The Reanimator’s Academy: The Immortal Sovereign #3

Chapter 1

The vibration of the heavy diesel engine was a physical assault.

It traveled up through the reinforced steel floor of the Cartel crawler-tank. It rattled the bolts. It vibrated the heavy iron steering levers.

It ground directly into Caelan Cross’s fractured ribs.

He did not flinch. He sat in the rigid, leather-backed driver's seat.

The Wastes rolled past the cracked, reinforced windshield in a blur of toxic purple smog and jagged obsidian.

He was the architect. He was the Warlord.

But right now, he was just tired meat.

He held the right steering lever with the ancient, silver-etched foundry iron of his [Structural Grafting] . The heavy metal claws locked flawlessly onto the steel.

His left arm rested heavily on the dashboard.

It was no longer a human hand. It was the [Venomous Chitin Graft] .

Three feet of glossy, impenetrable black arachnid bone terminated in a razor-sharp scythe. It was a terrifying, asymmetrical nightmare.

It was also slowly poisoning him.

The raw, smoking green venom that fused the deep-crust chitin to his splintered radius actively seeped into his cardiovascular system. His human heart hammered a frantic, irregular rhythm.

He was forcing his frail biology to filter an apex predator’s neurotoxin just to keep his shoulder from necrotizing.

His vision swam with faint, pale green static.

"Take the helm," Caelan rasped.

His voice was a dry, mechanical grind.

Jax scrambled across the cramped cabin. The Cartel scout favored his tourniqueted leg, sliding into the driver's seat the second Caelan stood up.

Caelan did not rest.

He walked to the back of the cabin.

He unslung his heavy iron-wood rucksack. He dropped it onto the steel floor.

He unbuckled the thick leather flaps.

The Warlord required inventory. There were no magic pockets in the deep crust. A flesh-crafter without supplies was just a butcher waiting for a slab.

He reached into the velvet-lined compartments.

Empty.

He pulled out the pristine glass vials. There was no freezing Cartel stasis-fluid left. Not a single drop.

He checked the heavy canvas pouches. The alchemical surgical salts were entirely depleted.

He had sacrificed everything. He had burned through his entire hoarded cache of premium Cartel medical supplies to stitch the massive, four-ton chassis of Kragga Iron-Maw to the rear deck.

He looked at the heavy steel door leading to the exterior flatbed.

He could hear the rhythmic, heavy thud of the stolen Inquisition Aether-Core pulsing within the Thall’s chest.

The siege engine was functionally perfect. It was an indestructible, multi-limbed god of war.

But the architect was running on absolute fumes.

If Xyrielle took a kinetic shell to her remaining good leg, he could not fix her. If the arachnid venom creeping up his left arm breached his heart valve, he could not stop it.

He closed the empty rucksack.

He leaned against the cold steel wall of the cabin.

Zylia Vex was asleep on the floor.

The shadow-weaver was curled into a tight ball, shivering in her ragged black robes. Her face was pale, streaked with dried blood from her ruptured eardrums. The massive, sustained magical exertion required to bypass the Cartel vault had drained her Aetheric reserves to zero.

She looked like a corpse.

At the front of the cabin, Jax gripped the steering levers with white knuckles.

The scout’s swollen, alchemically burned face was slick with terrified sweat. His single, un-swollen eye darted frantically to the rear-view optical monitors.

"They're coming," Jax muttered, his voice a frantic whisper. "Vane is dead, but the Cartel has outposts. They have perimeter patrols. They're going to track the treads. They're going to find us."

Caelan did not look at the monitors.

"The Cartel is broken meat," Caelan stated coldly.

He looked through the windshield.

He was not looking for scavengers. He was looking for the towering, pristine white walls of the Zenithar Schola . He was looking for the Spire of Luminance.

He had built his army. He was bringing the harvest to the High Arbiter.

The ambient light in the cabin suddenly died.

The harsh, violent purple glare of the Ashen Wastes vanished.

It was not a gradual sunset. It was violently snuffed out, like a candle crushed beneath a heavy iron boot.

