Armored Beast

POV AMARA

“Driving a military armoured truck down an avenue swarming with walking corpses sounds like fun — until the entire pavement starts shaking beneath your wheels.”

The tactical transport’s diesel engine roars like a caged beast inside the underground garage. It is an absolute monster of a machine. Eight heavy-duty wheels, three-inch reinforced steel plating covering every surface, and a massive front blade designed to shove aside barricades during urban warfare. It was built to survive battles that would turn ordinary vehicles into scrap metal.

“Fasten your harness,” Nikolai orders from the driver’s seat, his hands moving across the dashboard controls with the easy familiarity of someone who has operated these vehicles through a hundred suicide missions. “This beast does not stop for anything or anyone once it builds up speed. If we hit something solid, you stay strapped in tight.”

“Don’t worry about me, Lanston,” I reply, pulling the three-point belt tight across my chest and clicking it into place. “Worry about not driving us into the first wall we see.”

Before climbing aboard, I had already cleared out half the station’s supply lockers using my system inventory. Three sealed crates of high-density combat rations, four surgical kits packed with haemostatic sealant and emergency supplies, and two heavy-calibre armour-piercing ammunition cases sit safely stored in my dimensional space, taking up zero room inside the truck itself. It feels like having a whole quartermaster’s depot right in my pocket.

Nikolai slams the gear lever into first with a firm, satisfying clunk.

The armoured vehicle rumbles up the concrete ramp and smashes straight through the reinforced steel outer gate. Metal screams and buckles under the weight, and we burst out onto the main avenue, daylight flooding in through the narrow vision slits.

Midday sunlight is almost entirely blotted out by a thick blanket of black smoke billowing upward from the skyscrapers of the financial district ahead. The street below looks like a graveyard. Abandoned and overturned cars litter every lane. Shattered glass glitters across the pavement, and dark pools of coagulated blood stain the asphalt in ugly purplish-black streaks.

And then, they see us.

The deep, throaty rumble of the engine is like a dinner bell ringing across the entire district. From shattered storefronts, narrow alleyways, and the doorways of abandoned buses, dozens upon dozens of twisted figures snap toward the sound and surge out into the open, converging straight toward our lane.

“We have over two hundred runners pouring in from all sides!” I call out, watching them swarm through the vision slit in the windshield.

“Let them come,” Nikolai growls, and there is a cold, sharp grin in his voice.

He floors the accelerator.

The heavy engine surges, and we hit eighty kilometres per hour along the straight stretch. The first wave of infected foolish enough to throw themselves directly at the grille are caught by the front blade before they even touch the hull. The impact tears them apart instantly, their broken bodies tossed aside like broken dolls. The massive wheels roll right over what remains, crushing bone and debris alike without so much as a shudder. Nothing slows us down.

“I’m heading up to the turret!” I tell him, releasing the lock on my harness.

“Watch your head on the way up, Amara!” he shouts back, steering with one hand while swinging wide around a burning fuel tanker that blocks half the road. “And if anything climbs high enough to reach you, put it down fast. They won’t hesitate to claw their way through the sensor housings if they get the chance!”

I climb the short metal ladder inside the cabin and push open the circular hatch set into the roof. Hot air hits me full in the face, thick with the stench of rot, burning rubber and gunpowder. It is chaos out there, but up here, I have eyes on everything.

I step up behind the heavy rotary cannon mounted on a full-rotation turret ring. It is a brutal piece of military hardware — twin barrels fed by an endless titanium-link ammunition belt. The moment my hands close around the ergonomic grips, my tactical vision activates automatically, overlaying everything I see with crisp digital clarity.

[Weapon System Linked: Heavy Rotary Autocannon]

[Passive Ability ‘Core Vision’ Active — Ballistic Trajectory Corrections Online]

[Weak Points Highlighted: 48 Hostiles Within Effective Range]

The blue targeting reticle in my view splits into dozens of small, blinking red dots marking heads and chests across the swarm closing in on us. Some are scrambling over the roofs of parked cars, others sprinting along the sidewalks, all converging fast.

I squeeze the electronic trigger.

The weapon opens up with a deep, deafening roar that drowns out everything else. There is no wasteful spraying of bullets. Every three-round burst is tracked and corrected by the system’s guidance. Four infected leaping down from the roof of a bus are torn apart in mid-air, their skulls exploding before their claws can even graze the truck’s paintwork. I swing the turret forty degrees left and sweep another group of eight that had broken ahead and were trying to swarm along our flank.

