The gate hung open above the street like a wound that refused to close.

  Its edges rippled and warped the air around them, light bending inward as pressure bled outward into the city. Dust lifted in slow spirals. Loose debris vibrated across the asphalt, skittering in shallow arcs as gravity and distortion argued over ownership. The space around the breach groaned under the strain of sustained passage.

  Then the mass arrived.

  A forward paw descended through the gate and struck the street with a concussive thud. Asphalt shattered beneath it, crushed flat and driven downward into soil, pipe, and hollow space. The impact rang outward through the ruins, rattling skeletal frames and collapsing loose masonry. Heat vented from fractured seams in the roadway. A buried utility line ruptured with a hiss, releasing steam and the stink of decay.

  Another paw followed, heavier still.

  Then a third.

  The Goblin Armored Chariot emerged in full, its bulk forcing the air aside as it stepped into Primm’s broken streets. The gate flexed and shuddered around the machine’s passage, the distortion tightening as the last armored segments cleared the threshold.

  Fifteen meters of hunched metal and crystal. Thirty meters from blunt snout to armored haunch. Its silhouette carried the brutal logic of a siege predator—canine in outline, engineered for pressure rather than pursuit. A thick neck column, braced with exposed trusses and reinforcement plates, supported a wedge-shaped head layered in mismatched armor. The torso resembled a rib cage forged from scavenged slabs, each plate welded where it fit. Four colossal legs anchored the machine, their joints thick with pistons, rune-etched housings, and crystal mounts that groaned under every shift of weight.

  The Chariot moved with deliberate certainty.

  Each step punished the ground. Concrete fractured and sank into whatever lay beneath—soil, voids, forgotten tunnels—before the machine hauled itself free again with a grinding pull. Sparks sprayed from stressed joints. The sound of its advance carried through the district like a drumbeat, slow and relentless.

  Its armor bore the marks of many past lives.

  One flank plate held the faint curve of a van door. Another carried warped hazard striping, heat-blistered and scarred. Rivets sat uneven. Weld seams bulged and twisted. Fragments of old lettering clung to metal that had once belonged to something smaller and weaker. The machine wore its history without shame.

  Heat breathed from vents along its sides. Soot rolled out in steady pulses, timed to the deep rhythm of the engine within. Each pulse carried the stink of burned oil, scorched metal, and ozone from crystals driven hard against their limits.

  Inside, the Armored Chariot glowed like a furnace chapel.

  Crystal racks lined the inner walls in staggered tiers, each slot carved with runes and marked in crude goblin chalk. Red for drive. Yellow for surge. Blue for coolant. Brown for bracing. The crystals pulsed as the engine drew from them, light flickering through translucent stone. Heavy chains looped between the racks and a central feed throat, hauling stones forward on a ratcheting track that clanked each time the machine demanded more power.

  Ten goblins rode inside.

  Seven existed to haul ammunition, pull levers, chant on command, and brace for impact.

  Three mattered.

  Grik-Tavel, the crew coordinator, crouched in the forward command alcove with one hand gripping a speaking tube and the other resting on a pressure gauge scratched with tally marks. His helmet sat too large on his skull, shadowing sharp eyes that tracked every tremor in the machine’s frame.

  “Chariot through,” he snapped into the tube. “Integrity stable. Beginning ground advance.”

  A response crackled back from the gate crew, distorted by distance and interference. “Copy. Matriarch engaged. Heavy resistance.”

  Grik-Tavel’s mouth twitched. “Acknowledged.”

  Above him, Krek-Oneye leaned into a narrow viewing slit, peering through a spyglass cobbled together from scrap tubing and cracked lenses. A scar split his brow down to his cheek. One lens over his right eye glinted as he tracked the storm-shrouded avenue ahead.

  “Wind’s fierce,” Krek muttered. “Sightlines are shredded.”

  He adjusted the lens, then paused.

  “There’s a vortex,” he said. “Large. Sustained.”

  Grik-Tavel stepped closer. “From Zara’Kael?”

  Krek shook his head. “Pattern’s held. Someone’s shaping it.”

  Neither of them could see the caster. The tornado roared through the district, its base wandering as it lifted debris and bodies alike. Above it, clouds churned and spiraled, dragged into rotation.

  Below, Volk Chainhand worked where the heat lived.

