High in the Andes mountains, The Behemoth waited for The Gryphon. The Behemoth had been waiting since the moment it felt The Gryphon hatch, waiting for The Gryphon to find it in what would be the site of their battle. The Gryphon approached from over the ocean to the west, flying above the stratosphere. The Behemoth was eager for their battle to commence, and blew a large pillar of green fire high into the sky. The Gryphon needed no help in locating The Behemoth, all The Behemoth's display of fire accomplished was to reveal its impatience to The Gryphon. The Gryphon arrived at The Behemoth's location, descended from the sky and hovered in the air before The Behemoth, ready to do battle. The sky turned black, thunder rumbled and lightning flashed. To observe the battle, the Architect dispatched four Watchers, humanoid figures that wore white priest's robes and green plague masks and carried gold staffs. They descended from the sky through openings in the clouds that created four columns of light in a diamond pattern. With the watchers now present, The Behemoth and The Gryphon were free to commence their battle. The Behemoth vaulted from the ledge it was standing on and went straight at the gryphon, attempting to gore it with its horn. The gryphon rolled out of the way of the behemoth's attack, flew up above it, and with all four of its wings unleashed a gust of wind that sent the behemoth crashing to the ground with enough force to split the earth where it landed and cause boulders to crumble from the surrounding mountains. After striking the ground the behemoth got straight back up on its feet but it didn't go straight back after the gryphon. This creature that was its opponent was stronger than it was expecting and required the behemoth to put more thought into how it fought in this battle.

Chris's rally in Washington to Stop The Steal drew 400 000 people. They all gathered on the National Mall before a stage that had been constructed for speakers to address the crowd. Speakers at the rally included leaders of far right groups, far right members of congress and right wing media personalities. All of the speakers gave speeches about the various ways in which the election was compromised and the Democrats' reasons for rigging the election, which included wanting to take away peoples guns and throwing open the border so that the country could be flooded by illegal immigrants. These speakers did their job of getting the crowd fired up before Chris Dixon took the stage, which, when he did, was before a febrile, foaming-at-the-mouth crowd of supporters.

"Well, well, well, here we are..." Chris began.

The Behemoth had worked out that the gryphon was too fast for it to just charge in recklessly. It decided to keep its distance from the gryphon for a while, using its flames to keep attacking without getting too close to its opponent. The gryphon had no trouble dealing with the behemoths attacks. It could easily dodge, blow away or, in what came as a big surprise to the behemoth, counter with flames of its own. It was dawning on the behemoth that perhaps it was outmatched, which was making it angry, which wasn't helped by the Watchers floating through the air and following it everywhere it went.

"Here we are not far from the building where the will of the people is about to be crushed, where an election that was decided by bogus ballots and votes cast by illegal immigrants is about to be certified by congress, by people who know that what they're doing is wrong but don't have the courage to do what's right because they are beholden to corporate, academic and political elites who don't want to see the kind of change that is necessary to save this country..."

At the time that the Stop The Steal rally was taking place, Russian troops had already been in Ukraine for two weeks. No fighting had taken place yet; the Russians were for now merely setting up forward positions for the purpose of establishing supply lines. Any doubts that people had about whether Russia was serious about starting a war with Ukraine were dispelled when the first Russian troops crossed the border. Many Ukrainians, fearing a brutal and bloody war, fled the country, most of them going to neighboring Poland. The Wolf was watching all of this unfolding, waiting for the moment to come when its intervention was necessary.

In its battle with the behemoth, the gryphon was yet to go on the offensive. It was wary of the behemoth's strength and wanted to evaluate its power and abilities first. The sense the gryphon got was that it was definitely faster, but by how much it couldn't say. To find out it needed to test the behemoth's full speed for itself. While the behemoth was hovering in the air the gryphon charged it and sunk its talons into its neck, causing black blood to ooze out. The behemoth hadn't tried to dodge the gryphon's attack, it had let the gryphon sink its talons into it so that it could attack it from up close. The behemoth tilted its body forwards, kicked off with its hind legs and smashed the gryphon into the ground, causing a second major seismic event.

"It has been left to us to save this country. By showing up here today, you all have shown that there is nothing more important to you than your country and that you are willing to fight and do whatever else it is that you need to do to save it!"

The behemoth had managed to trap the gryphon beneath it in the centre of the large crater created by their descent to earth and was stomping it with its searing hoofs.

"So we are going to march to the Capitol where our country is busy being stolen from us, and we are going to fight like hell, because if you don't fight like hell then you're not going to have a country anymore!"

The crowd did as Chris instructed them to do and began marching in the direction of the Capitol building, many of them carrying weapons and wearing tactical armor.

