The morning suns rose over the Lion Oasis, illuminating a scene that would have given a sociologist a stroke.
For the first time in the history of Aetheria, the boundaries were gone. The perimeter markers, usually pissed on by Lions or clawed by Wolves to denote "Death to Tresspassers," were ignored.
The Oasis was packed.
It smelled of wet fur, raw meat, ozone, and intense, suppressive awkwardness.
On the left, the Lion Pride stood in rigid formation, looking glorious and golden, radiating a "we are better than you" energy. On the right, the Shadow Wolves crouched in the shade of the palms, sharpening knives and looking visibly uncomfortable with being in direct sunlight. Perched on every available rock, tree branch, and tent pole were the Storm Griffins, preening their feathers and dropping occasional judging squawks on the groundlings below.
And in the middle stood Elara Vance. She was standing on a crate. She was holding a cone made of rolled-up bark. She looked exhausted.
"Testing," Elara shouted into the bark-cone. "One, two. Is this thing... no, of course it's not on, it's a piece of tree."
She lowered the cone and looked at her three Alphas, who were standing behind her like a wall of terrifying muscle.
"Okay," Elara whispered to them. "This is the 'Independence Day' speech. I need you three to look united. Kaelen, stop growling at Zev's shadow. Roric, stop looking like you're plotting a murder. Zev, stop... vibrating."
"I am excited," Zev chirped, his feathers fluffing up. "We are going to war!"
"We are going to a hazardous waste site," Elara corrected. "Now, look authoritative."
The Speech
Elara raised the cone again. She took a deep breath.
"Warriors of the Alliance!" she shouted. Her voice cracked slightly, but she pushed through. "Yesterday, we stopped an invasion. We froze the Feral Army in their tracks. But the 'Master'—the metal man in the Dead Lands—is still awake. And he is building more."
A murmur went through the crowd. The Lions roared softly in agreement. The Wolves hissed. The Griffins clicked their beaks.
"We are going to march to the Dead Lands," Elara continued. "We are going to walk through the Acid Mist. We are going to kick down the front door of the Lost City. And we are going to turn off the machine that is eating your world!"
Silence. Absolute, confused silence.
Finally, a Lion Beta raised his hand. "We cannot walk in the Dead Lands, Weaver. The air melts the lungs. It is the forbidden death."
"Excellent point, Steve," Elara said (she had started naming them randomly). "Which brings me to Phase Two: Operation Charcoal Face."
The Great Filtration Project
The war effort immediately shifted from "Sharpening Spears" to "Arts and Crafts."
Elara knew they couldn't survive the sulfur and acidic smog of the Dead Lands without respiratory protection. She didn't have N95s for three hundred beastmen. But she had the basic principles of filtration.
"Charcoal," Elara instructed, drawing a diagram in the sand for the confused warriors. "We need activated charcoal. We burn the wood until it's black, then we crush it into powder. It absorbs toxins."
She held up a prototype she had stitched together using scrap leather and Roric's patience. It looked like a feed bag mixed with a plague doctor mask.
"Two layers of tight-woven cloth. A layer of crushed charcoal in the middle. Wet moss on the inside for moisture. You strap it over your muzzle. It will be hot. It will be uncomfortable. You will look ridiculous. But you will breathe."
The manufacturing process was chaos.
The Lions were assigned to wood-burning. Kaelen turned it into a competition, seeing who could make the hottest fire. They ended up scorching half the palm trees, but they produced a mountain of charcoal.
The Wolves were assigned to crushing. It suited them. They sat in circles, silently pulverizing the charred wood with stones, staring intensely at anyone who walked by.
The Griffins were assigned to stitching. Surprisingly, their sharp talons and keen eyesight made them excellent tailors, though they kept trying to add decorative feathers to the gas masks.
"Zev!" Elara shouted, walking through the assembly line. "No tassels! This is a safety device, not a fashion statement!"
Zev, who was sewing a shiny blue bead onto a leather mask, looked affronted. "If we must die in the poison fog, we should look magnificent!"
"You can't look magnificent if your lungs liquefy," Elara countered. "Remove the bead. It compromises the seal."
The Fitting
By mid-afternoon, they had three hundred crude gas masks. Then came the hard part: putting them on.
Beastmen, as a rule, did not like having their faces covered. It hindered their bite, their smell, and their ability to roar.
Elara found Kaelen sitting on a rock, holding his custom-made mask (extra large, reinforced leather) with deep suspicion.
"It smells of burnt wood," Kaelen grumbled. "And it restricts my jaw. How can I bite the metal man?"
"You don't bite the metal man, Kaelen," Elara said, stepping between his massive spread knees to adjust the straps. "He is made of steel. You will break your teeth. You use your mace. And you wear the mask."