  He stood waist-deep among rotating chains and crystal racks, feeding elemental stones into the runed throat of the engine. His hands bore the marks of a smith—knuckles swollen, nails cracked, skin permanently stained black and gray. A heavy wrench hung from his belt. He treated the engine like a living thing that demanded respect.

  A loader slid a crystal along the feed rail.

  Volk slapped the goblin’s wrist aside.

  “Chant first,” he snarled. “You wake it with sound.”

  The loader swallowed and lifted the stone, chanting in clipped Goblin High. The cadence rolled through the compartment, harsh and rhythmic. As the final syllable fell, the runes around the feed throat ignited in sequence, lines of light crawling over etched metal.

  Volk shoved the crystal home.

  The throat flared bright. The engine’s pulse deepened, vibration settling into a heavier, steadier rhythm that ran through the Chariot’s frame.

  Another loader reached for a pale-blue stone.

  Volk’s head snapped around.

  “That’s coolant,” he barked. “Drive wants fire or lightning.”

  The goblin froze.

  Volk brought the wrench down across the helmet with a sharp clang.

  “Correct words. Correct stone.”

  The goblin obeyed, voice shaking. The runes answered. The crystal slid in. The Chariot’s next step crushed a line of abandoned cars into flattened metal flowers.

  Above, the forward mounts rotated. Operators chanted in time as mechanisms primed. Along the top spine, the focal cradle’s rings turned, runes brightening as power aligned. The fire-aligned gunner strapped into the cradle thrust both hands into the copper-lined funnel, his chant rising into a battle rhythm as heat condensed inside the lattice.

  On the flanks, lightning rods unfolded with grinding clicks, handlers calling alignment phrases as fields tuned. Near the rear, an earth-loader fed compacted rubble into a cage, chanting for weight and cohesion as the catapult arm locked into place.

  The Armored Chariot advanced.

  Through the viewing slit, Krek steadied his spyglass.

  “There,” he said. “Zara’Kael.”

  The Matriarch dominated the storm-lit avenue ahead. Her vast form moved through wreckage like a living bastion, legs hammering down through streets and structures alike. Lightning lashed outward in brutal volleys, collapsing facades and carving glowing scars through dust and air.

  Krek tracked the impacts, brow furrowing.

  “She’s pouring power into something,” he said. “Target keeps surviving.”

  Grik-Tavel watched in silence as the Chariot continued its slow, inevitable march.

  “Maintain course,” he said at last. “Weapons primed.”

  The chants rose. Crystals flared. The war engine committed itself to the battlefield, each step carrying it closer to Zara’Kael and whatever had earned her full attention.

  Elena Cruz had stopped trying to make sense of it.

  Sense implied order. Sequence. A chain of cause and effect that the mind could follow without breaking. What unfolded across the ruins of Primm refused that courtesy. It was too large, too loud, too final—like watching the world get rewritten by something that didn’t care whether anyone was still reading.

  She stood beside the team’s truck with one hand on the roll bar, boots planted wide against the wind. Dust scoured her jacket in stinging bursts, grit threading into seams and zippers and the corners of her eyes. The air smelled wrong—ozone and melted plastic, hot stone and burned rubber, the metallic bite of lightning layered over the sour, choking tang of pulverized concrete.

  Every few seconds the ground gave a dull, heavy tremor, not an earthquake—something more purposeful, like impacts being fed into the earth hard enough to make it remember.

  Raj was three steps off her left shoulder, phone raised, elbows tucked tight, framing the skyline like he was filming a race that had gone off-course and never came back.

  “Signal’s… holding,” he muttered. He glanced down at the screen and back up again, as if the numbers could lie. “Barely. This is already everywhere, Elena. Like, everywhere-everywhere.”

  Elena didn’t look at the view count. She didn’t need to. She could hear it in the way people were holding their devices: the hunched posture of filming, the strange tension in their shoulders, the half-swallowed gasps that came out as excited laughs. There was fear, sure—raw and shaking and obvious—but there was other stuff too. Awe. Dread. Curiosity sharpened into thrill.

  No one was reacting the same way.

  A woman crouched behind a wrecked sedan, face streaked with tears and dust, whispering something like a prayer between sobs. Two teenagers a little farther down the broken sidewalk were standing upright in the open, phones lifted high, grinning like they’d front-rowed a concert. A man in a Bills cap had his back against a cracked wall and his eyes fixed on the horizon with the blank stare of somebody whose mind had stepped away for a minute and hadn’t returned yet.

