S?urtinaui wasn’t unfamiliar with the word nuke. Requiem had its own versions of them—except instead of radioactive fallout and politics, they were usually the size of moons, crafted from condensed Ryun and divine spite. The kind that erased regions from maps.

  But PHD Flopper nukes?

  Yeah, that was new.

  She barely had time to process the idea before Caroline shoved a glowing purple drink into her hand.

  “Bottoms up!”

  S?urtinaui stared at it suspiciously. “It’s warm.”

  “It’s supposed to be warm!” Caroline said, slicing through a zombie. “Means it’s fresh!”

  The elf exhaled, muttered something in Elvish that sounded suspiciously like “I die with honor,” and chugged it down.

  The taste hit her like bitter grape juice mixed with molten metal. Her throat burned, her body tingled, and a pulse of raw energy rolled through her veins. Her vision flickered—the world sharpening to crisp, vibrating detail.

  “Ok… so now what?” she managed, wiping her mouth.

  “Get Double Tap and Stamina-Up!” Caroline yelled, gunning down a wave of crawlers.

  “Double Tap makes your bullets hit harder—like, double-tap harder,” Kiera added between shotgun blasts. “And Stamina-Up gives you that zoom-zoom juice!”

  S?urtinaui blinked. “Zoom… zoom?”

  Caroline grinned. “It makes you fast again! You’ll be around pre-nerf speed!”

  Sure enough, after downing both perks, she felt her body snap back into motion. Her aura expanded, cleaner and stronger. The sluggish restrictions of the V-Dungeon peeled away, her movements flowing like a blur again. Her next shot obliterated a charging ghoul, blowing a hole straight through three more behind it.

  “Effective,” she admitted, smirking.

  Caroline grinned mid-swing. “Told ya! Now—here’s the plan.”

  Kiera kicked a zombie off her back, reloaded.

  “We’re gonna belly flop this bastard!” Caroline yelled, jerking her thumb toward the giant zombie, which was now trudging closer, shaking the earth with each step.

  S?urtinaui frowned. “You’re going to… jump on it?”

  “Explode on it,” Caroline corrected cheerfully. “With PHD Flopper, if you hit the ground hard enough, you go kaboom. Big cinematic explosion.”

  “That’s… insane,” S?urtinaui said flatly.

  “Exactly,” Kiera said, grinning like a psychopath.

  Caroline fired again, ducking under a swing. “We’re gonna hit it from above, chain the flops, and when it goes down—boom. The explosion should wipe the horde too.”

  S?urtinaui’s eyes widened. “That’s suicide.”

  Caroline smirked. “Not if we land it perfectly.”

  “Which we will,” Kiera added with full confidence and no evidence.

  Before S?urtinaui could argue further, Caroline grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “We need you to check with the purples—see if they’ve got anything that can launch us. Cannons, barriers, slingshots, whatever! We need height!”

  S?urtinaui blinked twice, then sighed deeply. “This is absurd.”

  “Absurd saves lives!” Caroline shot back.

  The elf nodded, reloading her rifle. “Fine. I’ll check with the purples.”

  “Perfect!” Kiera barked, spinning her shotgun and pointing at the few remaining red tags. “You lot—keep that Titanic rotting bastard busy! Hit the knees, hit the ankles, whatever slows it down!”

  The reds saluted with various degrees of terror and enthusiasm.

  Caroline and Kiera grinned at each other like kids about to commit an extremely fun crime.

  S?urtinaui sprinted off through the chaos.

  “Alright, Team!,” Kiera barked, reloading mid-sprint. “Let’s dance with the apocalypse!”

  The Titan brought its corpse sword down in a sweeping arc, cutting the earth itself in half. Kiera dove forward, slammed her hands into the ground, and ripped up a chunk of terrain the size of a house. With a roar, she flung it upward, meeting the blade head-on.

  The impact detonated like thunder. The shockwave blew zombies off their feet.

  Caroline ducked under debris, firing through the smoke, every round bursting heads like fireworks. “Yo, Captain Muscle-Brain! You planning to throw the whole continent next?!”

