By 2022, people had already started flying manned quadcopters.

Strictly speaking, a quadcopter was just a variant of helicopter — scale up the rotor assembly far enough and it could carry a person the same as any rotorcraft. Shen Cong couldn’t build a helicopter from scratch by himself, but expanding the existing quad platform, adding enough lift capacity to carry an extra ten kilograms or so — that was feasible.

He sketched out the plan: replace the drone’s wireless communication module with a wired connection, redesign the frame for a payload capacity of roughly ten kilograms, and fly it tethered to ethernet cable up to a hundred meters. The cable would carry both power and signal. Eyes in the sky at genuine altitude.

Theoretically sound. Power draw will be high. But if it can hold position at a hundred meters for two minutes, that’s enough to sweep everything within seven or eight kilometers.

If he could push the payload capacity further, he’d ditch the battery entirely and run continuous power through the cable — a truly persistent high-altitude observation post.

The wired drone would take time to build. He set the design aside for now and went back to the Hummer.

After a full night of continued Activity drain, the vehicle’s Activity Value had fallen to 0.054H. At that level, the original activation structure — the part of the Hummer that had first been touched by Activity — emerged clearly in his perception, distinct from the surrounding dead metal.

It corresponded to the vehicle’s core mechanical skeleton: engine block, front axle, rear axle, the primary load-bearing structure.

Something about this section felt different. Its Activity radiation signature was identical to the rest of the vehicle — no measurable difference on any instrument he could apply. But it produced a sensation he couldn’t explain away: a deep, pulling urge to consume it, to draw it into himself and make it part of Vajra. An appetite stronger than anything the rest of the Hummer had produced.

This wasn’t a desire he’d chosen. It was coming from somewhere below his decision-making, and it made him uncomfortable.

What’s special about this metal?

He disliked the feeling precisely because it wasn’t under his control. Urges that could drive behavior were liabilities.

He held the impulse down and pushed his perception into the structure as carefully as he could. An hour passed. He found nothing he could articulate — only the persistent, unmistakable sense that this metal was different. No mechanism. No explanation. Just the fact of it.

The afternoon ran out.

When he’d exhausted every approach and still couldn’t find a way to reinject Activity into the Hummer, he guided Vajra to absorb the final 0.2H remaining — and ended it.

A vehicle that had been alive, that had been Wang Gen’s bonded extension, became true scrap metal at 6:10 PM on August 20th.

Or not quite scrap. Even dead, the original activation structure continued to pull at him. Whatever secret it held, it hadn’t gone with the Activity that had once animated it.

He didn’t get to pursue the question further.

From far across the sky came a sharp, clear cry — and his attention snapped upward.

Two dark specks, moving fast from the horizon. Birds, by their silhouette.

Birds.

He was already moving — back into Vajra, armor sealed, crossbow in hand, roof hatch open.

Nothing in the sky was just a bird anymore.

He raised the binoculars.

Two creatures, close enough now to see clearly.

The first resembled a hawk or falcon, scaled up grotesquely — grey-black plumage, a beak that was long and blade-thin and enormous, feathers that caught the light like hammered steel. Genuinely imposing.

The second was harder to describe charitably. It brought to mind a news story Shen Cong had once seen about a depressed parrot — enormous rounded head, massive beak, body almost entirely bare except for a band of blue feathers along each wing. Compared to the hawk beside it, it looked unfinished. Ugly in the specific way of something that hadn’t come out right.

They weren’t flying together. They were fighting as they flew — and had apparently been doing so for some time. The parrot-thing bore multiple wounds already. The hawk had lost several feathers.

Are they heading for me?

He tracked them. Both creatures were angling toward Vajra’s position.

This was the first time he’d seen surviving birds since the apocalypse began. Entering the urban area, he’d noticed the absence — no pigeons, no sparrows, no insects. Even flies had disappeared from the city. Out in the countryside there’d still been a few, drawn to animal remains. Here, the environment had been too thoroughly stripped. Nothing had been left to sustain them.

Humans, even devastated as they were, still ruled the surface. Animals and plants existed at human convenience.

If these birds stayed high, he couldn’t touch them. If they came within range, he’d put them down immediately.

He trained the crossbow on the hawk — the more dangerous-looking of the two — and waited.

Closer. Closer. Close enough to see without the binoculars.

Still fighting as they descended toward him.

“Kree—!”

The hawk twisted sideways in a single fluid motion, letting the parrot-thing’s attack slide past it, then shrieked once and drove both talons into its opponent’s belly. The claws carved through bare skin and the parrot-thing’s intestines came spilling out in a loose tangle.

“Graaak—”

The parrot-thing flapped desperately, trying to pull away. The injury was catastrophic. It began to drop, trailing viscera, drifting sideways — toward Vajra.

Shen Cong shifted his aim to the hawk. It had won. It was still airborne. Still the threat.

But the hawk didn’t press toward him. It seemed to register his presence through the armored shell — began circling at altitude, watching, not approaching.

He tracked it with the crossbow, turning as it turned.

And then the parrot-thing — which should have been falling — let out two ragged croaks, arrested its descent somehow, and banked hard. It landed on the Hummer’s stripped frame beside Vajra, talons finding the axle housing, and immediately began driving its enormous beak into the wreckage. Intestines dragged on the ground. It didn’t seem to notice, or didn’t care. It was eating the metal.

The hawk, which had been maintaining careful distance from Shen Cong, saw the parrot-thing feeding.

The caution evaporated. Wings snapped shut. The hawk dropped like a stone, hit the parrot-thing at full speed, and drove its beak through it. One strike. The parrot-thing went still. Then the hawk threw it aside and turned its attention to the Hummer frame.

Shen Cong fired.

Thwack.

The fang arrow crossed the distance and missed — passing just wide of the hawk’s body. The angle was awkward, shooting almost directly overhead at a moving target, and he’d misjudged the trajectory. By the time he had a second bolt nocked, the hawk had already landed and was tearing at the metal with its beak, and the shot opportunity was gone.

He lowered the crossbow.

Reached for his phone instead. Opened the camera and started filming.

The hawk was roughly the size of a large goat when standing, but when it spread its wings the span was enormous — seven or eight meters, easily. Like unfolding a small sail. The beak was the length of his forearm, 25 centimeters or more, yellow, slightly curved, proportioned in a way that looked almost absurd until you watched it work.

Every strike pulled a strip of metal cleanly from the Hummer’s frame.

Shen Cong watched that and felt something go cold and quiet in his thinking.

An ordinary bird couldn’t do that. Couldn’t tear steel. This hawk had found a way to use its Activity core offensively — to focus its Sharpening through the beak, the same way he’d learned to infuse his weapons.

Evolved animals have figured out how to use Activity.

He frowned, still filming.

This was not good news.

(End of Chapter 82)