The compound's fences creaked behind him, swallowed slowly by moss and time. Narakul lumbered forward, every step pressing his weight into the soaked jungle soil, leaving behind a print as heavy as a curse. The air grew denser the farther he moved from the ruins of human steel. Trees stretched taller here, vines hung thicker, and shadows pooled longer between trunks where the sunlight dared not fully reach.
There was something different about this part of the island. The birds no longer sang. Insects avoided his path. It was not just his presence that caused the silence. It was something older, humming beneath the surface of the earth, something that made the roots whisper and the leaves tremble long after the wind had passed.
He paused.
A faint whirring drifted in on the air. It wasn't natural, not the beat of wings or the breath of a predator. This sound carried purpose and precision. Narakul tilted his thick skull upward. Between branches, a dark speck hovered in the sky, just above the canopy.
A drone.
It was small but sleek, with a dull black finish and a single red light blinking rhythmically under its chassis. It hovered silently, balancing with remarkable steadiness as it tracked his movements from above. It wasn't hunting, but it was watching.
He stepped slowly beneath the trees, his tail dragging leaves across the earth like a living blade. His spider-derived hairs tingled faintly. They were detecting electromagnetic pulses in the air, signals sent and received, brief and coded, streaming from the drone toward some distant receiver. Someone was out there. Someone was observing him.
Far away, miles across the island, a hidden monitoring bunker sat nestled against the mountainside, built on the ruins was a surveillance station. Inside, half a dozen figures gathered around a bank of screens. It was the legacy surveillance team tied to Wu's weaponization program.
"Target is visible in Sector Six," a young technician said, tapping the side of his headset. "Optical recognition system has detected an anomaly, large mass. Base form matches Ankylosaurus, but… something's off."
His supervisor looked up, frowning. "Define off."
The technician pulled the feed onto the main display. Grainy footage from one of the perimeter motion-cams showed a hulking creature lumbering through the brush, mostly obscured by foliage. At first glance, it resembled a typical ankylosaur, low-slung, heavily armored, tail club, but then it shifted, too smoothly, its limbs flexing with unnatural agility. A glint of light caught a set of vestigial feathers ruffling along its forelimbs. Its tail moved not like a swinging bludgeon, but like a serpentine whip, coiling and relaxing with unnerving control.
The technician leaned in. "It's… it's looking at the camera."
For a moment, the figure stood still, then its head tilted slightly, locking eyes with the lens. Not with instinct. With intent.
The system beeped.
[ANOMALY DETECTED]
Classification Error: Mismatched Biometric Signature
Alert Level: 2
Threat Class: UNKNOWN
Dispatching Additional Observation Drones…
The supervisor's eyes narrowed. "That camera wasn't even on the active feed rotation. What triggered it?"
"Passive scan algorithm flagged it. Not on movement, but on pattern deviation. Its spine musculature and gait pattern don't match any known asset."
The supervisor didn't blink. "Pull up thermal. Launch the drone. And send a soft ping to Central, don't flag high alert yet. Just… keep watching."
Back in the jungle, Narakul watched the drone shift closer, its tiny lens adjusting again. He could feel its gaze crawling over him like ants.
For a moment, time stretched thin.
Then he moved.
With terrifying grace for something so massive, Narakul spun his body and hurled his tail upward with the precision of a whip and the weight of a falling tree.
The club struck the drone mid-air.
The sound of crushed carbon fiber echoed through the jungle as the drone spiraled downward, trailing smoke. It crashed into the underbrush with a heavy crack, sparks dancing between its broken rotors. The blinking red light stuttered… and died.
In the bunker, the feed went black.
"Signal lost," the technician muttered.
"He saw it."
"It's not possible. It shouldn't be aware of surveillance. That level of sensory perception isn't documented"
"This isn't just sensory. It anticipated the drone's flight path. It calculated. It acted."
The room fell silent again.
Then the older voice returned, colder than before.
"Backtrack the telemetry. Where did this thing come from?"
Another operator hesitated. "We tracked a heat bloom three weeks ago. Southern hemisphere. Satellite picked up a small-scale meteor impact. We assumed it was volcanic."
"That was near Sector Five."
"You don't think this thing… came from it?"
"If it did," the older man said, "it isn't Earth-born."
"Then what is it?"
"It's something to fear. Something unknown."
Narakul stepped over the drone's remains. He didn't even glance at them. He could still feel the signal's echo, a faint warmth in the air, but it was fading now. Whatever watched him had lost its eyes.
He turned again towards the inner island.