The road to the southern entry felt like a throat. Straight, open and waiting to swallow her.
Talia kept the bike at a controlled speed, engine growling under her, eyes scanning ahead. The air here was thicker, tainted with smoke, petrol and the sour reek of too many beasts in too tight a space.
The sounds reached her first.
A rolling, layered thunder — paws and hooves and claws hammering asphalt. Snarls blending into a single, constant roar. Now and then, a human shouts, screams or the crack of something breaking.
She crested the low rise and saw it.
Eight lanes wide, straight as a spear, the southern highway ran into a commercial strip lined with servo stations, fast food, car yards, a tyre shop. Spot fires scattered amongst debris revealed the entire length of road was choked with corrupted beasts.
Shadowy figures flowed like a constant river of fur and teeth.
At the far end a small sun made of spotlights shone over a half-formed barricade of cars and a bus teetering at an angle, marking the South Blockade. A scattering of defenders clung to it — firefighters in blackened gear, a few locals with bats and crowbars, someone in a construction hi-vis swinging a metal pipe.
They were losing ground.
Beasts slammed against the vehicles, clawing, biting, climbing. The humans fought back, but every kill dissolved into ash and made no dent in the tide.
Talia rolled off the throttle and let the bike coast, thinking hard.
'Brute force won't cut it here.'
At the East Interchange she'd been able to twist the terrain, use the ramps and broken lanes, turn herself into a moving blade that thinned the flow.
Here, it was a straight shot from the outskirts to town centre. No choke. No complexity. Just volume.
She watched for a few seconds longer. Long enough to see one firefighter nearly dragged over a bonnet before a friend yanked them back. Long enough to see a dog beast leap a gap, hit someone's chest, and get hammered off by a crowbar at the last second.
Her grip tightened.
'Change the terrain, then.'
Her gaze slid sideways — to the line of petrol stations flanking the south approach.
The idea clicked into place, cold and clean.
"Okay," she muttered. "We do this the ugly way."
She dropped a gear, swung the bike down a service lane before the beasts could fully track her scent, and cut around the main wave.
As she passed the barricade's flank, shouts reached her over the engine.
"Where are you going?!"
"You can't outrun them!"
She didn't answer.
She had no intention of outrunning anything. Going home now meant fighting through a sea of beasts, and she was many things — but suicidal wasn't one of them.
Still… something tugged at her. A gut-deep instinct. If this "binding" the message talked about meant what she thought, she'd find her family again. If not in this world, then the new one mentioned.
The first petrol station sat just outside the main blockade line, half its signage hanging sideways. A lone sedan rested at pump three, door hanging open, driver nowhere in sight. The forecourt was eerily empty — the wave had been focused on the barricade, not the edges.
Perfect.
Talia gunned the bike up the slight ramp, slid it beneath the awning and killed the engine in one move. Silence slammed down hard enough to make her ears ring.
Her leg almost gave out as she dismounted, she caught herself on the handlebar, then hissed as her shoulder revolted.
"In and out," she told herself. "Fast."
She headed straight for the convenience store.
The sliding doors had failed halfway, leaving a crooked gap. She shoved through. Inside, fluorescent lights flickered uncertainly over rows of intact shelves, Chips, Lollies, Bottled water, Batteries. The coffee machine in the corner.
The normality of it made her teeth ache.
She swept the aisles at speed, grabbing shelves and their items on autopilot: water, energy bars, lighters, a bulk pack of matches, several aerosol cans, the first-aid kit from behind the counter, Storage crates, folding chairs and jerry cans out back.. All of it vanished into her space with the now-familiar mental tug.
Somewhere out there, other survivors were doing the same. System spaces opening in hearts and pockets, swallowing supplies, changing odds.
She didn't dwell on it.
Back at the fueling area, she went for the pumps.
Safety casings were still shut. She didn't care.
Her spear punched through the plastic shell of pump two. She levered hard until something cracked. Petrol began to spill in a thin, glistening sheet.
"Sorry, Earth," she muttered. "You were doomed before I got to this point."
Pump three next. Then four. She hacked at casings, tore at hoses until the forecourt became a shimmering film of fuel. It slithered into shallow dips and drains, spreading out in uneven lines.
The smell was overwhelming.
She kicked an empty drink crate aside, then grabbed the edge of the awning on a nearby building and hauled herself up onto the roof using a light fixture as a foothold. The move strained her shoulder so badly she saw white for a heartbeat.
