The Holy City's Plea for Help

A faint sound came from the distant night. Jipta froze for a moment, then frowned and looked toward the far end of the darkness. Everything there was pitch-black. He tried hard to make out what lay beyond the ten layers of electric fencing several miles away, but he saw nothing.

That sound just now seemed to have been an accident.

"Was it just my imagination?"

Jipta's heart tightened. He hurriedly lowered his voice into the communicator. "Captain... something seems wrong over here."

Crackle, crackle.

The communicator's signal cut in and out.

Such things occasionally happened inside the "cage." This was not Jipta's first time encountering it. He slapped the communicator hard, but this time, it did not immediately return to normal.

"Damn."

Jipta cursed helplessly.

To be safe, he began backing away. At the same time, he switched on his spare flashlight, keeping the recording running as he shone it across the desolate grassland ahead. But the moment the beam swept over it... Jipta's scalp went numb.

In the darkness stood a gigantic shadow, right "nearby"... This thing had somehow passed through four or five layers of electric fencing without making a sound. That faint noise earlier had come from it. The ultra-high-voltage grid, carrying nearly a million volts, had simply been crushed beneath it. The wires tangled around it like a fishing net, and when the light struck it, Jipta finally saw what "it" looked like.

A super-sized butterfly, a full fifty meters across?

He felt like his whole world had collapsed.

What the hell!

How could something like this grow so huge... And why had it made such a faint sound when it hit the electric fence? Where was the electricity? The fire? The light?

The entire night over F Zone was silent.

Jipta suddenly froze. Light... wait,