Chapter 231: C.R.E.E.D V
I pulled the door down.
Someone was screaming about the left wall.
Someone else was screaming about the east.
Nobody agreed on anything, and in the smoke and the noise and the fire that had started somewhere near the north gate, the camp that had been cheering 6 minutes ago was discovering what panic actually felt like from the inside.
***
The camp from above, smoke covering the center courtyard.
Kiara stood at the northwest wall, watching a wave of Sporeherd bodies hit the reinforced outer layer and stop. The layer holds. Though, her jaw is set. She turns and points and says something nobody hears over the noise.
A guard at the east gate. Was ordered to hold it. He is holding it. A Sporeherd reaches him and he doesn’t step back. He takes the hit, drives it down, holds the gate.
He gets bit on the arm.
He doesn’t let go of the gate.
Somewhere in the building, the 3rd floor apartment window. A family of four, mother and father and two children, pressed against the glass looking down. The father has his arm around the mother. The mother is praying, lips moving fast and silent.
The older child is holding the younger one’s hand.
They don’t look away.
***
The horde had never been the point.
I figured it out standing in the middle of the courtyard watching the defenses hold, watching Jisoo’s preparations do exactly what she’d designed them to do— the trucks deflecting the Bloomed detonations outward, the barricades funneling the horde into the kill zones, the reinforced northwest corner taking hit after hit and not breaking— and feeling, underneath the relief of watching it all work, that something about the whole situation was still wrong in a way I couldn’t locate.
They were bait.
All of them. Thousands of infected throwing themselves at the north wall, drawing every weapon, every eye, every frightened breath toward the front— while the real approach came from somewhere else entirely.
Ah... fuck, if only I have a fire spell... would everything turn out good?
Then I heard it. A wet, splitting sound from underground— not an explosion, something slower, something growing— and then the pavement in the center of the courtyard buckled upward in a long crack that ran south to north in under 2 seconds.
Roots pushed through. Not tree roots— something thicker, darker, moving with direction and purpose, splitting the ground open as they came.
Then they came over the wall.
The butterfly mutated ones.
They cleared the defenses entirely— not breaking through, not pushing, just going over, gliding on wide amber-brown wings that caught the firelight and made them almost beautiful for exactly as long as it took to see the rest of them.
Pale human torsos, the muscle structure wrong, too dense, the stomach open where the lower body should have been, organs visible and spiling down intestine swaying beneath their torsos.
No legs— just the wings and the clawed arms and the moth skull where the head should have been, antennae rising in branched curves, a mouth full of teeth that belonged to something much larger than the face containing them.
They glided over the wall in silence.
The defenses were facing the wrong direction.
But the trucks were still at their angles. The barricades were still in place. And the firing positions Jisoo had set— not just for the outer approach, but spread across the interior, positioned to handle threats from multiple directions— those were still manned.
A winged one dropped toward the center courtyard.
It hit the barricade line and the interior positions opened up at the same time, and it went down before it reached the ground.
Then another. Then three at once.
Then another and it glided toward one guard and snatch him toward the sky, licking his forehead then stucking its long tongue down toward the guards throat and started sucking.
The trucks deflected the Bloomed that had finally breached the outer ring, the angle sending the detonation away from the residential buildings exactly the way Jisoo had calculated.
The reinforced northwest corner held a third wave. The interior barricades funneled the winged ones into overlapping fire the same way the outer ring had funneled the horde.
People were dying.
I stood in the middle of it and watched Jisoo’s work hold together under conditions she’d prepared for without being able to see them coming, and the word that came into my head was wow. Just that. Simple and specific.
Then the trees fell.
Not bent. Fell. The entire northern section of the treeline just— came down, whole trees toppling in sequence, and what stepped through them was the reason nothing had needed to hurry.
Green skin, the color of something that had been growing for a very long time in a place without light. Rotting in sections— patches of the hide sloughing away, dark and wet, but the body underneath still moving, still massive, the decay happening alongside the life rather than replacing it.
Bat ears, wide and thin, rotating forward as it stepped through the fallen trees. Tusks, two of them, curving upward from the jaw, ancient and yellowed and enormous. It walked on four legs and the ground registered every step.
It hit the north wall.
The north wall disappeared.
It scrambled beneath it, the structure simply ceasing to exist under the impact, the reinforced metal and the welded sheets and the concrete Kiara’s people had spent months building gone in one motion.
The watchtower on the north side came down sideways. The people in it had already jumped.
It stepped through the gap.
Inside the camp now. The defenses that had held everything else had not been built for something this size, and this wasn’t even in Jisoo’s comic, I don’t know what its weakness is.
I stood in the smoke and the fire and the noise and watched half the camp fold under the weight of it moving through, and the only thing I could think, standing there watching it, was that the other half was still standing.
Because of Jisoo.
I stood there.
The monster moved through what remained.
And somewhere in the supply garage on the south side, behind a row of boxes, a 9 years old hyper kid with a stitched white bunny was waiting for me to come back.