They'd left Storm City at dawn. Lia had driven them out through the broken districts, past the checkpoint where some Enforcer looked at their permits and just said "Good luck" like he was signing death certificates. Then the city's electrical buzz cut out, replaced by the kind of quiet that made you turn at every corner for some unseen creature hiding in the shadows.

  Cole had tried sleeping that first day, but his brain wouldn't shut up. Senna had caught him staring at nothing and pressed something into his hand—a copper coin, still warm from her pocket.

  "For luck," she said, then went back to her screens.

  He'd shoved it in his vest pocket without saying anything, but he could feel it there. Stupid little piece of metal, but it was something solid in all this nothing.

  Now, three weeks into the Wastes, the coin felt like a relic from another world. Out here, lucky charms were a joke against what they were heading into.

  They passed endless ruins and desolate landscapes very few would ever see and live to describe.

  Then one afternoon, he spotted this twisted metal skeleton leaning against the sky. His optics zoomed in on some rusted sign at the base. The metal was fused with what looked like bone, human or otherwise, impossible to tell.

  "Huh," he said to no one in particular. "Eiffel Tower." His voice was oddly flat, the magnitude of seeing such an icon reduced to scrap metal hitting even his perpetual optimism.

  "Used to be Paris," Lia said quietly. "My grandmother had a postcard from before the Collapse. Said it was the most beautiful city in the world."

  "Now it's the most beautiful graveyard," Lucius replied, watching a flock of two-headed birds with metallic feathers circle the dead monument. "At least it's still standing. Sort of."

  They continued on, the monument to a dead world disappearing in their rearview display. The vehicle's radiation sensors clicked steadily. Background rads were four times lethal for an unaugmented human. Their cybernetics filtered most of it, but Cole could still taste metal on his tongue.

  Most Domains never went out to the wasteland unless they were collecting monster parts or had one-hundred percented their core cleansing. There was no point in collecting rift-beast cores before your ascension as each journey could spell death. Out here there was a 73% mortality rate for Sequence 6 Domains, dropping to 41% at Sequence Five.

  The days ground down into a rhythm of high-tension boredom. Every morning Senna launched her birds, a swarm of silent, sparrow-sized drones that painted the wasteland in multi-spectrum relief. She plotted their course on the display, a thin gold line threading the needle between death and slightly slower death.

  "Rerouting," Senna announced. "There's a swarm of Glasswing Devourers about eight miles northeast. They're migrating, and if we keep going this way, we're probably going to run right into them."

  "How bad are Glasswing Devourers?" Cole asked, though he wasn't sure he wanted to know.

  “Their wings can slice through damn near anything. A swarm can shred a city block in minutes," Senna replied. "Going around costs us six hours. But I'd rather be late than shredded."

  "I am casting my vote against being turned into confetti," Lucius added from the back.

  Cole watched the apocalypse roll by through the armored glass. The landscape was beautiful in a broken sort of way. Reality worked differently here. He saw a stream where the water flowed uphill, and rocks casting shadows that pointed toward the sun instead of away from it. The aftermath of the world being broken and hastily patched back together.

  A pack of skeletal, canine things watched them from a crumbling overpass before skittering into the dark. The HUD tagged them in yellow: "Bone Hounds. Threat Level: Moderate. Avoid Engagement."

  The rear feeds showed more following them, keeping pace just out of weapons range. They'd been shadowing them for two days now, waiting for a mistake.

  "Still blows my mind how many rift-beasts are out here," Cole said, breaking the silence.

  "They don't ever stop coming from the rifts," Lia replied from the driver's seat, her eyes never leaving the horizon. "Just be thankful the truly massive ones—the Sequence One Void-class abominations—stay near the rifts. We saw one once, from forty-two miles away. It was just standing there, tall as a skyscraper, watching. Senna said if it had noticed us, we'd have had maybe nineteen seconds before we were dust."

  “Weird how they guard the rifts. You’d think they’d want to spread out, consume everything,” Lucius chimed in from the back, where he was polishing his new daggers.

