Enormous thumps quaked the bunker just under Ystets' surface. Power had been completely cut off as Vocath trudged through the city above, destroying and devouring everything in its wake.

An ordinary, pale-skinned man with short black hair and casual office clothes sat on a couch, surrounded by darkness, illuminated only by the glow of his phone. Although he couldn't see much without power, two other volons were just to his left, one of whom was sitting on the same couch as him. He didn't mind.

“Hope my trucks are still intact,” the ordinary man named Glenn said.

“Oh, they'll be fine. We've dealt with worse,” a sickly sweet, feminine voice replied from the other end of the sofa.

“I don't know if we've dealt with anything worse than this,” Glenn responded.

“What a party pooper!” the woman responded. She scooted closer to Glenn on the couch, revealing the silhouette of a curvy, scantily clad woman with deathly white skin. When she looked at him, he only saw two black crosses aligned vertically, and a little grin beneath them.

“It's about time something happened to the humans' grip on this place,” the woman – Tennadeirovaein – sang. “Or, what remained of it,” she finished with a giggle.

“They're saying the death toll is over 20,000 already. It's most certainly going to reach six figures before the humans manage to kill it. Your food supply might be pretty scarce if this keeps up.”

Tenna produced a coin from the pocket of her shorts. “Wanna bet on its final kill count?”

“No.”

“Come on,” she whined. “How about you, Eckire?”

Her question was answered by a quiet grunt from the darkness. Eckire, the crew's great volon, was seldom talkative.

“Well, I see this as an opportunity,” Tenna explained, rolling the coin across her fingers. “Volons are going to outnumber humans in Ystets by, like, 20 to one after this is done. I already have dozens of ferals trained and ready to gnash at a moment's notice. If we got more forces mustered, we could take over this entire city.”

“What's left of this city,” Glenn remarked, listening to the titan's footsteps continue off into the distance.

“Details, details! My point is this could be a window for us to really make an impact in this world. I, for one, am tired of being cooped up in this tiny shoe box. Besides, stealth has never been my image. Just imagine... Queen Tennadeirovaein, the fearsome ruler of Hallow! I'd sit atop my throne of skulls with human servants fawning over me,” she finished with a dreamy sigh. “What do you think?”

Glenn slowly nodded. “Yeah.”

Tenna nudged him in the side. “You could at least pretend to be inspired.” Another sigh, not so dreamy this time. “I wonder what that girl's up to.”

“...Janice?”

“That's the name! Yeah, she was a cute piece of work. I wonder how hard it would be to bring her on board.”

Extremely hard, Glenn thought, suppressing a chuckle.

“Do you know where she's at? Don't think I haven't seen you chirping around at her, you little flirt~!”

“Miyatama, last I heard.” It was a lie of omission; Glenn knew full well that Janice didn't want anything to do with Tenna, but staying in his boss's good graces was his best chance at getting by until Vocath was dealt with.

“You wouldn't be holding out on me, would you?” she suggested.

“Janice and I talk every now and then, but it's not daily. I don't know what she's up to right now.”

“Okay, then. I believe you~!”

With no power, the bunker was starting to grow cold, but it wasn't anything his species couldn't handle. To pass the time, Glenn looked down at his phone to see yet another impromptu news story about Vocath on the website's feed.

“Oh, they're spraying it with napalm now,” he explained. “Think it'll work?”

Tenna chuckled. “I've given this kind of thing some thought before. You said earlier that it was constantly shapeshifting – if I was that big and I lit on fire, I would smother the flames with my own body. Drag the burning flesh into myself so the flames can't breathe. I imagine, at that size, you could probably do it faster than the fire could spread. At least, that's what I'd do. So, I guess it depends on how deliberate its flux is. Ooh, ooh! And if the humans manage to start winning against me, and I struggled to get around, I would 'play dead'. Let them think they'd won. I'd stay in one place and keep putting out the fires with my body as best as I could, and then... I'd start seeping into the ground beneath me. Nobody would even notice that I was secretly planting the seeds of another elder volon underground!”

It was unnerving when Tenna dropped the ditzy act. Glimpses of her true intelligence were swift reminders of the reason the trio had become as influential as they were, even if an elder was smashing the entire city above them. If Tenna had thought this much about a hypothetical elder's survivability, Glenn assumed there was more wit behind her whims of establishing a new world order than she let on.

“You have any plans after Vocath is dealt with?” he inquired.

“Why? You looking for some action, cutie?” she sang.

Glenn rolled his eyes at the return of the ditzy facade. “No.”

“Hmph. I don't have plans... yet. Military and rescue efforts are going to be everywhere once Vocath either leaves Ystets or dies, so we'll probably be stuck down in here for weeks yet. The big question is whether the humans are going to try to save the city or let it crumble.”

“I'm guessing you've planned for both scenarios.”

“You know it~! If there's not enough human life here, and the surface ferals keep picking humans off, something tells me reconstruction is going to be fairly low on their list of priorities. Perhaps then, we could finally establish a real foothold here, even if we're working with the scrapped remains of this city. And if that goes well, I have plans for... elsewhere.”

“Hm?”

“I've been keeping a close track of missing human reports and volon sightings across Hallow. If the humans can't figure out how to fight us off as a whole, the ferals are going to do our job for us, and I hypothesize there's going to be a lot of immigration to their space colonies to escape. Like that ring world. And if that happens... well, I shouldn't spoil the best part!”

Glenn pursed his lips. “And if they try to rebuild Ystets?”

Tenna sighed. “We stake our claim on the city. Not us three specifically, of course – the surviving volons on the surface will definitely keep the humans occupied. We'll just have to take advantage of all the ferals I've trained and continue our subterfuge. Humans are adorably easy to corrupt.”

“Noted.”

Glenn still wasn't sure where his role would fit into her plans – or how he felt about it. She certainly would have planned around his specialty as an expert driver and mimic, but whether he would still be a part of her crew by then was still unclear.

What was clear is that Vocath's arrival marked a turning point for everybody – volons, humans, robots, and genofexians alike. If there was one elder volon on Hallow, there were certainly more elsewhere, and it was blatantly obvious the humans weren't even ready for a single elder.

Unless they act fast, Glenn mused, these coming years are going to be rife with devastation.