She pulled the strap tight behind his ears. Kaelen huffed, the sound muffled by the leather bag now covering his nose and mouth. He sounded like a very angry vacuum cleaner.
"I sound... muffled," Kaelen complained, his voice booming weirdly inside the mask. "Like a cub under a blanket."
"You sound like a tactical genius who isn't going to die of sulfur poisoning," Elara said, patting his cheek. "And honestly? It emphasizes your eyes. Very mysterious."
Kaelen preened slightly. "Mysterious... yes. The Lion is a shadow of golden death."
Meanwhile, Roric was having a different problem.
"My warriors rely on scent," the Wolf Alpha stated, refusing to put his mask on. "If we cover our noses, we are blind."
"Roric," Elara said, walking over to him. "The only thing to smell in the Dead Lands is death and rotten eggs. You don't want to smell it. Trust me. You rely on sight and vibration today."
She handed him his mask. It was sleek, black, and minimalist.
Roric looked at it, then at her. He leaned down, his voice low. "If I wear this muzzle... will you promise to stay behind me? In the blind spot?"
"I'm staying right in the middle of the formation, Roric," Elara promised. "Surrounded by the Trinity. I'm not going anywhere."
Roric nodded slowly and donned the mask. He looked like a terrifying, post-apocalyptic ninja.
The March
At sunset, the army was ready.
It was a sight that would be sung about in the Aetherian ballads for a thousand years.
Three hundred massive warriors—Lions, Wolves, Griffins—all wearing crude, bulky leather muzzles packed with charcoal. They carried spears, maces, and storm-glass blades. They looked terrifying and slightly absurd.
The "Union" moved out.
They crossed the desert sands in a formation Elara had designed on a napkin.
The Vanguard: Kaelen and his heavy Lions. They were the shield. The Flanks: Roric and his Wolves. They were the sensors, watching the perimeter. The Sky: Zev and the Griffins, flying low to avoid the high winds, scouting the path ahead. The Center: Elara, carrying the only radio transmitter (a repaired walkie-talkie she had scavenged from the lab), the Sun-Stone, and a bag of medical supplies.
The march to the border of the Dead Lands took all night. As they approached the wall of green mist, the temperature dropped, and the air began to taste metallic.
"Masks up!" Elara ordered, her voice cutting through the silence.
Three hundred warriors stopped. Three hundred leather masks were tightened.
They stepped into the fog.
The Fog of War
The transition was instant. The world turned green and grey. Visibility dropped to ten feet. The sound of the desert—the wind, the insects—vanished, replaced by a heavy, oppressive silence.
"Stay close!" Kaelen's muffled voice boomed. "Follow the Golden Standard!"
Elara walked directly behind Kaelen, clutching his fur cape for guidance. To her left, Roric moved like a ghost, his hand occasionally brushing her arm to reassure her of his presence.
"Status, Zev?" Elara whispered into the walkie-talkie.
Static crackled. Then, Zev's voice, sounding tinny and distant. "We are above the mist layer. I see the spire. It is lit up. He knows we are coming."
"Of course he knows," Elara muttered. "We aren't exactly sneaking."
Suddenly, Roric stopped. He held up a fist. The entire column froze.
"Vibration," Roric hissed through his mask. "Heavy. Rhythmic. Ground tremors."
Elara felt it through the soles of her boots. Thump. Thump. Thump.
"It's the Feral Army," Kaelen growled, unlimbering his massive stone mace. "But I thought we froze them?"
"We froze the ones with the armor," Elara realized, her blood running cold. "We froze the upgraded ones. But the Master... he has reserves. The rejects. The un-augmented ones."
Out of the green mist, shadows began to materialize.
Hundreds of them.
They weren't the armored super-soldiers. These were the scrappy, starving, desperate Ferals of the wastelands. They didn't have lizard-skin suits. They had rusty pipes, sharpened bones, and madness in their eyes.
And there were thousands of them.
"We are outnumbered," a Lion Beta whimpered.
Kaelen turned to his warriors. He ripped off his mask for one second—just one second—to take a breath of the poisonous air and roar.
"LIONS! DO YOU FEAR THE DOGS?"
"NO!" the pride roared back, the sound muffled but vibrating with power.
"WOLVES!" Roric shouted, his voice cutting like a whip. "DO YOU FEAR THE CHAOS?"
"WE ARE THE SHADOW!" the Wolves howled.
"GRIFFINS!" Zev screeched from above, diving down through the mist, his wings creating a vortex that cleared a circle of fog. "DO YOU FEAR THE GROUND?"
"WE ARE THE STORM!"
Elara stood in the center of the roaring trinity, her heart pounding so hard she thought it would break her ribs.
This was it. No more planning. No more charcoal filters.
"Union!" Elara screamed, drawing her small, Shadow-forged dagger. "CHARGE!"
