Thirty minutes before VIR was activated.
Below, Francis felt the pressure lift.
The targeting sensation—that faint thermal precursor that preceded each orbital strike—faded and then disappeared entirely. The sky above him, still dark with residual clouds, went quiet.
He didn't wait.
Wings reformed and he dropped into a low trajectory, cutting across the terrain at a speed that left nothing visible behind him. The landscape blurred—mountains, then floodplain, then the dark outline of a giant scorpion.
He had already fixed the direction.
Verak's corpse was unmistakable even from a hundred kilometers out. Not just because of its size. It was the energy signature. Dense, radiating outward in powerful pulses.
Francis descended without slowing and hit the ground running.
The corpse loomed ahead like an ancient structure, its body textured like the surface of the ground itself.
