The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

Feeling a little bit like a politician on the campaign trail, I thank her and start to pull back my hand. She holds tighter, the calm visage of Jennifer replaced suddenly by the hard stare of Deena. “Can we trust you?”


I match her serious gaze and say, “I would die for all of you, or one of you.”

She holds my eyes for a moment, perhaps judging the sincerity of my words. Then she lets go of my hand and steps back. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

When the shaking ground intensifies, I urge her to follow Kainda and Em and she complies.

As the last of the hunters walk past, I bring the razor wire back together. I can’t weld the strands back together, but I bunch and overlap it enough that the jutting razors entangle and hold the two sides together. Standing at the front of my army, I look toward the end of the valley. No one yet fills the gap, but I know they soon will. Nephil will react to being wounded and chased off with blind rage. On one hand, this benefits us because rage is often absent strategy. On the other hand, it means they will likely rush our position en masse, which is the one strategy that is most likely to succeed. If that happens, the only thing that will slow them down will be the bodies of their own dead.

I stand still, listening to the rumbling footsteps. Distant battle horns sound out. I reach out, feeling the earth and the air. There are so many that I cannot distinguish a human footfall from a behemoth. It’s all just one giant force, crushing the land and trampling the jungle.

Five minutes, I think. They’ll reach the bottleneck in five minutes.

The thought was intended for myself, but I hear a soldier in the trench behind me whisper, “Oh God,” his voice filled with terror. Luca must have transmitted the timeframe to the entire camp, which is probably good, but the twinge of fear I felt was also sent to everyone.

Sorry, Luca’s voice says in my mind. He sounds small and apologetic, no doubt realizing that my thought wasn’t intended for public consumption.

Its fine, I think, we’re all afraid, and I need to say something about it. Ready to give a lecture?

I can feel him smiling. Ready.

Making a note to watch the intensity of my personal thoughts, I turn around and face the base. An army stares back at me. Men from the trenches, from the tanks, and the walls. But there are many more inside the base, waiting by the choppers, manning artillery and crewing the distant ships who need to hear what I have to say, too.

After taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I project them through Luca, to an army.

The Nephilim are mankind’s oldest and most vile enemy. They have ruled us, enslaved us and broken us. Our ancestors worshiped them as gods and they became immortalized in our history. You know the eldest of them as Zeus, Odin, Osiris, Enki and so many more names that have been distorted by time and intention. They seek not just dominion over the planet, but the extinction of the human race, of whom they are jealous. For it is we who were given souls that live on after death, it is we who are more powerful and it is we who are protected by a grand design beyond understanding.

They are large. Huge. They inspire fear in all who see them. They attack without hesitation or remorse, and they delight in pain because they can heal from most any wound. Some will fly with outstretched wings, others will sting with scorpion tails, and still others will attack our minds with their own. Our enemies are the heroes of old, men of renown, and they are to be feared.

But the human race has defeated them in the past. Long before we had guns, tanks and warships, an army of men stormed the city of Jericho, a Nephilim stronghold. Using sword, spear and the blast of horns like the one that just freed three thousand men and women from the Nephilim’s corrupt grasp, men conquered that city, vanquished the monsters inside and sent the Nephilim scrambling to the underworld where they have hidden for thousands of years.

In that time, they have grown stronger, and they have plotted against us. Their hatred has grown. And now, freed from the ice, they are once again on the cusp of destroying our world. But once again, an army unlike anything in the history of mankind has been brought together. It is we who stand in their path now, and it is we who will stop them. But this time we will not simply turn them away and send them back to the underworld. We will destroy them. We will scour them from the face of the planet. We will end their soulless existence so that they can never threaten the human race again.

I pull Whipsnap from my belt and hold the now iconic weapon over my head, letting out a battle cry, both mental and physical.

As my army shouts back—including the cresties—charged and ready to fight, a rumble rolls beneath my feet so strong that I know the enemy is just seconds away from filling the bottleneck.

Prepare yourselves, I think, and then give the order that sets everything in motion. Jericho-Alpha.





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