The escape convoy—sixteen heavy diesel transport trucks packed with three hundred wounded civilians, orphan apprentices, and medical staff—rumbled up the narrow trench ramp toward the inner outer edge highway.
Behind them, the rear guard had only thirty meters of open mud before the collapsed quarry entrance.
Emerging from the churning violet fog were over four hundred Chimera Trench Stalkers. They were fast, low-slung horrors. Hybrids of pit-vipers and desert baboons, their elongated forelimbs ending in four-inch black glass climbing claws, their snake-like tails carrying poisonous rattling barbs. They moved across the mud in a horrifying, waving gallop, hissing with the sound of escaping high-pressure steam.
“Hold the ramp!” Arthur Vance’s voice rang out across the mud. “Give the transport convoy three minutes to clear the highway junction!”
Arthur stood atop a ruined concrete bridge pillar, the ARC-7 Mag-Carbine braced against his shoulder. His charcoal trench coat was drenched with gray dust and chemical rain. But his hands were steady as razor-sharp clamps.
Beside him, Grimm and Vesper stepped forward onto the mud.
It was an extraordinary contrast in hungry perfection.
Grimm was a mountain of solid charcoal bone and gravity-dense muscle, his six-hundred-two-pound bulk planted firmly in the center of the eight-meter trench floor. His black glass bone-spurs bristled along his spine. His amber eyes glowed with ancient Fenrir dominance.
