Smash

The impact came before the warning sirens. In the lower decks of the dead megacity, something huge moved through the quarantine gates with the patience of a machine and the violence of a collapsing tower. Every door it touched folded inward. Every skull in the corridor cracked from the pressure wave alone. The engineers called it a containment failure, but the priests knew better: Smash was the name carved into the iron fists of the thing they had buried under the foundry. Now it was awake, dragging chains through sparks and black coolant, breaking open sealed wards one by one, not to escape, but to make the whole city small enough to crush.