Kamia stood on the cracked watchtower, coat flapping in the radioactive wind when the sky tore open.
A red star fell.
No. A woman.
Eight and a half feet of obsidian and lava, wings like burning sails, tail carving spirals of molten glass in the air behind her.
She landed thirty metres from the outer barricade with the silence of something that didn't need permission.
Every rifle in the perimeter snapped up.
Twenty-eight soldiers (the last full platoon left topside) formed a ragged crescent, uranium rounds already chambered.
Kamia's voice cracked across the comm like breaking ice.
"All units. Hold fire until my mark. That is a direct order."
She stepped forward alone, boots crunching on frozen blood-glass.
The red woman watched her with furnace eyes, head tilted, curious.
Kamia raised her right arm.
From the silo behind the bunker, the ground shuddered.
Hydraulic locks screamed.
Shinoryu-09 rose.
Forty-five metres of black-scale dragon forged from forbidden pre-WW3 alloys, spine glowing violet-white with Shinigaminoyoso (Sg-500), five hundred neutrons, one lone electron, the element that makes uranium look like table salt.
Its pilot tube was grafted directly into Kamia's nervous system (veins black with element exposure, eyes already bleeding light).
The dragon's maw opened.
A sound like reality tearing.
Kamia's voice came again, calm, almost gentle.
"Identify yourself."
Nerúdium smiled, slow and terrible.
"I'm the mother of the children you're trying to feed," she said, voice layered with three souls and a promise. "And I just came to talk."
Shinoryu-09's jaws began to charge.
Violet-white light pooled between teeth the size of tank barrels.
Kamia's finger hovered over the firing synapse.
Twenty-eight rifles trembled.
One wrong heartbeat and the last army on Earth would open fire on a goddess who still smelled faintly of strawberry seeds.
Kamia didn't blink.
Her voice came out flat, cold, absolute.
"If you move one millimetre without my permission, Shinoryu-09 will pump enough Shinigaminoyoso into your body to evaporate a continent. You will be radioactive ash before your wings finish spreading. Do you understand?"
Nerúdium's lava eyes flickered (amusement, respect, something ancient and tired).
She lowered her wings slowly, deliberately, until the tips brushed the frozen ground.
Talons spread in the universal gesture of empty hands.
Tail coiled tight around her own ankle like a leash.
"I understand," she said, voice softer now, almost human. "I'm not here to burn your people, Colonel. I'm here to beg."
The word hung in the air like a cracked bell.
Beg.
From a goddess who could delete cities with a bad mood.
Kamia's finger stayed on the firing synapse.
Shinoryu-09's jaws glowed brighter, violet-white light leaking between teeth, ready to turn the next ten kilometres into glass and ghosts.
Twenty-eight rifles did not lower.
Nerúdium kept her hands open, wings folded, tail still.
She waited.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Kamia finally spoke.
"Talk."
The serpent suit heard its mistress's need before she spoke.
Black scales rippled, multiplied, poured down her body like liquid night (from barely-there lingerie to a long, flowing cloak that swallowed every curve, every hint of skin, every weaponised inch of sexuality).
In two heartbeats Nerúdium stood covered neck to ankle in living armour that looked almost modest.
Almost.
She kept her hands open.
"I know what suffering is," she said quietly.
Kamia's face twisted.
"Suffering?" The word cracked out of her like a bullet.
"You monsters even know what that word means?"
Her voice rose, raw, ugly, human.
"I carried her for nine months. I felt her kick when the bombs fell. I sang to her through fallout sirens. I promised her a world that would never be red."
Tears cut clean lines through the grime on Kamia's cheeks.
"And your kind turned her into a puddle holding a rabbit plush in fifteen seconds."
She was screaming now, finger white on the synapse trigger.
"She was nine years old! Nine! And now she's a name on a glass stake!"
Shinoryu-09 roared (a sound like a dying star).
Violet-white light flared so bright the snow began to boil.
Nerúdium didn't move.
She just looked at Kamia with eyes that had once belonged to a mother too.
"I know," she whispered, and the cloak of scales trembled. "I know exactly what nine months feels like when it ends in red."
Nerúdium reached slowly (so slowly) into the folds of her new cloak.
From an inner pocket she drew the two sealed pouches taken from Angelos.
She held them up between two talons like an offering.
"Strawberries," she said. "Avocados. Wheat that still remembers sunshine. Ten percent of everything the fat city grows. Enough to feed your thirty-seven million for a year if you plant now."
She placed the pouches on the frozen ground between them and stepped back.
Kamia stared at the seeds.
Then her face crumpled.
"You monsters play well with our feelings, don't you?" Her voice broke into something raw and animal.
Tears froze on her cheeks.
She screamed (wordless, centuries of grief in one sound) and slammed the firing synapse.
Shinoryu-09 lunged.
Forty-five metres of black-scale death, jaws wide, violet-white annihilation pouring out.
Nerúdium didn't dodge.
She moved (faster than light, faster than thought).
One wing snapped open, wrapped around Kamia, and yanked her sideways.
The Shinigaminoyoso beam carved a kilometre-long trench of glass where Kamia had stood a heartbeat earlier.
The attack hadn't come from the dragon.
It came from behind the barricade.
One of Kamia's own soldiers (eyes wild, rifle glowing with stolen Sg rounds) had fired at Nerúdium's back.
Nerúdium's wing took the hit.
Obsidian scales boiled away in a ten-metre circle, exposing raw lava muscle.
She didn't even grunt.
She just turned, looked at the soldier who had tried to kill her, and spoke with terrifying calm.
"I said I came to talk."
Then she looked down at Kamia, still shielded inside her burning wing.
