The storm arrived faster and harder than anticipated.

The ambient Activity in the air seemed to boil. The Golden Jiao Totem's field-force storm had Great Vajra sitting in what felt like an Activity ocean — absorbing, digesting, amalgamating, exchanging without pause. The Activity Value counter ticked up 0.001H every three minutes.

A magnificent feast, under ordinary circumstances.

What accompanied it was less pleasant. One moment the sky had been bright; within minutes the clouds were total, the light gone, enormous raindrops hammering the roof with a sound like irregular percussion. A blink later, standing water was already collecting on the ground — Great Vajra's tires threw up sheets of water with each rotation.

Blackhead was in the greenhouse, pressed against the panoramic skylight, her compound eyes — or whatever sensory apparatus she used — tracking the patterns the rain drew and erased across the glass. The Antgod lay quietly in the ant burrow. Something was visible at the base of her wings: the root junctions were beginning to crack. Wing-shedding had begun. She was becoming, truly, a queen — preparing to reproduce and build her colony.

The water climbed quickly. Ten centimeters. Then the storm escalated beyond rain — the individual drops were gone, replaced by continuous curtains of water that reduced the camera feeds to grey static. Shen Cong opened the windshield panel and ran the wipers, which helped somewhat but not much.

Outside: dark. The headlights drowned in water. Even his 90x light sensitivity was scrambled by the interference.

The pulse radar came into its own. Salvaged from garrison stockpiles, it swept the terrain ahead continuously and rendered it as a three-dimensional model — enough to drive by.

He slowed to 20 kilometers per hour and turned toward camp.

He wasn't staying out in the open overnight. He had no idea what the water levels would reach by morning, and Great Vajra's fifty-plus ton weight didn't prevent it from floating — in deep enough water, the vehicle would be at the mercy of the current. And in water, the Dog-Croc was unquestionably the dominant predator. That particular matchup…