  “Maybe!” Kiera grinned savagely. “Depends how ugly this bastard gets!”

  Beside her, Tengen—the owl-cat hybrid—soared in short bursts of flight, swooping down with his plasma blades to slice through clusters of undead closing in on Kiera’s flank. “Eyes left! Two more abominations incoming!”

  Caroline spun, double-tapping both creatures before they could pounce. “Handled!” She kicked one corpse away, rolled under another, and stabbed a crawler clean through the jaw. Her hoodie was soaked in gore, but she was grinning through it all.

  “Careful!” Tengen squawked, swiping a claw through an encroaching ghoul.

  “It’s my middle name!” Caroline shouted, hurling a frag grenade that vaporized another twenty zombies.

  Meanwhile, on the Titan’s lower half, Hoene and Filek worked in perfect sync. The Berkes twins—darted between the creature’s legs, hacking with axes.

  “Left tendon cut!” Hoene yelled, leaping back as black ichor sprayed out like acid.

  “Going for the right!” Filek growled, sliding under the swinging limb. His axes bit deep, carving through the rotted sinew.

  The Titan staggered and roared, trying to stomp them into paste. The ground quaked with each attempt, sending shockwaves that flung debris like shrapnel.

  Kiera caught one of those boulders mid-air, grinned, and hurled it straight back.

  It slammed into the Titan’s chest, cracking bone and pushing the giant half a step back.

  “That’s right!” she shouted. “You think you’re big?! I’ll show you big!”

  Caroline vaulted off Tengen’s back, spinning in midair to spray bullets into the Titan’s exposed leg. The creature swung its sword again, a horizontal sweep that could have leveled a city block.

  “MOVE!” Kiera planted her feet, the ground beneath her cratered as she parried the Titan’s swing with a piece of the landscape itself.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The collision cracked the air like a sonic boom.

  Every zombie within a hundred meters disintegrated from the pressure.

  Caroline landed beside her, panting, ears flicking at the ringing silence that followed. “You good?”

  Kiera grinned, blood dripping down her temple. “Never better. He’s slowing down.”

  Tengen glided down beside them, wings smoldering, “Slowing’s not dying!”

  “Then let’s fix that,” Caroline said, cocking her gun with a smirk.

  Filek and Hoene backed away from the Titan’s collapsing stance. The giant groaned, kneeling slightly.

  Kiera clenched her fist, eyes flashing with determination. “Alright, Moonlings—Phase Two. We hit it hard, we hit it fast, and we make it regret standing up in the morning! Let’s kill this bastard!”

  Hoene cracked his neck. “It’s already dead.”

  “Then we’ll make it deader!” Caroline yelled.

  The horde swarmed again, shrieking, and the team dove back into the fray.

  S?urtinaui’s and the purples—had turned the north zone into a fully armed garden fortress.

  The lag spike from Tinsurnae’s interference gave them precious breathing room, and in that sliver of time, they went absolutely feral with upgrades.

  Rows of Razorpetal Turrets lined the barricades, their vine-covered barrels spitting out sharpened seed pods that shredded anything within fifty meters. Sunroot Rechargers pulsed with a warm glow, feeding energy into every barrier and turret nearby. Overhead, Wall-Nuts—literal massive stone-coated nut constructs—formed shield bulwarks, slowly repairing cracks as they absorbed damage.

  And behind it all, the Chomper-class Maw Traps snapped up zombies that got too close, dragging them underground with wet crunches.

  S?urtinaui stood at the center of it all, rifle slung across her shoulder, barking orders with the precision of a battlefield conductor. “Rotate the Sunroots to Sector Three! Keep the Rechargers cycling—no downtime! And someone get those Kernel-Pults firing on the left flank!”

  “Yes, ma’am!” a Moon engineer shouted, already hurling buckets of biotic ammo into the catapult’s glowing pods.

  The horde still came—wave after wave—but it wasn’t the bloodbath it had been before. The line was holding.

  And better yet, they’d improvised some delightful new tools.

