The Primordial Forest was downright magical at night. I surfaced into a cloud of fireflies that ghosted over the surface of the pale, glowing water. The full moon cast a soft golden glow through the lacework of branches overhead. Slowly, quietly, I moved through the cut-up patchwork of light and dark, heading toward the north-east. A map overlay hung in the corner of my HUD, but I didn't need to rely on it. Instinct and scent guided me toward the Fossil Springs.

The terrain began to climb about a mile from the edge of the forest, becoming rockier and drier. It wasn’t long until I found Hell Pigs. The first patrol loomed out of the semi-darkness only about half a mile from the last deep body of water: Four men mounted on raptors, with a mounted Hyperboar in the lead. They picked their way down a well-rutted trail barely wide enough for the legion. Once they passed, I slipped out of concealment and followed that same trail, keeping my ears pricked and my nose to the ground. Twenty minutes later and some careful positioning, and I was looking over the Fossil Springs.

In the real world, Fossil Springs was the kind of place that would have been designated as a national monument. As the forest thinned, it gave way to a field of monoliths: boulders carved and shaped by wind, water and time into a maze of standing stones. Some of them were narrow, jutting towers of volcanic tuff twenty feet tall or more. Others were as squat as a hobgoblin, tumbled and split from the larger stones. Steaming water bubbled up from the ground and ran down through the rocks in dancing streams, carving lime-crusted channels between them. It was a giant three-dimensional maze, and there was no doubt in my mind that the gently-upsloping caverns, gorges, cracks and crevices were heavily trafficked and probably trapped.

That was one problem. The other was that the Pigs had turned the place a natural fortress. In fact, as far as I could tell, they’d fenced off the entire biome. Ramshackle watchtowers were spaced every hundred feet, surrounded by outward-pointing rings of wooden spikes. Palisades filled every available gap in the stones to create a wall. From my vantage point in the trees, I saw people moving around inside the watchtowers. There were no lamps inside with the guards. All the lights were on the outside to illuminate people coming in by ground.

I waited and watched. Thirty minutes trickled by before I spotted a second patrol return from the east. They raised their hands to the guys in the towers, making a series of specific gang signs with their fingers. After a minute or so, a gate between two monoliths opened, and the weary men and their dinosaurs trooped up into a shadowed, steep rocky road that led deeper into the springs.

'Hmm.' I swished my tail in thought. According to the map, Oil Town was in the heart of the Fossil Springs. I had to think back to what I'd told Angel - that there was no point in worrying when the only way we could move was forward. Still, the defenses were a much tougher nut to crack than Vanara's mostly-exposed ruins.

With claws and tentacles, I carefully returned to the ground. Staying low, I crawled around the towers, looking for a way up that wouldn't be obvious - or possible - for a human to climb. I found the route on the western side: a patch of darkness created by a pair of watchtowers. I was vaguely aware of the viewer count ticking up in my HUD as I crept through the sparse bushes to the rock face.

All this stone was tuff - not as in 'tough', like strong. T-u-f-f, a kind of volcanic rock with a surface like coarse sandpaper. It was easy to climb. I let the tentacles unfurl, anchoring them into small holes on the surface, and pushed up off the ground to scuttle up the rock face like a large-but-unusually-handsome spider. As I crested the round top of the boulder, some instinct froze me in place before I could drop down. I'd barely drawn breath when a pair of men: one with a bow and arrows, one with a torch and a whistle in his hands - rounded the corner on the narrow path below.

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‘Damn. This place is crawling.’ My heart sunk. It was real unlikely that me, Angel and Lulu were gonna be able to bust in here together. All it would take was a flash of pale skin or one unselfconscious 'ooh!' from Lulu, and we'd have two hundred Hell Pigs descending on us like the fist of an angry porcine god. Even if there were other entries to Karkinos' lair in the Fossil Springs, the likelihood of finding one was low.

Once the soldiers had moved past, I dropped down and melted into the maze of stone. At first, I could navigate the labyrinth by scent. There were paths the patrolmen regularly took through the rocks, paths that smelled stronger than others. But the further I went, the more the harsh, chemical smells of tar and petroleum overwhelmed everything else. I stopped trying to find a path through and started to climb again, following the hazy glow of many lights radiating from the center of town. Eventually, I quietly scaled a tall, pitted boulder and peered down into Oil Town Seven.

Like the other Hell Pigs settlement I’d seen, OT7 wasn't exactly picturesque. There were three roads in, all from the base of the hill. Steaming pools that might have once been hot springs were now filthy with tailings and other waste, billowing fumes into the air. Built up around those and the few scattered monoliths was a town that was eighty percent oil refinery, twenty percent huts and lean-tos. It looked like a homeless camp built around the base of a primitive coal refinery. Crude stone vents and wooden scaffolding loomed over everything. The only 'free' spaces were circles of pale bare earth surrounding half a dozen wooden pumpjacks. Like giant dipping birds, their cross arms bobbed up and down, up and down, pulling up oil from deep wells. Slaves toiled around them at even this late hour, overseen by taskmasters who whipped the ones not working fast enough.

Our goal was at the back of this industrial nightmare: a crude, but sturdy round fortress. In terms of defense, it was miles above anything I’d seen on the island thus far: an irregularly shaped ring of fifteen-foot stone walls and rammed earth sturdy enough to take the impact of a tank. The doors looked to be made of metal and were almost anachronous, too modern compared to the rest of the structures I’d seen on the island thus far. Guards patrolled the parapets and manned a pair of searchlights that also looked out of place.

I weaved my head to focus my vision on a pair of guards chatting on one of the walkways – then flinched at the jolt of recognition. It was one of our Hell Pigs Elite buddies from the attack near Fort Hope. He lit a cigarette behind a cupped hand, nodding absently while his friend kept speaking. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but… I was sure it was him. The Russian Sponsored.

Then, suddenly, something clicked. The wheels in my head began to turn while I waited and watched to see if the inner fort to open. It took a while, nearly an hour until the bronze gates swung open to admit a triceratops pulling a wagon loaded with wooden crates. By the easy way the dinosaur was moving, it was a light load. The wagon went in, the gates closed. Half an hour later, they opened to let the trike out. This time, the beast of burden was clearly pulling a lot more weight, and he was flanked by half a dozen Elites and their ghostly mounts.

Thinking hard, I slithered back down the rock face, and began to retrace my steps toward the Primordial Forest. When I reached the edge of the treeline, I went back to my first vantage point, waiting to see if the trike was headed somewhere outside of Oil Town. Barely had to wait ten minutes before the wagon emerged from the perimeter gates – and turned east.

My eyes narrowed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”