The red cloud swallowed the sky.
It rolled over the outpost like a shroud, blocking out the gray daylight and replacing it with a deep, angry crimson.
The falling rain grew warm, then hot, biting into the skin like needles.
CRACK.
A bolt of red lightning crashed into the mud two hundred yards from the eastern wall, blasting a column of dirt thirty feet high. Where it struck, the ground split open and something climbed out.
Holden stopped mid-stride.
The beasts around him stopped too. From the lowest wolf to the massive siege-boars, every beast in the swarm froze and turned toward the arrival.
They were afraid.
The thing that crawled out of that hole was massive, easily fifteen feet tall. Its body was encased in armor had been forged from the shells of a thousand dead beasts, layered and fused together into a crude but impossibly thick shell. Dark veins pulsed beneath the armor like glowing arteries.
