The hunters ignored the changes in the sky. It wasn’t their job to analyse it; others would observe and study. Their job was to protect the vale. They thundered down the corridors, splitting off at intersections, some heading for the vehicle bays, others toward staging grounds and airfields.
They didn’t spare a glance for the sky as it warped, as if pulled in a direction no three-dimensional mind could comprehend. They ignored the queasy, heady sensation that accompanied it, the world tilting slightly as if reality itself were off-kilter.
They didn’t ignore when the world changed.
There was no sensation, no internal shift, no warning—only a sudden difference. Giants in open spaces or near windows glimpsed it instantly. Roads stretched into impossible distances; new buildings appeared as if they had always been there, fitting seamlessly into the valley. Foreign giants, colonists from the distant expansions, now populating the newly formed dwellings. Logistics centres, barracks, and towers for observation dotted the landscape, all integrated with flawless precision.
The valley’s appearance was unaltered, but its scale was larger—vastly so. For the first time since the virus came, they felt the weight of the impossible pressing upon their world. They survived the virus, if they acted right, they could survive this.
Everywhere, the giants felt the change echo across the valley. In the lower waystation, the giants stationed there saw the same phenomenon—the vehicle pool larger from one moment to the next, populated with new vehicles. But these were not designs from the outer colonies, each adapted to their harsh climates. No, every vehicle here bore the original valley design, specialized to the mountain’s climate.
In the airfield, the giant who had marched to the tree—the one who had chosen the most dangerous role, Jensen—saw it as well. Opening the door from the corridor to the open air, he found a scene that didn’t match his memory. Not only had the airfield expanded, but the mountain itself had grown unfathomably. From his high vantage point, he saw far more peaks than there had once been, steeper cliffs, and more ice upon the summits.
Ignoring all of it, he sprinted to the base of the control tower. Inside, the air traffic controllers worked in a flurry of activity despite only a minute passing since the phenomenon began. Voices overlapped, issuing, receiving, and revising orders with each second—every instruction obeyed without hesitation.
Few giants moved toward management, as most received orders by radio. But the Hunters’ protective equipment, which shielded them from radiation, blocked all digital communications. They were used to working as tight-knit units, communicating through body language and minimal speech alone.
Jensen was met at the door, flanked by one of his pack and quickly joined by two other hunters. Without preamble, a giant wearing a headset motioned to a digital map projecting the newly expanded mountain range and the far reaches of the desert.
“Containment mission,” he said briskly, his gaze sweeping over each of them. “The desert boundary has shifted. We need immediate reconnaissance to determine the scale of expansion.”
Jensen’s eyes flicked over the map. The expansion of the mountain might mean the expansion of other biomes, of more, new abominations. Containment had to come first.
“Jensen, Hunter plane’s in the hangar—take the HT-1,” the giant continued, his voice taut but steady. His glance shifted to Jensen’s pack mate. “You’ll be carrying a nuclear payload.”
Jensen nodded, already turning toward the airfield, the duty of others irrelevant. Outside, the HT-1—first model of Hunter Transport—loomed on the tarmac, dwarfing the other planes. It’s perfectly reflective plating, an echo of the hunters’ own armour, mirrored the scrambling aircraft—except for the few spots where armour didn’t cover. Without a word, they crossed the tarmac and climbed into the cockpit. The engines roared to life as the thorium salt reactor sparked deep within.
As Jensen and his companion prepared the plane for flight, a vehicle arrived carrying his pack mates and a large bomb. With strength borne of gene-enhanced musculature, they hauled the bomb off the vehicle and, working as a team, loaded it onto the plane.
While they fastened the bomb and secured themselves into their seats, Jensen unfastened a section of his armour, hooking a fibre-optic cable into an exposed port and connecting to the internet through the HT-1’s powerful receiver.
The news was worse than he’d expected.
The expanded airfield he had taken in stride. The valley’s sudden growth was more concerning. But the massive increase in waystations—each a new point of vulnerability—signalled something far larger at play.
And then, the report on the satellites: gone. All orbital infrastructure had simply vanished.
