The missile detonated behind him with a deep, rolling boom.
The Razorwhale was already past the valley by the time the fireball climbed.
Wyatt didn’t wait to see where it hit.
He flipped the fighter over the next ridge, cut speed, and dropped low. When he found a patch of soft sand, he jumped.
He hit, rolled, and vanished between a cluster of boulders.
Behind him, the Razorwhale kept flying—following the last command he’d left it. It climbed and accelerated, trying to drag the Ghost Bees away.
It bought him seconds.
The pursuing swarm wrapped around it anyway.
The damaged fighter lasted less than ten seconds before it was torn out of the sky and smashed into a far slope.
The Ghost Bees didn’t leave. They swept beams across the crash site again and again, circling, cataloging every shard.
Wyatt stayed still.
Stealth mode pulled him into the rock-shadow until he was almost indistinguishable from stone.
He barely cared about the dozen Ghost Bees above.
He cared about the nest behind him.
Only seconds passed before the valley answered.
Buzzing wings. A sudden roar of air. The scuttle and scrape of countless legs. Chaos-footsteps. And threaded through it all—those sharp, rising screams that only the giant pincer beetles made.
The noise swelled.
Then came engines. Then frigates.
As expected, the valley began to flash with explosions.
The swarm was fighting the pursuers.
Wyatt couldn’t see it, but he didn’t need to. The plan had worked.
Broken insect bodies were flung high into the air. A few tumbled up the slope and rolled past him, leaking dark fluid onto the sand.
Dozens of winged drakes burst out of the gorge and climbed to meet the Ghost Bees. A handful angled toward the search pattern above Wyatt’s hiding place.
The Ghost Bees snapped off their sweep and dove back into the melee.
The moment the sky cleared, Wyatt slipped away—running in the opposite direction, keeping to cover, letting the battle eat the attention behind him.
That should buy the convoy time.
“I’m sorry, Miller,” he thought as he ran.
Minutes stretched. The sounds behind him faded into distance.
He checked the time.
Fifty-one minutes since he’d separated from Dorian.
If the convoy truly left after an hour, they should already be on the move.
Perfect.
While Phantom Forge’s focus was buried in the bug-nest fight, all Wyatt had to do was follow the planned route, catch up, and rejoin them.
Then the night lit up behind him.
A straight white beam stabbed from the valley into the clouds—then blossomed into a cross, bright enough to bleach the ridges.
Wyatt froze, staring.
It took him a heartbeat too long to remember what that was.
And when he did, his mind bucked into noise.
A Goliath missile designator.
Usually a fighter or a frigate dropped the beacon at a strike point. Minutes later, from thousands of kilometers away, a Goliath would come screaming down at roughly Mach 30—landing dead center in that cross of light.
Depending on the model, everything within several kilometers… or several dozen… simply stopped existing.
The beacon was only used when units were offline. In all his long years of service, Wyatt had seen it once. Maybe twice.
That was why he hadn’t recognized it immediately.
But the reaction above confirmed it.
Fighters and frigates scattered outward in a practiced burst—clearing the kill zone.
Wyatt’s threat alarms screamed.
He wasn’t even two kilometers from the valley.
Even the smallest Goliath yield would erase him along with everything else.
Phantom Forge had factored him in.
He abandoned stealth and ran.
He vaulted two ridges at full speed. Six minutes bled away. The missile could hit at any moment.
Near the valley floor, he found a small strip of sand on a slope. He scanned the terrain once, made the call, and stopped running.
He dropped into a shallow depression, curled behind his shield, and made himself as small as possible.
Seconds later, night turned into brutal noon.
A sound like the world tearing open slammed into him. The ground convulsed.
A ring-shaped shockwave expanded out from the valley, pulverizing stone as it went—sand and rock blasting, cliffs sloughing off, boulders disintegrating into powder.
When the roar finally faded, rubble lay thick over the sand.
A moment later, the rubble moved.
Wyatt shoved the stones off with his shield and forced his way out.
His armor was scored so badly it looked like he’d been fed through a turbine, but a rapid self-check came back clean: no critical damage.
Even he felt a flicker of surprise.
The layered ridges had bled off part of the blast. And the custom super Yalu-alloy armor Julian had built for him had eaten the rest.
He turned in place.
The landscape had been rewritten.
The impact point had become a vast bowl, and the surrounding peaks had been shaved down. The Goliath had punched a circular “plain” nearly ten kilometers across into the Budalawa Mountains.
Wyatt stood at the edge of it.
Above, the explosion had torn a round hole through the cloud cover. Moonlight poured down through the gap like a spotlight.
In that odd brightness, he noticed “stars” both above and below the cloud layer.
The ones below weren’t stars.
They were the returning aircraft—Punishers and fighters, swarming back in.
A deep rumble rolled overhead.
Wyatt dropped back into the rubble just as a frigate glided past, its broad spotlight washing the stone field in harsh white.
Phantom Forge still hadn’t stopped hunting him.
If anything, there were more units now, combing the area without restraint.
What did he do—hide until dawn?
No.
The convoy had only just left, and the Sunflower was barely thirty kilometers away. Wyatt might be able to vanish on his own, but the convoy couldn’t. It was enormous—longer than an Ithaqua-class frigate.
And for air units, thirty kilometers was nothing.
Then another thought hit him—worse than the searchlights.
Before leaving, Wyatt had ordered the robots he’d left behind to detonate the ship’s unstable nuclear batteries after one hundred minutes.
The blast would erase the workshop, the new carriage builds, the wing fabrication—everything that could hint at their intentions. It would also kill the leftover units, so Phantom Forge couldn’t pry their memories open.
He’d assumed the nest would delay the enemy for at least half an hour.
Instead, it had been vaporized in minutes.
If Phantom Forge reached the Sunflower before the batteries blew…
Those robots would be captured.
And Phantom Forge would learn everything.
Wyatt felt something like panic, sharp and cold.
He thought for three seconds, then made the only call that mattered.
He went back.
When the frigate’s spotlight drifted away, Wyatt broke from cover. Hijacking a frigate crossed his mind—but the math didn’t work.
He ran.
He released the Shadow Falcon and used its intermittent aerial feed to thread between patrol patterns. After three kilometers, the density of air units dropped, and he poured on speed.
Fifteen minutes later, he was back at the valley that hid the Sunflower.
The convoy was gone.
The ATV and the supply truck were gone from the entrance.
Without the TBM’s coverage, the ship’s access point sat exposed.
Wyatt’s Shadow Falcon spotted enemies on the outskirts of the valley—ground units, likely the ones he’d seen earlier. They hadn’t chased him into the mountains. They’d kept searching.
They were here now.
In less than ten minutes, they would find the entrance.
And the batteries still had twenty-six minutes on the clock.
Wyatt didn’t hesitate. He sprinted inside.
The workshop was empty.
Dozens of robots stood around the two nuclear batteries, each more than four meters tall. The batteries were active, ready—waiting for the moment they’d be ordered to pull the overload switch.
As Wyatt entered, every head turned toward him.
He swept them once—then issued his command.
“All units: rearm. Combat-ready in three minutes.”