The Northern Wildlands. 05:18 PM
Three Days Later…
…..
The Northern Bastion announced itself from three kilometers away.
Zeph crested a ridge of broken highway, three days of hard travel through the Wildlands behind him, and stopped dead.
The walls rose like a second horizon—twenty meters of reinforced construction that made the word "fortification" seem inadequate.
They stretched in both directions farther than his enhanced vision could track, curving gently with the geography, creating a barrier between the chaos of the Wildlands and whatever civilization existed beyond.
But it wasn't just the height that made him stare.
The walls moved.
Not in any obvious way, but Zeph's Enhanced Hearing picked up the constant low hum of active systems—power flowing through embedded formations, defensive arrays cycling through detection patterns, automated turrets tracking movement across the approach zones.
