The survivors scrambled up the treacherous mountain path, a ragged line of fear and exhaustion. Eva, her mind a tactical map, calculated their position, their resources, the defensibility of the terrain ahead. Her thoughts were a shield against the sounds of slaughter echoing from the raider camp below. Wolfen is a force of nature, she told herself. He will handle it. Our job is to survive.
She did a quick headcount, her eyes scanning the panicked faces. Derek, leading from the front. Leo, helping an older woman. Jordan, bringing up the rear, his resurrected body moving with a grim purpose.
Maya was not among them.
A cold knot tightened in Eva's gut. She was at the back, moving slower than the rest. Eva had assumed it was the lingering trauma, the exhaustion. Now, she wasn't so sure.
"Keep moving! Find a cave, anything!" Eva shouted to Derek, before turning and starting back down the path, her enhanced senses straining. "Maya!"
She found the scene a hundred yards down the slope, just around a rocky outcrop. And the sight stole the air from her lungs.
Two of the Architect's creations had broken off from the main fight. One was a lithe, insectoid creature with scythe-like arms. The other was bulkier, with reinforced plating. The insectoid one lay on the ground, its head… gone. Not just severed, but removed in a single, catastrophic bite, the edges of the neck a ragged mess of torn metal and flesh. The sheer scale of the bite-mark was horrifying.
The second creature was hammering blows onto the back of a figure that stood, unmoving, absorbing the impacts that would have shattered granite. It was Maya, but transformed beyond anything Eva had seen before. She was larger, her scaled form more massive, more bestial. The spines along her back were like a forest of jagged black spears. She didn't flinch, didn't stagger. The blows landed with dull, wet thuds, and she simply ignored them.
Then, she moved. Her taloned hand, now the size of a shovel, shot out and closed around the torso of the armored creature. There was a sound of crumpling metal and splintering bone. She lifted the twitching form and, with a casual, brutal motion, brought it to her maw and bit down. The sound was a wet, crunching squelch. She was eating him alive.
"Maya!" Eva cried out, her voice cracking.
Maya's head slowly turned. Her eyes were not just black pools; they were voids, absolute and depthless, reflecting no light, offering no recognition. A low, possessive growl rumbled in her chest, a warning to stay away from her kill.
"Maya, it's okay. It's me, Eva. Stop. It's dead. They're both dead." Eva's voice was a forced calm, the tone she'd use on a cornered animal. She took a slow, careful step forward, her hands up. She reached for the mangled, half-eaten limb still clutched in Maya's hand, trying to gently pry it from her grasp. "Let it go. It's over."
The void-like eyes focused on her. The growl intensified.
Maya's other hand, slick with gore, moved faster than thought. It closed around Eva's entire head, the talons digging into her scalp. She lifted Eva off the ground as if she were a doll.
In that moment of terrifying suspension, Eva knew. This wasn't the feral predator. This wasn't the traumatized woman. This was something else entirely. The last vestiges of the person she knew were gone, consumed by the hunger. The balance had tipped, and the monster had won.
Maya drove her fist into Eva's stomach.
The impact was apocalyptic. It wasn't just a punch; it was a demolition. Eva felt her organs liquefy, her spine scream in protest. A torrent of hot, coppery blood erupted from her mouth, spraying Maya's scaled arm. The world dissolved into a white-hot nova of agony.
She was still kicking, her body twitching in a useless, autonomic response to total systemic failure. Maya didn't hesitate. She slammed Eva down onto the rocky ground with enough force to crater the earth. The air left Eva's lungs in a final, broken sigh.
Then the kicks began.
Each impact was a localized earthquake. Eva felt her ribs disintegrate. She felt something in her face rip—her cheek tearing away, the bone of her orbital socket shattering. The world in one eye went dark, forever. A sickening, dry snap echoed in her ears as her arm bent backwards at an impossible angle, the bones ground to powder. Another kick, and her leg twisted beneath her, the foot pointing in a direction it was never meant to.
The pain was no longer a sensation; it was her entire universe. It was a white, screaming static that erased thought, erased hope, erased everything but the raw, animal need for it to stop. Through the haze, she saw Maya's form lean down, saw those terrible jaws open. There was a pressure, a grinding, and then an unimaginable, searing agony as her lower leg was severed, consumed in a single, brutal bite.
Eva lay broken in the dirt, a ruined thing. The crying started then, not sobs, but silent, helpless tears that mixed with the blood on her face. She wasn't crying from the pain anymore; the pain was too vast to cry about. She was crying for the sheer, utter hopelessness of it all. She had fought so hard. She had saved them, bargained with a devil, led them out of hell. For what? To be torn apart by the very person she was trying to save. She hated them in that moment—the survivors, their neediness, their fear. She hated Wolfen and his games. She hated this world. All she wanted was her sister. All she wanted was for the darkness to take her. She looked up at Maya's monstrous form, looming over her, and in her mind, she begged. Just do it. Finish it.
Maya raised a taloned hand for the final, decapitating blow.
And then she stopped.
Her head cocked. The void-like eyes shifted their gaze from the ruin at her feet, looking down the mountain, towards the now-silent raider camp. Something had caught her attention. A new scent on the wind? A more interesting vibration? The predator's focus had shifted.
She stood there, a statue of scaled death, watching, listening, the dripping talon still poised in the air.
From a hidden crevice higher up the slope, three pairs of eyes watched in petrified horror. Derek, Leo, and Jordan had seen it all. They had found a cave and come back for their saviors. They had witnessed the entire, brutal disassembly. Jordan's hand was clamped over his own mouth, his body trembling. Leo's knuckles were white on his bat, but he knew swinging it would be a death sentence. Derek's face was a mask of tear-streaked fury and utter helplessness.
They were waiting. For a moment, a miracle, a single second of distraction when they could dart out and drag what was left of Eva away from the abyss. But with Maya standing guard, a hair-trigger away from violence, that moment felt like a lifetime away.