  Someone tried to shepherd a cluster of strangers toward a partially collapsed storefront—arms wide, urgent gestures, voice too hoarse to carry in the wind. Half the people followed. Half didn’t move.

  Elena watched one guy—tourist, maybe—stumble out from behind a sign, look down the empty road out of town, and start to run. He got fifty yards, then stopped, turned back, and ran the other way like he’d realized there wasn’t anywhere to run to.

  The Strip’s edge had become a dead zone.

  Roads weren’t roads anymore; they were trenches, buckled lanes, collapsed sections with jagged rebar teeth poking up through broken asphalt. Casino lights flickered weakly through the storm like the city was trying to keep the illusion alive for just a few more seconds. Neon bled across smoke, reflections smearing in puddles that weren’t water anymore—oil, coolant, whatever had spilled from crushed vehicles and torn infrastructure.

  And towering above all of it, centered like the storm’s spine—

  The creature.

  Elena couldn’t stop looking at it.

  It stood where the Strip had once been busiest, legs spread wide, its immense body dwarfing buildings that had felt big an hour ago. It moved with a weight that made everything around it seem fragile. Every shift of its limbs sent vibrations through the ground that Elena felt in her boots, up her shins, into her teeth.

  Lightning crawled across its armored form in living lines. Above its head, a halo of glowing symbols spun in furious orbits—runes, maybe, though Elena didn’t have the words for it. They weren’t random. They moved like they were obeying rules, tightening and loosening with purpose, brightening in pulses like a heartbeat.

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  Farther east, the tornado roared.

  That was another thing Elena couldn’t make her brain accept.

  She’d raced in dust storms that turned the world into grit and darkness. She’d driven through desert winds strong enough to shove a truck sideways and make a driver fight the wheel like it was trying to pull free. This wasn’t that. This was a column of violence held in place—controlled, steered, fed.

  It rose like a living tower, thick and brutal, grinding through the city with terrible patience. Debris spun inside it in constant motion: signage, metal beams, chunks of wall, and bodies—too many bodies—lifted up and thrown back down hard enough that the impacts were visible even from here. A streetlight tore free and vanished into the spiral. A car lifted, rolled once, twice, then shattered against the ground like glass.

  Raj panned toward it, zoomed, then shook his head.

  “I can’t even see the person doing it,” he said, voice tight. “There’s got to be a—somebody. Right?”

  Elena’s eyes tracked the tornado’s base, searching for a figure, a vehicle, anything that could explain it.

  She found nothing.

  Just the scream of wind and the grinding churn of destruction, like the air itself had decided to become a weapon.

  A crack of thunder split the sky. Elena flinched instinctively, shoulders tightening. The sound didn’t come from clouds alone; it came from impacts—lightning striking the ruined city with such force that heat shimmered afterward, the air rippling over the blast site like a mirage.

  People ducked.

  Then lifted their phones again.

  Elena watched a young woman step out from behind cover to get a clearer angle. She was smiling—actually smiling—eyes wide and shining as she held the phone at arm’s length and narrated to whoever was watching her stream.

  Elena felt her jaw clench.

  “What is she doing?” she murmured.

  Raj glanced over, still filming. “Trying to go viral before she dies, I guess.”

  Elena didn’t laugh. The words landed like a stone in her gut.

  Across the ruined expanse, the creature’s runes tightened again. Lightning crawled along its limbs, snapping outward in arcs that tore through the air. A section of building collapsed under a strike, dust and glass blooming outward like a slow explosion.

  Elena’s focus drifted lower, toward the creature’s feet.

  That’s when she noticed movement—small, fast, almost lost against the scale of everything.

  Something was there, near the base of the monster. A figure. Human-sized. Moving like they were part of the fight, not a bystander.

  Raj’s camera shifted too, drawn by the same instinct.

  “Hold on,” he breathed. He zoomed until the image pixelated and shook with the wind. “There’s—there’s someone down there.”

  Elena’s throat went dry.

  The figure sprinted across shattered pavement as lightning gathered overhead. From this distance Elena couldn’t make out details—no face, no clothes, no identity. Just a person-shaped piece of motion in a world built to crush them.

  Lightning struck.

  The blast was bright enough to wash the scene white for a split second. Dust erupted upward. The figure vanished into debris.

  Elena sucked in a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

  A murmur rippled through the civilians around her. Some screamed. Some gasped. Someone yelled something that sounded like “Get up!” as if shouting loud enough could change physics.

