Eleven days.
The Australian outback had become a waking nightmare of red dust and bleached bones. Wolfen and Zoey had walked through valleys where the skeletons of ancient monsters lay like mountain ranges—rib cages large enough to fly through, skulls that could hold buildings. They'd killed hundreds of creatures, from twisted humanoid horrors to beasts seventy-seven feet tall. Anything larger, they avoided. Some things even they couldn't handle.
The sun beat down. The dust never settled. And Lily remained hidden.
On the eleventh day, the roaring started.
It wasn't a single sound—it was a chorus. Thousands of voices, from thousands of throats, rising in a cacophony that shook the very ground. Wolfen's golden eyes snapped toward the horizon. Zoey's hand went to her head, the pressure of so many creatures pressing against her senses.
They climbed.
The mountain-like formation rose before them—weathered rock, ancient and unstable. They scrambled up its flank, finding purchase on ledges that crumbled beneath their weight, until finally they reached the summit and looked down.
The valley below was an ocean of monsters.
Hundreds of thousands of them, spread across the red earth like a living carpet. They came in every size, every shape, every nightmare imaginable. Small ones, the size of dogs, skittered between the legs of larger ones. Massive beasts, the size of buildings, stood motionless, waiting. And among them, three towered above all.
Dead stood third-largest, his one hundred feet of armored crimson hide gleaming in the sun. His horn pulsed with that terrible red light, his eye fixed on something in the distance.
Beside him, the second-largest rose six hundred feet into the air—a quadrupedal colossus of black scales and golden spines, its head shaped like a hammer, its tail long enough to sweep mountains. It breathed in slow, deep rhythms, each exhalation sending dust storms across the valley floor.
And the largest—a godzilla-like titan, seven hundred feet of armored fury. Its hide was a patchwork of obsidian plates and glowing blue cracks, as if magma flowed just beneath the surface. Dorsal spines ran along its back, each one the size of a skyscraper, pulsing with internal light. Its eyes, each one as large as a house, burned with ancient intelligence.
On the opposite side of the valley, the Architect army waited.
They were engineered—every one of them. Thousands of identical monsters, grown in vats and programmed for obedience. They stood in perfect formation, their bodies variations on a theme: armored, clawed, hungry. Among them marched humanoid robots, their metal frames gleaming, guns mounted on every available surface. Larger mechs—three stories tall, some five—carried cannons capable of leveling city blocks. And behind them all, thousands of Architect soldiers in white armor raised their weapons, ready to fire.
The two armies faced each other across the valley, a living wall of flesh and metal waiting for the signal to destroy.
Wolfen's enhanced eyes scanned the chaos, searching, searching—
He found her.
Lily sat atop Tusk, a tiny figure against the immensity of her army. Around her, Kael and the rest of the squad formed a protective circle, their weapons ready, their eyes fixed on the enemy. She was so far away, so small, but Wolfen could see her clearly.
She was looking at the ground.
Then her head lifted. Turned.
Her eyes met his.
Across miles of distance, across armies waiting to slaughter each other, the Monster Queen looked directly at Wolfen Welfric.
Her lips moved.
Wolfen's breath caught. A smile touched his face—just a flicker, just a moment—followed by something that might have been surprise. He read the words on her lips, understood the command she was giving.
He knew what was coming.
The Architect army surged forward.
Cannons fired. Robots raised their guns. Thousands of engineered monsters charged across the valley floor, their roars joining into a single, terrible sound.
Lily's army answered.
Dead's horn pulsed once, twice—a signal. The massive creatures at the front lowered their heads and charged. The smaller ones flowed around them, between them, a tide of teeth and claws meeting the enemy head-on.
Energy beams shot from both sides—crimson from Lily's monsters, blue-white from the Architect mechs. They crossed in mid-air, detonating in explosions that shook the valley. The ground cracked. Dust rose in clouds that blotted out the sun.
The armies collided.
It was a massacre.
The engineered monsters met Lily's creatures and dissolved. Those identical, vat-grown horrors had never faced real predators—things that had survived, evolved, learned. Lily's monsters tore through them with savage efficiency. Claws ripped armor. Teeth found throats. Tails swept legs out from under charging ranks.
Dead waded through the chaos like a god. His horn impaled mechs, lifted them, crushed them. His crimson beam swept across lines of robots, melting them to slag. The six-hundred-foot colossus beside him swung its hammer-head into a cluster of larger mechs, sending them flying like toys.
The godzilla-like titan hadn't moved yet. It stood at the back, watching, waiting, its glowing blue cracks pulsing with barely contained power.
The robots fired. Their bullets and energy beams bounced off armored hides. The Architect soldiers fired. Their weapons found gaps, drew blood, but there were too many monsters, too many targets, too much hunger.
Lily's army rolled over them like a wave.
Within hours, it was over.
The Architect army was annihilated. Broken machines littered the valley floor. Torn bodies—engineered and real—lay in piles higher than buildings. The ground was soaked with blood and oil, a slurry of death spreading across the red earth.
Lily's monsters stood among the wreckage, roaring their victory.
Then the missiles came.
Eleven—maybe thirteen—streaked out of the clouds, their contrails painting white lines across the sky. They descended fast, too fast, their trajectory aimed directly at the valley.
"NUKES!" Zoey's scream was raw, desperate.
Wolfen moved.
Umbralite erupted from his hands, spreading, thickening, forming a dome over them so dense, so thick, that light itself couldn't penetrate. He pulled Zoey close, wrapping himself around her, the Umbralite sealing them in absolute darkness.
The world turned white.
Even through the Umbralite, they felt it—the heat, the pressure, the sheer force of multiple nuclear detonations. The ground beneath them liquefied, then vaporized. The air itself became plasma. For long seconds, there was nothing but the scream of annihilation and the thin shell of Wolfen's will keeping them alive.
Then silence.
Wolfen lowered the Umbralite.
They stood in a crater. A massive crater, stretching miles in every direction, its edges glowing with residual heat. The valley was gone. The armies were gone. Dead and the six-hundred-foot colossus were gone—their bodies nothing but ash in the wind.
But something moved.
The godzilla-like titan rose from the devastation, its armored hide cracked and bleeding, but alive. Seven hundred feet of fury, standing in the center of a nuclear crater, roaring its defiance to the empty sky.
It turned and walked away, toward the wasteland, each footstep shaking what remained of the ground.
Wolfen watched it go. A slow smile spread across his face.
"That was cool."
Zoey hit him on the back of the head.
He stumbled, rubbing the spot, his grin undimmed. "What? It was!"
Zoey stared at him, then at the devastation, then back at him.
"You're insane," she said.
"Probably." Wolfen looked toward the horizon, where the titan was disappearing into the dust. "But we're alive. And somewhere out there, Lily's alive too."
Zoey followed his gaze.
The wasteland stretched before them, empty and silent.
But somewhere in that silence, the Monster Queen was waiting.
The hunt continued.