Holden woke up to the end of the world.
The ground shook so hard his cot bounced off the floor, cracking the concrete walls as dust rained down from the ceiling. The lamp swung wildly on its chain, throwing shadows in violent arcs across the room.
BOOM.
It wasn’t a cannon blast. This was something deeper, heavier, the kind of sound that traveled through the earth before it reached the air.
Renna fell off her cot, literally hitting the floor before scrambling to her feet with her bow in hand, her eyes barely open. "What was that?! Earthquake?! Are we under attack?!"
Emric was already on his feet, shield in hand, glasses crooked on his nose. "That’s not natural."
"Translation, Emric!"
"Something big is coming."
Lyra was already dressed, her spear humming with cold energy. She hadn’t slept much. None of them had, but exhaustion didn’t matter when the ground was trying to eat you.
Holden grabbed his gear, but the second boom hit before he could reach the door.
BOOM.
This time, the ceiling cracked. A chunk of concrete broke loose and smashed into Renna’s cot. If she had been sleeping ten seconds longer, it would have hit her head.
"That’s it! I’m sleeping outside from now on! Inside is DANGEROUS!"
They burst through the door into daylight.
Or what passed for daylight at the Demon Mouth Outpost. The sky was still choked with black smoke, but the morning sun fought through in pale grey shafts, lighting the compound in a dim, sickly glow. It was enough to see.
Enough to see what was coming.
The Abyssal Portal pulsed on the horizon, that massive, swirling black hole in the earth that had been vomiting monsters for twenty-four hours straight. But something was different. The portal wasn’t just spitting out fodder anymore. It was pushing something out. Something that didn’t fit.
The ground between the portal and the Outpost was split with fresh cracks. Deep fissures radiated outward from a single point in a spiderweb pattern, and at the center of that web, moving slowly and deliberately toward the walls, was a Siege Turtle.
The creature was massive, easily the size of a four-story barracks. It walked on pillars of legs, its entire body covered in heavy armor. A glassy black dome of obsidian made up its shell, shimmering with oily colors while jagged spikes ringed the edge with wisps of dark smoke. Up front, its head was a thick battering ram of bone and muscle, glowing with solid red eyes.
And on its back, mounted directly on its shell, was a cannon.
Not some biological part, but a genuine cannon grown from crystallized abyssal energy. Shaped like a tube and pointed skyward, it hummed with a terrifying amount of dark energy.
The turtle stopped.
One of the watchtower operators screamed something Holden couldn’t hear. The cannon on the turtle’s back glowed, and the dark energy inside it compressed, spinning tighter and tighter until the air around it screamed with pressure.
Then it fired.
A beam of pure black energy shot from the cannon and hit the northwest watchtower.
CRACK!
Instead of exploding, the tower simply fell apart. The beam pierced the structur, turning stone, steel, and wood into instant dust and tumbling debris.
Twelve soldiers were on that tower.
Holden didn’t look at where they landed.
BOOM.
The turtle took another step, and the ground shook.
Captain Venus was screaming into his radio, his voice raw, torn, barely human. "ALL CANNONS! FIRE ON THE TURTLE! EVERYTHING WE HAVE! NOW! NOW! NOW!"
The cannon crews on the walls scrambled. Six heavy artillery pieces swiveled toward the approaching monster as the gunners loaded shells with shaking hands, aimed, and fired.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Six explosive shells hit the turtle’s shell in rapid succession. Fire and smoke erupted across its surface. The impacts were massive. Each shell was designed to breach fortified walls. They could level buildings.
The smoke cleared.
The shell was unmarked. The obsidian surface gleamed exactly as it had before, as if the shells had been raindrops.
"Again!" Venus screamed. "Reload and fire again!"
The crews obeyed. Shells loaded. Cannons fired.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Same result. The explosions washed over the shell like water over a rock, and the turtle didn’t even slow down. It took another step, then another, each one shaking the Outpost to its foundations.
Maeve’s voice came through the earpiece. She was in the bunker, watching the radar, and her voice was fast, urgent, close to breaking.
"Holden, I’m analyzing the shell structure. It’s heavily reinforced with obsidian chitin over a subdermal energy grid. I’m not seeing a single flaw or a gap anywhere. The energy distribution is totally uniform. You simply can’t cut through that armor, and you won’t be able to crack it."
"There’s no such thing as a perfect defense."
"I’m telling you what the data says. The cannon on its back is charging for a second shot. If it hits the main wall, the Outpost perimeter is breached."
"How long until it fires?"
"Ninety seconds."
Holden looked at the turtle. It was four hundred meters out and closing, slow, steady, unstoppable. A walking fortress designed to break walls and armies, the kind of weapon that ended sieges by simply existing.
He looked at his team.
"Stay here. Hold the wall. If it fires again, get the soldiers behind cover."
Emric opened his mouth. "Holden, the data says no melee weapon can penetrate that shell. Even a Rank 3 strike would need sustained force on a single point for an extended duration just to create micro-fractures. Going through the front doesn’t work."
"Good thing I’m not going through the front."
"What?"
Holden walked to the edge of the wall. The wind hit his face, carrying the smell of sulfur and dead monsters. The sky above was dark with smoke, but above the smoke layer, the storm clouds churned, grey and heavy and endless.
He activated the Abyssal-Bone Wings.
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