  Massive, vine-powered launchers—converted from spore cannons—now fired anything they loaded into them: barrels, zombies, even empty ammo crates. The results were glorious. One Moon member laughed as a zombie was launched skyward like a meteor.

  “Target practice complete!” they cheered.

  And then there were the grappling hooks. Jury-rigged from zombie spine fibers (gross, but efficient), they were latched into the ground and ceiling, letting teams zip between barriers or yank each other out of danger.

  S?urtinaui herself tested one by latching onto a nearby perch, firing at a charging brute midair, and landing in a crouch. “Perfect,” she muttered.

  The comms crackled.

  “Yo S?urtinaui!” Kiera’s voice burst through static, loud and bright as ever. “We’re on our way back—and you better tell me you’ve got something flashy over there!”

  S?urtinaui smiled faintly, snapping the hook back into place. “Flashy, destructive, and moderately unsafe. You’ll love it.”

  Caroline’s voice cut in next, giddy and out of breath. “Perfect! Because we’re about to test how well your traps work when we throw a mountain at them!”

  S?urtinaui blinked, sighed, and muttered, “Of course you are.”

  She turned to her squad.

  “You heard them. Reinforce the perimeter—and prep the launchers.”

  Once Kiera, Caroline, and the others made it back to the north zone, the barrier wall erupted in coordinated violence.

  The ground ahead was a killing field of glowing flora—Spikeweed Fields snapping upward like iron jaws, Cabbage-Pult Mortars lobbing explosive heads into the swarm, and clusters of Spikerocks detonating in sharp green bursts that tore through both the Titan’s ankles and the horde rushing around its feet.

  A triple-layer of Ice-Shroom Mines went off next, freezing everything in a thirty-meter radius, and the Gloom-Shrooms followed with their deep, concussive booms. The shockwave staggered the Titan itself, forcing it back a half-step. Its rotten legs cracked under the assault, green flame dripping from the wounds.

  Caroline threw her fist in the air. “YEAH! That’s what I’m talking about! Purple team out here playing 4D chess!”

  S?urtinaui exhaled through her nose, rifle still trained ahead. “Don’t celebrate yet.”

  “Why!? We’re about to make history—or craters.”

  The plan was brutally simple:

  Get launched into the air. Explode on contact. Chain the explosions. Survive long enough for the next respawn wave.

  The twins—Hoene and Filek—had gone down during the retreat, their bodies torn apart by the Titan’s blade, but if they made it through the round, they’d respawn next cycle. The thought alone kept everyone moving.

  To replace them, three blue tags and two purple engineers stepped forward, PHD Flopper bottles in hand.

  Kiera grinned. “Guess that means it’s our time to beta test the apocalypse.”

  “To reckless science!”

  “To catastrophic decisions!”

  Behind them, the Sunroot Rechargers pulsed brighter, funneling energy into the vine-launchers that S?urtinaui and her squad had cobbled together.

  The elf’s voice came over the comms, “All launchers ready. Angle set.”

  “Copy that,” Kiera said, already strapping a grappling hook to her waist. “Let’s go make fireworks.”

  The group climbed into the vine-wrapped launchers. Caroline offered a shaky thumbs-up, her twitching nervously. “If this works, I’m naming it after me.”

  “Magjesti Bomb?” one of the blues offered.

  “Exactly.”

  “Three… two…”

  The launchers fired with a thunderous crack, flinging them into the sky like comets. The air streaked with color as they soared upward, grapples uncoiling and snapping taut for mid-air control.

  Below, the Titan groaned and lifted its decaying head, its emerald eyes narrowing in confusion. It tracked their ascent for a moment, tilting its massive skull—

  Then it swung.

  The corpse sword sliced upward like a guillotine through air and light. Two blue healers didn’t have time to dodge. The blade caught them mid-flight, vaporizing them in a streak of green fire and scattering their Ryun residue into glowing ash.

  Caroline screamed, feeling the shockwave rattle her bones.

  Kiera gritted her teeth. “They didn’t die for nothing—keep it going!”

  She flipped her grapple, redirecting her fall. The others followed suit, spiraling down toward the Titan’s skull.

