Chapter 111: Road to Power Part 1
The city faded behind them, swallowed by the horizon until nothing remained.
The convoy kept moving.
Six vehicles. No music. No conversation worth mentioning.
Francis had chosen the back seat of the second truck, away from the others.
He was in his human form, but he kept the blindfold on.
He leaned against the window and watched the landscape slide past.
Aris rode in the front.
She had not said a word since the rooftop incident.
Nathan kept watching her from the corner of his eye — subtle enough that she probably noticed and chose to ignore it.
"Get some sleep," Nathan suggested.
"I’m fine."
"No, you’re not."
She looked out the window instead of answering. He let it go.
Then the radio crackled.
Static, then a voice. One of the forward scouts positioned near the eastern coast, a Covenant member.
"— coastal defense is holding but barely. Flying types. Category 5 and above. The NET fired twice and cleared a large section but the attack rate of the orbital cannon is too long. —"
The signal broke up.
"Ground forces are covering the gap but casualties are —"
Gone.
Silence filled the vehicle again.
Aris closed her eyes.
She had seen this coming. Everyone celebrated when they killed a ’King’. But no one thought past the celebration to ask what came after.
It’s size and power had kept every flying-type beast underneath it in check.
The stronger ones stayed back. The aggressive ones stayed quiet. Its dominance was the only reason the skies weren’t constantly contested.
Now that it was dead, there was no lock anymore. Every flying beast that had been holding itself back was now charging forward, trying to claim the empty throne by proving it could do what Rynik failed to do .
Aris opened her eyes.
"It was always going to go this way. The moment humanity proved they could kill a King, the countdown to their extinction began."
Nathan had no answer for that. Although the Covenant opposed the government and had no issue with genocide, they still did not want total eradication.
Francis heard every word.
He did not have to try. His hearing had long since stopped being normal— it was always on, processing everything within range the way most people processed background noise.
The radio transmission, Aris’s voice, the heartbeats of the six people in his vehicle. All of it registered without effort.
Flying types flooding the coast. Reload windows too slow. Ground forces stretched thin.
He filed it away without reacting.
None of it changed his plan or where he was going. His only goal was Category 10.
He turned back to the window.
Hours later, the convoy stopped.
Ahead of them sat something that could barely be called a town.
Tall walls. Turrets mounted at intervals. Cannons at the corners, aimed outward. The whole structure felt more like a fortified checkpoint than a place people actually lived.
"What is this place?" Francis asked.
Nathan answered from the front. "An outpost. They’re spread across the country — refueling stops, mostly, but they double as shelter for people who can’t make it to a city. Beast encounters are rare this far out, but they built them ready anyway."
Francis nodded, then looked out at the long, empty highway behind them. For a route that connected major cities, it was completely dead.
"There’s no traffic," he said. "For a highway this size, that’s strange."
"Most cargo travels underground now," Nathan said. "There’s a transit network beneath the country — government-run, heavily secured. Highways became obsolete once that was built."
Francis had never come across it. He had spent most of his time in the city’s central districts, with a few trips to the industrial outskirts — the biker gang’s base, Vance’s old train hub, the abandoned warehouses.
The industrial zone wasoutdated when he passed through it. Now he understood why. Whatever was still running was underground, out of sight.
"Why didn’t we use the network instead of the road?"
Aris answered that one. "Because the Federation would track us."
She turned slightly in her seat. "The NET is strong enough to kill a King. We know that now. If they find out you exist, their satellites will find you wherever you go. There’s no wall thick enough to protect against a beam fired from orbit."
Francis understood. Speed would not save him from something he could not see coming. A strike from space would not give him time to react. Staying off their radar was the only practical defense.
Inside the outpost, things were loud and moving fast.
Military personnel were everywhere, directing people, checking credentials, managing what looked like a steady stream of arrivals from every direction.
Francis’s group was stopped, identified, and waved through without much delay.