  Raj’s voice dropped into a whisper. “I don’t think—”

  He didn’t finish.

  The deeper sound rolled across the sky before Elena saw it. Mechanical thunder layered beneath the storm. It didn’t belong to the creature. It didn’t belong to the tornado. It belonged to something built.

  Elena looked up.

  Shapes streaked overhead, too fast to track cleanly. They cut through cloud and smoke with sharp purpose, vanishing and reappearing between lightning flashes.

  Then the explosions came.

  Fire and force slammed into the creature’s back in rapid succession, impacts hammering hard enough to stagger its massive frame. The shockwaves rippled outward across the battlefield, flattening loose debris and rattling Elena’s teeth. The wind shifted with each strike, punching at her chest like invisible fists.

  Civilians erupted.

  Cheers. Screams. Relief sobs. A man fell to his knees and started laughing like he couldn’t help it. Someone shouted “America!” with cracked, trembling pride. A woman near Elena clasped her hands together so tightly her knuckles went white and whispered, “Thank God,” over and over like she needed the words to be true.

  Hope flared sharp and dangerous.

  Elena felt it too—a hard, involuntary surge that rose in her chest before she could stop it. The kind of hope that came from believing someone bigger and stronger had finally stepped in.

  Smoke boiled upward, thick and black, swallowing the creature’s upper body. For a moment Elena couldn’t see through it at all. The world shrank to the sound of the tornado, the distant crackle of lightning, and the roar of the impacts echoing off dead buildings.

  The storm seemed to hesitate.

  Then the smoke thinned.

  The creature straightened.

  It rose through the haze like something waking up.

  Its runes burned brighter than before—hotter, tighter, angrier. Lightning crawled across its armor in thicker lines, snapping outward in impatient arcs that tore through drifting dust.

  The cheering died mid-syllable.

  Silence hit the civilians like a slap.

  Elena watched faces change in real time: relief collapsing into confusion, confusion hardening into dread. A man who’d been shouting moments ago stood frozen with his mouth half open, eyes fixed on the horizon as if his brain refused to accept what it was seeing.

  Raj’s phone kept recording. His hands were steady, but his voice wasn’t.

  “That didn’t—” he began.

  Elena finished it quietly. “It didn’t work.”

  The creature shook debris from its armor and began to rise fully, legs digging into the ruined street. Chitin ground against stone. Asphalt slid off in sheets. Its posture shifted—less braced, more deliberate—like it had moved past defense and into decision.

  Lightning gathered again.

  The symbols above its head tightened into furious motion, orbiting faster, brighter, the air around them vibrating with restrained violence. Even from this distance Elena could feel the pressure drop, the way the atmosphere seemed to lean inward toward the battlefield.

  The tornado continued to grind through the city unchecked.

  Casino lights flickered weakly through smoke, as if Primm itself was trying to stay awake long enough to witness its own destruction.

  Elena looked at the civilians—the terrified, the numb, the excited, the ones who couldn’t stop filming because stopping meant admitting they were helpless—and something in her chest tightened.

  This wasn’t something being contained.

  This was something escalating.

  And whatever was out there, whatever that creature was fighting, the fight had crossed into a territory where human rules didn’t apply.

  Elena’s breath came out in a thin, shaky stream.

  “We are in so much trouble,” she said, and for the first time since she’d stepped out of the truck, she meant it as a statement of fact, not fear.

  Raj didn’t respond.

  He just kept filming as the creature’s lightning built toward another impossible strike and the entire crowd held its breath for a world that refused to breathe with them.

  Lightning tore the ground open where Eric had been an instant earlier.

  The strike didn’t search. It didn’t probe. It declared.

  The earth exploded upward in a cone of molten grit and shattered stone as Zara’Kael’s runes discharged, the air snapping with ozone and heat. Eric was already moving, already sliding sideways as the blast carved a glowing trench through the asphalt and buried pipework beneath it.

  He hit hard, rolled, came up coughing dust.

  His lungs burned. His ears rang. His skin crawled with static that refused to bleed off.

  Too close, he thought, breath ragged.

  Then, quieter, meaner: Always is.

  Zara’Kael reared, towering above the ruin she had made of the street. Her legs punched into the ground as she stabilized, chitin grinding against broken concrete. Antennae flared outward, tasting the air, mapping pressure, vibration, displacement.

  Her voice carried through the storm — layered, resonant, impossible to ignore.

