The air inside the boathouse was stifling, thick with the smell of rot, gun oil, and desperation. Paul Best stood at the boarded window, jaw clenched so tightly the muscles stood out like cables. Outside, the lake still glowed with that obscene, pulsing green — the color of something that should never have been born.
“We’re out of time,” he said. “Vulgaris is about to come through the floor. If we don’t do something now, we lose everything.”
Mordecai loomed over Garet’s unconscious form, his massive fingers moving with surprising care as he checked the Stabilization Unit pressed upon the technomage’s chest. “It’s holding,” he growled. “The unit is keeping him stable… for now. But it doesn’t cure him. We’ve got four hours before he wakes up still changing. Four hours to end this thing before we lose him for good.”
Arkadiusz knelt in the corner like a man possessed, sweat cutting lines through the grime on his face as he wired together the monstrous device — a nightmarish marriage of every explosive they still possessed. His hands never stopped moving.
Paul’s voice was low and edged with exhaustion. “I’ll take Vulgaris. Buy us the time we need.”
“No,” Mordecai snapped. “We hit the Radboleth directly. We lure that bastard up and shove this thing down its throat.”
The argument grew heated fast, voices rising in the cramped, rotting boathouse. Noelani lay unconscious on the floor between them, breathing slow and shallow. Garet remained deathly still on the counter, locked in fragile suspension by the Stabilization Unit.
Then the floorboards exploded upward.
Vulgaris erupted from below like something possessed, vines whipping wildly. Mordecai met him head-on, trading blows that shook the entire building. Electricity crackled violently as Mordecai’s non-bonic hand ignited, his massive fist engulfed in searing blue-white energy. With a thunderous roar, he drove the glowing hand straight into Vulgaris’ torso.
Paul grabbed Noelani and started dragging her toward the door. Arkadiusz hauled Garet by the heels, grunting with effort as he backed out onto the landing.
Mordecai finally dropped Vulgaris with a point-blank shot from his Mark XII Blaster Rifle. The Plantiant collapsed in a heap of twitching vines.
For half a second, they thought they had won.
Then Noelani’s eyes snapped open — glowing the same poisonous green. She twisted like a cat, slamming Paul backward and launching herself at Arkadiusz. She tried to ensnare him with her leg irons, but he clotheslined her mid-leap. She hit the ground hard and went still again.
They had barely caught their breath when Mordecai’s motion scanner screamed.
The fog was rolling in again.
And this time it brought company.
A new wave of Souls’kers came skimming across the water, half-a-dozen of them, a droning black swarm of hunger. From the foliage behind them, a monstrous black scorpion the size of a horse burst forward, claws raised, stinger arched high. It went straight for Arkadiusz.
The battle descended into pure chaos.
Mordecai and Paul opened up on the mosquito swarm, blaster and plasma rifle lighting up the fog. Arkadiusz danced with the scorpion, dodging strikes that shattered wooden planks, firing his MP5K in desperate bursts.
Then the lake itself seemed to boil.
Huge tentacles thicker than a man’s torso erupted from the glowing water, whipping through the air with terrifying speed. The Radboleth had finally come.
Arkadiusz planted his feet and reached out with his mind, trying to seize control of the creature using the very thought-pattern it had once tried to impose on him. For one terrible moment, he felt it — vast, ancient, and impossibly alien. Then the Radboleth simply shrugged him off like an insect.
The mental backlash nearly dropped him to his knees.
There was no more time.
Arkadiusz tore the massive bomb off his back and hurled it toward Mordecai. The great ape caught it, spun, and with a roar of pure effort, heaved the nightmarish device in a long, arcing trajectory toward the center of the lake.
The Radboleth’s massive tentacles surged upward with blinding speed, snatching the bomb out of the air like a striking predator. For one terrible heartbeat, the creature held its prize just above the surface.
Then it slipped back into the glowing green murk, dragging the explosive down into the darkness without a sound.
Everything was still.
Then the bomb detonated.
A column of water and fire roared skyward, shaking the ground. The explosion was cataclysmic. A violent whirlpool formed at the center of the lake, sucking down water, boats, and wreckage with terrifying speed. In minutes, the entire artificial ecosystem began to drain.
When the chaos finally settled, the lake was gone — nothing left but a vast, steaming crater of mud and broken machinery. At its center lay the cracked black-glass dome the Ancients had built centuries ago, now split wide open and glowing with lethal radiation.
And there, slithering through the shattered dome like a nightmare returning home, was the Radboleth — wounded, but very much alive.
A cold, chemical laughter echoed through the minds of Paul, Mordecai, and Arkadiusz — mocking, triumphant, and utterly inhuman.
Their enemy had not been destroyed.
It had simply found a new, deeper place to hide.
The Gamma Knights stood among the ruins of the Safari Boat Ride, breathing hard, surrounded by the corpses of Souls’kers and the drained corpse of what had once been a thriving ecosystem.
They had survived.
But the Radboleth had escaped.
And somewhere in the darkness beneath the Melkath Crater, it was already beginning to dream again.
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