The actual ‘transit hub’ wound up being a quick, whisper-quiet maglev trip eastward in a private car attached to a public line, heading for Reagan Island in the middle of Obijway Bay. The maglevs were a necessity; surface transit between Empire City and the bay was basically a buffet invitation for any awakened beast with a taste for commuters.

  The armored underground tubes were mostly safe, though there was always a non-zero chance a carni-worm would decide to burrow through for a snack. Thankfully, the really nasty stuff tended to stay in the western deserts. Out here, anything too small just became an appetizer for something bigger, like a land-shark or a particularly hangry roc.

  .\When we emerged back into the sunlight, past the imposing sea walls of Reagan Island, a charmingly anachronistic little city was revealed. Most of the architecture looked like it had been stolen from a pre-Q-bomb history book, all antique shopfronts and cobblestone streets that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1800s. That is, until you saw the Kellar station.

  The Academy itself was a study in contrasts. Parts of it were genuine relics, ivy-coated buildings transplanted brick-by-brick from Boston after it fell, their lobbies doubtless filled with plaques solemnly recounting tragedies no one my age could truly comprehend. These ancient structures were nestled amongst modern facilities—the world-famous arena, new dormitories, and training centers—all carefully sculpted to mimic the prevailing brick and ivy-league aesthetic. It was like a theme park version of higher education, if the theme was ‘surviving the apocalypse with good grades.’

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  The student body was surprisingly small, less than two thousand per semester, a drastic reduction from the twenty-thousand-plus it had housed before relocation. The difference was quality over quantity; today, Kellar housed a technically-oriented crowd of the best and brightest, or at least the most powerfully gifted.

  People from the last century probably would have thought our world was a sci-fi dream: flying cars, maglev trains, gleaming arcologies. The reality was less glamorous. Overcrowded, walled cities required computerized traffic systems just to avoid total gridlock. Personal air transport was a necessity for inter-city travel unless you fancied being a kaiju’s toothpick.

  Ever since the Q-bombs turned open-air and wireless transmission into a dice roll, most sensible growth went underground. My crap apartment was ten floors down for a reason. The super-green ‘return to nature’ folks had been thrilled about the new focus on vertical populations and untamed wilderness, right up until the wilderness, now mutated and supremely pissed off, started eating them.

  These days, nature was the enemy, and it was winning.

  Add in invasive species from God-knows-where—some, like dragons, could solo a Class Six—and the occasional city-stomping Kaiju that could only be driven off, not killed, and you had a humanity that had retreated into the protected city-states of the ancient past. We’d traded spears for contraweave and call-out posts on Vilnet, but the principle was the same: huddle together for warmth and hope the monsters eat the neighbors first.