The south highway looked worse at night.
By day it had been a river of beasts. Now it was a graveyard that refused to stay still.
The fire corridor she'd made earlier was still visible in black streaks and warped metal. Half-burnt fur clung to guard rails. Ash piles lay in irregular drifts. Here and there, a stubborn strip of flame still licked along a puddle of fuel, turning the air into a wavering heat-haze.
Talia rolled the bike down the on-ramp and slowed.
The South Blockade was degrading.
The defenders at the far end were older now—not in years, but in exhaustion. Movements slower. Shields heavier. The line held, but only because they had no other choice.
Between her and the blockade, the road was a mess of half-burnt beast corpses that hadn't fully dissolved yet. Some twitched when she passed — nerves firing late.
She kept the bike at a careful speed, weaving between them.
She could've gone straight in. Instead, she took a detour.
Zero-dollar shopping time. She had more space to fill. She gave herself five minutes per stop, no more — long enough to sweep the critical shelves before the next wave's shadow brushed the edge of her Hunter's Vision.
Talia veered off the highway, rolled into a side street, and killed the engine in front of a darkened pharmacy.
The front glass was already cracked. She smashed through the rest with the butt of her spear and stepped into the stale, medicated air.
Talia had a shopping list. Only those items difficult to reproduce top of the list: Baby formula tins, nappies, contraceptives, female hygiene products, medical alcohol and disinfectant, allergy meds, inhalers, syringes, vitamins. Talia swept the aisles, mentally storing anything on the list within the one meter range.
She was halfway to overextending when her Hunter's Vision spiked hard — the approaching wave snapping her out of the hoarder trance.
She left, she wasn't ready for a big battle just yet.
Next stop: a small supermarket. The entrance was blocked by two abandoned trolleys. She moved one, limping slightly, and raided the inner shelves.
Another sweep of the essentials, she also found some everyday sanity items she had missed in the cosmetic aisle;scissors, razors, soap bars, toothbrush multipacks.
Moving on she found a bookstore and decided to cultivate the future generations. She took a pile of classics, textbooks, technical and the leftover space slotted whatever was near.
By the third store, her leg felt like it was packed with hot sand, but she forced herself through one last sweep. Another supermarket.
Entering she filled up on her targets and spotted a shelf full of seeds, she tagged the seed shelf with a mental command and watched the whole thing vanish into her space, shelving and all. Spotting a water bottle rack she did the same, stacking it neatly in a top corner.
Her pocket space now looked like a warehouse of towering apartment blocks. A 10m x 10m space full of shelving was nothing to laugh at, unless it was full, like Talia's.
Her Hunter's Vision spiked hard — a heavy, rolling pressure of bodies heading her way. She heard nothing yet, but she trusted the sense more than her ears.
The closer she got to the South Blockade, the more obvious the strain became.
The car barricades she'd helped set earlier were scorched and dented. Some had shifted a few centimeters under repeated impacts. Fences on the edges of properties leaned outward like they'd been punched too many times. Concrete barriers were spiderwebbed with cracks from boar charges.
The fire corridors were failing in patches—burnt out, puddles evaporated, fuel lines broken by collapsed cars or random impacts. In those gaps, beasts had started pushing through again.
She killed the engine, rolled the last few meters in silence, and slid off the bike.
Her Hunter's Vision stretched, mapping the leftover pools of unburned fuel she'd laid earlier. Some had dried; others had been shielded by debris. She could almost see the web in her mind — threads of potential flame.
Time to light it again.
She jog-limped toward a stalled ute half-jammed into the median. Two petrol cans still sat in the back, someone's aborted evacuation plan.
She clambered up, grabbed the handles and gritted her teeth as pain spiked up her thigh with the kick, but the cans tumbled, burst, and spilled exactly where she needed them. Fuel sloshed, then flowed downhill, joining a leftover slick that ran across three lanes.
She moved fast, repeating the pattern.
Kick. Splash. Join. Extend.
Her Hunter's Vision showed her where the next wave would crash into the corridor—the densest point, about forty meters ahead of the main blockade. She made sure the richest fuel paths intersected there.
She was running on automatic now. The only thing keeping her going was the countdown in the top corner of her HUD, both dread and relief for when it inevitably strikes 0.
By the time the first front-running dogs came into view, panting, she had a crude but deadly web laid out.
She pulled a flare from her vest, waited for the beasts to enter her net, then she struck the flare, waited until the red glare caught, then hurled it into the deepest pool.
For a heartbeat, nothing. Then the flame caught, fire crawled along the fuel threads, turned corners, followed the sloping roads, raced under cars, licked up wheel wells. The wave hit it halfway through and fell apart—beasts stumbling as flames emerged under their paws, bodies shoving others into hotter patches.
The smell of burning meat slammed into her.
Talia stepped back, shielded her face with one forearm, and watched.
[Kill Count: 2800]
[Kill Count: 2920]
[Kill Count: 3035]
Another reward slid into place at the edge of her vision, marked with a different subtle glow.
[Reward #3000 Pending → Special Node Seed]
She didn't open it. Later. When she had a territory and a sky that wasn't on fire.
