CHAPTER TWENTY
The wasteland was worse than Olivia had imagined.
They travelled in three armoured vehicles—modified Humvees with reinforced plating and mounted machine guns. Twelve fighters total: Commander Sable, Lucas, Olivia, Cass, and eight Vanguard soldiers, three of them awakened.
The city had become alien. Buildings stood half-collapsed, wrapped in luminescent vines that pulsed like heartbeats.
The sky was still fractured, though less violently than the first night—now it looked like cracked glass, different skies visible through the gaps.
Strange fauna wandered the streets: dog-sized insects with crystalline wings, birds with three eyes, a deer-like creature that stood ten feet tall and watched them pass with unsettling intelligence.
"Don't engage the wildlife unless it attacks," Sable ordered from the lead vehicle. "We move fast, we stay quiet, we reach the university in ninety minutes."
They didn't make it ninety minutes.
The ambush came at mile six, in a district of collapsed apartment buildings. The creatures hit the lead vehicle first—leaping from rooftops, stone-gray skin, too many limbs. Golems. Six of them.
The lead Humvee flipped, rolling three times before crashing into a storefront. Sable emerged from the wreckage in a burst of blue light, her awakened power manifesting as crackling energy around her fists.
"Contact! All units, engage!"
Chaos. Pure, overwhelming chaos.
Olivia followed Lucas out of their vehicle, her spear in hand, her heart hammering against her ribs.
A golem charged her—smaller than the one in the gym, faster, more agile.
She sidestepped its lunge, pivoted, and drove her spear into the gap between its shoulder blades.
The blade scraped stone, found softer material, sank deep. The creature roared and collapsed.
"Behind you!" Lucas shouted.
She dropped without thinking, a golem's fist passing inches above her head. She rolled, came up inside its reach, and used her low centre of gravity to unbalance it—a judo trip modified for something that weighed five hundred pounds. It stumbled. Lucas's sword severed its head.
They fought back-to-back. Olivia's spear flashed, her flexible body weaving around attacks that should have crushed her. She moved like water, like smoke, like something that couldn't be hit. The Weasel. The name made sense now.
But there were too many.
A golem caught Marcus—one of the soldiers, the teenager from the streets—with a backhand that sent him flying into a wall. He didn't get up. Another soldier fell, screaming, as a golem's jaws closed on his leg.
"Fall back!" Sable commanded. "Rally on me!"
They retreated to the remaining vehicles, fighting every step. Olivia took a glancing blow to her ribs—she felt something crack, pain lancing through her side—but she kept moving. She couldn't stop. Stopping meant dying.
Lucas pulled her into the vehicle. "Drive! Now!"
The Humvee roared away, leaving the golems behind. Olivia slumped against the seat, gasping, her hand pressed to her ribs. Blood ran from a cut on her forehead. Her spear was broken, the blade snapped off in a golem's back.
"Casualties?" Sable demanded.
"Two dead," someone reported. "Three wounded. Marcus is unconscious."
"Damn it." Sable's face was splattered with gray golem blood. "We continue. The artifact is more important than any of us."
"More important than our lives?" Olivia asked.
Sable turned those glacier eyes on her. "If we don't find a way to seal the Veil, Olivia, everyone dies. Not just us. Everyone. So yes. The artifact is more important."
Olivia looked at Lucas. He was cleaning his sword, his jaw tight, his eyes distant. This was the reality of war—not glory, not heroism, but desperate survival and impossible choices.
She touched her broken ribs and thought of Valeria Vance, who had once carried a shattered arm through three days of battle to deliver a message that saved a city.
*"Pain is just information,"* Valeria had said. *"Your body telling you what matters. Listen, adapt, and keep moving."*
Olivia sat up straighter. "I'm not done."
"You're injured," Lucas said.
"I'm alive. That's enough."
Sable studied her for a long moment. Then, incredibly, she smiled. "Lucas was right about you. You're a monster in a small package."
"I've been called worse."
"I know. I read your file." Sable turned to the driver. "Continue to the university. Full speed."
The vehicle accelerated through the ruined streets, carrying them toward whatever waited in the darkness.
Olivia gripped the hilt of her broken spear and whispered, "Okay, Val. Let's see what you've got."