July 11th, 2022, 3:00 PM. The floodwater has fully receded — just wet ground left. I’m going outside to right Vajra.

He typed the entry into the Apocalypse Log document, shut the laptop down, and sealed it back in its dry bag.

He didn’t know how other survivors were managing out there. He only knew his own way of doing things. Logging each day’s events, each research development, each incident as it happened — it was less a habit than a compulsion. The record existed whether or not anyone would ever read it.

Going outside meant going outside properly.

The unknown creature that chewed through rebar. The thing that had just spent half a night using Vajra as a chew toy. A storm that had dropped meters of water with no warning. The world after the apocalypse had inverted the food chain, and the sooner he stopped forgetting that, the longer he’d last.

He spent half an hour bringing the Optimus 1.0 back online — the Activity had fully bled out of it during the flood, reducing it to ordinary iron plate. Amalgamation, guided carefully, pushed it back up to full saturation. Another half hour for the Type 64 replica and the hand crossbow. Both metal, both fast to process.

The Activity was useful precisely because of that — metal took the infusion quickly and held it well. Non-metal components were slower, which was why the last fifteen percent of Vajra’s pre-flood coverage had always lagged. Plastic housings, rubber seals, composite materials — all of them resisted Amalgamation in a way steel didn’t.

The Type 64 replica with full Activity saturation was an interesting question he still hadn’t answered. He’d never fired it in its current state. Whatever an Activity-infused bullet did, he’d find out eventually.

He also had three high-pressure air rifles — cosmetically styled after assault rifles and submachine guns, plastic-framed, awkward to Amalgamate, and probably less effective than the handgun anyway.

Armor on. Handgun in hand. Telescope around his neck. Fang-knives on his belt. Crossbow across his back. Hydraulic jack under one arm. He climbed out.

He did a full circuit of the area before touching the truck.

The DJI Phantom 8 was still in its case — his original plan for aerial reconnaissance, a tool he’d expected to be invaluable. The reality had turned out differently. The radiation environment had wrecked long-range signal transmission: GPS and Beidou were both dead, which killed the drone’s beyond-visual-range functions. The 5.8GHz visual range module — nominally good to ten kilometers — was apparently getting its signal eaten by whatever the radiation was doing to the electromagnetic environment, cutting the effective range to under fifteen meters.

A drone with a fifteen-meter ceiling was worse than a telescope.

He’d flown it once, confirmed it was useless, and put it away. When he’d finished the radio system upgrades and rebuilt the communication infrastructure, maybe he’d revisit it. For now: eyes and glass, the old-fashioned way.

The flood had rearranged the landscape.

The uniform carpet of yellow sand and gravel that had covered everything since the storm was largely gone — washed away by the volume of water, displaced, redistributed. What remained was a network of dry channels where the water had run, with low ridges of large stones defining their banks. Some of those stones, examined closely, had the texture and geometry of construction material — building remnants that had been carried here by the flood from somewhere else.

The new terrain was uneven and awkward, but it had one significant advantage: Burrowers needed loose sand and gravel to operate. Solid rock and irregular stone formations would limit their ability to ambush from below.

The dozer blade handles anything that blocks the path.

He confirmed the perimeter was clear, then went back into Vajra and dragged out three large steel traps — the ones he’d been fabricating in spare moments since the Gnawrat encounter at Carrefour. He’d only managed four total, limited by available steel stock, and one had been left behind in that basement. He positioned the three remaining ones around the vehicle’s perimeter as an early warning layer, then reduced his alertness level from maximum to high.

Time to get to work.

Righting a thirty-ton vehicle with a single hydraulic jack and no assistance was an exercise in patience.

The process went like this: jack the hull up a few centimeters, find a large enough stone in the surrounding area to slide underneath as a shim, relocate the jack to a higher contact point, repeat. Each cycle gained a few degrees of rotation. Each degree of rotation required a larger stone than the last. The stones had to be found, evaluated, carried, and positioned while also performing regular perimeter sweeps with the telescope and checking the trap placement.

One and a half bull’s worth of strength was genuinely useful for moving large rocks. It was not sufficient for moving thirty tons of armored truck efficiently. The physics simply didn’t care.

He started at three-thirty. By six-thirty, with the sun already leaning toward the horizon, Vajra had reached forty-five degrees — center of gravity approaching the tipping point.

Shen Cong got into position, braced his feet, and pushed.

CRASH.

Vajra rolled the rest of the way over. Twenty-two tires found the ground.

He stood back and looked at it properly for the first time since the flood.

The connection point between cab and cargo container had twisted significantly out of alignment. Several chassis support members showed visible cracking. The outer armor — which had once been a uniform surface of welded steel plate studded with outward-facing spikes — was now a catalog of damage: scrape marks layered over scrape marks, deep gouges that had pushed through to the base metal, and unmistakably, in several places, the impression of something large and serrated pressing hard against the steel. The spikes had been flattened in swaths, whole sections bent flush with the surface.

The forward lights were all shattered.

This was just the exterior.

Inside, beyond the water damage to the electronics and the supplies that the dry bags hadn’t fully protected, several pieces of equipment hadn’t survived the rolling. The collateral losses from being tumbled repeatedly by something large enough to do that to a truck.

Headlights first, then the interior. Work through the list.

He glanced at the sky. Still light, barely. Enough time for one more task.

The blown tire — rear section, driver’s side, the one the creature had bitten through — came off in twenty minutes. The replacement went on in the same time. The wrecked tire he re-hung on the chassis undercarriage. Activity-assisted self-repair was slow, but he only had the one spare and couldn’t afford to throw the damaged one away. In a week, maybe two, it might be serviceable again.

He collected the three traps from the perimeter, did a final telescope sweep, and turned to face the sunset.

The sky was doing something he hadn’t seen since before the apocalypse — a full spread of red and orange from one end of the horizon to the other, the kind of evening sky that had probably been common once and now felt like something recovered from a different life.

He stood and watched it until it was gone.

Then he climbed back into Vajra. Forty-eight hours without sleep, by the watch.

Tomorrow, the real repair work began.

Tonight, he was done.

(End of Chapter 12)