The roar snapped him back to reality.

End of the world. Mutated creatures. Right.

He dropped back through the hatch, sealed it, and went straight for the duct tape — plugged every side ventilation port he could reach, leaving only the roof vents open. The water had to stop coming in. Whatever was out there in the dark could wait thirty seconds.

The tape bought him a temporary fix, not a solution. As long as the rain kept falling and the water kept rising, the crisis wasn’t over. He couldn’t do anything about the rain.

What he could do was make sure that if Vajra went under completely, the contents survived.

He spent half an hour sealing everything that couldn’t handle water — food, electronics, the USB drives and hard drives above all. Three hundred drives and fifty hard disks, everything he’d downloaded from digital archives and libraries before the world ended. Medicine. Engineering. Chemistry. Electronics. Every field he’d thought might matter.

Before the apocalypse, he’d assembled all of it as a precaution, half-convinced he was being ridiculous. Now, watching Vajra evolve through guided Activity, he understood that knowledge wasn’t a backup resource — it was infrastructure. The gap between what he could do and what he could theoretically do was almost entirely a knowledge gap. Lose the drives, lose years of potential development.

He wrapped everything in dry bags, taped the bundles together, anchored them to fixed points on the walls. If Vajra rolled, he didn’t want equipment flying around the compartment.

Vajra was swaying more noticeably now. The water was still climbing.

An hour and a half later, it won.

The water came through faster than the tape could hold — thin jets forcing through every imperfect seal, spreading across the floor and rising. Within minutes it was at his thighs. The lights on the wall threw a few sparks and went out. Short circuit.

Complete darkness. Inside and out.

The only light left in the compartment was a line of text painted in phosphorescent paint on the cargo wall, glowing its faint green:

“A person who knows why they live can endure almost any how.”

Shen Cong looked at it for a moment, treading water in the dark, and felt his heart rate come down.

He tightened his grip on the oxygen regulator in his arms.

Good thing I packed two 40-liter tanks.

A single 40-liter tank ran between 48 and 96 hours. Two tanks, splitting the difference, gave him roughly six days of breathable air. With his current physical conditioning — Activity-enhanced endurance, lungs that hadn’t felt genuine fatigue in weeks — six days submerged was manageable. Uncomfortable, but manageable.

He didn’t believe this rain would last six days. That would require a cloud system of genuinely impossible scale. But if it did, he’d abandon Vajra and swim for it. Getting eaten by something outside was at least faster than drowning slowly in an airtight box.

He was right about the rain.

At 10:57 PM on July 10th, the sound stopped.

He checked the watch and did the math: 32 hours and 39 minutes of continuous rainfall.

Impressive. Even by apocalypse standards.

The water wasn’t going anywhere immediately — the pressure gauge on the wall read over a meter of submersion above the roof line. He floated in the dark cargo section, exhausted and waterlogged, and contemplated the practical problem of sleeping and managing bodily functions while fully submerged in his own vehicle.

The second issue resolved itself after about ten minutes of deliberation.

Everything is already ruined. Stop overthinking it.

He exhaled, let himself relax, and started rationing the oxygen.

Almost immediately after he fitted the regulator and took his first assisted breath —

BANG.

Vajra lurched sideways and kept going, rolling completely over. Shen Cong was thrown hard against the ceiling — which was now the floor — slowed by water resistance enough that he didn’t break anything, but the impact still rattled through him.

This wasn’t current. Something had hit them.

He barely had time to reorient before it hit again.

Vajra spun. Once, twice, three full rotations in the water, end over end and sideways, while every unsecured tool left on the walls became a projectile. A wrench caught him in the shoulder. Something metal clipped his knee. He grabbed the nearest handhold and held on while the compartment turned around him.

Every single tool is getting Amalgamated into the frame the moment I can dry this place out.

When the spinning stopped, Vajra was on its side. The interior had gone still. Whatever had been hitting them had paused.

Shen Cong pulled himself to the roof hatch — now at a ninety-degree angle from its original position — cranked it open, and shone his flashlight into the water.

Murky. He couldn’t see more than a meter. But there was something out there — a large dark shape, moving slowly around the vehicle’s perimeter. He caught it twice, circling. There was a faint scraping sound against the hull each time it passed.

I need to know what that is.

Unknown things were more frightening than visible threats. Always. His brain could handle a defined danger. It couldn’t handle a shadow.

He thought for a moment, then went for the sealed medical bag in the supply section.

Portable digital X-ray unit — a 2021 model, iPad-sized, battery-powered, wrapped in waterproof packaging. He’d packed it for field medicine. It had ten shots on the internal battery. Not designed for this application, and without a proper blocking plate the image would come out blurry — but blurry was better than nothing.

He unwrapped it carefully, confirmed it was still functional, and positioned himself at the open hatch with the unit aimed outward.

He waited.

Thirty seconds later, a massive shadow swept past the opening.

He pressed the button.

Click.

The X-ray pulse fired. The display lit up with a wash of white bone structure — blurred, imprecise, but visible for a full second before the creature outside reacted to it. Not well. Something about the radiation apparently hit a nerve; Vajra was immediately slammed again, harder this time, rolling and tumbling through the water while Shen Cong braced himself with one arm and protected the X-ray unit with the other.

It took several minutes to stop.

When everything finally settled — Vajra at rest again, the creature apparently satisfied or distracted — Shen Cong straightened up and looked at the image properly.

Half a body. The head hadn’t been in frame. But the rear section was clear enough: a broad, elongated tail, short thick legs splayed wide, a flat and heavily-built torso. The bone structure was dense, the proportions unmistakable.

That’s a crocodile.

He stared at the X-ray image for a long moment.

What kind of crocodile knocks a thirty-ton truck around like a beach ball?

He thought about the size implied by those proportions. The force required to rotate Vajra’s full mass repeatedly in open water.

A very, very large one.

Whatever it was, being stuck at the bottom of a flooded plain with it circling the hull was not a situation with good outcomes written into it.

(End of Chapter 10)