Los Angeles, USA
The tsunami was not a wave; it was the ocean rising up in angry judgment. It devoured the coastline, swallowing the Santa Monica Pier, surging over the freeways, and turning the sprawling metropolis into a murky, churning extension of the Pacific. At the heart of the deluge, the Deep Sea Giant Whale made landfall. It moved with a slow, grinding inevitability, its colossal body carving a canyon of destruction through the flooded streets of Long Beach. Skyscrapers groaned and collapsed in its wake, their foundations washed away by the torrent. The city was drowning.
Stellar Nucleus Academy, Nevada
The Academy, a place of controlled, sterile science, had become a hive of frantic, barely controlled panic. Alarms blared, their red lights flashing across the faces of technicians and scientists who ran through the gleaming white corridors.
Jack Wilson was cornered in the primary hangar bay by Director Thorne and a squad of grim-faced security personnel.
"You can't be serious," Jack spat, his eyes wide with a mixture of fury and disbelief. "Sentinel One is a prototype! Its power core has never been pushed past seventy percent. The stress simulations for a B-Class encounter showed a ninety-seven percent failure rate!"
"The failure rate for doing nothing is one hundred percent, Doctor," Thorne replied, his usual calm demeanor replaced by a sharp, brittle urgency. He gestured to a massive holographic screen showing the live feed from Los Angeles—a scene of biblical destruction. "The entire West Coast is about to be wiped off the map. Your simulations are now irrelevant. This is a field test."
Before them, bathed in the harsh glow of the hangar lights, stood Sentinel One. It was a fifty-meter titan of polished grey alloy and reinforced composites, a machine that represented the pinnacle of human engineering. But Jack knew its secrets. He knew its joints were prone to overheating, that its energy shielding was inefficient, and that its stellar nucleus power core, the very heart of the machine, was a volatile, unpredictable engine. It was a beautiful, deeply flawed, half-finished god.
"The neural interface isn't even fully calibrated!" Jack protested, his last-ditch effort at reason.
"Then you'll just have to be a fast learner," Thorne said, his voice cold. "Get in the damn machine, Doctor. That's an order."
There was no choice. Two security guards flanked him, their presence making it clear that refusal was not an option. He walked the gantry to the mech's chest cockpit, the metal groaning under his feet. As he strapped himself into the pilot's harness, a dozen technicians swarmed over the machine, running final, frantic diagnostics.
The cockpit sealed, shutting out the noise of the hangar. A 360-degree holographic display flickered to life around him, the neural interface needles in the harness pressing against his neck. The world outside the machine vanished, replaced by a torrent of data streams and the view from the mech's optical sensors. He was no longer Jack Wilson, physicist. He was the ghost in the machine.
"Launch sequence initiated," a calm, computerized voice announced.
The floor of the hangar slid away, revealing a vertical launch silo. With a deafening roar of electromagnetic accelerators, Sentinel One was hurled into the sky, a fifty-meter steel javelin aimed at the heart of the apocalypse.
Jack arrived over the ruins of Los Angeles minutes later, his thrusters leaving a trail of fire across the storm-grey sky. The sight below was breathtaking in its horror. The city he knew was gone, replaced by a churning, brown sea dotted with the broken teeth of skyscrapers. And in the middle of it all was the whale. It was so much bigger than the satellite images had suggested. A living mountain range, wreathed in an unnatural, sickly blue-green light.
He was an insect about to challenge a god.
He engaged the primary weapon systems—a pair of shoulder-mounted plasma cannons. "Energy levels at ninety-two percent," the computer announced. He took a deep breath, his mind racing, calculating trajectories, atmospheric distortion, and the creature's slow, ponderous movements. He aimed for what he hoped was a weak point: the cluster of bioluminescent sacs on its flank.
He fired. Two lances of brilliant blue energy shot from the mech's shoulders, striking the whale with a sound like tearing thunder. The sacs exploded, showering the creature's hide with its own glowing, viscous fluid.
The whale stopped. For the first time, it seemed to register something other than the buildings it was crushing. Its colossal head, a quarter of its entire body length, slowly turned. A massive, milky-white eye, the size of a bus, opened and fixed its gaze on the small, metal annoyance hovering in the sky.
A low, guttural rumble vibrated through Sentinel One's frame. It was not a sound the whale made with its mouth. It was a psychic projection of pure, ancient malevolence. The mech's systems shrieked, alarms blaring as sensor ghosts and phantom energy readings flooded Jack's display.
"Energy levels at seventy-nine percent," the computer stated calmly, as if it weren't announcing his rapidly approaching death. The plasma cannons were already a massive drain. He had fired one volley, and he was already a fifth of the way through his power.
The whale's colossal tail rose from the water, a dark, terrible tsunami of its own, and swatted at him as if he were a fly. Jack roared, firing the thrusters, but he was too slow. The impact was a cataclysm of screeching, groaning metal. Sentinel One was sent tumbling through the air, crashing through the top thirty floors of a submerged skyscraper. The world became a blur of shattered concrete, twisted steel, and a cascade of red warning lights on his display.
He was buried in the heart of a ruined building, his mech crippled, his energy plummeting. And outside, the monster was turning to finish the job.