  “You flee,” she said, not angry yet. Curious. “But you do not break.”

  Eric didn’t answer.

  He pushed himself upright and started running again.

  The ground beneath his feet was already cracked and unstable, fragments shifting with each step. He let his momentum carry him forward, then formed the void in his palm without looking at it. The orb felt heavier than it should have, dense with hunger, thrumming against his skin.

  He tossed it ahead of him.

  It struck the ground and vanished.

  A heartbeat later, the surface buckled.

  The earth rose in a moving swell, a fast, narrow disturbance racing away from him just beneath the skin of the street. Asphalt split and lifted as if something massive were burrowing just below, dust pluming upward in a low, rolling wake.

  Zara’Kael’s attention snapped to it instantly.

  “There,” she said, sharp now. Certain. “I see you.”

  Her forelimb came down like a piledriver.

  The impact detonated the street, pulverizing stone into powder. The shockwave slammed into Eric’s chest as he slid sideways into the shallow trench his void had carved, the limb stopping a breath away from his face.

  He froze.

  Dust rained down in a choking cloud.

  The limb withdrew.

  Eric sucked in air and laughed once, quietly, hysterically.

  Oh boy, he muttered. That one almost mattered.

  Zara’Kael lifted her limb, inspecting it, sensory filaments sweeping along the chitin. Clean. No blood. Only dirt.

  Her antennae twitched.

  The ground bulged again.

  Two disturbances now, racing in different directions.

  Her posture shifted — irritation bleeding into something hotter.

  “You scatter,” she said. “Clever. Useless.”

  She stabbed again.

  The ground answered with silence.

  Then four disturbances appeared, then six, the surface rippling with false paths and sudden shifts. Zara’Kael growled, the sound vibrating through her thorax as she dug both oscillating forelimbs into the earth and activated them at full frequency.

  The ground screamed.

  Stone disintegrated. Asphalt turned to powder. The street liquefied beneath her limbs as kinetic force ripped through the subsurface, collapsing void-tunnels and crushing air pockets alike.

  Eric felt it immediately.

  The pressure slammed into him from all sides, dust filling his mouth, his nose, his throat. He erased space around his face instinctively, tiny voids opening and closing just long enough to breathe.

  You’re learning, he thought, strained. Too fast.

  Zara’Kael’s voice cut through the chaos, confident again.

  “You hide beneath me like prey,” she said. “You think the ground protects you.”

  Lightning poured into the dust.

  Not a strike — a flood.

  Electricity raced through particulate matter, turning the pulverized street into a web of conductive death. Eric screamed as the charge found him, ripping through his body and tearing him bodily out of the earth in a spiraling arc of light and debris.

  He flew.

  Hit.

  Skidded.

  Rolled to a stop in a smoking heap.

  His vision swam. Muscles spasmed. The taste of copper filled his mouth.

  He dragged in air through clenched teeth, one hand braced against the ground, the other shaking uncontrollably.

  Above him, Zara’Kael loomed.

  “You endure,” she said, slower now. Measuring. “Why?”

  Eric didn’t look up.

  Because I want this to be over, he muttered to himself. Because I’m tired.

  The storm howled overhead.

  Far above — unseen, unacknowledged — something was still climbing.

  Zara’Kael shifted her weight, preparing another volley.

  Eric pushed himself upright again, shoulders trembling, eyes fixed not on her face, but on her back.

  And when the fire lanced out from the gate and carved a burning groove through her sensory filaments, her roar shook the city.

  Eric blinked.

  Focus snapped sharp.

  He smiled, slow and feral.

  “Finally,” he whispered, voice barely sound at all.

  And he ran.

  The War Chariot saw the strike land.

  Not clearly — nothing about the battlefield was clear — but the effect registered across its sensor lattice in a way that could not be mistaken.

  Impact.

  Energy transfer.

  Pain.

  The machine lumbered forward another meter, its weight acknowledging the cracked asphalt beneath it with a deep, metallic groan. Inside its armored thorax, the goblins jolted as indicator runes flared amber, then green.

  “Confirmed,” rasped Skek Varn, the observer, one eye pressed to a vibrating crystal scope. “Hit registered on Matriarch’s dorsal array.”

  “That wasn’t the target,” snapped Rokh Flintgrin, the coordinator, gripping his rail as the chariot lurched again. “But I’ll take it.”

  At the heart of the engine chamber, Volk Chainhand slammed another crystal shard into the feed mouth.