The gryphon blasted the behemoth with fire from its mouth but the behemoth was unfazed and continued crushing the gryphon with its ferocious stomps.

The Russians began their offensive by advancing on three fronts. From the south they advanced from Crimea towards Kherson, from the east they advanced from the Donbas towards Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, and from the north they advanced from Belarus towards Kyiv, Ukraine's capital city, the capturing of which was the main objective of the incursion. The commencement of the Russian attack was signaled by cruise missiles being fired from the battleship Moskva in the direction of Odessa, Mariupol and Kherson. The invasion wasn't going exactly according to what Sonya had told them to expect but that made no difference to the Wolf and the Leviathan.

The behemoth trapped the gryphon beneath its hoofs, grabbed hold of one of its wings with its jaw and threw it into the side of a nearby mountain. The behemoth was every bit as strong as the gryphon thought, in fact it was probably stronger. The gryphon sustained considerable damage from the behemoth's onslaught and needed to avoid being so reckless for the remainder of their battle; one more such assault from the behemoth could inflict injuries upon the gryphon that left it at an insurmountable disadvantage. The gryphon was confident though that the fact that the behemoth hadn't tried to avoid its attack meant that it did in fact have the speed advantage, an advantage it had to exploit. It charged at the behemoth again but this time rather than sinking its talons into the behemoth it slashed at it with one of its talons as it flew past it, leaving behind deep lacerations that momentarily hobbled the behemoth. The Goose and the Raven arrived at the battlefield just then to witness the battle, with both of them feeling confident about their creature's chances.

As soon as the Moskva launched its first volley of missiles the Wolf and the Leviathan went into action. The Leviathan was curled up on the seafloor directly beneath the Moskva and as soon as the ship fired its missiles the Leviathan fired a jet of water upwards that smashed the ship to pieces and swallowed the missiles from out of the air. The Secretary of the Navy, Yuri Olin, witnessed the destruction of the Moskva in real time through surveillance drone footage and instantly recalled the conversation that he had had with General Yevgevny Lobachenko, in which Yevgevny had warned him that there were forces at work beyond his comprehension and for his own sake he'd better make sure he was on the right side, which was the side that Yevgevny and Sonya were on. The secretary ordered an immediate full retreat of the entire Black Sea fleet, not caring what consequences he would have to face for doing so. The Leviathan had done its job, and returned to the Atlantic to fulfill the remainder of its assignment.

The gryphon's speed advantage over the behemoth was greater than it thought. After striking the behemoth with its talon, the gryphon unleashed a flurry of attacks striking at the behemoth with its talons, moving too fast for even the Raven and the Goose to follow it. The behemoth did all it could to repel the gryphon's attacks but it was all to no avail. The fire that it blew at the gryphon was easily nullified and overwhelmed by the gryphon's own flames, and the boulders that it raised out of the ground as a shield were smashed to stones by the gryphon without it needing to slow down or change course. Something was happening that the Goose, the Raven and the Watchers could see and that the gryphon and the behemoth could feel: the gryphon was getting stronger and faster while the behemoth was getting weaker and slower.

With the Russian navy taken care of it was time for the Wolf to do its part to thwart the Russian invasion. The Wolf was in the north, close to the Belarus border. From the top of the hill that it was standing on it saw the first convoy of Russian vehicles carrying troops and equipment crossing the Belarus border and heading south in the direction of Kyiv. The Wolf waited for the convoy to leave in its entirety and when it had traveled about a mile along the highway the Wolf phased into the ground and approached it from behind. The earth beneath the highway opened up into a huge chasm that swallowed up the convoy, destroying the vehicles and equipment and killing a good number of the soldiers. The Wolf continued moving south and destroyed the convoys advancing from the east and the south in the same way that it destroyed the northern convoy. The Russian Defense Secretary, General Sergei Sechin, received word of the massacre and the bizarre nature of it and turned to General Lobachenko and Admiral Olin with a look of horror on his face. Yevgevny and Yuri rushed over to the Defense Secretary's office after the Moskva had been sunk to give Sergei the same warning that Yevgevny had given Yuri. The truth of what they had said to him was undeniable, and in his shock Sergei was powerless to do anything but what he was told. He ordered a halt to any further troop advancements and made the announcement that he was resigning from his post with immediate effect, to be succeeded by Head of Strategic Planning Yevgevny Lobachenko.

The behemoth had lacerations all over its body from the gryphon's slashes. Blood loss weakened the behemoth more than it had already been weakened by the physical damage that it had sustained at the hands of the gryphon. It's fear and anger grew, which caused it to lash out in frustration by roaring, stomping the ground and blowing flames all around it. The gryphon by contrast was calm and composed. It could feel the behemoth getting weaker, and it could feel its own strength rising higher and higher. A third pair of wings had sprouted from its back, the spike on its tail had grown larger and developed serrated edges, and the claws on its talons had grown longer and sharper. The gryphon was so strong that it could afford to take its time and kill the behemoth at its leisure.

