The woods were a different kind of suffocation. After the open, rocky scar where the bunker sat, the dense, mutated forest felt like being swallowed. Giant, pulsating fungi glowed with a sickly green light, illuminating twisting vines that seemed to twitch as they passed. The air was thick with the smell of decay and something sweetly chemical. It was a place to hide, and they needed to hide.
Kael's final words were a brand on their minds. A bounty on Wolfen. A target on Eva. Their brief hope for sanctuary had been obliterated first by violence, then by farce, and finally by a chilling promise of endless hunters.
They moved in a tense, silent single file. Derek led, his enhanced senses parsing the forest's countless sounds—the skittering of oversized insects, the drip of sap, the groan of overburdened wood. He filtered out the natural (or unnaturally large) dangers, listening for the specific, shuffling gait they were truly fleeing: the horde.
They'd seen the first signs just as they'd abandoned the bunker's ruins—a shambling, ragged line of figures emerging from a dust cloud on the horizon, drawn by the sound of battle like flies to a wound. Not the fast, twisted things from the early days, but a relentless, grinding tide of the dead. They had no time to salvage, no time to plan. They just ran, leaving the shattered door and their brief fantasy of safety behind.
Eva moved in the middle of the line, her mind a storm. The absurdity of not being a Prime. The specific, fabricated reason for the hit. It wasn't random. Someone had painted a target on her back with a very specific, prestigious brush. Why? To discredit something? To frame her for something? To use Kael's elite team as a scalpel to remove her?
Her thoughts were a tangled maze, and in her distraction, she forgot.
A scream tore through the forest's twilight.
It wasn't a scream of pain or attack. It was a high, piercing shriek of pure, unadulterated terror. It was close. And it was human.
Eva stopped dead. The sound sliced through her mental fog and connected to a memory, a single, horrifying image: a small room in the bunker barracks. A blanket on a cot. A sleeping form with void-black hair.
Her blood ran cold.
"SHIT!" The curse ripped from her, raw and loud.
Wolfen, walking just ahead of her, glanced back, one eyebrow raised. "What now? Step on a snake?"
Eva whirled on him, her eyes wide with a panic they hadn't seen since the Laboratory. "We forgot her!"
"Forgot who?" Wolfen asked, his tone suggesting he'd misplaced a sock.
"Maya, you jackass! MAYA!" Eva shouted, the name echoing in the fungal glade.
Leo and Jordan, ahead, turned. Derek backtracked to them.
Wolfen's face was a perfect blank of polite incomprehension. He looked at Leo for clarification. "Who is she talking about?"
Leo stared at him, incredulous. "Maya? The one who transformed and kicked your butt? Remember? The big, scary, universe-deleting one?"
A spark of recognition finally lit in Wolfen's ancient eyes. He snapped his fingers. "Ooooh. Yeah. Her." He frowned, thinking. "I didn't see her for quite a while, to be honest."
Eva's panic was curdling into fury. "She was scared! After the box, after everything... she was exhausted! I left her in my room to sleep! We just... we just left!"
The guilt was a physical weight, heavier than Korgath's fist. In the chaos of the attack, the shock of the "Prime" revelation, the scramble to flee the zombies—they had abandoned one of their own. The most vulnerable, most dangerous one of all.
Without another word, Eva turned and ran back the way they had come, pushing past Derek, her Prime biology fueling her speed.
"Eva, wait!" Derek called, but she was already a blur between the glowing trees.
The others exchanged a single, grim look and followed, plunging back towards the danger they'd just escaped.
Eva burst out of the tree line, skidding to a halt at the forest's edge. The bunker mountain was a dark hump in the distance. And between her and it, spilling from the access road and into the rocky field, was the horde. Hundreds of them. A slow, grinding sea of decay and mindless hunger.
And in the middle of that sea, a tiny island of terror.
Maya stood maybe fifty yards out in the field. She was just… standing there. She wore only the simple clothes she'd slept in. Her bare feet were pale against the grey rock. She was staring, frozen, at the advancing wall of dead, her entire body trembling. The sight of the lonely, petrified girl surrounded by an ocean of monsters was a punch to Eva's gut.
The nearest zombies, sensing easy, living prey that wasn't running, let out a guttural moan and lurched towards her.
Eva took a step forward, a scream building in her throat. She was too far. She'd never make it.
Then, movement.
