The South corridor was trembling long before Talia reached it.
Dawn light stretched thin across the sky, catching on asphalt that steamed like a volcanic crater. Heat lifted in slow, sick waves, shimmering against broken signs and crumpled light posts. Shadows twisted from fires still burning in cracked gutters.
And the noise—
It didn't sound like beasts anymore. It sounded like the world grinding its teeth.
Talia slowed her bike at the rise and stared down the eight-lane throat of the corridor.
A wall of beasts.
Not a wave. Not a surge.
A wall.
Hundreds thick. Thousands behind them. Every lane filled, every shoulder packed, every space smothered by fur and snapping jaws. In the floodlight glare, the mass rippled like a single organism rolling toward town.
Her stomach dropped.
The barricade at the far end—cars lashed together, buses braced with chains, structures that had held all night—was sinking. The weight pressing against it had begun to crush the vehicles downward. Bonnet frames buckled. Wheels bent at wrong angles. Metal groaned like something dying.
They wouldn't last ten minutes.
Talia killed the engine halfway down the highway and and pushed into an awkward half-run, half-limp the rest of the way.
She hit the barricade just in time to see the first breach.
A ute on the left flank lifted—slowly, impossibly—as a monstrous boar rammed its underside. The car tipped, rolled, and slammed down, crushing a man beneath.
"BREACH LEFT! LEFT!" someone shouted, voice breaking.
Beasts poured through the opening like water through a burst dam.
People screamed. Talia didn't hesitate.
She charged into the gap, spearing a fox mid-leap, twisting, taking a dog through the throat, then stepping sideways as a goat slammed past. She caught its horn, used its own momentum, and hurled it into two wolves pressing in behind.
All three dissolved mid-roll.
Ash sprayed the air, mixing with smoke.
For a moment, the breach held.
Defenders threw whatever they had into the space—trash bins, a twisted gate, somebody's fridge, a smashed toolbox. A man braced his shoulder against the makeshift plug, teeth bared.
"Hold!" he roared. "Just HOLD!"
But the corridor wasn't finished.
A second breach tore open at the center when the fire corridor failed.
The fuel she'd laid earlier was spent. Without fresh lines, the corridor was just scorched concrete. No fuel. No puddles. No web to reignite.
The last line of defence—the one that had saved them hours ago—was nothing but dry, charred streaks.
A teen stood staring at an empty fuel can in his hands, face gone white.
Talia dumped a small pile of full cans from her space at his feet. "Use it. Hurry. Lay lines across the choke points — not one big puddle."
"Use it. Hurry."
He jolted like she'd slapped him. "Y-Yeah! I got it!"
He grabbed two, bolted toward the broken line, yelling, "Cover me! I'm relaying fuel!"
Her HUD flickered.
[Kill Count: 4432]
She couldn't stop fighting to watch him. If she stopped, the defence wall would fail faster.
She sprinted along the barricade, cutting off a breach starting on the right, then pivoting back to plug a gap in the center. The whole blockade hung in a precarious stalemate, everyone waiting for the tension to snap.
It did. In the worst way.
A firefighter leaned too far forward, trying to pull a wounded civilian away from the edge. A wolf beast lunged from below, teeth sinking into his leg, jerking him off balance.
He shouted once—raw and startled—before he toppled over the bonnet. A tide of bodies slammed over him.
"NO—!" someone screamed.
"Pull him back—!"
They couldn't.
He vanished under fur and teeth.
Morale cracked like ice under a boot.
The defenders recoiled instinctively. A woman sobbed openly, still swinging her pipe. Someone yelled, "We can't hold it—fall back! FALL BACK!" and someone else shouted desperately, "WE CAN'T! Our families are behind us!"
Beasts slammed harder, sensing the fear, the shift in weight.
For the first time all night, Talia felt the line tilt toward collapse. There wasn't enough of her to plug every breach.
Her skull prickled—family vision clawing at the edges. She let it take her.
The Rowe home bucked under a moonless sky as a massive wave slammed into the street. The neat defences from earlier were gone—torn up, rebuilt, layered in frantic patchwork. Wreckage littered the road. New barricades rose out of the chaos.
She prayed the neighbors had fortified or moved.
The wave hit front and side fences simultaneously, knocking planks loose. Solar lights shook on their mounts.
Cael and Theo anchored the side fences—two walls of muscle and blade. Their long weapons moved in furious, precise arcs, striking, retracting, striking again.
Grandma's spade flashed silver at the front—cracking jaws, breaking skulls, smashing into ribs with dull, sick thuds. She led the front gate defence with the new-world follower team, face set, eyes bright.
Dad stood on the overturned water tank by the porch, taking in the whole field with one glance.