  "No idea why they do it. One of those fun mysteries that'll probably get us killed someday," Senna added, her focus on her drone feeds. "Just be glad you weren't around for the Third Rift War. Only about a fraction of everyone deployed came back. Half of them went insane within a year. The rest... well, let's just say they weren't okay."

  "Do they even have a plan to reclaim the land?" Cole asked. Through the window, he could see the rusted remains of a highway sign: "Lyon - 200km."

  Lia let out a short, bitter laugh. "'During the Third Rift War they decided to let the Corps handle it. To let them try to invent a technological way out of a divine mess. Nexus Dynamics claimed they could close a rift with their prototype reality anchor. We sent in a full battalion of their best. The rift just ate the anchor and doubled in size. The Alliance of Nations had thrown everything they had at the Central Asian Rift. They had the only Sequence One user in recorded history, a Collective Absolute of the Hive Domain, leading them. Zhang Wei, they called themselves. Not him or her—themselves. They were a walking city of consciousness, countless minds thinking as one."

  She paused. Her grip on the steering wheel threatened to crack the composite. The transport's bio-monitors flagged the spike in her pulse and the vents hissed, trying to flood the cabin with a mild sedative. She killed the command with a sharp gesture. "They had hundreds of Sequence Twos, thousands of Sequence Threes, and over hundred thousand of the Sequences below that. It was the largest concentration of human power ever assembled. The energy signature was visible from orbit. They say the gods themselves were watching."

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  "What happened?" Cole asked.

  “It wasn't enough. The rift beasts just kept coming. Every tactic we used, they learned. Every power we displayed, they developed counters. They lost Zhang Wei on the fifth day. The official report says they 'dispersed.' The truth is uglier. The rift beasts found a way to inject disorder into their perfect unity. A trillion minds suddenly disagreeing, pulling in different directions. They tore themselves apart from the inside. After that, it was just a slaughter."

  The silence in the cabin had mass. It pressed against the hull plating like deep-sea pressure. Outside the viewport a ruin drifted past. It used to be a school. The playground equipment was twisted into unrecognizable steel knots by a force that treated structural beams like wet cardboard.

  "Probably should have had a Chaos Absolute with them," Lucius added with a touch of bravado. But even his perpetual optimism sounded forced.

  "Well, we wouldn't know that, would we, Lucius?" Lia's voice was sharp. "Considering there has only been one person to ever reach Sequence One in any Domain. Now they swarm any Sequence Two that gets near a major rift. They know what we can become, and they're not letting it happen again."

  "Sometimes I wonder," Cole said quietly, "if the gods gave us these powers just to watch us fail. Like we're entertainment."

  "That's the kind of thinking that gets you corrupted," Senna warned. "Focus on what we can control. Wondering if the gods hate us doesn't help anyone survive."

  But Cole could hear it in her voice, she was saying the words more for herself than them.

  The vehicle's proximity alarms suddenly blared. Something massive passed overhead, casting them in shadow. Cole looked up through the sunroof to see a creature that defied description—part whale, part nightmare, swimming through the air as if it were water. Barnacles on its hide were actually smaller creatures, themselves the size of cars. It paid them no attention, continuing its flight toward the horizon.

  "Well," Lucius said after a moment, "that's going in the therapy discussion folder."

  "Target found," Senna cut in, her voice all business again. Good. Business Cole could handle. Philosophy and flying whale-nightmares, not so much.

  On the tactical display, her drone feed popped up. A toxic swamp sprawled below, its waters giving off an unhealthy glow. Not pretty. Just nature's way of saying piss off.

  “The Voltaic Wyrm,” Lucius breathed, his lazy posture snapping into one of predatory focus. “That’s my girl.”

  "Your girl has killed at least forty-seven Domains that we know about," Senna reported, pulling up historical data. "It's been alive for at least six years, maybe longer. When it dies, the electrical discharge can turn sand into glass for two miles in every direction."

  "Romantic," Lucius grinned. "I like a woman with a history."

  "It's nesting," Senna reported, highlighting a cave system behind the creature. The caves were not natural—something had melted them into the rockface, leaving glossy, obsidian walls. "Best time to hit it is during its next feeding cycle, about two hours from now. It'll be distracted, stuck in one spot for about twelve minutes while it feeds on the bioelectric energy in the swamp."