"Your people are scared," she whispered. "So am I."
Kamia's voice cracked across the perimeter like a whip.
"STAND DOWN! ALL OF YOU, STAND THE FUCK DOWN!"
Too late.
Twenty-seven rifles opened up at once.
Shinigaminoyoso-tipped rounds punched through obsidian skin, detonated inside lava veins, carved glowing craters across wings and chest and horns.
Nerúdium staggered.
One knee hit the frozen ground.
Black blood hissed where it touched snow.
She stayed there, head bowed, letting the bullets scream into her.
Only when the magazines clicked empty did the gunfire stop.
Silence, broken only by the hiss of cooling metal and the wet sound of lava dripping.
Kamia ran forward, screaming at her own soldiers, face unrecognisable.
Then the laughter came.
Low, familiar, wrong.
From the treeline limped Kartus (one of Kamia's own lieutenants), dragging Captain Aria Petrova by her broken arm.
Aria's face was pulp. One eye swollen shut. Blood freezing in her hair.
Kartus shoved her forward. She collapsed at Kamia's feet.
He grinned, teeth red.
"Waiting to see what it feels like, Colonel?" He spat blood. "Power?"
He raised the sidearm he'd used to pistol-whip Aria and pointed it at Kamia's head.
"Turns out it feels exactly like you always feared."
Nerúdium rose behind him (slow, bleeding molten gold, wings shredded but spreading).
Her voice was very quiet.
"Let the girl go."
Kartus laughed again.
And pressed the muzzle against Aria's temple.
Kartus smiled wider, blood on his teeth, gun still against Aria's temple.
"Did I demand something wrong?" He shrugged like he was asking for coffee. "Let's start breeding, Colonel. Repopulate the species. I miss my son. You miss your daughter. We all lost someone."
He dragged Aria closer by the hair, casual, like she weighed nothing.
"There's still less than forty million humans left. We need wombs. You've got one. Let's be useful."
Kamia stared at him.
Then she spat (full in his face, thick and red with frozen blood).
Her voice came out low, shaking with something colder than rage.
"Women are not trophies. We are not sex toys. We are not your fucking livestock to 'repopulate' whenever your dick gets lonely."
She took one step forward.
"We are human. We have the right to choose. We are not slaves. We are not dolls you get to play with because the world ended."
Aria whimpered, trying to nod through the pain.
Kamia's eyes never left Kartus.
"My daughter is dead because monsters like you think power means owning people. I will die before I let you turn the last women on Earth into your breeding stock."
Behind her, Nerúdium's shredded wings twitched, lava dripping faster.
Kartus wiped the spit from his cheek and laughed.
"Then die."
His finger tightened on the trigger.
Kartus's voice cracked into something unhinged.
"RETURN MY SON!"
He dropped the pistol, grabbed Kamia by the throat with one hand, and ripped her uniform open with the other (buttons scattering like hail).
Cold air hit bare skin.
He shoved her down into the frozen ash, knees pinning her arms, already fumbling with his belt.
Kamia didn't scream.
She just stared up at him with pure, frozen hate.
Then the sky fell.
Nerúdium launched (one shredded wing still smoking, the other beating hard enough to crack the sound barrier).
She hit Kartus like a meteor.
Talons punched straight through his shoulders, lifted him bodily off Kamia, and slammed him ten metres away.
Before the others could react, Nerúdium tore her own forearm open (deliberately).
A river of living lava poured out.
She flung it.
The molten spray arced over the traitor squad (twenty-seven men who had chosen the wrong side of monsters).
Skin, uniforms, screams (everything melted in the same heartbeat).
Kartus writhed on the ground, half his face already glass, still trying to crawl toward Kamia.
Nerúdium landed between them.
One clawed hand gently (impossibly gently) closed Kamia's torn coat.
The other scooped Aria from the snow like a broken bird.
Both women were pulled against the furnace of her chest, wings folding around them, shielding them from the burning rain of their own soldiers.
Kartus reached one melting hand toward the sky.
"Return… my… son…"
Nerúdium looked down at him.
"Your son is dead," she said, voice soft, terrible, final. "And you just taught the last mothers on Earth why some monsters deserve to stay dead."
She closed her fist.
The lava finished its work.
Nerúdium carried them (one under each arm like children) across the ruined perimeter until they reached the main survivor camp: thousands of half-frozen people huddled around barrel fires.
She landed softly.
Then she did something no one expected.
The living serpent suit peeled away from her body in one fluid motion, folding itself into a small black sphere that hovered beside her like an obedient pet.
She stood naked, obsidian skin cracked with dying lava, wings folded tight, horns dripping the last of the battle.
But the nudity wasn't sexual now; it was deliberate vulnerability.
So the humans wouldn't feel small.
So Kamia wouldn't have to clutch torn cloth to her chest.
Nerúdium knelt in the ash, placed both women gently on their feet, and wrapped the sphere-suit around Kamia like a warm cloak instead.
Her voice was barely above the crackle of fires.
"That wasn't your fault," she said. "Some monsters deserve to burn in hell."
Thousands of eyes watched in silence.
Aria, face swollen, blood frozen on her lip, looked up at the goddess who had just saved them.
Her voice came out small, cracked, inevitable.
"What about Zero-One too?"
The air went dead.
Even the fires seemed to hush.
Nerúdium's lava veins dimmed to dull ember.
Her wings drooped.
For the first time since Nevada, the goddess had no answer.
She stood there, eight and a half feet tall, bleeding light, surrounded by the last scraps of humanity…
and said nothing at all.
Only the wind answered, carrying the smell of strawberries and burning flesh.