Now things made more sense. He understood why planes were being scrambled for reconnaissance instead of relying on satellite feeds. The satellites weren’t just offline. They weren’t there. The observatories had already turned their lenses skyward, trying to locate them, but there was nothing. If not for the towers acting as relays, huge sections of the valley would have been cut off.
But he could analyse the implications later. His pack mates gave the all-clear from the back, and ATC flashed a green light on his console. They were ready.
The HT-1 shuddered as Jensen throttled up, and the reactor’s deep hum grew into a bone-rattling roar. Massive intakes flared on either side of the plane’s sleek body, pulling in air with an audible rush—gale-force winds so powerful that anything loose nearby would be pulled into the intakes and obliterated by the force driving the reactor within.
The sound built and layered—a low, relentless rumble underscored by the searing thrum of the reactor, the kind of sound that seemed to vibrate through the metal and into their bones. Within seconds, the plane surged forward, the roar amplifying until it was quite literally deafening. The HT-1 moved eerily quickly for something of its size, the reflective plating catching fragments of light as it tore forward. With one last push, it lifted from the ground, engines kicking into overdrive, a roar trailing behind as it tore into the sky.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The afterburners flared, releasing a plume of plasma that glowed in an unsettling, almost unnatural blue. This light shimmered against the reflective plating, casting ghostly patterns that hung in the air unusually long, like lightning bolts frozen in its wake.
The blue glow drifted and twisted behind the HT-1 as it climbed, refracting like faint, spectral fire, illuminating the runway below in fleeting tendrils of light that lingered for a breath before fading into the darkening sky.
Flying across the desert, Jensen was filled in on everything the giants knew. Every person from every colony was now in the valley. Their homes were gone, yet in the districts that had suddenly appeared within the valley, their culture remained intact. Though not vastly different from the people of the valley, the displaced colonists noticed the subtle distinctions immediately. To the giants who had always lived in the valley, however, the change was only becoming apparent now.
The valley itself, Jensen learned, had more than doubled in size. The mountain range surrounding it had nearly quadrupled.
The observatories, still searching the skies, had found nothing of the satellites. But they’d noticed something far, far more unsettling: the stars were different. Entire constellations had shifted or disappeared. Jensen couldn’t exactly do anything about that, so he promptly put it out of his mind.
More relevant was a preliminary guess regarding the desert’s expansion. Judging by the earth’s curvature, the planet itself hadn’t changed in size. Yet no matter how far the giants searched, there was only desert stretching endlessly to the horizon. Beyond that, the ground dropped out of view, leaving only the vast, empty sands and no sign of an end.
Smaller, faster planes had already been sent out to scout the desert’s closer reaches, ensuring nothing lurked nearby. But the HT-1’s thorium salt reactor was rated for extreme long-term flights, so it was Jensen and his pack’s mission to explore what lay farther out.
And so, they flew.
For an hour, they cruised along the edge of space, where the reduced drag allowed them to see far beyond what the observatories could. But they weren’t the first to spot the end of the desert—that courtesy went to one of the smaller planes.
The news was grim.
The land beyond the desert didn’t transition to dirt, then stone, as it did toward the mountains. Instead, the sand grew coarser, turning to gravel, then to stone and then to meat.
Whatever force had expanded the world’s boundaries had redefined certain massive abominations as part of the terrain itself. Already, the ground was a feast, an orgy of violence and bloodshed. Smaller creatures devoured the larger, only to be consumed in turn by even greater monstrosities. Spilled blood soaked into the springy flesh underfoot, spawning new abominations that writhed to life, feeding on anything too slow to escape.
It was hell.
More concerning was the chaos’s unpredictability. This violent frenzy was breeding new mutations with every moment, unpredictable forms spawned from blood and flesh. The abominations below churned and transformed, each adaptation giving rise to new forms in an endless cycle of creation and destruction—a ruthless, living ouroboros.
And while this cycle would eventually stabilize, consuming itself into something more balanced, there was the chance that something might survive long enough—grow strong enough—to reach the mountain. If one of the abominations feasted and grew before being felled, it could pose a threat to the entire valley. Even if it ultimately met its doom, it would still be too late if it reached them first.