[Phase 1 Infected eliminated… +10 Points]

[Phase 1 Infected eliminated… +10 Points]

[Phase 1 Infected eliminated… +10 Points]

[Total Warfare Dominance: 540 Points]

The numbers keep climbing steadily in the corner of my vision. We are cutting through them like a scythe through tall grass.

Suddenly, an overturned pickup truck is shoved directly into our lane by the sheer weight of the horde pushing behind it. It blocks our entire path. If we hit that engine block at this speed, the front axle will shatter and we will flip completely.

“Nikolai, vehicle dead ahead at twelve o’clock!” I yell into my helmet comms, my eyes locked on the obstacle.

“I see it. Hold tight!” His voice comes back sharp and steady in my ear.

Through the hatch, I catch a glimpse of his left arm extending slightly out his open window. The acid burns have healed completely, and now his forearm is encased in that familiar dark titanium plating, glowing faintly with deep crimson light along the edges.

A pulse of sheer kinetic force blasts outward from his open palm, cutting through the air like an invisible shockwave. The two-ton pickup is simply lifted aside as if it were made of cardboard, hurled spinning through the air to crash against the facade of a bank building, crushing a dozen infected in the process. We roar through the gap without so much as lifting our foot from the accelerator.

[Bloodline Resonance: Increased to 25%]

[Tactical Link: Commander Lanston has absorbed Purification Energy]

A surge of fierce, wild confidence washes over me. We are not just surviving this nightmare — we are carving our own path right through the heart of it. Nothing seems able to hold us back.

“Nice shot, Lanston!” I shout down, unable to keep the grin from my face.

“I told you we don’t stop for anyone!” he laughs back, his rough voice crackling over the speaker. “Save your heavier rounds though. We’ve got five kilometres until the elevated highway, and who knows what waits along the way!”

I rotate the turret slowly rearward to scan our trail. Hundreds of mangled bodies litter the smoking asphalt behind us. The ones still chasing are falling further behind with every second.

But my smile freezes in place.

Beneath all eight heavy tyres, the ground itself begins to thrum with a deep, unnatural rhythm. It isn’t engine vibration or the rattle of uneven pavement. It is a pulse, heavy and slow, like a giant hammer striking the foundations of the city itself.

The runners still pursuing us screech to a halt all at once. Their primitive hunger vanishes, replaced instantly by sheer, animal terror. They scatter, scrambling frantically into doorways and alleyways, vanishing from the open street as if something far worse than us has just appeared.

“Nikolai… something is very wrong,” I say quietly, releasing the cannon handles and reaching instead for the ion dagger at my belt.

“I feel it through the steering wheel,” he replies, all humour gone from his tone, replaced instantly by that sharp military focus. “The entire front suspension is shaking. Something massive is moving beneath the road surface.”

Fifty metres ahead, right where the avenue rises onto the elevated highway overpass, the asphalt splits open in a spiderweb of cracks stretching a full metre wide. A slab of pavement the size of a school bus erupts upward, blasted apart from underneath.

From the smoking crater, something enormous leaps into view. It clears twenty feet straight up, landing directly in our path with a crash that shakes the entire street. It stands over three metres tall, shoulders wider than a concrete barrier. Its entire head and torso are encased in jagged, bone-white plates of natural armour so thick and dense they look like solid granite. Its arms are massive pillars of rotting muscle, ending in fists the size of wrecking balls.

With a heavy, thunderous step, it walks forward and brings its full weight crashing down onto the armoured hood of our truck.

Three inches of reinforced steel crumples like an empty soda can. The engine screams and bursts in a cloud of white steam and exploding sparks. The front axle drives downward into the road, the rear end lifting completely off the ground as tyres screech and blow out under the impossible pressure.

The violent jolt rips me upward from the turret ring. I catch myself against the hatch rim just before being thrown clear. Dazed, I look up — and find myself barely two metres away from it. Two tiny, pus-filled red eyes glare back at me, set deep inside a helmet-like skull with no visible neck.

The creature raises one colossal fist high above its head, preparing to crush the cabin roof in a single blow.

And burning bright across my vision, the system flashes in blood-red letters:

[DEVASTATION WARNING: Phase 2 Brute Class Mutant — ‘The Breaker’]

[Defence Rating: Heavy Armour Grade S]

[Vehicle Integrity: 12% — Engine Destroyed]

“We had the toughest armoured truck in the city at our disposal. But we had just run headfirst into a mountain of living muscle that had absolutely no intention of letting us walk away.”