but a heavily modified T-60 suit painted a deep, stormy gray with streaks of crimson tracing the ridgelines like dried blood. His helmet was off, tucked under one arm, revealing the face of a man who had once known the sun but no longer cared for it.

His eyes burned.

His gray-streaked hair was slicked back with sweat and grime, his mouth twisted in a scowl of fury barely restrained. Flanking him were the last of his loyalists—eight men and women in hardened combat armor, some with painted bone motifs, others with jury-rigged exosuits humming with faint energy. Their weapons were up, eyes wide with defiance and cornered desperation.

MacCready stopped in the doorway. His rifle stayed raised, but he didn't fire.

Drenner took one step forward, the servo joints in his Power Armor letting out a low, hydraulic hiss. His voice boomed through the chamber, bouncing off the reinforced walls with the weight of a man who had spent too long giving orders and expecting them to be followed.

"So…" he growled. "You finally come to spoil it. All that I built. All that I bled for."

His free hand gestured to the chamber around him. "This? This was supposed to be the new capital. The new seat of power in the Commonwealth. Not some rotten old trading post with dreams of being a republic."

Kara stepped forward, rifle aimed dead at his chest. "You poisoned water shipments. You killed innocent people. You set raiders loose on whole towns just to buy time."

"You called this a dream?" MacCready added, disgust bleeding through every word.

Drenner's mouth twitched.

"You don't get it," he said, voice sharpening like a blade. "You never did. You think you've built something in Sanctuary? You think you've got a future with your little markets and patrols and peace talks?"

He stomped forward another step. The ground quaked under the weight of his armor.

"I carved this from nothing! Took scrap and corpses and made them loyal. We would've been the biggest gang in the Commonwealth. Bigger than the Gunners. Bigger than the Brotherhood. We would've ruled!"

His eyes flared. "And you bastards ruined it. And for that—"

He lowered his helmet into place.

"—you're going to pay."

Everything erupted at once.

Drenner's last loyalists opened fire, and the Vault's reactor chamber became a warzone.

Kara dove behind a collapsed console as bullets sparked off the metal housing. MacCready ducked behind a heavy processing terminal, feeling the air scream past his face as plasma bolts scorched the ground near his boot. Duke and Harper returned fire instantly, Harper shouting something over the cacophony as he took out one of the enemy gunners with a clean headshot.

Sergeant Ellison moved like a ghost, his shotgun roaring from behind a generator coil, turning another of Drenner's men into a heap of scorched limbs and armor shards.

But Drenner…

He didn't just stand in the fight—he commanded it.

He stomped forward with terrifying force, his modified Power Armor shrugging off MacCready's first shots like they were pebbles tossed at a tank. A shoulder-mounted missile launcher fired off his left pauldron, forcing Kara and Duke to scatter as the explosion tore up the floor behind them.

Kara hit the deck hard, coughing through the smoke. "He's got a targeting rig!"

"Eyes on his back!" MacCready shouted. "He's shielding the servos!"

Harper lobbed a plasma grenade over a data core—too short. It bounced and exploded near a coolant pipe, showering the chamber in steam and green light. The loyalists were closing in, forcing the Sanctuary soldiers to reposition. One of them flanked Duke and caught him square in the chest with a shotgun blast. He dropped with a cry, armor cracking.

"Medic!" Kara screamed.

But MacCready had no time to check—because Drenner was moving for him now.

The warlord charged, the thudding steps of his armor a drumbeat of death. MacCready barely had time to leap out from cover before a hydraulic fist smashed the terminal he'd been crouched behind into splinters.

MacCready rolled, hit the ground, came up shooting.

Clang. Clang. Clang.

The bullets sparked off the Power Armor but caught Drenner's helmet just enough to stagger him. Kara used the opening. She emerged from the steam with her rifle slung back, both hands gripping a launcher she'd scavenged from a fallen loyalist.

"Hey asshole!" she yelled.

Drenner turned just in time to take the full brunt of an armor-piercing rocket straight to his side.