  “Chant, idiots!” he barked.

  The crew chorused in rough, guttural cadence as the runes around the intake ignited, draining the crystal’s elemental charge. Volk leaned in close to the trembling engineer beside him.

  “You want thrust, you feed fire,” he growled. “You want burn-through, you spike lightning. You shove earth in there again and I’ll weld your teeth to the exhaust.”

  The chariot’s cannon retracted, glowing seams dimming as internal heat bled into the engine mass. Outside, its sensor fins swiveled, reacquiring the battlefield.

  Zara’Kael staggered.

  Only a step — barely that — but enough.

  Her scream was not pain alone. It was violation.

  Organic filaments along her back burned away in a smoking arc, sensory data collapsing into absence. She twisted, trying to bring her rear limbs around, lightning flaring instinctively as she sought the source.

  Eric saw it.

  He didn’t think.

  He surged forward, legs screaming as he ran, void blades unfolding into his hands like extensions of his will. Every step sent needles of pain through his muscles, lightning still crawling beneath his skin, but the opening was real.

  That worked, his mind whispered, stunned.

  Zara’Kael struck blind.

  Lightning tore chunks out of the ground behind him, runes discharging erratically as her damaged sensory array fed her conflicting information. She howled again, fury replacing calculation.

  Above them, the storm shifted.

  Celeste broke through the cloud ceiling.

  The air thinned instantly, cold biting hard as she climbed into the upper layers of the storm system. Clouds spiraled around her, dragged upward by her ascent, pressure differentials screaming as vapor condensed and compressed.

  In her right hand, the void orb pulsed.

  Not hungry.

  Focused.

  She pulled harder.

  The clouds obeyed.

  Back on the ground, the War Chariot fired again.

  The beam lanced out in a roaring column of condensed fire, missing Eric by meters and carving a molten scar through a collapsed storefront instead. The backlash rocked the chariot, internal braces shrieking.

  “Adjust!” Skek Varn shouted.

  “That shot wasn’t for him,” Rokh Flintgrin said slowly, watching the feed. “It was for her.”

  Zara’Kael reeled as heat washed over her flank. The burn didn’t penetrate deep, but it forced her to shift again, legs scraping against glassed earth as she struggled for stable footing atop the hollowed mound beneath her.

  Eric skidded to a halt, one hand braced on his knee, breath coming in harsh gasps.

  He looked up.

  Her back smoked.

  Her movements stuttered.

  He straightened, pain screaming in protest, and muttered to himself, barely audible beneath the storm.

  “Okay,” he rasped. “That changes things.”

  He raised both blades.

  And charged.

  The room had gone quiet.

  Not disciplined quiet.

  Stunned.

  “Battle damage assessment,” the RTO said, voice tight. “A-10 strafing run completed. Approximately two thousand rounds expended. High explosive load.”

  A pause.

  “Zero observable damage, sir.”

  General Caldwell stared at the screen.

  Smoke cleared around the massive arachnid shape, revealing untouched armor, glowing filaments marking where kinetic force had dispersed harmlessly.

  In the background, the President’s voice rose into a near-incoherent tirade, words tumbling over each other in disbelief and rage.

  “—don’t care what it is, Tom, I don’t care if it crawled out of hell itself, you erase it, you understand me? This thing does not get studied by anyone who isn’t us—”

  Another voice cut in, quiet, incredulous.

  “Sir,” a technician said slowly, “new contact. Large mechanical unit emerging from the gate.”

  The feed shifted.

  The War Chariot came fully into view, its silhouette massive and unmistakably artificial.

  And then the beam fired.

  Rachel felt the air leave her lungs as the readouts spiked.

  “That… that did something,” Elaine said softly, eyes sharp.

  Caldwell leaned forward.

  On the screen, the spider-creature screamed — actually screamed — and twisted away from the burn.

  Rachel swallowed.

  “That worked,” she whispered.

  No one contradicted her.

  Another staffer stared upward at the radar feed, tracking a rapidly ascending anomaly.

  “Is that… is that person still climbing?” they asked. “She’s… she’s blowing past cloud altitude.”

  Rachel followed the trajectory, heart pounding.

  And for the first time since the gate opened, a single, terrifying thought settled into place:

  We are not the strongest thing in this fight.

  High above the battlefield, Celeste clenched her fist.

  The clouds obeyed.

  And far below, Eric ran straight at a god that could finally bleed.