The north side of town didn't look like a city anymore.
Warehouses squatted in long, low lines. Forklifts sat abandoned with forks half-raised. Shipping containers were stacked three and four high in crooked towers, some already shifted by the tremors. Cranes loomed over everything like metal christmas trees with all the lights hanging off them.
"Very interesting lighting idea." Talia commented.
Between it all, an eight-lane bypass carved a straight line toward the industrial estate.
It was full.
From ramp to ramp, beasts stampeded in a constant flood — Horses, Tigers, Boars, Feral strays, possums leaping on the backs of other animals and a scattering of stranger shapes half-lost in the crush. Their claws and hooves turned the concrete into a drum.
Talia pulled the bike up on an access road and just stared for a moment.
South was still worse.
But this was bad.
Here there was no helpful clutter of small cars to weave between, no convenient shops to break into kill funnels. These were long, straight strips of concrete designed for trucks and freight.
"Big, flat, and ugly," she muttered. "Perfect."
For them.
Unless she changed it.
Her kill count hovered in the corner of her vision.
[Kill Count: 522]
Time to make that number jump.
She rolled the bike forward at a crawl, scanning the layout.
To the left: a logistics depot with its big roller doors stuck half-open, forklifts scattered nearby, a couple of curtain-sided trucks sitting nose-out toward the road. To the right: a stacked container yard, cranes frozen mid-swing, several containers hanging precariously suspended over the lanes.
A slow, hard grin tugged at her mouth, "Thank you, industrial safety violators."
But humor faded fast as the reality of the wave hit her — this was going to be a grind.
There were already defenders at the north blockade — a mix of high-vis workers, a fire crew that had fallen back from somewhere else, and a small team of cops. They'd jammed two semi-trailers across three of the eight lanes and were trying to hold the gaps with handheld weapons and a couple of hunting rifles.
They were not winning.
16 hours of non stop fighting can play havoc with the mind, throw in, the time being 1am, when most people are sleeping. It's no wonder they are dragging a bit.
'Understanding and accepting are two different things. Losing wasn't an option. Not with the clock ticking and her family and the Town still fighting.' Talia told herself.
A deer went down under a volley of hits, only for three wolves and a bull to surge into the space it left. One man swung his crowbar too wide and almost got his arm taken off. A firefighter dragged him back, swore, then braced again.
Talia didn't join them.
Not yet.
She took one more look, then veered off behind the warehouse line and killed the engine in the shadow of a loading dock.
Her thigh throbbed in protest, as if saying it wanted to rest . Her arm ached, in sympathy with her shoulder and the spear felt heavier than before so she stowed it in the space. It didn't matter, she could bring it out quickly enough now.
She jog-limped toward the loading bay, mind already breaking the scene down into blocks.
Kill zones, Funnels, Platforms. She wasn't just a ranger anymore, she was a battlefield designer.
The first step was denying lanes.
She found a green forklift sitting beside a stack of pallets, keys dangling in the ignition like a gift. She climbed in, twisted—and nearly sagged with relief when the engine coughed to life.
"Good machine," she explained to it, "We're going to be rude together."
She jammed the forks under the side of a pallet loaded with boxed something and lifted, inching the machine out toward the bypass.
The sound of the wave grew louder as she approached the road. She shoved the pallet off, letting it crash into one of the empty lanes, then grabbed the next — this time a stack of steel drums still wrapped in plastic.
She worked fast, using the forklift to drag and drop obstacles into lane positions — not neat barricades, but staggered blocks that would force anything charging through to slow, swerve, split.
Behind her, the defenders started to notice.
"What the— who's that?" someone shouted.
"Let her work!" the firefighter woman from the south blockade yelled back, voice hoarse but certain. She must've radioed ahead and moved north when the fire corridor stabilised. "She knows what she's doing!"
That was debatable, but Talia accepted the endorsement.
The wave hit the first improvised obstacle cluster and began to deform.
Instead of a solid, straight wall of beasts, they broke into columns, some slamming into crates, others forced to detour toward the edges where fallen pallets narrowed the path. The swarm-like pressure on the main trailer barricade eased, just a little.
