Half an hour of driving, and Shen Cong had seen nothing but dead land in every direction.

At one point he spotted the remains of a building — looked like a factory floor, by the shape of it. Nothing left but a twisted steel skeleton, bent in on itself. He pulled over and climbed out to check. No signs of life. The battlefield radar showed nothing moving. The infrared picked up no heat signatures.

He’d always known most people wouldn’t survive something like this. But knowing it and standing in it were two different things. The silence was total. No movement, no sound, no living thing in any direction. Just him.

He also hadn’t found any food.

The supplies loaded in Vajra, rationed carefully, would stretch maybe three years. The diesel would cover roughly a thousand kilometers. He’d always assumed that after the apocalypse, gas stations would just be there for the taking — nobody left to charge you. What he hadn’t accounted for was a storm that erased the stations entirely, along with everything else.

At least Vajra was alive now. He could guide its development over time, work toward solar power or whatever other energy sources turned up. Fuel dependency wasn’t a permanent problem — just an immediate one.

The Activity could grow. He’d felt that clearly over the past month. When it all started, only Vajra’s metal frame had been touched by it. Now the whole vehicle was integrated, and the feedback into his own body had gotten noticeably stronger. He felt like he could put a bull down with one punch.

If my heading’s right, Wuwei should be about a kilometer ahead.

No GPS, no landmarks left standing — he was estimating from speed and time. Rough math.

Then —

Vajra lurched.

The jolt snapped Shen Cong out of his thoughts. He reached out through the connection immediately and felt it: something underneath the chassis, hitting it from below.

Something alive.

He didn’t feel excited. His first instinct was wariness — his persecution complex had never fully gone away, and whatever this was, it was attacking from underneath. He stood on the brakes. Vajra settled to a stop in the sand.

Whatever had hit them wasn’t large. The impact was sharp and forceful, but it hadn’t done any damage to a hull Shen Cong had spent years reinforcing. Still — taking a hit without responding wasn’t his style. And he genuinely wanted to know what had managed to survive.

Bang.

Another impact. Vajra rocked slightly.

He didn’t get out. Instead he went back into the cargo section, grabbed a periscope from the equipment locker, then unlatched a fist-sized steel panel in the floor and lowered the periscope through the gap. Six years of paranoid over-engineering meant he’d planned for exactly this — a way to observe underneath the vehicle without exposing himself.

He swept the periscope around.

There it was.

A mutated insect, vaguely roach-shaped. It was the size of one of Vajra’s tires.

Vajra’s tires had been sourced from heavy industrial machinery — 1.5 meters in diameter. That made this thing roughly 1.5 meters long. Its head was dominated by a pair of enormous sickle-shaped mandibles that caught the dim light with a dull silver gleam, like polished steel.

Shen Cong stared at it for a long moment.

How is there a bug that size.

Then again — Vajra had come alive. A mutated insect wasn’t exactly the hardest thing to accept after that. He took a slow breath and made himself move on.

The creature seemed to be getting frustrated. Unable to damage the chassis, it twisted around and bored back down into the sand — then came rocketing back up and slammed into the undercarriage again. There was something almost admirable about the commitment.

It was also a problem. He had no idea how to deal with something that could disappear underground whenever it wanted, and one look at those mandibles was enough to rule out getting out and fighting it hand to hand.

So. He’d have to be clever about it.

He went to the food storage and pulled out a strip of cured pork — he’d only packed a small amount, mainly for morale purposes; the calorie-to-volume ratio wasn’t worth the space. He threaded it onto a steel hook, then chained the hook to a length of cable just long enough to reach the floor hatch.

Fishing. He was going to fish for a giant mutant roach.

He also grabbed one of his high-pressure air rifles — the kind that fired steel shot — and put a whistle between his teeth. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, he cut half the meat off the hook and put it back. No sense wasting it if this didn’t work.

Hook through the hatch. Rifle aimed at the hatch. He blew the whistle.

The creature was mid-headbutt when the sound hit it. It spotted the meat immediately, lunged, and bit down on the hook. The moment it realized it was stuck, it let out a horrible shrieking sound.

Big as a dog, brain the size of a grain of rice.

He’d been planning to use the air rifle, but watching the thing thrash uselessly, it was clear the bite force wasn’t there. He swapped the rifle for a steel pitchfork, lined it up with the hatch opening, and drove it down.

Thud.

Shen Cong, whose body after months of Activity feedback could drive a pitchfork through ten millimeters of steel plate, did not have trouble with a large insect. The tines went in through the mouth and straight through. The creature convulsed for a few seconds, then went still.

Through the connection, he felt something — the faint trace of Activity that had been present in the creature, slowly fading now.

He opened the undercarriage hatch and hauled the thing up into the cargo section.

Time to study it.

Six years of building Vajra alone, from scratch, had made Shen Cong into someone who figured things out for himself. Whatever crossed his path, he investigated it.

Most people, after killing something like this, would have looked at it for a minute and moved on.

Shen Cong got out his camera.

He photographed it from every angle, took measurements, wrote up an entry in his laptop — the dedicated one he kept for logging information about the new world — then dissected it methodically, recorded the data, and filed everything away properly.

Maybe that was the real difference between him and everyone else. Other survivors would be scrambling to stay alive. He was treating the apocalypse like a field study.

Strong muscle elasticity — consistent with Activity enhancement. But how did Activity get into this thing in the first place? Same source as me? The meteor?

He filed it under his working notes and moved on to naming it.

Burrower. Classification: mutated cockroach-type insect. Combat rating: low intelligence, physically weak, aggressive temperament.

Also — it’s a lot meatier than a regular roach. I wonder if it’s edible.

He cut a section of white muscle from one of the legs, ran a basic acid-base test on it, didn’t find anything alarming, rinsed it off, and put it in the pan.

While it cooked, he turned his attention to the mandibles. Each one was roughly the length of a hand, heavily degraded into a sickle-shaped structure — but something about the texture had been bothering him since he first saw them through the periscope.

They didn’t look like bone. They looked like metal.

Metal. Activity. Is there a connection?

He turned it over in his mind for a while, got nowhere, and let it go. Not enough information yet.

The meat was done. He cut off a piece roughly the size of his pinky nail, chewed it carefully, and rendered his verdict.

Can’t say whether it’s toxic yet. Taste-wise… kind of like chicken, but drier. Stringy. Less oil next time.

He ate the one small piece and stopped there. Better to wait and see before committing to more. He set out the antidotes and fast-acting injectors he kept on hand for exactly this kind of situation and kept them within reach.

Then he started up Vajra and got back on the road.

(End of Chapter 4)