Time until next Challenge: 11 days, 8 hours, 23 minutes

  We continued fleeing throughout the rest of the evening and deep into the night. We detoured around a small town in Tennessee called Fayetteville, although we paused to replenish my fleet of defenders and swap out our damaged cars for fresh ones.

  Only eleven cars remained from our original fleet, cars the Arsenal had crewed with a primary driver and a backup, who could alternate driving and resting. Everyone else had peeled off along the way as their drivers or passengers grew too exhausted to continue fighting their way through the Titan gauntlet.

  We’d lost people, as well. One woman had been chomped by one of the speedy yellow titans, and we’d lost an entire vehicle during a devastating combination assault including a Titan that emitted hallucinogenic gas. No one had realized that the driver’s mask had been damaged in an earlier attack until after he’d swerved wildly, unluckily careening right under the waiting feet of a truly mammoth monster.

  Their SUV had been crushed flat in seconds, and only one person aboard had enough physical reinforcement to survive.

  The only blessing was that the onslaught had continued to slow as we got farther into the Tennessee wilderness. Many of the tiny towns that dotted the roads had only a few hundred people before the apocalypse, and most had lower populations now.

  People living in rural areas had experienced the apocalypse very differently than those of us in large cities. On the one hand, food had been far less of an issue: Lots of people kept sheep. Even if they were raising the animals for wool, rather than food, the fact of the matter was that a single adult sheep could keep a family fed for over a week if the meat was butchered properly and frozen via ability. That left aside farms, home gardens, and the wilderness itself. Even with guns taken off the table, it wasn’t uncommon to know how to set a snare for wild squirrels and rabbits, or to know how to forage for edible plants. Water was rarely an issue either, since most small towns were built along creeks or ponds. It had to be sterilized, still, but even with no Shops available, people could meet their basic needs.

  Monsters had been a bigger issue for them.

  A lot of people had been away from shelter when the apocalypse hit: out in the farm fields or on a desolate country road. Many had been armed, but, tragically, that had only lead to more casualties in the first few minutes, as people uselessly pumped the trigger on now-defunct firearms instead of running or finding a different weapon to fight with.

  Even those who’d made it inside were in poor shape. With more space between buildings, most people had found it difficult to meet up with neighbors and form communities. Abilities like Announcement were less effective when there were only 50 people in range instead of 5,000. Many people had been facing the apocalypse alone, with each new monster a fresh horror they had to figure out by themselves.

  The Arsenal had been bringing people together and finding ways to loop them into the information network, but many farms and small towns had suffered before the Arsenal had reached them.

  Sick as it was to say, that was lucky for us. In Huntsville proper, we’d been fighting two or three Titans every five minutes. That had declined steadily, and now we were dealing with approximately one fight per hour, plus an extra fight anytime we came near a bigger town like Fayetteville. Hamlet could have hit us more frequently with singletons, but he - or his handlers - seemed to have decided that “maximum power” was the way to go, popping out groups of Titans and sending them to rendezvous along our route.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  He’d tried arranging for larger groups to come from farther away, but Ariel could see what he was doing. If she spotted a swarm of Titans heading toward us from over twenty miles away, we could usually alter our route to avoid them and send messages to local strike teams, asking them to take them down. Any that snuck by didn’t catch us off-guard: we were ready, waiting, and prepared to strike at their weakest points.

  It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked well enough… except for how exhausting it was.

  I’d tried to catch some sleep in between these big fights, but I hadn’t been having much success. Even when there wasn’t any risk of Titans, smaller monsters still came after us. Stabcrabs could pierce the sides of any car and hellbees were quick to make it through the gaps. Many monsters, like the shinos, frogdeer, and rustpiles, were too large for the cars to plow through, slowing us down as we fought our way through to clear the way.

  We were still making decent time. Nothing amazing, but around seven miles an hour? Enough to stay ahead of the steadily-growing crowd of legoliaths I’d been told were doggedly creeping after me. Those heading toward us from the north were a bigger problem, but blessedly rare. Also, Hamlet didn’t seem to have very fine-grained control of them. He’d gone through some shenanigans to get one oncoming legoliath directly onto our route of travel, but he’d had to change the “target point” for all the Threats in order to do so, slightly expanding our lead over our pack of pursuers as they meandered off-course toward Hamlet’s temporary target.

  I was okay for now. I could go a day without sleeping, if needed.

  I was still worried.

  “We can’t keep this up for twelve days straight,” I said.

  “Technically, the next Challenge will begin in eleven and one-third days,” Pointy said.

  I glared at her.

  Pointy sniffed. “I take your point. However, the legoliaths present an issue. Incapacitating all the Titans in such rural areas is quite feasible, but with the Threats converging on us from all angles, it is unlikely that we could manage a stop of significant length.”

  “Hm.” Gavin was slumped across my lap, drooling, and I drummed my fingers on his back. “If only we could take out one or two. Didn’t the Arsenal have some success making high-grade explosives? Can they get some out in front of us?”

  “I’ll ask,” said Marie. Her eyelids were only half-open. Like the rest of us, she was tired and hadn’t gotten any true chance to rest. I’d caught her snoring once or twice, but she’d remained sitting, slumped forward, occasionally straightening up to pass a message.

  She was quiet for a few minutes, sometimes mumbling her own end of the discussion aloud.

  Eventually, she shook herself. “Okay. They actually had already gotten some explosives together and had them ready to fly north, but they only have enough on hand to take out two Threats.”

  “That’s not enough,” I said. “Where can we get more? Tennessee has a lot of mining towns, doesn’t it?”

  Vince patted my shoulder. “Anything those towns have would have been neutralized too, Meghan.”

  “No!” said Marie. “Maybe not! The experts I was just talking to at the Arsenal said something… Just wait a minute.”

  All the adults in the car, plus Micah, straightened up, suddenly awake. We were dead silent as Marie continued her discussion, now awake enough not to mutter her end out loud, a fact that was a little frustrating as a would-be eavesdropper.

  “Hah! Got it,” she said savagely. Then she opened her eyes to see all of us staring at her hopefully and shrank a little. “Uh…”

  “Well?” I snapped impatiently.

  “Okay, uh… Well, the bad news is that we’ll have to keep going. We’ll need to make it about twice as far as we have already. We’ll have to keep driving for 14 or 15 hours.”

  I frowned, glancing at the man behind the wheel, who tilted his head enough for me to see his face. He looked concerned, but he gave me a stiff, tight nod. He thought they could do it. “Alright. That’s not great… but… you have good news too?”

  “Yeah. If we can make it to Gordonsville, we should have access to enough explosives to shred every Threat coming our way.