The two armies collided with the force of a tectonic plate shift.
The Battle of the Smog
It was absolute, chaotic violence.
Kaelen was a whirlwind of golden fur and blunt force trauma. He waded into the tide of Ferals like a reaper in a wheat field, swinging his mace with terrifying efficiency. Every swing sent Ferals flying back into the mist.
Roric and his Wolves fought differently. They moved in pairs, low and fast. Hamstring, throat, move. Hamstring, throat, move. They were a grinder, chewing through the enemy flank with surgical precision.
Zev and the Griffins were the artillery. They would dive, snatch a Feral off the ground, drop it from fifty feet, and repeat. It was raining enemies.
Elara stayed in the center pocket, guarded by three of Kaelen's elite Lionesses. She wasn't fighting the horde; she was fighting the path.
"North!" Elara shouted, checking her compass. "We have to cut through them to get to the Tower! We can't kill them all, there are too many! We need to punch a hole!"
"You heard the Weaver!" Kaelen bellowed, smashing two Ferals' heads together. "WEDGE FORMATION! PIERCE THE LINE!"
The Lions formed a triangle. A flying wedge of muscle and rage. They pushed forward, step by bloody step, carving a path through the screaming mass of Ferals toward the looming silhouette of the Lost City.
The Gatekeeper
They reached the outskirts of the city. The broken skyscrapers loomed out of the fog like tombstones.
The Feral horde was thinning, but directly in front of the main street—the only path to the Tower—something was waiting.
It wasn't a Feral. And it wasn't a robot.
It was a tank.
Well, a biological tank. It was a massive, mutated beast—something that looked like a cross between a rhino and a dinosaur, covered in crude metal plates bolted directly into its flesh. On its back was a turret. An actual, rotating gun turret.
"Grandpa really went all out on the budget," Elara whispered, staring at the monstrosity.
The turret swiveled. It aimed at Kaelen.
"SCATTER!" Elara screamed.
BOOM.
A shell fired. It hit the ground where Kaelen had been standing a second ago. The explosion threw Lions and Wolves into the air.
"It has a cannon!" Zev shrieked from above. "A boom-stick!"
"We can't get close!" Roric shouted, dragging a stunned Wolf to cover behind a rusted bus. "The armor is too thick for spears!"
Elara looked at the tank-beast. It was blocking the road. They couldn't go around; the buildings were collapsed. They had to go through it.
"I need an explosive," Elara said frantically, searching her bag. "I used the flash powder!"
"I have the Sun-Stone!" Kaelen roared, crouching behind a concrete barrier. "It is heavy!"
"It's a rock, Kaelen! You can't throw a rock at a tank!"
"I can throw it very hard!"
"Wait," Elara said. She looked at Zev, who was hovering erratically above the mist. Then she looked at the tank. The turret was open-topped.
"Zev!" Elara grabbed her radio. "Do you still have the sulfur-flasks?"
Before they left, Elara had filled several clay flasks with concentrated acid from the thermal pools—the nasty, yellow stuff that melted boots.
"I have two!" Zev replied.
"I need you to drop them," Elara ordered. "Not on the beast. In the turret. Down the barrel."
"That is a very small hole, Weaver!"
"You are the Sky-Rider! You are the Sniper of the Clouds! Do it, and I'll let you wear the tassels!"
There was a pause. Then: "FOR THE TASSELS!"
Zev folded his wings. He entered a terminal velocity dive. He was a bronze streak screaming down from the heavens.
The tank-beast saw him. The turret swiveled up.
"Kaelen! Distraction!" Elara yelled.
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He jumped out from behind the barrier, waving his arms. "HEY! UGLY! OVER HERE! I AM A DELICIOUS LION!"
The beast hesitated. The turret wavered.
That split second was enough.
Zev swooped low, his talons releasing the clay flasks with mathematical precision. They arc, tumbling through the air, and vanished perfectly into the open mechanism of the gun turret.
Zev pulled up, his belly feathers scraping the top of the tank.
CRASH. HISS.
Inside the turret, the clay shattered. The concentrated acid hit the heating mechanism and the ammunition.
KA-BOOM!
The tank's weapon system detonated from the inside out. The turret blew off, flying into the air and crushing a nearby hot dog stand (or what was left of one). The beast roared in pain and confusion, bucking wildly, then collapsed as the explosion knocked it unconscious.
"Bullseye!" Elara cheered.
"I am the greatest!" Zev crowed, doing a victory loop.
"Move!" Roric commanded, already sprinting past the smoking carcass of the tank. "The path is clear!"
The Union surged forward, pouring into the streets of the Lost City. They had breached the perimeter. They had survived the horde. They had killed the tank.
Now, they just had to fight a sentient building, an army of robots, and Elara's grandfather.
Easy.