The explosion threw him sideways, crashing into a half-dismantled reactor conduit. Sparks and steam erupted around him. One of his men tried to drag him clear, but MacCready put a bullet through his neck.

Harper and Ellison pushed forward, clearing out the last of the loyalists with ruthless precision. One screamed and tried to surrender—Ellison didn't wait to see if it was real.

In under two minutes, the chamber fell silent again.

Except for the wheeze of Drenner's suit.

The warlord lay half-embedded in the wreckage of the conduit, smoke curling from vents across his chest plate. The left arm of his Power Armor was mangled, and his helmet had been knocked free in the blast. Blood trickled down his temple, but he still breathed—still scowled.

Kara approached first, limping, gun raised. "You're done, Drenner."

"You think I'm afraid of dying?" he rasped. "I built this place knowing it would fall someday. But I made a name. I made a legacy."

MacCready knelt beside him.

"You made a grave," he said.

The reactor chamber still hummed with the remnants of violence. Shattered steel and scorched tile told the story plainly—whatever dream Drenner had tried to forge in this steel crypt had just been crushed under boot, bullet, and resolve.

He lay in the debris like a man whose gods had turned on him—bloody, broken, glaring at a world that no longer bowed.

MacCready straightened slowly, his chest heaving with the weight of the fight and the countless moments that had led to it. He could feel the ache settling into his bones, like the adrenaline was draining through his boots into the grates beneath him.

Kara kept her rifle leveled at Drenner's chest for another long breath. Only when his head slumped slightly, consciousness flickering, did she lower it—barely.

"You made a grave," MacCready had said. And looking around, he saw nothing but tombstone parts—holotapes cracked and flickering, loyalists crumpled in corners, half-melted insignias barely clinging to their makeshift armor.

"Ellison," MacCready called over his shoulder. "Cuff him. Strip what's left of that armor."

Ellison stepped forward without a word. Harper covered him from the flank while the sergeant knelt beside Drenner, yanked what was left of the warlord's gauntlet free, then zip-tied his wrists with reinforced cuffs. The man grunted faintly but didn't resist. He was spent—rage spent, strength spent, kingdom crumbled.

As Ellison pulled Drenner to his knees, MacCready turned to Kara. "How's the leg?"

She was leaning against a melted bulkhead now, her helmet off, sweat beading across her brow despite the cold. Her leg was stiff, stained from mid-thigh to knee in darkened blood.

"Hurts like a bastard," she muttered. "But I'll live."

"Good," MacCready said, then tapped his comms. "Field medic, this is MacCready. I need a report on our wounded."

There was a short burst of static, then the medic's voice cracked through. "Mac, it's Henley. Got two critical upstairs—Donner and Duke. Duke's stabilized but unconscious. Donner's lost a lot of blood. Might not make it if we don't evac soon. Everyone else is stable."

MacCready winced. He'd seen Donner stumble into that fight knowing the odds. "Get them prepped for extraction. Tell the surface team to prioritize med evac."

"Already on it. Bird's en route from the north ridge."

He looked to Kara, who was already pulling a stim pack from her pouch and stabbing it into her thigh with a grunt.

"Don't be a hero," MacCready muttered.

Kara rolled her eyes. "Too late for that."

Just then, a heavy clank echoed through the chamber entrance, followed by the deliberate, mechanical stride of something too massive to be unarmored.

Robert stepped through the smoke, his Power Armor still glowing faintly from heat discharge. The minigun was no longer spinning—it hung across his back now, like a lion too full to chase—but the look in his eyes was sharp as ever.

He took one long glance around the room—the downed loyalists, the reactor's blinking lights, the mangled corpse of what had once been Drenner's command post—and nodded.

"You did good," Robert said simply, then looked down at the restrained warlord being hoisted to his feet by Ellison. "That him?"

"Yeah," MacCready said. "The voice behind all of it. Water theft, false trades, gang consolidations, and whatever the hell this operation was supposed to be."