Caelan pushed himself off the wall.

"Did you cut the headlights?" Caelan demanded.

"No!" Jax yelled, frantically toggling the heavy brass switches on the dashboard. "The electrical grid is fully powered! The exterior floods are on!"

Caelan walked to the front windshield.

He looked up.

The sky was no longer a bruised, toxic purple.

It was a suffocating, oily black.

It was not the darkness of night. It possessed physical weight. It was the crushing, heavy gloom of the deep ocean trenches.

The howling, dry winds of the borderlands died instantly.

The heavy, rattling chassis of the crawler-tank went eerily quiet.

The ambient temperature plummeted. Condensation instantly froze against the inside of the reinforced glass.

A foul, overwhelming stench flooded the cabin through the rusted ventilation grates.

It smelled of rotting kelp. Stagnant saltwater. Crushed, hyper-dense biology that had never seen the sun.

"What is that smell?" Zylia groaned, waking up. She clutched her stomach, gagging against the sudden, nauseating odor.

Caelan’s [Anatomical Insight] violently flared.

The silver geometric runes washed over his vision.

They did not map a single threat.

The runes flooded his retinas with a solid, unbroken wall of catastrophic red error codes. The ambient Aether of the Wastes was completely gone, replaced by a massive, overriding frequency of pure, unadulterated corruption.

"Stop the tracks," Caelan ordered.

"We can't stop!" Jax panicked, grinding the gears. "If we sit still—"

"Stop the tracks!" Caelan roared, the Warlord's gravity crushing the scout's fear.

Jax slammed his heavy boots onto the iron brakes.

The massive crawler-tank violently lurched. The fifty-ton vehicle ground to a sudden, shrieking halt.

Caelan was thrown forward. He caught himself against the dashboard with his iron arm.

He stared through the windshield.

The horizon was gone.

Two miles ahead, the flat, pulverized expanse of the ash dunes simply ceased to exist.

A wall was moving toward them.

It was a towering, seventy-foot-high tidal wave of pitch-black, corrupted sludge.

It was the Abyssal Tide .

It was not an army. It was not a Cartel patrol.

It was a world-ending, oceanic flood.

Caelan’s visual processing finally penetrated the black wave.

The sludge was not just mud. It was alive.

It was packed with thousands of hyper-mutated, deep-crust shadow-beasts. Feral leviathans with far too many limbs. Boiling, toxic seawater surged up from the deepest, unmapped fissures of the continent, carrying the monsters in a rolling, apocalyptic avalanche of rot.

"Gods above," Jax whispered.

The scout let go of the steering levers. His hands fell limply to his sides.

"It's the ocean," Zylia breathed, pulling herself up to look out the glass. "The deep crust cracked. The ocean is flooding the Wastes."

"It is not water," Caelan stated.

The clinical detachment was completely failing against the sheer scale of the anomaly.

"It is a biological purge."

The vanguard of the wave hit the valley.

The sound was a deafening, wet roar.

The first surge of the black tide rushed across the dry pumice.

It slammed into the heavy steel hull of the Cartel crawler-tank.

The impact did not shatter the armor.

It changed the physics of the earth.

The dry, packed ash of the borderlands instantly dissolved. The highly acidic, corrupted sludge saturated the ground in a microsecond.

The earth turned into a sinking, toxic quagmire.

The crawler-tank violently shifted.

The front chassis dipped sharply downward.

"We're sinking!" Jax screamed.

The scout grabbed the heavy iron levers. He slammed the massive diesel engines into full reverse.

The engines shrieked. Black exhaust poured from the top vents.

The heavy iron treads spun wildly.

They did not catch. They churned the black sludge, digging the massive fifty-ton vehicle deeper and deeper into the acidic mud.

The mud swallowed the treads. It rose over the lower armor plating.

Caelan Cross stared at the towering, endless wall of oceanic corruption rolling across the continent.

His grand, calculated march on the Spire was dead.

The borderland war of scavengers and Cartel mercenaries was entirely over.

The continental apocalypse had arrived.

The Warlord was no longer hunting.

He was drowning.