After the Revolution · Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

Chapter Twenty Three

July 23, 2021·1 hr 40 min·5 clips

Sasha snorts ketamine before battle, immediately vomits, and Roland and Jim laugh in delight.

Civilians and warriors gather while Mike positions their little group on a hill above the scene. Sasha asks what is happening, and Mike tells him they are there to watch her take their faces. The story then shifts to Roland and the machinery being assembled around him. Jim's men strap him into a murder suit unlike the powered armor he faced a few days ago in Dallas or the gear he remembered from his days as an American soldier. Sardar walks him through the gauntlets with relish. One side carries scatter-rockets meant for anti-personnel use. The other side can punch a tiny bronze dart through the front armor of a Leopard Mark V. Roland takes in the workshop of death that Jim had flown out here. From the outside, it looked a bit like a shipping container, but it had been built for violence with careful, rounded edges and a glossy finish. The armor is practical, dense, and ugly in the way serious war gear tends to be. Roland's nerves still react to the process anyway. He feels the old nausea of preparation even though his body is no longer fully human. The story stays close to the logistics of killing. It lingers on hardware, on placement, on the difference between a weapon that maims and one that punches through steel. That attention keeps the scene grounded instead of decorative. The tone keeps slipping between tactical detail and black humor. Then the story jumps forward to the Brazos. Roland's armored body lies beside an old semi-truck, apparently dead. Two men are already down in front of him. The others think he has been killed by his own hand. They move in, expecting a corpse. Instead, Roland lifts his ruined head and speaks. Blood is still running out of his face. Teeth are missing. Daylight shows through his skull. Even so, he asks who the fuck are you people. The ending turns shock into a brutal joke and makes the moment feel less like a label than a warning.

As heard by us

A brutal chapter where precise war hardware turns spectacle into dread.

Chapter Twenty Three puts two pressures side by side: a city gathering that wants to see violence, and Roland locked into a custom killing suit with ugly hardware.

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Why you'd press play

Play this if you want war prep that ends in a brutal reveal.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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