"Rotate left! Cael, three meters back! Theo—your flank, WATCH it, Hank, they're charging in! Mum, let the younger ones in, they need experience!" he shouted.
Grandpa guarded the younger kids behind the wall, one hand on his axe, the other shoving children back whenever claws came too close.
Brielle led the mothers and older sisters in a tight formation through the courtyard—dragging the wounded away, patching cuts, forcing water into trembling hands.
They were holding.
Barely.
And somehow… they were still shouting jokes between orders. Still making comments that didn't fit the apocalypse.
"Oi, Cael, that one was mine!"
"Win it back then!"
"Grandma, you're scaring the beasts more than the kids!"
"Good. Then they can run away together."
Talia's chest hurt with the fierce, ridiculous warmth of it.
The vision snapped away before she saw how the wave ended.
She wanted more. But the system gave her just enough to know:
They were still alive.
Something hit the barricade behind her—a heavy, bone-jarring impact.
Talia snapped back into her body with cold, sharp clarity.
The collapsing barricade. The screaming. The rattling metal.
Beasts climbing over the cracks like ants on sugar.
She set her shoulders and drew a single, slow breath.
"I need a minimum of two hundred kills here," she said quietly, "or this entire line falls."
Then she moved.
Her hunter sense opened—wide and absolute. No wasted motion. No wild swings. Everything reduced to survival geometry.
Short arcs. Half-thrusts. One-stab kills.
She hurled a Molotov into a dense knot of beasts trying to chew their way through a car grille, then another farther back to sever the wave's spine. She was suddenly very glad she'd hoarded an emergency stash.
She slid under a boar's tusk, stabbed up through the jaw hinge, ripped sideways to take a fox in the neck, pivoted, shoulder-checked a wolf into a car door, stabbed downward, reversed grip, and drove the butt of the spear into a possum's skull.
Her spear didn't hesitate. Her body didn't pause. Hunter's sense and System-stiffened gear dragged her past where normal muscles should have failed. Every motion was controlled, precise, lethal.
Her Kill Count spiked.
[Kill Count: 5108]
[Kill Count: 5463]
[Kill Count: 5791]
Between her fires, the crush of beasts against the barricade, and the defenders finishing the wounded, the System counted it all.
Another notification slid into the side of her vision:
[Reward #5000 Pending → High Lord Package]
She ignored it, filing the phrase away with a cold shiver. High Lord could wait. Right now, she just had to not die.
She forced herself deeper into the breach, using beasts as moving shields, letting them slam into each other while she intercepted anything that tried to slip through.
Her thigh howled, hot blood soaking the bandage. Her shoulder was a constant blur of pain. But she couldn't afford to stop now. Her head swam for a moment, black spots flickering at the edge of her vision, but she forced her breathing steady and locked her knees.
The slower she moved the more deaths.
Behind her, defenders rallied.
Seeing her hold the impossible gap gave them something solid to cling to. People who had been shaking now stepped forward, teeth clenched, bracing shields, swinging pipes, jabbing with broken broom spears.
"Shove with me!" one man yelled, ramming his shoulder into a car.
"On three! ONE—TWO—PUSH!"
"Don't let her stand there alone!"
"She's buying us time—buy it back!"
Down the corridor, a sudden bloom of fire erupted—a massive flame net catching and wrapping around a fresh surge of beasts.
The boy with the fuel can had done it.
Talia let out a ragged breath. 'Good. He did it.'
The barricade still groaned.
Still sank.
Still shuddered.
But it did not fall.
A rumble began under her boots.
Not beast footsteps.
Not metal cracking.
Deeper. Heavier.
The smoke ahead churned slowly, like something huge was shaping the air with each breath.
A long shadow stretched through the haze, taller than a bus, wider than any beast she'd seen so far. It didn't move like the others; the wave flowed around it instead of with it, parting like water around a rock.
Someone behind her whispered, voice hollow with fear, "What… what is that?"
Talia didn't answer. Not because she didn't know. But because she did.
Whatever it was—
—it wasn't part of this wave.
It was something new, something meant for the end of the night. The end of the test, the last few hours before Binding. Something that could break a barricade even if it were made of steel and prayer.
The wave finally thinned enough for defenders to drag the dead firefighter's armor back behind the line.
Talia staggered back six steps, panting hard, blood running down her leg again in a slow, steady trickle.
Her HUD flashed.
[Kill Count: 6375]
The South Blockade was about to fall. And she was standing in the middle of it.
Smoke curled.
The massive shadow shifted again. Something alive and enormous exhaled within the grey.
Talia tightened her grip on her spear.
"Hold the line," she rasped. "Don't break. Not yet."
The ground rumbled once more—
—and the morning itself seemed to brace for what was coming next.