The lab was buried beneath three miles of Siberian permafrost, a necropolis of steel and flickering holograms. Figures in blackened lab coats moved like wraiths between consoles, their faces obscured by breathing masks filtering air thick with the stench of alien enzymes. At the room's center, a hologram pulsed—a countdown etched in blood-red glyphs.
*00:00:07*
"The final threshold," one scientist rasped, fingers trembling over a console. Bioluminescent veins throbbed beneath his gloves, evidence of illegal gene-splicing. "The vanguards… they'll destabilize the mantle. The Congress will trace the quakes—"
"Let them," interrupted a taller figure, voice distorted by a rebreather. Their coat bore no insignia, but the others flinched at their presence. "The Earth's carcass is ours to carve. Activate the remaining three."
A younger technician hesitated. "We lost seven to the Spearhead. If these fail…"
The figure turned, revealing eyes swallowed by oily black lenses. "The Spearhead gutted *decoy* vanguards. These three… are *primordial*. The ones that seeded this rock millennia ago. They'll reduce humanity's strongholds to kindling."
*00:00:01*
The hologram imploded. Alarms shrieked.
——
Deep below the lab, the Earth's crust split. Three titans uncoiled—bio-mechanical leviathans entombed during the planet's infancy. Their bodies, fused with bedrock and fossilized DNA, stretched a kilometer each: serrated tails capable of cleaving continents, maws lined with geothermal vents, and cores humming with gravitational distortions.
As they stirred, the planet screamed.
Jakarta vanished first. The Bastion's fusion reactors imploded as the ground yawned open, swallowing towers and streets into magma. In New York, the Liberty Enclave's walls buckled, skyscrapers folding like paper as a vanguard's spine breached the Hudson, its roar echoing across the Atlantic. Tokyo's neon skyline melted into a sinkhole, tidal waves dragging refugees into the void.
The quakes weren't localized. They rippled, a chain reaction. The Alps fractured. The Amazon boiled.
——
Liu Jian felt it first—a searing pull in his marrow. He'd been in the Mongolian Steppe, overseeing a fledgling cultivation outpost, when the ground lurched. Herds of mutated gazelles stampeded, their antlers crackling with panicked bio-energy. The sky turned jaundiced, swirling with ash.
Yumi materialized beside him, her form blurring between human and *baihou*. "It's not a beast. It's… the planet."
Kyra emerged from a distortion in the air, her quartz eyes spiderwebbed with fractures. "They woke the *Elders*."
The squad gathered, their anomalies subdued but thrumming. Aisha's shadow pooled like tar, Ravi's scales hissed against the charged air, and Hiroto stood silent—a mountain on the brink of eruption.
"The Congress?" Meili asked.
"Gone," Kyra said. "The Bastions are collapsing. The vanguards… they're not here to conquer. They're here to *digest*."
Liu Jian's ember-lit eyes narrowed. "Then we cut them out."
A hologram flared from Kyra's claw—a global scan. Three pulsating beacons glowed beneath Jakarta, Reykjavik, and the Sahara. "Their cores. Destroy them, and the vanguards crumble."
Ravi snorted. "Easy. Just dive into a planet's guts and fistfight extinction."
Yumi's claws unsheathed, glinting with a new, oily sheen. "We'll need an army."
"No," Liu Jian said. "Armies die loud. We die quiet."
The ground heaved again. In the distance, a vanguard's tail breached the horizon, scalded bedrock raining from its ridges. It turned, sensing them—*hungering*.
Kyra's voice frayed. "They know we're here."
Liu Jian ignited, flames spiraling from his core. "Good. Let's remind them what fear tastes like."
The squad dissolved into the chaos—embers, shadows, and silent vows. Above, the atmosphere crackled, the first voidships breaking through the clouds.
The voidship tore through the Earth's mantle like a bullet through flesh, its hull groaning under pressure that would vaporize Congress warships. Liu Jian stood at the cockpit, ember-eyes reflecting the hellscape outside—rivers of magma, tectonic plates splintering like glass. Kyra's voice crackled over the neural link, strained. *"The vanguards are clustered in the outer core. Their shells are weakest there. Strike before their cores synchronize."*
Yumi strapped into the weapons array, her fingers dancing over holographic triggers. "Weakest" was a relative term. The ship's scanners showed the vanguards coiled in a trinity, their carapaces fused with the planet's molten iron. They pulsed, slow and fetal, but already each heartbeat quaked the ship's stabilizers.
