The bedrock fractured under Elara’s boots.

She ducked behind a shattered stalagmite, bracing her shoulder against the stone to keep the First Division line from folding. Corrosive venom melted the rock inches from her visor. The enclosed topography shook relentlessly under the combined barrage of the First and Second Divisions.

A Scorpion-class Kaiju thrashed against the primary containment line. Its armored tail whipped through the ash, crushing a mechanized walker against the cavern wall. The metal chassis crashed into the dirt, burying the pilot.

Elara’s HUD tracked thirty-five million active viewers, but the numbers were useless to her. Golden sponsor logos hovered as semi-transparent holograms over the battlefield, flickering through the dense smoke. A glowing banner for Apex Munitions drifted directly across her line of sight, blocking her angle on the beast’s flank. She gritted her teeth, swiping a hand to clear the projection from her visor.

Twenty yards to her left, a First Division elite named Vane swung a heavy broadsword against the Scorpion’s foreleg. The chitin held firm, snapping Vane’s steel blade cleanly in half. A jagged shard spun into the dirt.

Vane backpedaled from the claw sweep and slapped his gauntlet, opening his public channel.

"Armory goal is open. I need a replacement blade on this flank."

Elara saw the neon progress bar fill before Vane finished speaking.

A tungsten delivery capsule tore through the cavern ceiling, cratering the stone three feet from Vane’s boots. It popped open, deploying a fresh high-frequency phase-blade. Grabbing the hilt, Vane engaged his suit thrusters and charged back into the fray.

"Hold the left flank," Elara barked over the roaring command channel. Ejecting a spent thermal magazine from her rifle, she slammed a fresh core into the receiver. "Force its center toward the heavy cannons. Do not let it anchor."

The Scorpion pivoted, lashing its barbed tail toward the Second Division lines. The stinger targeted a heavy gunner pinning its flank.

A hexagonal force field erupted around the gunner. The stinger slammed into the energy shield. The visual watermark of a luxury logistics company glowed bright blue upon impact, absorbing the fatal blow entirely. The force still cratered the bedrock beneath the gunner’s boots, dropping him into a shallow pit, but he kept his finger on the trigger.

The shield dropped. Whipping its tail back through the secondary lines, the beast caught a D-rank support recruit.

No shield deployed. The razor edge of the stinger sliced the recruit perfectly in half. Blood rained across the rocks.

The public feed blurred the body before it hit the rocks. A yellow donation prompt opened over the smear, asking viewers to fund emergency support.

Elara ignored the flashing sponsor banners. She leaned around the rock and fired a continuous stream of white plasma into the beast’s articulated jaw.

Rearing up on its hind legs, the Scorpion exposed its underbelly.

The segmented plating split open. A tearing noise echoed over the artillery fire. Hundreds of translucent eggs dropped from the beast’s abdomen, hitting the cavern floor and rupturing.

A swarm of arachnid crawlers poured out of the amniotic fluid. The size of guard dogs, the drones possessed multiple black eyes and mandibles dripping with corrosive spit. They skittered over the broken stone, flooding the First Division line.

"Incendiary rounds!" Elara commanded.

Drawing her own phase-blade, she wove through the swarm. She severed the drones with fast, efficient slashes, keeping her momentum shifting to avoid getting pinned. Black fluid sprayed across her visor. The physical toll of the melee dragged at her shoulders, her chest tightening inside the heavy armor respirator as she kicked a leaping drone out of the air and drove her steel straight through its thorax.

Through the smoke, Vane spotted an opening.

The Scorpion’s underbelly remained exposed from the egg drop. A pulsing blue sac glowed unprotected beneath the heavy chitin plates.

"Primary core exposed!" Vane yelled over the comms. "I have the execution angle. I’m taking it."

Elara saw the plates shifting. It was a trap.

"Vane, hold your position!" she ordered, fighting to keep her line of sight clear. "It’s drawing the line too deep! Pull back!"

Vane’s viewer count spiked across Elara’s HUD. His sponsor tags brightened around his armor. He ignored the order and ignited his suit thrusters, vaulting over the crawling swarm to launch himself directly under the towering beast. He drove his sponsored blade straight upward toward the glowing blue sac.

The blade pierced the soft tissue.

The Scorpion held its ground.

The heavy chitin plates lining the beast’s underbelly slammed shut like an iron bear trap. The plates caught Vane at the waist. His feed cut out before the upper half of his body hit the mud.

The golden sponsor logos hovering above him dissolved into static.

Elara caught what Vane’s death exposed.

When the underbelly plates snapped shut, the violent muscular contraction pulled the armored plates at the base of the Scorpion’s neck tight. The heavy chitin shifted upward, exposing the bare spinal cord for a fraction of a second.

She planted her boots, using the chassis of a ruined artillery mech as a springboard. Launching herself thirty feet into the air, she crested the smoke and gripped her blade with both hands.

She drove the glowing steel deep into the exposed gap in the Scorpion’s cervical plates.

Blue blood geysered from the wound, coating Elara’s armor. She twisted the hilt, shredding the internal nervous system. The physical resistance of the beast’s dense muscle fought the blade, vibrating up her arms and rattling her teeth.

The Kaiju shrieked, detonating a defense mechanism.

Compressed air and venom mist erupted from its core. The force launched Elara backward off the creature’s back. Hard-light shields deployed across the First Division line to catch the blast. Elara hit the dirt hard, rolling through the ash to bleed off the momentum. The entire cavern filled with pulverized rock and smog.

Forcing herself upright, Elara raised her blade. Each breath dragged hard through the respirator.

The dust cleared.

The space where the Scorpion had stood was entirely empty.

A jagged sinkhole gaped in the center of the battlefield. The beast had burrowed straight down through the shattered bedrock. Elara tapped her wrist console, tracking the seismic tremors fading into the deep earth. The trajectory line cut straight down through the industrial strata. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Caleb’s squad was down there.

She switched to the tactical map to verify the lower perimeter.

The grid for the subterranean ravine sat completely black.

Adjusting the frequency yielded nothing. The tracking signals for Assault Squad Three were gone. The heavy maintenance bulkheads separating the upper cavern from the lower tunnels registered as manually sealed.

Elara stopped moving for half a breath. Grid failures happened during major artillery barrages. Blast doors did not digitally weld themselves shut during an active breach.

She opened a priority channel to the Second Division heavy lines.

A mechanical rumble vibrated over the comms, punctuated by the rhythmic pounding of anti-aircraft flak cannons. The Second Division Captain stood atop a mobile artillery platform miles across the cavern, his silver hair plastered to his forehead with ash as he manually fed tungsten shells into a jammed autoloader.

"The primary line is buckling, Elara," the silver-haired Captain grunted, his voice a gravelly bark over the roaring artillery. "I am losing heavy mechs to the sinkhole. What do you need?"

"I have lost telemetry on Mercer and the veterans," Elara shouted. "Do you have visual on the maintenance bulkheads?"

Static answered her.

Elara stared at the dead frequency. Caleb’s squad was below that bulkhead.