In the water, the Dog-Croc was an undisputed apex predator.

Shen Cong stood on Vajra’s roof and watched it work, helpless to intervene, as it took the survivors one by one. There was nothing to be done from here.

And it wasn’t alone. He counted three Dog-Crocs in total, their heads surfacing at intervals across the floodwater, moving through the drowned landscape with obvious ease. Occasionally one would thrash at something below the surface — evolved fish, probably, swallowed between the larger kills.

The world had returned to something primordial. Enormous beasts at the top of every food chain. Humanity — which had ruled this ground for millennia — reduced to floating debris, prey items, things that screamed briefly and disappeared.

Shen Cong was the exception to that rule, and he knew it.

Even if a Dog-Croc hauled itself up Flag Mountain, he wasn’t afraid. Wang Gen’s four demolition packages were prepped and ready, each loaded with twenty detonators. The kind of charge that could split bedrock could certainly handle a mutant crocodile. If any of them came for him, he’d give them a taste of what Sun Wukong did to the Bull Demon King’s wife.

He was, and had always been, a person who remembered grudges. The Dog-Croc encounter that had nearly killed him early on had left something carved into him that hadn’t faded. He wanted that tail spine. The triangular drumstick growth at the tip — larger than a basketball, dense with Activity — fashioned into a warhammer, swung with nearly six-bull strength behind it, would be a close-quarters weapon unlike anything he currently carried.

His ranged arsenal was solid now — the rhino horn arrow and javelin had raised that ceiling considerably. But his close-quarters options remained weak. The crescent blade was decorative. The fang knives were too short for serious work. A Dog-Croc hammer would fill that gap completely. He’d back himself in a solo fight, with that in hand.

The light rain continued. The floodwater held.

He was still running through this when he noticed the Dog-Crocs were multiplying.

More arrivals, surfacing steadily from different directions. By the time he counted ten, he’d stopped standing on the roof. He dropped back into Vajra, got the detonators within reach, and watched through the cameras.

Ten Dog-Crocs, gathering in the water between Flag Mountain and Drum Mountain. Exactly where Vajra had been parked before the storm.

A hundred meters of flooded slope separated them from his current position.

What are they doing?

One or two he could handle. Ten was a different problem entirely. He shut down the diesel generator — engine noise carried through water, and he had no interest in drawing their attention.

The minutes passed. The water level was visibly dropping — the poplars at the mountain’s base were emerging from the flood, more trunk showing every few minutes. Depth down to roughly two meters. And between the mountains, the count had climbed to fifteen Dog-Crocs, churning in tight circles, their calls — a deep, rolling gurgle — building in frequency and agitation.

What’s gotten them worked up?

His first thought was mating season. Animals congregated in numbers for that.

He was wrong.

Before he’d ever entered the southern district, Shen Cong had heard the Dragon Slayers’ name and rolled his eyes at it. Middle-school fantasy energy. He’d known the story — Zhang Tianshen had supposedly seen a dragon, named his faction after it, the whole thing. Every survivor who’d heard the tale had treated it as a joke. A delusion, or at best an exaggeration.

A dragon. Right.

Snakes could evolve, sure. But into a dragon? That was mythology, not biology.

At 3:30 PM on August 22nd, with the sky still heavy and grey and light rain still falling, Shen Cong understood for the first time what Zhang Tianshen had actually been trying to say.

The fifteen Dog-Crocs were calling loudly, their gurgling rising to a sustained roar — and then something surfaced from beneath them.

A head. Enormous. Larger than any Dog-Croc’s skull. Crowned with two gnarled, branching protrusions that curved like horns.

“Dragon.”

The word left him before he’d consciously formed it. The cameras tracked it immediately.

It was a snake. Had to be — the body structure, the scales, the way it moved. But a snake that, seen from a distance with those horns and that scale pattern, genuinely looked like something from a legend. Terrifying and magnificent at once.

The neck alone, raised above the water, was covered in yellow-white scales that immediately called one thing to mind: Burmese python. Golden phase. He was almost certain — this creature had been a golden Burmese python once, before the world ended.

The Golden Python’s appearance sent the already-agitated Dog-Crocs into a frenzy. They churned the water around it, bellowing, surging toward it and pulling back, trying to intimidate something that showed no sign of being intimidated. The great head simply hovered above the surface, tongue flickering in and out, tasting the air.

Sampling information.

Even at this distance, watching through cameras, Shen Cong felt cold.

The head alone matched a Dog-Croc in scale. The body beneath the water — he didn’t want to think about how large the body was.

Please let them destroy each other.

The battle started at four o’clock.

The Golden Python had apparently collected enough data. Its tail moved first — a loop surging up from beneath the surface, coiling around one of the Dog-Crocs in an instant. Even on camera, the tail’s diameter was visible: fifty centimeters across at minimum. Bucket-thick.

The trapped Dog-Croc thrashed violently. The others fell back, bellowing. After a moment of sustained pressure, the Python released it — a probe, not a kill. The tongue resumed its work.

Then a bold Dog-Croc lunged. Jaws open, driving toward the Python’s neck.

The tail came around and swept it off its feet, sending it tumbling across the water’s surface in a spray of white. Then the rest of the pack moved — all remaining Dog-Crocs attacking simultaneously, the water exploding into chaos, jaws snapping, bodies rolling. The Golden Python fought back with its full mass, coiling and uncoiling, hurling Dog-Crocs away with the force of its body. It opened its own mouth periodically — no venom, but the teeth were formidable, and when one Dog-Croc came too close it nearly had half its torso torn away.

Biting. Thrashing. Coiling. The violence escalated until Shen Cong could barely follow it — the water spray blocked the cameras, and all he could read was the color: the surface around the fighting had turned red. Dark, spreading red, running with the current out into the wider flood. Evolved fish he’d never seen before leapt from the water at the edges of the blood plume, feeding on whatever they could reach.

To them, the blood of Dog-Crocs and a Golden Python was a feast beyond imagining.

Twenty minutes. The water had dropped further — barely a meter of depth remaining. And the battle reached its conclusion.

The Golden Python won.

Barely.

Six of the fifteen Dog-Crocs were dead. The remaining nine, wounded to varying degrees, gurgled their retreat and dispersed into the receding flood. The victorious Python floated motionless for a time, its body scored with wounds across its entire visible length. Then it consumed two of the Dog-Croc carcasses — unhurried, methodical — and moved off slowly toward the Juchao urban district, sliding beneath the surface.

The battlefield went quiet.

Less than a meter of murky water remained between the two mountains. Four Dog-Croc carcasses drifted in it, already being worked over by small evolved fish that had followed the blood scent in from somewhere — tearing at the bodies in a frenzied, churning mass.

(End of Chapter 88)