Not enough.
Talia looked up.
Shipping containers towered over the bypass on the right, stacked on scaffolds that extended out above the road. A few had already shifted crookedly. Two cranes stood nearby, one with a container still suspended over the lanes, chains taut.
That was a ready-made guillotine.
She abandoned the forklift and sprinted — as much as she could still sprint, heat flashing with every stride — toward the yard, her legs wobbling once — the kind of weakness that didn't come from fear, but from hours upon hours of constant output.
Up close, the container yard smelled like rust and oil and something faintly metallic that clung to her tongue. The office was deserted. The gate was open. The big control cranes shuddered slightly in the wind.
She climbed the nearest service ladder, ignoring the way her shoulder and leg protested, the strained joint sparking sharp, hot pain every time she pulled herself upward and entered the crane platform.
Panels blinked at her in the operator's cabin, some red, some dead. The main display was cracked, but a couple of manual levers still looked intact.
"Please be on manual," she muttered, slapping at the emergency override.
By some miracle, the power system had failed in a way that left just enough juice for what she needed or there was a generator running out back. Looking at the other four cranes, wished 'Please let them be on an emergency grid or have the generators on still running overtime on the night shift.'
The suspended container swayed slightly as she tested the controls.
Her Battle-Sense prickled.
A pressure in the back of her mind. Movement patterns. The sense of where the beast wave would be in ten seconds, fifteen, twenty.
She closed her eyes for a heartbeat, letting impressions spill in.
A cluster of beasts.
A break in the wave as it squeezed between two of her makeshift lane blocks.
Fifty, maybe more, forced into a temporary tight knot directly under the hanging container.
Her eyes snapped open.
"Alright then."
She wrapped her fingers around the manual release handle, black flecks danced at the edge of her vision when she braced to swing the lever—fatigue demanding its due. Shaking her head, Talia refocused.
"Not yet, Not yet. Almost" She counted heartbeats along with the heavy footfalls she could feel reverberating up through the metal.
"Now." She yanked. The locking pins blew.
For a split second the container simply existed where it was, then gravity took it and it fell.
The crash was like thunder. The container hit the road and crumpled in the middle, air and dust blasting out from underneath in a dirty shockwave. Along with shards of metal pinged off the crane frame above, forcing her to duck instinctively.
Talia felt the impact through her feet even up on the crane.
Her kill count spiked.
[Kill Count: 610]
[Kill Count: 640]
She let out a slow breath.
"Fifty to a hundred," she murmured. "Good."
The wave bucked around the new wreck, some beasts trying to climb the steel walls, others rebounding away and into the gaps she'd left.
Looking out at the next hovering container, she said "Your turn to shine."
When her boots hit the pavement again, her thigh nearly buckled — but she steadied herself on the spear, summoned from her space, then she moved onto the next crane.
Repeat. Amazingly three out of four cranes had power, generators were still going she was told later by an old industrial hand.
It became a weird soothing rhythm to the fighters below and Talia.
Lift where she could. Drop where she had to. Another group of Beasts gone.
One container fell onto a dense knot of wolves and dogs trying to leap a stalled semi, turning their surge into a smear of ash. Another slid off a high rack when she knocked the supports out with a swing of the crane, its path crossing the bypass at an angle and wiping out a cluster of boars.
Crude. Violent. Effective. Each impact sent vibrations up the steel framework and up her bones.
Her battle-sense sharpened — no longer wild foresight flickers, but a focused instinct for timing and flow — something primal enough she mentally labeled it her 'Hunter's Instinct.' She could feel where the wave was thickest, where spilling a new obstacle would force the beasts into the worst possible routes for them, and the best for her.
By the time she climbed down again, the industrial bypass looked less like a highway and more like a maze built by a cruel child.
Semi-trailers angled across lanes. Forklifted pallets blocked others. Containers lay like fallen giants, creating elevated platforms and dead ends.
Kill zones.
Now she could carve the Beast.