Smoke and light made everything flicker. The blockade defenders, bathed in orange glow, looked like something out of a war mural—silhouettes braced against hell.
The first sweep was almost entirely fire.
The second was all spear.
When the remaining beasts tried to flee the worst of the heat, they ran for the edges—broken sections where the fuel had been too thin to catch or where debris had blocked the flow.
Talia met them there.
She used low movement arcs, protecting her thigh—short thrusts. Every time she took a step, she made it count. Dale's warning echoed in the back of her mind — no big moves — so she kept everything compact. No leaps. No spins. Just brutal, efficient lines.
Boar charge → side-step, spear up through the jaw.
Dog leap → spear sideways, let its own momentum carry it onto the blade.
Goat vault → duck under, hook with the butt, snap the neck on the barrier.
In the gaps between her movements, the defenders joined in with excitement, a rare opportunity to hit back at the beasts attacking their blockade.
[Kill Count: 3180]
[Kill Count: 3305]
When the immediate surge finally thinned, she stepped back to the relative safety of an overturned hatchback and let herself really look at the South Blockade.
It wasn't good.
Fences bent, concrete damaged, guard rails warped.
Beyond the immediate kill zone, she could feel the imprint of something larger building in the distance — the way sound might feel before a train arrives. Big wave.
An hour away, maybe less, if the pace of the earlier surges held.
She found Rob near the main line—a broad-shouldered man, Launa's husband, by the way he wore the same stubborn focus around his eyes. He had a system shield on his arm and ash streaked through his hair.
Rob wiped his forehead with a filthy sleeve and nodded when he saw her.
"Talia. Heard you're running circles around the city."
"More of a loop than a circle," she said. "Blockade stable?"
"For now." He didn't sound convinced.
"South won't," she said bluntly. "Not all night. You've got maybe a few hours before this place collapses. Concrete's already breaking."
He looked past her at the scarred road, lips tightening.
"Yeah," he admitted. "We've been trying not to say it out loud."
"Say it now," she replied. "And build for it. You need a second line—outside the worst impact zone. Side street or a yard with solid walls. Somewhere that doesn't become a crater when this finally drops."
"We've scouted a couple of places," Rob said slowly. "There's an industrial yard two blocks back. Fences, office building, space for cars as barricades. We're short on hands to fortify it."
"I'll send you help," Talia said. "Launa's crew at Industrial should be stable enough to spare a unit once I get back there. They're in an easily defensible container maze now. When I hit Industrial, I'll tell Launa myself. If they can spare bodies, I'll push them your way."
Rob huffed something like a tired laugh. "You're organising my wife from across town?"
"Hey, she's too relaxed, needs more work," she said. "We'll get the second line built. When the mega-wave hits, fall back there. If I'm still breathing, I'll swing back through."
He held her gaze for a moment, then nodded once, firm.
"We'll be ready."
Her skull prickled before she even turned away.
Vision. She didn't resist. She needed the comfort of her family.
Dav again.
He stood in the middle of a junction that looked like a war film backdrop—burnt-out cars, smashed storefronts, light from emergency lamps throwing long shadows.
He wore full system gear now—four-piece armor set wrapping chest, shins, forearms, shoulders. Two swords hung in his hands, both made of that not-quite-earth metal that caught light too cleanly.
His squad matched him—each with a four-piece set and a mix of weapons: spears, bows, a whip coiled at someone's hip, twin daggers, a short sword, a brutal greatsword taller than its wielder.
They'd been recalled to front-line duty.
The beasts came.
Bulls first, crashing forward with reckless power. Wolves flanked them. Something larger and stranger lurked at the edge of the vision, but didn't come in yet.
Dav moved.
He took the bulls at angles, swords biting at tendons and joints, never clashing head-on with raw strength. Took one down, pivoted, trusted the squad to cover the exposed side.
They did.
A girl with a spear intercepted a wolf lunging for Dav's back. Another man's whip snapped around a boar's leg and yanked it off balance. Arrows from behind them took out anything that tried to circle.
They fought back-to-back, in practiced rotations. Not perfect. Not pretty. But effective.
Ash drifted past them like dark snow.
The vision lingered just long enough for Talia to feel the trust in that unit. The reliance. The way each one moved as if the others were extensions of their own bodies.
She smiled despite herself.
Her HUD ticked up again, delayed notifications finally catching up, or more beasts succumbing to the fires. Whichever it was, she appreciated the free kills.
[Kill Count: 3450]
[Kill Count: 3600]
She'd done enough here for now.
She looked one last time at the South Blockade — flickering fires, bent fences, people leaning on shields for a breath before straightening again.
Cracks everywhere, some visible, some not.
"Second line," she reminded Rob quietly as she passed him.
"We'll have it," he promised.
She swung onto her bike, forced her thigh to bend, and started the engine.
Racing through the streets she saw a faint glow on the horizon. Dawn was only a couple of hours away. They had to hold out.
Industrial lights flickered faintly in the far distance, beyond the smoke.
She turned toward them.
South Corridor: stabilised. Not saved. Not really, just given a few more hours of life.
She opened the throttle and headed for the maze of warehouses and containers, where the last part of the night waited.