Wolfen Welfric walked away from the catastrophe with the deliberate pace of a man leaving a bad play at intermission. The woods swallowed the sounds of the moaning horde and the crackle of Leo's desperate lightning. He didn't look back. He'd given the order. His conscience, such as it was, was clear. Either they followed, or they became part of the statistical noise of this blighted world.
He heard the heavy footfalls of Leo and Jordan thundering past him, their panic giving them speed. He paid them no mind. They were heading in the correct direction: away.
Then, he felt it.
Not a sound, but a shift in the pressure of the world behind him. A localized tide of silence rushing forward, swallowing the forest's ambient noise. The air grew cold and dead.
He had just enough time to think, Oh, for the love of—
He turned.
Maya—or the monstrous, scaled engine of entropy she had become—was charging. She moved not with the silent grace of before, but with a terrifying, ground-shaking purpose, plowing through saplings and glowing fungi like they were mist. Her flat, black insectile eyes were locked on him. He was the loudest thing. The most anomalous. The source of the original pain. The equation was simple.
Wolfen sighed. He didn't raise his hands. He didn't summon fire or Umbralite. He just stood there, watching the apocalypse in a seven-foot, horned package bear down on him.
"It's been fun, would-be-world," he muttered, a strange, almost fond resignation in his voice.
She was upon him. A scaled fist, large enough to crush his skull, swung in a brutal, silent arc. There was no rage in the movement, just efficient deletion.
THWUMP.
The impact was a sickening, meaty sound. Wolfen's head snapped to the side. His body left his feet, twisting through the air before crashing through a thicket and sliding to a stop against the base of a giant, petrified tree, thirty yards away. He lay there, unmoving.
Leo, who had skidded to a halt to look back, saw it. He saw the invincible, sarcastic god get knocked into next week like a bothersome fly.
"DO SOMETHING!" Leo screamed into the woods, not at anyone, at the universe itself. His eyes darted from the unconscious, distant form of Wolfen to the monster that was now turning its gaze towards him and Jordan.
"Ouch," Wolfen's voice groaned, faint and dazed from the far trees. He wasn't dead. But he was definitely out of the fight.
Maya took a step towards them. Then another. The silent, deadly intent rolled off her in waves.
"RUN!" Jordan barked, the sheer, illogical terror of the situation finally overriding his probability calculations.
They ran. They crashed through the undergrowth, leaping over roots, driven by pure survival instinct. But the sound of the pursuit wasn't the crashing of a giant. It was an eerie, swift rustle, like a shadow flowing through the leaves. She was gaining. She wasn't even running hard.
Leo risked a glance back. The scaled horror was a dark silhouette against the glowing green of the fungi, closing the distance with terrifying ease. Her horned head was lowered, her dead eyes fixed on them. They weren't going to make it. They were going to be silently, efficiently unmade in the middle of nowhere.
Then, all of a sudden, the forest above Maya exploded.
Not with fire or light, but with synchronized, mechanical precision. From camouflaged platforms high in the canopy, four tungsten-alloy cables shot downward, their barbed tips striking the ground around her in a perfect square. Before the cables had even gone taut, a massive, dull-grey collar—a seamless ring of a non-reflective metal—dropped from directly above.
It clamped around Maya's thick, scaled neck with a hydraulic HISSS-THUNK that echoed through the woods.
She froze mid-stride. The collar didn't shock her. It didn't inject her with anything. It simply hummed with a deep, subsonic frequency. The silent aura around her flickered and died. The creeping coldness in the air vanished. The monster let out a roar—not of the void this time, but of pure, frustrated, animal rage. She clawed at the collar, her black talons screeching against the metal, but it didn't budge. She was anchored, trapped not by force, but by a technology that counteracted her very nature.
Leo and Jordan stopped, panting, staring at the captured titan.
From the shadows of the trees, they emerged. Not zombies. Not hybrids.
Men and women in form-fitting, grey combat armor, their faces hidden behind smooth, featureless silver helmets. The masks of the Architects. They moved with a quiet, terrifying coordination, fanning out. Some trained heavy, blocky rifles on the thrashing Maya. Others swept the area with scanner wands.
One of them, a figure with a single red sigil on its shoulder, pointed a gloved hand directly at Leo and Jordan.
Leo raised his sparking fists. Jordan brought his Umbralite katana up.
It was futile.
There was a soft pfft sound, almost gentle. Two small, feathered darts sprouted from Leo's neck and Jordan's thigh. They felt a cold pinch, then a spreading, heavy numbness that raced through their veins faster than thought.
Leo's lightning sputtered and died. His biopolymer filaments went dark and limp. His legs gave out. He crashed to the forest floor, his vision tunneling. He saw Jordan slump gracefully to his knees, the black katana slipping from his fingers, before the larger man toppled sideways.
The last thing Leo's fading consciousness registered was the silver-masked figures moving towards them, their movements efficient and devoid of malice. Not the brutal strike team. This was different. This was a collection.
Then, the world dissolved into a silent, grey nothing.
The Architects had gotten them. Not through battle, but through observation, timing, and perfect, clinical efficiency. They had let the chaos play out, let the monster be drawn into the open, and then they had dropped the cage. And picked up the pieces left behind.