Before the fire could touch my skin, the eight-foot titan scooped me up with its primary arms, shielding my body with its massive, armored bulk. At that instant, the creature’s anatomy shifted with a mechanical squelch. It split and lifted the heavy, obsidian-armored forewings protecting its back, revealing multiple organic, cylinder-like vents fused directly into its thoracic musculature.
With a concussive boom that matched the explosion below, the bionic-nozzles ignited. A continuous jet burst of superheated gas erupted from its back, launching us violently up into the air just as the entire terrace entrance collapsed into a crater of smoke and rubble. The Goliath’s hardened forewings acted as heavy rudders mid-air, tilting and angling against the raw forward momentum to steer its massive body with terrifying agility and hover high above the roof.
I watched from our vantage point in the sky as the final remnants of the shockwave ripped across the helipad. The terrace entrance had collapsed completely into a crater of smoking rubble, the explosive blast subsided and the thick smoke began to thin.
I glanced at the handful of infected that had already been roaming the roof before the collapse. They were still mindlessly snapping their jaws at the sky. I commanded coldly, "Goliath, kill the remaining infected and secure the roof and the aircraft."
The monster tilted its rigid forewings mid-air to cut its vertical lift, dropping back down onto the concrete with a heavy, bone-jarring thud. Instantly, its integrated five-finger machine gun and hand cannon spun to life, shredding the infected into red mist.
I was a little muffed to see that the system was no longer awarding me any stats for killing infected. As the air cleared, I scrambled out of its grip and ran for Major Bane’s waiting aircraft, a Gargoyle Heavy Tiltrotor.
The machine was an absolute beast of modern mana tech and mana blending. A heavy, tactical tiltrotor gunship and transport hybrid, cloaked in a matte, stealth-black finish with brushed-metal accents that absorbed the flickering fires of the rooftop. I quickly circled the aircraft, stepping over the riddled body of the Bane’s pilot lying on the concrete. To my relief, the fuselage hadn’t taken any significant damage. Its armor plating was forged from a high-grade mana blended alloy of rare earth metals and reinforced ores extracted from monster gates, engineered to withstand frontline monster raids. A high-tier asset like this was easily worth a quarter of a billion denars.
I hit the exterior hydraulic switch, and the heavy cargo bay ramp hissed open. Stepping into the cavernous interior, I found it stacked to the ceiling with reinforced secure crates. A quick glance at the manifest terminals showed they were packed with unclassified high-tier weaponry and rows of glowing, premium-grade mana stones. I smirked. It looked like Major Bane had intended to use this flight to smuggle out the salvageable assets from the Clover Corporation’s Red Creek base before the final nuclear cleansing.
The Goliath thudded into the cargo bay behind me, its massive insectoid body dripping with the black, synthetic blood of the infected it had just liquidated. I gestured toward a reinforced holding bed in the corner of the deck. A heavily anchored platform specifically designed with magnetic restraints to transport high-threat biological assets. The creature complied instantly, stepping onto the rig and powering down its organic thrusters into a low, mechanical hum as the locks snapped into place around its chassis.
With my ultimate weapon safely secured, I turned on my heel and headed straight up the internal corridor toward the advanced cockpit. Using the deeply ingrained muscle memory of Crispin Cross, I flipped the ignition arrays, warmed the thruster nacelles, and piloted the multi-million-dollar military gunship and transport hybrid into the sky. The vertical takeoff went flawlessly, and I headed to the outskirts of the city without delay.
Below, the Red Creek City was completely crawling with the infected. A surging, mindless sea of teeth and claws filling the choked streets. The rare human survivors were mostly huddled in dark corners, desperately hiding out of sight. Just as I smoothly maneuvered the heavy tiltrotor around the jagged, shattered frame of a burning skyscraper, a brilliant streak of crimson light erupted from the darkness.
Someone had fired a flare from a nearby roof.
I banked the aircraft, squinting through the armored cockpit glass at a commercial high-rise tower to find a small group of desperate people gathered on the roof, frantically signaling for a rescue. Zooming in with the gunship’s tactical optics, my stomach dropped. Standing right there at the edge of the helipad was the protagonist herself, Aegis McColon, surrounded by her small band of survivors.
I had absolutely zero desire to run into the main character when I was this close to safely reaching the ending of this novel. I knew the terrifying rules of this genre all too well. Getting close to an awakening protagonist was an automatic death sentence, becoming another expendable stepping stone or a tragic sacrifice to fuel her character ascent.
I immediately pulled back on the flight yoke, forcing the powerful jet bursts to lift the heavy Gargoyle steeply into the night sky, maximizing our altitude. But I had vastly underestimated the insane, rule-breaking physical capabilities of an action-novel protagonist. Even at our current height, Aegis didn’t hesitate.
With the explosive assistance of her companions throwing her upward, she launched herself off the roof in a gravity-defying, superhuman leap. I watched in sheer disbelief through the ventral cameras as her silhouette rocketed toward us, her hand outstretched, attempting to grab the aircraft’s heavy landing gear.
She missed by a fraction of an inch. As her forward momentum died and she hung briefly suspended in the thin air, a few feet short of the fuselage, our eyes locked perfectly through the thick cockpit glass. Even in the flickering red glare of a dying city, I could confirm she was every bit of the striking, ethereal beauty the novel had painstakingly described her to be. But her eyes weren’t beautiful right now, they were filled with the cold, calculating glare of an apex predator marking its next target.
I didn’t blink nor hesitate, cruelly jammed the thrusters forward, forcing the tiltrotor’s engines to roar to life as I locked my course directly toward the city borders, leaving her to drop back down onto a neighboring rooftop. I felt a small twinge of guilt, but my relief trumped over it. The plot could play out without me.