Someone had said it once — whoever controls the air controls the initiative in any war.

The line had stuck with Shen Cong. It was how the Americans operated everywhere they chose to intervene: air superiority first, information dominance second. For Vajra’s purposes, in an environment saturated with radiation interference, the DJI Generation 8 — ceiling of 200 meters, stable transmission floor at 150 — was what passed for information dominance. It was the closest thing he had to eyes above the battlefield.

But the Antgod, with two pairs of working wings, was something else entirely. That was air superiority. Or the possibility of it — if it could actually carry him.

The Antgod’s Talent was exceptional, its physical stats comprehensively beyond Blackhead’s in every category. Its offensive capability was another matter. No stinger. No crop. No Super-2 Ant Acid. Its mandibles weren’t even Activity cores — which meant in a straight fight, Shen Cong wasn’t certain the Antgod could beat Blackhead, despite outweighing it by a factor of three.

Blackhead was smaller, but its mandibles were Activity cores with pronounced metallic gradation — real striking power. Add the Super-2 Ant Acid and one good hit from the stinger would leave the Antgod in serious trouble. At the concentration Shen Cong had collected — a full small vial’s worth — a single injection would probably be lethal.

So the Antgod’s value wasn’t as a combat unit. It was as a platform.

If he could fly, ground-based evolved beasts became target practice. He could work above them, out of reach, and bring weapons to bear from angles they had no answer for. Even the Golden Python — increasingly something he thought of as a future problem rather than a current one — lost most of its threat if he was fifty meters overhead with a concentrated payload of Super-2 Ant Acid, detonators, and grenades. That thing could shed a layer of skin and keep moving, but a concentrated strike from altitude was a different proposition entirely.

He didn’t let himself get too far ahead. First things first: could the Antgod actually lift him?

The Antgod understood the instruction without much prompting. It climbed onto Shen Cong’s back, all six legs hooking into the Half-Activated Armor with precise, deliberate grip — the fine claw-tips finding purchase in the metal surface without slipping.

Shen Cong ran the numbers in his head. His body: roughly 73kg. The armor: approximately 64kg. Combined: 137kg, just under 300 jin.

He had no idea if that was within the Antgod’s lifting capacity.

The concern lasted about three seconds.

The Antgod’s wings blurred into motion. Without any visible strain, both of them left the ground — Shen Cong’s boots clearing the asphalt, altitude building steadily, the buzz of the wingbeats a physical sensation against his back.

Fast. Getting faster.

Shen Cong’s armor was gripped from behind, leaving his arms and legs completely free. He extended both arms, flipped up his visor, and let the wind hit his face directly.

The ground shrank. Vajra shrank. The landscape that he’d only ever seen through drone footage unfolded beneath him in every direction, real and immediate and enormous.

“Woah!“

He let it out in a single shout — pure reflex. He nearly broke into song immediately afterward, something half-remembered about flying up to meet the sun and changing the world, but the moment he opened his mouth the wind filled it completely.

He closed his mouth and kept climbing.

“Keep going, Antgod. Show me your ceiling.”

The Antgod climbed.

Shen Cong used the altitude to experiment with aerial shooting — crossbow, slingshot, handgun, rifle. All of it was useless. His body swung with every shift in the Antgod’s flight path, and without a stable platform there was no such thing as a sight picture. The weapons weren’t the problem. The coordination was.

That would take time to develop. He wasn’t going to rush it.

For now, being airborne at all was the achievement. Even without precision shooting, aerial mobility added an entirely new layer to his survivability options. And if he eventually trained the Antgod to fly steady enough for aimed fire — or trained it to carry a payload and release it on command — the tactical implications expanded significantly. A flying delivery system for Super-2 Ant Acid and grenades was not a small thing.

At three hundred meters the Antgod’s climb rate dropped sharply. Past that point, every additional meter of altitude cost noticeably more effort. Shen Cong read the feedback through the bond and made the call.