  The moment they hit open sky, the world became a blur of fire, motion, and raw instinct.

  Wind howled past their ears. Flying zombies—mutated horrors with skeletal wings of bark and fungus—swarmed like vultures, their shrieks cutting through the storm of gunfire. Kiera spun in mid-air, grabbed a grapple line, and used the tension to whip herself into a spiraling kick that cratered one out of the sky. The explosion that followed painted the air gold and red.

  Caroline twisted beside her, rifle bursting like a drumbeat, each shot detonating a zombie into a rain of limbs. One winged corpse slammed into her, claws raking, but she kicked off its chest and PHD-Flopped straight into it—the contact turned her into a living bomb. The blast ripped through the sky, vaporizing half the swarm.

  Below, the Titan raised its corpse-sword, shielding its decaying face. Chunks of molten flesh sloughed off its shoulders as detonations tore craters into its hide.

  Tengen fired his grappling hook into Kiera’s harness, slingshotting himself upward through the rising smoke. He caught another attacker mid-flight, snapped its neck, and used its momentum to catapult higher. His claws coated with blood, and he dove—impacting the Titan’s chest like a missile.

  BOOM.

  The ground rippled from the force. The Titan’s ribs cracked like ancient trees under thunder.

  Caroline came down next, spinning through a field of flying corpses. A hook from below caught her wrist mid-fall—S?urtinaui’s line—and flung her back up again. She screamed wordlessly, adrenaline and fury blending into sound. The next explosion chained to the last; it was less like a team now and more like a circuit of detonation, an upward-downward rhythm that bent the battlefield into light.

  They bounced off each other like planets slamming into orbit—flinging, grappling, ricocheting through the sky.

  Each impact bloomed in color.

  Each nuke tore away another piece of the Titan: arms, spine, jaw. The monster’s roar turned from fury to panic, echoing through the ruins as it tried to swat them like insects and only hit fire.

  Kiera ricocheted off its shoulder, spun mid-air, and shot her grapple into its throat—she yanked herself downward, slamming headfirst into the weak point. The explosion was blinding. The Titan’s head erupted outward in a mushroom of glowing gore, its upper torso folding inward like collapsing metal.

  S?urtinaui hit next, her PHD charge detonating in sequence with Kiera’s. The Titan’s chest blew open, ribs curling outward like molten wings. Flames poured through the cracks.

  They didn’t stop.

  They couldn’t.

  Grapples re-latched mid-fall. They flung each other back into the air, their explosions chaining across the Titan’s falling body.

  The avatar inside the Titan screamed. Its form convulsed, veins of blackened light spreading through its decayed skin like cracks in glass. The tremors ran all the way to the Whispering Tree, whose roots writhed in panic as the infection spread backward through the soil.

  The world buckled. The dungeon’s sky flickered between night and day, between pixels and lightning. The Beast’s will—distant and watching—made it shiver with realization. The reflection was at the core, and now the curse, the story, and the dungeon were bleeding into each other.

  It wouldn’t allow that.

  The Titan avatar let out a cathedral roar, one that shook the air into ribbons. Its ribs split open, peeling backward like gates, and from the hollow emerged black, hardened spikes of flesh. They jutted out in precise symmetry, curling into a grotesque cross that reached toward the sky. Tentacles unfurled from the wounds, wrapping around its shattered spine, twisting and knitting themselves into a shrine-like lattice.

  Every tentacle dripped molten ichor, and wherever it landed, the ground withered.

  The air went dead quiet—just the low hum of the earth vibrating under its weight.

  Caroline’s voice broke the silence, half panic, half awe. “What the fuck is that?!”

  Kiera’s breathing came ragged through the comms, eyes blazing as she loaded another mag. “I don’t know—but the plan’s working! Don’t stop! DON’T STOP!”

  They dove again.

  Cutting through the sky like falling stars. The cross-shaped abomination below pulsed with energy, firing tendrils and beams of decayed light. The team dodged, flung themselves higher, relaunching with grapples and riding the shockwaves of their own explosions.