The three of them — Francis, Nathan, and Aris — found a pub near the center of the outpost.
The idea was simple: travelers passed through here from all directions. If anything significant had happened recently, someone in that room would know about it.
Place was jammed.
Every table full. People standing against the walls, packed near the bar. The noise was dense and layered — not the loud, loose kind that comes from a good night, but the kind where everyone was talking because staying quiet feels worse. Fear with nowhere to go sounds like that.
They found a spot near the back wall and settled in.
Nobody looked at them twice. Everyone else was too caught up in their own conversations.
Francis sat still and let the room come to him.
He was tracking at least a dozen conversations at once — a family near the window debating whether to push toward the capital or stay put, a group of soldiers comparing numbers from different regions, a man alone at the bar who had stopped talking entirely and was just staring at his glass.
Then the televisions changed.
No warning.
Two seconds passed. Then a new image loaded.
A large stage. A podium. A room that looked like it could seat thousands, and probably did. The lighting was careful and deliberate, the kind that gets planned in advance.
A man walked out.
Tall. Wide through the shoulders. Dark coat, no military rank on it, though he carried himself like rank was beside the point.
His hair was mostly dark with gray coming through, pushed back from his face. He stepped to the podium and looked directly into the camera before he said a word.
A title appeared at the bottom of the screen.
LUCIEN ARK — DIRECTOR, NET
Without ceremony, he looked at the camera and opened his mouth.
"I’m going to tell you what happened. All of it. Because you deserve to know the truth."
He nodded to someone off-screen.
The display behind him lit up. A map of the country, clean and detailed — cities marked, infrastructure lines visible. Then the red started appearing. Each marker pulsing, one at a time, as Lucien spoke.
"Four days ago, a single beast entered our airspace from the eastern sea."
He paused on that word.
Single.
"Its classification is Category 10. Our researchers have tracked its existence for years. What you saw over the past four days was not a surprise attack. It was a threat we knew about and could not stop."
The display shifted to satellite footage. Grainy, shot from high above — but even with the distance and the poor quality, the shape was clear.
An enormous winged creature moving through cloud cover, trailing arcs of electricity that lit up the sky in wide, stuttering flashes. It did not look like an animal. It looked like a storm that had figured out how to aim itself.
"In the span of four days," Lucien continued, "it struck six cities. Yesterday, it hit the capital."
The room in the pub had gone completely silent.
Lucien did not slow down. He walked through the numbers — confirmed dead, displaced, infrastructure destroyed.
The crowd in his auditorium was growing visibly angry, and so was the one in the pub. Curses cut through the silence. Someone near the bar slammed a glass down.
"These aren’t estimates," Lucien added. "These are confirmed figures."
He stepped around the podium.
"One beast. Just one. Moved through six of our most populated cities, killed millions of people, and destroyed property worth trillions."
His voice did not rise. It got harder instead.
"We told ourselves for years that the Defense Force were enough. That if we stayed behind them and stayed quiet, we could survive. What happened proves that was never true. A single beast can end us. All of us."
He looked straight into the camera.
"The era of waiting and defending is finished. We have the technology now. The capability. What we need is the will."
"Our time has come."
Just as he finished, he displayed a new image of Rynik’s corpse. It was so massive that humans looked like ants beside it.
Yet its former overwhelming presence was gone, reduced to a beast being cut apart piece by piece, its body stripped and harvested for materials.
Francis noticed Aris’s expression turning sour. He couldn’t tell if it was because she had its blood on her or because she didn’t like what was happening.
To him, however, the scene wasn’t unusual. Beast or human, it always came down to dominance. The one with the greater power always won. Right now, that power belonged to humans.
At the same time, he became more aware of the orbital cannon’s power. Looking at the huge hole in the beast’s head, he saw how clean it was. The flesh burned way before any blood could spill.
If that same attack was aimed at him, then no number of lives would be enough to save him.
