The wyrmlings were restless again.
Riku stood just outside the reinforced pen, arms crossed as the largest of the clutch slammed its horned head against the obsidian bar. It wasn't an attack—it was instinct. It could smell something moving beneath the stone, something alive and massive.
Kael joined him, brushing ash off his gloves. "Same behavior as two nights ago. They're sensing the ground before we do now."
"They're not wrong," Riku said. His voice was quiet, but tired in a way that hadn't been there a few days ago.
Sira approached from the forge's upper corridor, her face taut. "Scouts reported tremors three ridges east. Same pattern. Same heat spike. Only this time it's not moving in a line—it's circling. Underground."
Riku turned, frowning. "How wide?"
"Too wide for a normal breach. It's burrowing around the perimeter."
That's when he felt it too—low in the soles of his boots. Not a shake. A pulse. Like something massive breathing beneath the crust. Not a wyrm like before. Something slower. Smarter.
He looked at Kael. "Full fortification protocol. Eastern trench. Sira, move the glaive unit to the second line and keep the archers above the southern spike nest. If this thing finds its way up—"
Sira finished it for him. "We trap it before it traps us."
By nightfall, the entire eastern approach shimmered with heat. The steam lines vented intermittently, pressure cycling under the stone. Riku crouched beside the newly reinforced trench wall, the fresh alloy core slotted into place.
His hand hovered just above the stone, fingers spread.
It was coming.
But not like before. No sudden eruption. No charging mass. Just silence—and then a slow, groaning swell as the ground beneath trench two began to bulge.
"Positions!" he shouted.
The spearmen tensed. The traps armed. And then the ground sank.
There was no roar. No light. Just a sudden, enormous collapse as the trench imploded, swallowed whole by the maw of a beast that didn't rise—it unfolded.
Segments of plated stone slid out in a spiral, molten lines pulsing between armor. The creature stretched longer than the previous wyrm, but flatter, wider, with rows of ridged vent sacs along its back that pulsed like breathing engines.
An Apex-class tunneler. Not designed to charge. Designed to siege.
It began spitting molten rock in short, pressurized bursts, hammering into the upper walls.
Sira's archers returned fire immediately, arrows hissing as they met the heat, some combusting mid-flight. Kael flanked with his glaive unit, dodging blasts of steam as they approached the edge of the broken trench.
Riku sprinted toward the center line, glaive in hand. He wasn't trying to kill it. Not yet. He was buying seconds—for Kael to get under it, for Sira's team to shift formation, for the engineers to finish re-routing the outer plates.
Seconds.
That was all they had.
He landed on the collapsed trench's inner lip just as the beast twisted to face him, its vent sacs flaring. It didn't have eyes, but it knew where he was.
He moved first. His glaive sank into the nearest plate, skidding off but finding a seam. Steam exploded upward, blinding him.
Kael's strike came a moment later from the flank, splitting one of the vent sacs clean through. The creature howled—deep and guttural, vibrating the stone.
And then something strange happened.
The trench walls didn't just hold—they hardened. The slag plates Kael had installed the night before shifted, sharpened, as if sensing the pressure. They braced themselves, seamlessly locking into place. No flash. No glow. Just—change.
Kael stumbled back, glancing at the wall. "That wasn't me."
Riku didn't answer. He couldn't afford to.
He threw his glaive again, catching the wounded vent with a clean arc. The creature spasmed, twisted backward—and disappeared, burrowing into the earth as quickly as it had come.
Gone.
But not dead.
After the battle, smoke still drifted through the camp, rising in thin lines. Two glaive-bearers were injured. One would lose his leg. The trench was damaged—but not destroyed.
Riku stood at the lip of the collapse, watching the heat dissipate.
"They're changing," Sira said quietly beside him. "They're learning us."
"So we change faster," Riku replied.
Kael exhaled sharply. "We keep this up, we're not going to have time to repair before the next Blood Moon."
Riku didn't look away from the broken stone. "There won't be a next. Not like this."
He left them and returned to the forge vault, where the salvaged crate from the enemy convoy still sat unopened since the last skirmish. He unsealed the secondary latch and pulled out the core schematics.
Drill lines. Thermal flow maps. Locations labeled only by elevation.
All headed toward one thing.
The crater's heart.
Riku set the plans down, then looked toward the wyrmling den.
They weren't hatchlings anymore.
The next strike wouldn't wait for him.
And neither would he.