She lay there on the roof for a second, chest heaving.
Voices and roars carried on the wind. The beast river was close.
She pushed herself upright and crawled to the front edge of the roof. From here, she had a clear view of the highway. The main flow of beasts surged toward the barricade. A few lingered at the fringes, sniffing at the air, ears twitching.
She needed all of them.
Talia dug into her space and pulled out the car alarm unit she'd ripped from a wreck earlier in the suburbs. Wires dangled from its back. She jammed a battery into place, smacked the casing against the concrete.
The alarm shrieked to life, she tossed it into the fuel soaked fueling area.
The sound tore across the junction — high-pitched, repetitive, impossible to ignore. Even over the roar of the tide, it cut like a knife. Every beast within range turned its head.
"Right here," she whispered. "Come on."
They came.
At first it was just a handful — a dozen dogs, a few goats, a scattering of foxes that peeled away from the main flow and padded toward the servo. Then more. Bears, wolves, everything that followed noise.
In under a minute the fueling area was full.
Two hundred, maybe three hundred beasts crammed together on the petrol-slick concrete. They slipped and collided, bumping shoulders, heads jerking toward the alarm, eyes rolling.
Talia pulled out a cheap disposable lighter. Flicked it.
For a heartbeat, the tiny flame felt almost ridiculous.
Then she tossed it onto the fuel trail below her. It fell in an arc, a small bright spark tumbling through smoky air, and vanished into the fuel below.
The trail ignited.
Fire raced outward in a thin line, then exploded as it hit deeper pools. Heat and light blasted upward in a single roaring wave. Beasts shrieked, the sound needle-sharp as flames climbed fur and skin and twisted limbs.
Talia staggered back from the edge, shielding her face with her arm. Her jacket warmed uncomfortably. Bits of burning fur and fuel spat up, then fell back into the inferno.
Her kill count jerked like a heartbeat.
[Kill Count: 320]
[Kill Count: 350]
[Kill Count: 380]
She couldn't pick out individuals anymore. It was all movement and fire and sound.
"Mass-kill," she whispered hoarsely. "We're really doing this."
The river of beasts behind the burning knot hit the wall of heat and instinctively veered, splitting around it. That alone would thin the load on the central barricade.
But this wasn't enough.
Not yet.
[Kill Count: 410]
[Kill Count: 435]
[Kill Count: 460]
System prompts flashed at the edge of her vision.
[Reward #400 Pending → +1 Building Slot]
[Reward #500 Pending → B-Rank Territory Gift Pack]
B-Rank.
She filed it away without opening. Later. If later existed.
Down below, the flames began to gutter where the fuel thinned, leaving blackened, crumpled masses that dissolved into ash. The shrieking faded to crackling.
The southern wave flowed on. Thinner but still coming.
Talia shifted her weight and looked up the road.
Cars sat abandoned at odd angles. Some were leaking. A truck had gone half up onto the median. Another servo further down had ruptured pumps already, a dark stain spreading around them.
It wasn't a corridor yet.
But it could be.
Talia spent the next twenty minutes turning the south approach into a fuse.
She wandered the edge of the road, cutting hoses on wrecked cars and letting gravity tug thin streams of petrol into the gutter. She raided another servo for jerry cans, cleared it, pulled the beasts and set it alight. Then proceeded to use the raided contents to create rough, broken fuel trails that crossed the lanes in chaotic patterns.
Not a solid wall. A web.
Her breathing was ragged now, every few steps sending flares through her thigh, but the movements were smoother than before. Sweat slid down her spine. Her wounds pulsed in time with her heartbeat, but didn't reopen — the E-Rank wrap holding better than anything Earth could offer. Her body was adapting, tolerating what had seemed impossible hours ago.
She laid lines leading back toward the first burnt-out forecourt, creating overlaps and junctions where she could. If one caught, it would jump to the others.
Firefighters at the blockade watched her with wide, disbelieving eyes. They would have never believed a firebug would be so brazen.
One finally jogged toward her when she paused to catch her breath, hand pressed to her wrapped thigh.
"You can't—" he coughed on the fumes, voice rough. "We're supposed to stop fires, not start them."
Talia wiped a streak of soot off her cheek, aware of her leg throbbing steadily beneath her armor.
"The world is about to end," Talia said bluntly. "Do you want to survive it — or join its end?"