Fully equipped, he went back to the lake's edge.

The Condor Spade went to work on the rock blocking the valley throat. Against stone, the spade cut like the material barely qualified as an obstacle — Activity-sharpened bone-gold at sixteen-bull strength behind it, a combination that made Shen Cong something close to a human excavator in terms of raw digging output.

While he worked, the giant fish reappeared. A square meter of forehead breaking the surface, moving toward shore.

It kept coming. When it reached the shallows, Shen Cong could see it clearly through the clean water.

Dopey fish.

The local name for the Chinese sleeper goby — what scientists called Odontobutis potamophila — varied by region. Shen Cong had grown up calling them dopey fish, and he'd caught them with his hands as a child in village ponds. The name fit: a fish that looked perpetually confused, with bulging eyes on top of a disproportionately large head, a thick neck, and wide pectoral fins on either side.

This one was seven or eight meters long and had grown a colony of fleshy tumors across its flanks and belly. The pectoral fins glinted silver — Activity cores, clearly.

It crawled into the shallows on those fins, still trying to close the distance, jaw working at empty water twenty meters away. Then it ran out of water to crawl through and stopped, stranded, mouthing in his direction.

Shen Cong looked at it. Considered killing it now. Decided against it — the lake wasn't drained yet, and water was not his preferred combat environment. Wait until the ground was dry.

He went back to digging.

Fifteen minutes. The rock was cleared. Water was already seeping through the cracks. He packed explosives into the base of the breach, threaded the detonator, lit it, and ran.

Five seconds.

BOOM.

The remaining rock layer disintegrated. The entire near lakeshore began to collapse inward. The giant dopey fish hadn't made it back to deeper water in time — it went down with the collapsing bank, tumbling into the drainage channel below.

An enormous volume of water…