“Antgod, let’s cover some ground. Head for Fucha Mountain.”

A pulse of excitement came back immediately. The Antgod rolled into a long gliding turn — the motion startlingly smooth, somewhere between a bird and a very large insect — and set course northwest.

Fucha Mountain marked the boundary between Feidong County and Juchao District. Unlike the bare ridgelines and scrub of the barren zone, the mountain was substantially forested — wide stretches of tree cover on the slopes, the canopy dense enough to read from altitude. The ecosystem here had recovered more than he’d expected.

Ouyang Xiu had written about Fucha Mountain during the Northern Song — its clear springs and strange rock formations. The apocalypse had shaved the peaks significantly; there wasn’t much left of the strange rocks, and the springs were gone. What remained was a shallow valley between two summit ridges, a lake at its center catching the afternoon light.

Near the lake, half-collapsed and leaning, stood a transmission tower. And the tower was covered in vines.

Not grown around it. Grown on it — threading through the lattice, clinging to the frame, fine rootlets visibly pressed against the metal surface.

He’d never seen this species before.

“Easy approach,” he told the Antgod. “Stay away from the lake — assume something’s in it.”

The Antgod banked and set down beside the vine cluster, landing cleanly. Shen Cong took a moment to let his legs remember what ground felt like, then walked over.

The closer he got, the clearer the picture became. This wasn’t a vine that had spread from nearby soil. The main root was anchored directly into the tower’s base structure. Secondary roots ran along the metal framework. And the finest root filaments — hair-thin — had pressed themselves into the metal itself.

“This mutated plant is using metal as its growing medium. Is it actually drawing nutrients from the metal?”

He reached out, gloved hand touching the main stem.

The vine exploded.

Every branch whipped outward simultaneously — dozens of tendrils moving at striking speed, wrapping around his armor before he’d taken a full step back. The Half-Activated Armor was gripped from multiple directions at once, the vines pulling taut, and fine rootlets began probing at the surface, pressing into the joins and seams.

The Antgod went down under the same assault, six legs thrashing as the tendrils coiled around it.

Shen Cong didn’t panic. He took one second to assess the binding force, then detonated eight-bull strength through every muscle simultaneously.

Crack. Crack.

The vines holding him snapped. He grabbed the nearest main stem with both hands and pulled — not just the tendril, but the entire vine, ripping it free from the metal framework with a sound like tearing cable. Provoking someone operating at near-eight-bull strength was an objectively poor decision on the vine’s part. Shen Cong worked through it systematically, pulling the major stems clear one by one, detaching everything from the tower structure until the pile on the ground was twitching and writhing without the anchor points needed to do anything about it.

He left one thing intact: the main root still embedded in the tower’s base. Just enough to keep the plant technically alive.

The Antgod, once free, immediately went to work biting chunks out of the nearest vine segment in sustained retaliation. Shen Cong watched it briefly. For all its impressive stats — high Talent, massive frame, capable of lifting 137kg of man and armor to three hundred meters — when the vines had grabbed it, it had thrashed uselessly until rescued. Combat rating: negligible. Without its wings, it had nothing.

With its wings, though. That was enough.

He glanced around. From here he could just barely make out Vajra’s roof in the distance, and the distance immediately made him uncomfortable. He’d been away from the truck longer than he liked.

Crack. He cut a section of main vine with his fang knife and pocketed it.

“Back to Vajra. Let’s go.”

The Antgod had vented enough frustration. It grabbed him cooperatively and lifted off, carrying him back toward the truck in a long, smooth glide.

Ground contact. The familiar weight of Vajra’s presence through the bond. His composure settled back to its baseline the moment his boots touched the road surface beside it.

He laid the vine section out and studied it. He hadn’t pulled the plant up completely — he’d left it deliberately. A mobile plant that grew in metal and attacked on contact was either a threat or a resource, and he wasn’t sure yet which it was.

Worth finding out.

(End of Chapter 132)