The world inside Sentinel One was a symphony of failure. Red lights flashed, alarms blared a monotonous dirge, and the holographic display was a chaotic mess of error messages and cracked, spiderwebbing lines. Jack Wilson was buried alive in a tomb of his own genius, half a skyscraper collapsing around his crippled mech. Through a single, functioning optical sensor, he could see the Deep Sea Giant Whale, its one massive eye fixing on his metal coffin, its colossal form moving with a slow, grinding certainty to deliver the final, crushing blow.
"Come on, you piece of junk," he grunted, his fingers flying across a virtual console, desperately trying to reboot the primary power systems. "Just give me one more shot..."
The whale's shadow fell over him. Its immense head rose from the murky water, ready to descend.
Suddenly, a brilliant blue-white streak of light, impossibly fast, shot from the sky and struck the whale directly in its massive eye. The creature roared, a soundless, psychic wave of pure agony that made the very air vibrate, and recoiled, its massive head thrashing in pain.
High above, the ramp of a C-17 transport plane was open to the storm-grey sky. From it, a lone figure had just leaped, a small, dark speck against the clouds.
Lin Feng landed with a crackle of static electricity on the submerged roof of a building, his knees bending to absorb the shocking impact. He didn't pause. The whale, enraged and temporarily blinded on one side, was swiping blindly at the sky. Lin Feng ran. He moved with a supernatural grace, a blur of motion across the treacherous, debris-strewn water, leaping from the roof of a floating bus to a half-submerged piece of freeway overpass. He was a gnat, a hornet, a tiny, infuriating distraction to the leviathan.
Inside his cockpit, Jack's tactical display flickered to life. "External combatant identified," the calm computer voice stated. "Awakened. Energy signature: Electromagnetic."
Jack stared at the display. A single, friendly green icon was dancing around the colossal red signature of the whale. He couldn't fight, but he could think. "Rerouting auxiliary power to passive sensors," he commanded. "Run a full structural analysis on the target. Find me a weak point!"
"Targeting nerve cluster behind the primary blowhole," Lin Feng heard a voice, tinny and synthesized, crackle in his ear. He looked around, confused, before realizing it was coming from a discarded soldier's radio he'd picked up at the base. "It's reacting to electrical stimuli. You can hurt it there!"
Lin Feng didn't question the voice from the machine. He changed direction, his body a blur, and fired another, smaller bolt of lightning, a pinpoint strike that hit the whale's blowhole. The creature's entire body seized, a colossal spasm that sent a new wave crashing through the ruined city. It worked.
But the whale was adapting. It ignored the sky and began to lower its body, trying to submerge itself where the gnat couldn't reach.
It was then that the sea itself began to freeze.
A wave of impossible cold rolled in from the coast. The churning, brown water of the flooded city turned to slush, then to solid, white ice in a matter of seconds. The wave of frost spread with unnatural speed, encasing the lower half of the Deep Sea Giant Whale's body in a prison of a thousand tons of ice. Its slow, deliberate movements became a frantic, panicked struggle. It was trapped.
On a newly formed peninsula of ice that stretched from the shore, Colonel Ivan Petrov stood, his greatcoat whipping in the wind, his hands outstretched. His face was a mask of cold, absolute concentration.
"Two new combatants," Jack muttered in awe, his screen now showing three friendly icons working in tandem. He saw the logic, the perfect, unspoken synergy. Ivan was control. Lin Feng was the spear. And he, Jack Wilson, was the brain.
"The ice won't hold it forever!" Jack's voice crackled over Lin Feng's radio. "The dorsal plate, just behind its head! The ice is forcing it to expose the primary motor nerve cluster beneath! You need to hit it now!"
Ivan seemed to understand. He raised a hand, and from the ice field at the whale's back, a massive, spiraling ramp of jagged ice surged upwards, a frozen staircase to the monster's spine.
Lin Feng didn't hesitate. He ran, his feet finding purchase on the slick ice, every muscle in his body coiled with a final, desperate purpose. He gathered every joule of energy he possessed, the air around him crackling, his own hair standing on end as brilliant blue lightning began to arc between his outstretched hands.
He reached the top of the ramp, leaped onto the creature's back, and plunged his hands into the soft, vulnerable flesh that Jack had identified.
The world turned white. A torrent of pure, unadulterated lightning, a focused, controlled thunderbolt, surged from Lin Feng's body, through his hands, and directly into the central nervous system of the Deep Sea Giant Whale.
The creature's silent, psychic roar was a cataclysm. Every piece of glass for ten miles that had not yet shattered, did. Jack's display went dead. Ivan was thrown back by the sheer force of the psychic shockwave. The whale convulsed, a final, titanic death throe, and then, with a slow, world-shaking groan, its colossal body went still, its one good eye glazing over with a milky film.