“Keep going,” the operator on the other end of the line said. “The desert has expanded to nearly eight times its original size. We need to know if the abominations have doubled, quadrupled—or worse. Out”
“Affirmative. Out”
Jensen’s eyes scanned the writhing landscape below. The risk of flying over such active terrain was high; anything from below might try to reach them, even at the edge of space. With a few terse commands, they climbed higher, pressing to the edge of the atmosphere to stay clear of the frenzied evolution raging below.
Now well into the stratosphere, past the Kármán line, they continued on for a few more hours before they encountered the true anomaly.
The landscape simply ended.
The chaos of flesh and monsters abruptly gave way to peaceful, rolling green hills stretching as far as the eye could see—an idyllic sight no giant had ever seen before.
A few monsters crossed the boundary, but a simple truth protected the greenery. The roiling orgy of blood and violence contained far more biomass than the peaceful green hills, and most of the abominations were heedless of risk—driven by hunger too overwhelming to allow any kind of calculation or caution.
“Control, are you seeing this?” For the first time since he’d become a hunter, Jensen hesitated.
Paradise. It was paradise. Everything they had ever wanted, everything they’d once had.
And it was going to be destroyed. Again.
“HT-1, we’re picking up radio waves from ahead of you. Keep flying toward the green, out”
“Affirmative, out.
But Jensen wasn’t truly listening. He would have flown there anyway, would do anything to protect this place. Any giant would.
With fists clenched and voice taut, Jensen connected the video feed to the monitor in the plane’s hold, showing his packmates what lay before them.
“Fuck me!” Octavius shouted, truly losing his cool for the first time Jensen had ever seen. “Get us down there—now! We need to fight them, to help!”
“Radio waves from up ahead,” Jensen said, his voice calm again. “Life. People. They matter more. We link with them, integrate—better a combined military operation than a heroic last stand.”
“Jesus Christ…” Angelica murmured, before her voice strengthened. “Drop the bomb on the bastards, lose the weight—we’ll get there faster. Seconds count.”
“Good idea, comming central” Jensen replied, relaying the thought over the radio.
“Negative on the bomb, HT-1,” Central replied firmly. “Electromagnetic interference from the radiation will cripple radio reception. You’d need line-of-sight communication, which means staying high atmosphere. You’d cut off all diplomatic efforts. Out.”
“Affirmative. Out.”
Jensen hated that Central was right, but they were. There was nothing to do but wait. And so they waited.
For the first time on any mission, they fidgeted. It began with checking and rechecking equipment, then moved to tapping feet, the clenching and unclenching of fists. The sight below called to them, but they were still helpless to act.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the radio sounded again.
“HT-1, come in. Over.”
“Loud and clear, Central. Over.”
“We’ve figured out the radio waves. They’re audio files—a public broadcast. Unknown language. Sending you a text-to-video software package now. Once active, we’ll upload pre-set videos to explain what’s happening and pose questions. Out.”
“Affirmative. Out.”
For a while now they’d been flying over farms. Strange things, spread out horizontally over huge swathes of land. It was an unexpected defence, the abominations driven into the green didn’t discriminate between flesh and vegetation—anything would do for their endless hunger. Yet the farms had kept them at bay.
But it didn’t take long for farmstead to become towns, to become villages, to become cities.
It was strange seeing a city that wasn’t a pile of ruins covered by flesh.
“HT-1, lower altitude, make contact. Out.”
Finally.
“Affirmative. Out.”
As they descended, the structures below grew clearer. The houses on the farms were tiny; most wouldn’t even reach the giants’ shoulders. Some barely rose to their hips. These humans must be unaugmented, lacking the genetic and radiological resistance of the giants. They’d need to approach carefully lest they poison large swathes of the population, as well as all political goodwill.
But how to get their attention? How to signal that this was more than just a strange plane in their skies?
Jensen didn’t know, so he asked his crew.
“They’re small, probably unaugmented, probably delicate. Weak to g-forces,” Octavius mused, before speaking through an obvious grin “Do an air show, something to push our limits, something that would turn their organs to pulp.”
An air show, huh?