It wasn't Maya who moved. It was the air around Maya. It darkened, thickened. The shambling corpses closest to her—five, then ten—simply… came apart. Not with violence, but with a silent, swift unmaking. Their limbs detached, their torsos split vertically, their heads dissolved into dust, all collapsing into neat, geometric piles of inert matter. It happened in complete silence, a wave of invisible entropy radiating from the trembling girl.
The horde didn't notice. More came, filling the gaps.
And Maya changed.
It wasn't the furious, conceptual transformation from the city. This was slower, more horrific. Her body seemed to swell from within, bones cracking and elongating under her skin. Black, scale-like plates erupted along her spine and shoulders. Her jaw unhinged, extending into a muzzle lined with rows of long, needle-like teeth that shone like polished onyx. Five twisted horns, like jagged obsidian shards, spiraled from her brow and the sides of her head. A muscular, spiked tail, ending in a bladed tip, whipped from the base of her spine. She grew, and grew, until she stood seven feet tall, a nightmare of black chitin and silent menace. Her eyes were no longer blue, nor the void-black of the entity. They were a flat, insectile black, reflecting no light.
The new horror didn't charge. It simply stood its ground, watching Eva across the field with those dead, empty eyes. As the next wave of zombies shambled into range, its spiked tail moved. Not with wild fury, but with the cold, precise efficiency of a scorpion. It lashed out in short, brutal arcs. Each strike didn't just crush; it disintegrated on impact, reducing zombies to puffs of black ash. It was a grisly, methodical defense, a monster holding a line while staring down the one who had come back.
It took a single, thundering step towards Eva.
Eva didn't move. She was rooted, not by fear of the creature, but by the horrifying tragedy of it. This was the defense mechanism. The wall. The monster built to protect the terrified girl inside from a world of monsters. It was looking at her, and Eva didn't know if it saw a friend or just another source of the "noise."
The tail, in the middle of a swing at a zombie, suddenly changed its arc. It wasn't aimed at a zombie anymore.
Eva had a microsecond to brace.
The bladed tip of the tail, moving faster than sight, struck her not with a cutting edge, but with the full, dense mass of its bony structure.
The impact was catastrophic.
A sickening CRUNCH echoed as several ribs on her left side shattered instantly, the bone fragments driven inward like shrapnel. A white-hot lance of agony shot through her lung, her spleen. The force lifted her off her feet and sent her flying backwards like a doll hurled by a giant.
She sailed through the air for what felt like an eternity before crashing through the lower branches of the tree line and slamming into the thick trunk of a giant fungus, sliding to the ground in a broken heap.
Derek, Leo, and Jordan, who had just reached the forest edge, saw it all. They saw Eva's body crumple against the tree, saw the unnatural angle of her torso, saw the dark blood already blooming on her shirt.
"Maya..." Derek breathed, the word a sob of betrayal and horror.
Then his eyes snapped to Eva. His friend. Dying.
"EVA!" he screamed, and he was running, not towards the field, but into the woods towards her shattered form.
Leo and Jordan looked at each other, then at the field. The monstrous, scaled form of Maya was now turning its dead black gaze from where Eva had fallen towards them. The horde was still coming, a pincer of decaying flesh and silent entropy.
"Get Eva out of here!" Leo roared at Derek's retreating back. He turned, his fists crackling with desperate blue lightning, and stepped forward to face the field, putting himself between the nightmare his friend had become and the friend she had just killed. Jordan stood beside him, the Umbralite katana held in a two-handed grip, his face a mask of grim, final calculation. They wouldn't win. But they would buy seconds.
In the woods, Derek reached Eva. She was conscious, barely, her breath coming in wet, ragged gasps. Blood flecked her lips. Her Prime biology was already fighting, trying to knit shattered bone and torn tissue, but the damage was immense.
"We have to move," Derek choked out, sliding his arms under her as gently as he could. She cried out in agony, the sound shredding his heart. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
From the direction of the bunker, a bored, familiar voice cut through the moans of the horde and the crackle of Leo's lightning.
"Well," Wolfen Welfric sighed, stepping out from behind a different tree, brushing dust off his sleeve as if he'd just arrived from a stroll. "This is a mess."
He looked at the field, at the monstrous Maya holding back the horde, at Leo and Jordan preparing for a futile last stand, at Derek cradling the broken Eva.
"Conversation's over," Wolfen stated, his voice devoid of any humor. "This site is compromised. By the dead, by her," he nodded towards Maya, "and by anyone following that bounty. We leave. Now. Before the only paths out are closed."
He didn't wait for agreement. He turned and began walking deeper into the woods, away from the bunker, the battlefield, and the girl they'd failed, expecting them to follow or be left behind in the gathering storm.