Caleb kept the heavy plasma rifle aimed directly at the ruined machine’s black dome.

His boots sank deep into the wet dirt near Jaxson’s melted armor.

At the rear of the bottleneck, iron rattled as Rina slammed her shoulder against the sealed bulkheads.

"It’s welded shut," Rina yelled over the local link. Her boot kicked the metal door.

On the left side of the cavern, Hiro’s voice cracked from behind a fallen rock. "Optics are down. I have no visual on the dark corners."

To the right, the heavy clack of Iharu’s scatter-gun pumping echoed from the high ridge. The redhead shifted his weight, spraying loose gravel down the incline.

The Mimic was wrecked. The explosion had gutted its core, leaving an empty iron ribcage anchored to heavy legs. The black dome hung from a sparking neck seam. Tiny electrical currents popped along the exposed wiring, shedding weak light onto the mud. Caleb saw enough to know it was finished.

He tightened his finger on the plastic trigger.

The Mimic’s broken speakers crackled with static.

"You keep killing the wrong thing."

Caleb locked his jaw. He did not answer. He pressed the trigger.

The ground moved.

Caleb stopped. He waited for the optical sensors to twitch, watching the heavy iron legs anchored in the mud. The machine remained completely motionless.

The vibration did not come from the dead iron. It started deep beneath the floor, traveling up through the soles of his boots and rattling the bones in his knees. It felt older and heavier than the Mimic. The rumble came from below and off to the side, shaking the bedrock.

Rina dropped her hands from the sealed doors. "Hiro! Read the floor!"

"The grid is dead!" Hiro shouted back from the rocks. "I have no seismics!"

The rock ceiling above them fractured with a hard crack.

A wide chasm tore straight through the upper stone. Tons of broken rock and dirt cascaded downward, burying the remaining crawler drones against the walls. Boiling mud sprayed across the cavern, covering the gray moss in a thick layer of steaming sludge.

A plated limb forced its way through the fractured ceiling, crushing the remaining rock into dust. The noise of heavy shell scraping through stone echoed over the roaring collapse. Blue blood rained down from the dark, hitting the cold rock and steaming in the damp air.

The Scorpion-class Kaiju from the upper battle broke into the lower ravine.

Caleb kept his boots planted. He tracked the bleeding wound at the base of the beast’s neck as it dragged its wounded bulk downward. Elara had hurt it badly. Not enough to kill it. Her attack had forced the beast into a blind retreat, punching the upper battlefield straight through into their sealed space.

The beast thrashed. Its heavy foreleg smashed into the ruined chassis of the Mimic, scattering iron shrapnel across the mud.

Caleb stayed angled toward the wreckage, holding his ground. His body committed to the firing lane. He kept the plasma rifle raised, searching the collapsing geometry for a clear shot on the Scorpion’s neck.

The bedrock opened beneath him.

A barbed bone spike swung up through the boiling mud and broken rock. It moved in a blur, lashing out blindly from the beast’s tail as it forced itself into the ravine.

The stinger punched straight through Caleb’s lower back.

The impact bypassed the ballistic weave completely. Thick bone tore through flesh, muscle, and ribs. It burst out through the front of his chest plate.

The surplus armor shattered. Ceramic fragments blew outward into the damp air, raining down onto the mud.

The strike drove the breath entirely from his chest. His hands went numb. The heavy plasma rifle slipped from his fingers, falling into the dark to shatter on the rocks below.

The tail lifted him off his feet. Raw momentum carried him upward. The beast ripped its stinger high into the air, throwing him fifty feet above the cavern floor. The motion drove him hard into the upper wall.

Jagged rock bit into his spine. He hung pinned against the ceiling stone in the freezing dark.

Blood filled his mouth. He choked, coughing red droplets down his chin guard. His hands grabbed at the blood-slicked bone spike protruding from his chest. He pulled, trying to pry himself off the stinger, but his boots kicked empty air. He found no leverage. His fingers slipped against the wet bone, smearing red across the white shell.

Below him, the ravine broke apart.

Caleb looked down, his vision blurring through the cracked visor and the pain radiating from his chest.

Rina ducked under a falling slab of asphalt and fired a controlled burst into the dark. "Keep the ground solid!" she shouted over the roaring collapse. Her voice reached Caleb distorted by static and his own ragged breathing. "Do not let it sink the floor!"

Hiro followed the order. The teenager raised his rifle, aiming at the boiling mud bubbling up from the ruptured floor, and fired a frantic volley of cryo-rounds. Gray ice crystallized over the sludge, creating a brittle sheet of traction to keep the squad from sinking.

Iharu moved. He dragged his acid-burned leg across the frozen mud, shifting his weight constantly to deny the blind beast a static target. He fired his scatter-gun into the shifting debris, blasting loose rocks away to buy himself operating space.

Caleb hung over them. Every time the beast shifted its tail, the bone spike ground against his broken ribs. The cold air rushed through the hole in his chest.

The green viewer count in the corner of his cracked visor flickered.

Purple code cut across the glass, overriding the military operating system. The encrypted network locked onto the image. Blue Kaiju blood mixed with human red, dripping from the shattered chest plate. The lens captured him hanging impaled in the dark.

The viewer count sat at one hundred thousand. The locked cap trembled, straining under the flood of engagement, but it held firm.

The broadcast chat bled through the purple code, scrolling in a frantic blur across his fading vision.

[User_841: oh god the spike went right through] [RedLine: somebody divert a med drop to the lower grid right now!] [G-Corp: He’s bleeding out, where are the shields?!] [TitanSlayer: someone get him down! he can’t die like this!]

Caleb stared at the scrolling text until his eyes stopped tracking the words.