An ugly metal figure in battered armor moved carefully through the wreckage, handgun raised, clearing the area systematically.

Shen Cong, operating on his standard principle of threat elimination first, everything else second. He’d confirmed no immediate danger, and he was still wearing the Optimus 1.0 anyway — the persecution complex didn’t take days off. The armor was uncomfortable. He wore it anyway. Without it, he had a persistent mental image of something Burrower-shaped launching itself at him from between two rusted car frames.

Once he was satisfied the clearing was safe, he started actually looking at it.

The distribution pattern made more sense on foot than it had from the roof. The way the vehicles had come to rest — many of them half-vertical, nose or tail end driven into the earth — wasn’t consistent with a sustained wind pushing things horizontally. It was consistent with a vertical force. A tornado, most likely. An extreme one, the kind the old world’s meteorological scales hadn’t had a category for. He mentally filed it under the same classification he’d been using for everything the new world produced that exceeded previous benchmarks.

Super-catastrophic. My term. Nobody left to argue about the naming convention.

The densest concentration, right at the center of the radial pattern, was where the real strangeness was. Several vehicles had been compressed together in a way that looked less like impact damage and more like something had grabbed them and squeezed. He walked over and grabbed a bumper.

Crack.

The steel snapped without resistance. He looked at the break.

The corrosion went deep. Not two months deep — twenty years deep, at minimum. The metal had oxidized far beyond what exposure to the elements since May could account for.

He tried another frame section on a different vehicle. Same result — moderate pressure, immediate fracture, corrosion visible through the full thickness of the steel.

He picked up a section of iron support column and squeezed.

It crumbled into fragments in his hand.

This isn’t right.

The vehicles at the outer edges of the clearing — the ones he’d already salvaged parts from — had been corroded, but normally. Wind and rain and two months of exposure. These central vehicles had experienced something qualitatively different. Something had drained them.

He thought about the Plastic Rabbit. The Teddy-Dog and Tumour-Pig fighting in this exact spot. The consistent directional pull that had driven the rabbit bloody against its cage for two days.

Something in this pile was the source.

He went back to Vajra, chained the rabbit’s collar, and let it out.

It went straight for the compressed central mass, bounding across the cleared ground without hesitation. When it reached the wreckage, Shen Cong let it range freely — the debris was spread out now, nothing could hide in it. The rabbit hopped through the scattered metal, sniffing, investigating, and eventually lay down on top of a particular piece of framework and went completely still.

Is that a motorcycle frame?

He caged the rabbit, set it aside, and crouched over what the animal had chosen.

The frame was roughly motorcycle-proportioned — the right geometry for it, at least. He took hold of it and pulled.

It didn’t snap. Didn’t crumble. He increased the force and the frame flexed without breaking, the way metal was supposed to behave.

He looked more carefully at the surface. There was rust, yes — a surface layer of oxidation, the normal result of two months in the open. But when he rubbed his thumb across the rust, it came away easily, and underneath it —

Silver-white metal. Clean, bright, unmarked.

And the moment the surface rust cleared away, something moved through him that he didn’t have a word for. Not hunger exactly, though hunger was the closest concept. Not desire. Something more fundamental — a pull at the level of basic biological need, like the automatic reach for air. The word that fit best, if he was being honest, was devour.

At the same moment, he felt it: Activity radiation, emanating from the frame. Faint but consistent, the same electromagnetic quality he associated with Vajra’s systems, with the ambient energy after storms, with the Activity cores in the creatures he’d killed.

The thought arrived fully formed before he could stop it.

This frame is alive. The same way Vajra is alive.

He sat with that for a moment.

He didn’t believe he was the only survivor. He’d never believed that. And he’d always known intellectually that Vajra’s transformation probably wasn’t unique — the meteor shower had hit everywhere, and whatever process had animated the metal of his truck had presumably been available to any metal that had been in the right place at the right moment.

Knowing it and seeing it were different things.

He turned and looked at the Plastic Rabbit in its cage.

And another thought arrived, less welcome than the first: what if the difference between himself and the rabbit isn’t as large as he’d assumed? Both changed by the same event. Both carrying Activity. Both drawn to the same things.

I am not in the same category as that creature.

He said it out loud, firmly, and picked up the motorcycle frame.

There would be time to think about the implications later. Right now, the frame was going into Vajra.

He grabbed the Teddy-Dog and Tumour-Pig carcasses off the ground while he was at it, loaded them onto the dozer blade, and drove back to a safe distance before doing anything else.

With the motorcycle frame back inside Vajra, the Plastic Rabbit immediately lost interest in its cage door and returned to its default state — eating, in this case a generous portion of fresh Tumour-Pig meat. The blowflies received their own serving of tumour tissue.

Shen Cong processed the two new creatures first, working through the standard protocol.

The Teddy-Dog was slightly smaller than the Fangwolf — the curly coat and stub tail made the domestic origin obvious. The mutation had been generous in certain departments; he noticed, cut it off without ceremony, and threw it out of the cargo hatch. The Activity-enhanced body at twenty-two years old had no use for it, and the smell was appalling, and water was a strategic resource he wasn’t going to spend on washing something he wasn’t going to eat.

Four fangs total — upper and lower pairs, both showing Activity core properties. Smaller than Fangwolf fangs but more numerous.

He updated the field guide:

Teddy Tyrant: mutated canid, probable domestic Teddy dog origin. Agile. Low intelligence. Weak combat rating — likely below Fangwolf. Four Activity-core fangs recovered.

The Tumour-Pig was significantly more interesting. Water-buffalo scale, the body covered in fist-sized growths that he couldn’t determine the origin of — pre-existing condition, or a byproduct of mutation, or something the Activity itself had produced. The tusks were the standout feature: nearly 70 centimeters, curving close to a full semicircle, the largest Activity cores he’d encountered so far, radiating more strongly than anything else in his collection.

Shaped almost exactly like a crescent blade.

With some grinding work, they’d be crescent blades.

He watched the fight replay in his memory while he wrote up the entry:

Tumour-Pig: mutated domestic pig. Body covered in tumorous growths — cause undetermined. Slow movement. Low intelligence. Weak combat rating, but high defense — thick hide, difficult to penetrate. Two large Activity-core tusks recovered.

He ran a rough internal comparison of everything he’d catalogued so far. If his own combat capability indexed at five, the Plastic Rabbit was somewhere between zero and one, a Burrower sat around two to three, a Gnawrat and the Teddy Tyrant came in near four, and a Fangwolf and Tumour-Pig were four to five. The prehistoric crocodile was a different scale entirely and required its own category.

He didn’t record the numerical ratings — too subjective for the field guide. What he did record was Activity core intensity rankings, which felt more empirically grounded: Tumour-Pig tusks at the top, then Fangwolf, Teddy Tyrant, Gnawrat, Burrower, Plastic Rabbit still pending.

With the creature research filed, he turned to the motorcycle frame.

It lay on the cargo floor, radiating Activity with the quiet consistency of something that had been doing it for a long time. Every time he looked at it, the pull came back — that deep, wordless devour instinct that he still didn’t fully understand.

Whatever it was, it was connected to the Activity. And the Activity was connected to Vajra. And Vajra was connected to him.

He needed to understand what that meant before he did anything else with it.

(End of Chapter 18)