Robert didn't smile. "I hope he enjoyed the view. It's the last thing he'll ever see that isn't iron bars or a rope."

Drenner sneered weakly. "You idiots. You don't get it. You think this ends with me? You don't even know what you're sitting on."

MacCready took a step toward him, eye level steady.

"Then you can explain it to Sico. I'm sure he'll be real patient about the bodies you left in your wake."

Robert turned away from Drenner without another word and walked toward the far end of the reactor housing. Behind a bulkhead, two of his soldiers were placing shaped charges against the inner load-bearing walls.

MacCready followed. "You're setting charges?"

Robert nodded. "I've got two demo teams sweeping every critical corridor. Communications, engineering, power grid. We rig this place right, no one's using it again. Not slavers, not raiders, not some wannabe warlord's second wind."

MacCready ran a hand down his face, taking a long breath. "This place… it could've been something."

Robert's visor lifted just enough to show the grim lines around his eyes. "Yeah. So could Drenner."

There was a long silence between them, broken only by the occasional bark of an order over comms or the far-off hiss of a blown-out conduit venting its last.

"Vault 77 was always cursed," Robert added quietly. "One of the only Vaults without a known experiment. That's what the rumors said. But I think this was the experiment. Let people like him crawl in the dark and see what they become."

MacCready looked back toward Drenner. The man was still kneeling now, his breaths shallow, eyes locked on something far away—something none of them could see. A future he'd lost, maybe.

"Do it," MacCready said. "Level it all."

The next three hours were methodical.

Extraction teams descended from the surface. Injured soldiers were carried out on stretchers, wrapped in thermal blankets, their vitals monitored constantly by medics moving with surgical speed.

Robert oversaw the placement of the last detonators personally. His voice echoed through every level of the Vault as he called final positions.

"Sector Alpha—clear."

"Det cord set in Gamma wing."

"Fallout shields holding in place. All secondary payloads green."

MacCready and Kara escorted Drenner up through the main shaft. The warlord didn't speak anymore. Whatever defiance he'd carried into that last fight had drained out of him like fuel from a cracked tank. He walked with the half-limp of a man who'd spent everything and had nothing to show for it.

They reached the surface just as the sky was turning orange with the fading light of day.

The Wasteland stretched out in every direction, broken and burned and beautiful in the way only survivors could see. At the ridge overlooking the Vault's hidden entrance, Robert stood with his hands on a remote detonator. The soldiers formed a perimeter, eyes on the valley, weapons ready just in case.

MacCready approached slowly, Kara at his side, one hand still on her bandaged thigh.

Robert looked at him, silent.

Then he pressed the trigger.

The ground shook.

It wasn't a massive explosion—not the kind that split mountains or drew Brotherhood patrols. A distant boom followed by a plume of dust that rose from the hidden hatch like the earth itself was exhaling its disgust.

Vault 77 was gone.

Nothing left but rubble and ash.

The silence afterward felt heavier than the blast.

Kara finally broke it, staring into the valley. "Bastard thought he could build an empire in a hole."

MacCready wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. "Now it's a grave."

Robert turned to his men. "Mount up. We're heading home."

They moved quickly—efficient, silent. Drenner was loaded into a reinforced transport cage mounted on one of the Humvees. His eyes never left the ridge, not once.

Kara climbed into the passenger seat of the lead truck, groaning as she settled into the seat.

MacCready paused before joining her. He looked back toward the ridge one last time.

"Let's hope this is the last time someone tries to crawl out of Vault 77."

Robert's voice came through from behind him. "We'll make sure it is."

As the convoy rolled out under the reddening sky, with the sun bleeding across the Wasteland horizon and the wind blowing fine dust across the cracked road, MacCready sat back in his seat and finally let himself exhale.

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• Name: Sico

• Stats :

S: 8,44

P: 7,44

E: 8,44

C: 8,44

I: 9,44

A: 7,45

L: 7

• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills

• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.

• Active Quest:-