  "Twelve minutes to kill something that's been killing us for six years," Cole said. "No pressure."

  "I've run the numbers a few thousand times," Senna added. "If you stick to the plan exactly, you’ve got about a two-in-three chance of making it. If you improvise, that drops to maybe one-in-four."

  "I love those odds." Lucius was already checking his new daggers. The Eye and Hurricane thrummed with anticipation, sensing the fight to come.

  The vehicle began its descent toward the marsh, a silent, black brick dropping from a grey, uncaring sky.

  Below them, the swamp looked like someone had dumped every chemical plant in the old world into one hole. The water was a combination of oil-slick rainbows mixing with patches of that sick green glow that meant something down there was radioactive enough to light itself up.

  Dead war-machines stuck out of the muck everywhere. Rusted tanks, mech frames, things Cole couldn't identify anymore. That weird moss was growing on all of them, the kind that ate metal for breakfast. The whole place smelled of rot.

  Behind them the Bone Hounds that had been tailing them for days started howling. Not a threat. They were just announcing dinner was about to be served. The bastards knew how this worked, big fight meant fresh meat. They'd wait until the violence was over, then move in to clean up whoever lost.

  "Alright, team," Lia's voice cut through the comms. She and Senna were positioned on a high, rocky outcrop a mile away, their forms hidden by a temporary camouflage field. "Bio-signs are nominal. Neural loads are within acceptable parameters. Senna has a live drone feed. She’ll be our eye in the sky. Lucius, Cole, you’re on the ground. Remember the plan: Cole, you’re support. Your job is to create openings, run interference, and keep Lucius from getting himself killed. Lucius, your job is to kill the lightning snake. Try to do it without leveling the entire swamp. You need the core intact.”

  “No promises on the swamp part.”

  Lucius and Cole stood on a small, relatively solid island of black rock, the marsh water lapping at the edges.

  Lucius was the opposite of calm. He was a caged storm, his new daggers leaving trails of blue light in the air.

  "Come on, come on," Lucius muttered, his eyes fixed on the glossy, melted cave entrance across the water. "Dinner time, you storm-spawned monster."

  "Feeding cycle initiated," Senna announced. "Electromagnetic spike detected. Everyone brace for atmospheric distortion."

  As if on cue, the water in the center of the marsh began to boil. The bioluminescent algae flared, turning the entire swamp into a pulsating, electric-blue heart.

  Then, the Voltaic Wyrm emerged.

  It was magnificent in the way a core meltdown is magnificent. You admire the glow right before the radiation cooks you alive.

  Two hundred feet of serpentine nightmare coiled through the sludge. The scales were shifting hex-grids of solidified voltage cycling from deep cobalt to the violent violet of a dying neon tube. Each scale was a hexagon of solidified electricity, constantly shifting and rearranging like living circuit boards. Along its spine ran nodes of pure plasma, contained in organic Tesla coils that sparked and moved with barely contained power.

  A crown of crystalized discharge sat on its head and the eyes were twin fusion cores burning with cold indifference. When it breathed, Cole could see the air itself ionizing, creating brief auroras in the toxic atmosphere. It ignored them completely. The massive head dipped low to drink from the toxic runoff like it was siphoning high-grade fuel.

  "Holy hell," Cole whispered. The words scraped his throat. "The data feeds didn't mention it was this big."

  "Sequence Four classification confirmed," Senna stated, her voice tight with controlled tension. "Energy readings are... significant. It's drawing approximately 120 megawatts from the swamp's bioelectric field." A heartbeat of silence, then she said, "Engage. Now."

  Lucius rolled his shoulders, current running up his arms. He looked at Cole, and for just a moment, the manic grin softened into something almost serious.

  "You ready for this?" Lucius asked.

  "Yeah. Let's go kill this thing."

  "Showtime," Lucius whispered, and then he moved.

  They’ve been drinking my future like it’s corp-subsidized coffee. I’m about to make them choke on it.

  They stole my future. I’m stealing it back with interest.

  | LitRPG | Cyberpunk | Magitech | Underdog | Book 1 Written |

  ?? Read It Now!