The capitol police officers that were in charge of guarding the Capitol stood on the steps of the Capitol and watched as the crowd that had been summoned to Washington and dispatched toward the Capitol by Chris Dixon marched down Pennsylvania Avenue towards them. Two thousand officers were on duty at the Capitol for the certification of the electoral college, an insignificant number compared with the 400 000 that were bearing down on them. The handful of officers that stood on the steps watching the armed mob approach them were terrified, too terrified to notice the rapid transformation of the sky above them.

The gryphon toyed with the behemoth. With the extra set of wings that it had grown the gryphon was able to move so fast that even the Watchers couldn't keep up with it. The gryphon would watch the behemoth thrashing about for a few moments before using its supreme speed to dash in and inflict another mortal wound on the behemoth with its tail or its talons. The behemoth had sustained enormous damage from the gryphon's attacks and was by now so weak that the battle was as good as over.

The rain that fell in Washington felt like hail. Accompanied by strong winds, the torrential rain lashed at everything that it came into contact with like a whip. The mob had its progress halted by the ferocious downpour, with many breaking off from the group to look for cover. They could take cover from the wind, but the water was rising, fast. In just a few seconds the water was up to their ankles, a few seconds later and it was up to their knees. As the water rose, the current got stronger, and was soon too strong for any person to hold their ground against it. Watching footage of the storm on TV and seeing Pennsylvania Avenue turn into a raging river that washed away the protesters that had Chris Dixon summoned to Washington like flotsam, Jim Balmer believed that he was bearing witness to the Great Flood and looked back on his crisis of faith as a message from God that thankfully he'd been smart enough to heed.

The behemoth was so weak it could barely stand. Congealed blood from the wounds it had suffered was caked all over its body. It's horn had retracted, and it could no longer fly or blow fire. The time had come for the gryphon, which was now cloaked in golden flames, to put it out of its misery.

Word of the sinking of the Moskva and the annihilation of the convoys reached President Kolschonski through the Secretary of The Security Council, Nikolai Bortnikov. To find out what was going on the president made a call to the Ministry of Defense to speak with the Secretary of Defense but was informed by the man who answered the phone, General Yevgevny Lobachenko, that the Secretary of Defense had resigned and that he, Yevgevny Lobachenko, had succeeded him. The president immediately suspected that something suspicious was going on. His suspicions were confirmed when the head of the Federal Security Service, Ivan Yarov, burst into his office in the Kremlin and informed him that an attempted coup was currently underway and that for his protection they needed to get him to a secure location. Vladimir trusted Ivan implicitly and followed him out of the building and into the back of a car without question. The car was being driven by an FSS officer who had another officer sitting next to him in the passenger seat. The plan, Ivan said to Vladimir once they'd set off, was to take him to Novo-Ogaryovo, the presidential estate that was to the west of the city. He would be safe there and once he was safe they could begin coordinating their response to the coup. Vladimir believed that his rule and most likely his life had been saved by his oldest friend and most trusted ally, but when the car turned off the highway and onto a dirt road that led into a wooded area Vladimir realized that this was not the case. The car stopped, Ivan removed his gun from its holster, pressed it into Vladimir's abdomen, and told him to get out of the car. Vladimir was walked into the woods at gunpoint until they reached a grave that had been dug in preparation for this moment. Without hesitation Ivan put the gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger, and the two officers that he'd brought with him filled in the grave. When the three of them returned to Moscow Sonya was already in the Kremlin, with the leader of the Russian senate and the new Minister of Defense having announced that they recognized Sonya Kruschenko as the new president of Russia.

The gryphon pushed the behemoth down to the ground with its hind legs and held it down in place with its talons. The behemoth struggled in vain, unable to do anything against the gryphon's awesome strength. The gryphon clamped down on the behemoth's neck with its beak, ready to deliver the killing blow. Feeling its life slipping away, the behemoth performed its final act. From its mouth it spat out a small black egg that the Raven flew after. The gryphon tightened its grip on the behemoth's neck with its beak and snapped it, killing the beast. Once it had located the black egg, the Raven descended to the ground, picked it up with its beak and swallowed it before flying off. The behemoth's carcass was feasted on by the gryphon, which consumed the flesh of the slain beast until there was nothing left of it but its bones, which turned to dust and were scattered by the wind. The battle over, the Watchers ascended back into the sky, the gryphon and the Goose flew off, and the sky turned from black back to blue.