"Bombardment sequence loaded," Aisha said, shadows pooling around her station. Her voice was calm, but her reflection in the glass showed cracks in her pupils—veins of void-black.
"Do it," Liu Jian ordered.
The voidship's belly split, unleashing singularity rounds—black orbs that devoured matter and spat back radiation. The first volley struck the nearest vanguard. Its shell shuddered, magma-blood spraying into the chamber. The second round tore a fissure down its spine.
"It's working!" Ravi barked, talons gripping his console.
The third volley never fired.
The second vanguard *twitched*, its tail lashing blindly. Magma geysered, slamming the voidship sideways. Alarms screamed. Hiroto's console exploded, shrapnel embedding in his arm. He didn't flinch. "Shields at 40%. Another hit like that and we're slag."
"Keep firing," Liu Jian growled.
Yumi's hands blurred. Singularity rounds pummeled the first vanguard until its core ruptured—a dying star collapsing inward, sucking magma and debris into its grave. The second vanguard awoke in fragments, half its body torn open. Meili launched destabilizer drones into the wound, their chi-charged payloads detonating in a chain reaction. The creature's roar vibrated through the ship's hull, cracking viewports.
"Two down!" Meili shouted.
Then the third vanguard opened its eyes.
——
It didn't awaken—it *unfolded*.
The final shell shattered, not from bombardment, but by choice. The creature emerged, its body a paradox: obsidian-carapace dripping with liquid starlight, wings forged from compressed spacetime, a maw that hummed with event-horizon hunger.
Kyra's hologram flickered. *"Retreat. Now."*
"No," Liu Jian said. "Target its core!"
Yumi fired. The singularity rounds dissolved inches from the vanguard's hide, swallowed by gravitational distortion.
"It's bending physics," Aisha whispered. "Our weapons can't—"
The vanguard *moved*. Not through magma, but through reality itself. One moment it coiled miles below; the next, its talons raked the voidship's hull. The shields died in a shower of sparks.
"Breach in sector seven!" Hiroto roared, sealing bulkheads as atmosphere screamed into the void.
Liu Jian ignited, flames engulfing his body. "Get me close."
"You'll die," Kyra said.
"Closer," he demanded.
The voidship dove, evading the vanguard's claws by meters. Liu Jian leapt from the airlock, a comet of fire in the planet's belly. He struck the creature's chest, flames searing where weapons failed. The vanguard didn't roar—it *laughed*, a sound like collapsing galaxies.
Its tail flicked.
Liu Jian's fire snuffed out. He crashed into the ship's hull, bones cracking.
——
The vanguard turned its gaze upward, toward the surface. Then it *rippled*, vanishing into a gravitational warp.
The devastation began instantly.
In London Bastion, the sky tore open. The vanguard's tail swept across the city, reducing nanosteel towers to dust. In Shanghai, its wings fanned tsunamis of molten pavement. Refugees stampeded, but there was no escape—the creature existed in six places at once, a quantum predator.
Aboard the crippled voidship, Yumi watched feeds from the surface. A child clung to rubble, screaming as spacetime itself frayed around her.
"We led it there," Yumi said, hollow. "We woke it."
Kyra's hologram guttered. *"It's feeding on the planet's core. When it finishes… Earth becomes a husk."*
Ravi slammed his fist into the console. "So how do we kill it?!"
Aisha's shadows thickened. "We don't. We erase it."
The squad turned. Even Liu Jian, bloodied and silent, looked up.
"The voidship's engine," Aisha said. "We overload it. Create a singularity big enough to trap the vanguard… and us."
Meili's laugh was raw. "Heroic sacrifice? That's your plan?"
"No," Aisha said. "A *trade*."
Kyra's quartz eyes dimmed. *"The engine's blast radius… It'll cripple the planet. Millions will die."*
Liu Jian stood, flames flickering weakly in his palms. "Billions are already dead."
Yumi unstrapped, her claws unsheathing. "Do it."
The vanguard's shadow passed over the ship again, laughing.
They didn't pray.
They ignited the core.