The massive black silhouette rising from the lake was the size of a small hill. Old One-Eye spoke first. "That's a Sker Buffalo. Docile temperament, but don't make any aggressive moves. You don't want to provoke them."
The Monarch scientists were already familiar with Skull Island's fauna. Old One-Eye's warning was directed at the agents behind him.
The name "Sker Buffalo" sounded imposing, and the creature's appearance matched. Standing fully upright, it was five meters tall and over ten meters long. Its slightly curved horns spanned another ten meters tip to tip, and it weighed somewhere between twenty and thirty tons.
Its mere presence was suffocating. In reality, the Sker Buffalo sat near the bottom of Skull Island's food chain. To Kong, it was a pet—roughly equivalent to Bella's rabbits and turtles back home. To the Skullcrawlers that tunneled up from the deep, it was food. On any given weekend, a small pack of Skullcrawlers might grab one for a change of diet.
The buffalo typically slept submerged in water, its spine overgrown with vegetation that served as natural camouflage. Not camouflage for hunting—every variety of bovine was an herbivore. The disguise existed for one reason: to avoid being eaten by the island's apex predators.
Whether the species qualified as a Titan was still debated at Monarch. The argument for inclusion fell apart when you considered its size and combat capability compared to actual Titans—Kong treated them as pets, and Godzilla wouldn't even register them as that. The argument against faltered when you noted that the Sker Buffalo's dimensions still dwarfed anything else on Earth. Its height and length roughly matched a Tyrannosaurus rex, but it weighed twice as much. Pushed into a corner, one good charge could give even a T. rex a run for its money.
The Sker Buffalo, roused by the ORCA, surfaced and swiveled its murky eyes left and right. It didn't so much as notice the tiny humans on the shore. With a lazy shake of its head, it began to wander off.
"That thing moves like molasses. You think it took out our drone?" one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents asked.
None of the scientists had an answer. The language barrier was the real problem—the Sker Buffalo was famously skittish, and the Russells' attempts at several different custom audio sequences drew zero response.
Bella kept her eyes lowered and her mouth shut.
Skull Island teemed with monsters. The way Bella saw it, Old One-Eye and his people had botched the early exploration—skipped the entire dungeon, went straight for the final boss, and promptly got demolished. No wonder Kong's relationship with humans had always been hostile.
After extensive deliberation, the group could only conclude that the drone had been downed by one of the island's abundant bat-like megafauna.
Bella ran divination after divination, but every reading came back obscured by a strange fog. She speculated about what the truth behind the mystery might be.
"Let's head to the Iwi settlement. They might have information."
Old One-Eye suggested the next step. The group left the lake, crossed a stretch of undulating mountains, and followed the foothills westward.
Over two decades of painstaking work—despite the original defense-line plans being torpedoed by politicians, Congress, and Kong himself—Monarch and S.H.I.E.L.D. had managed to carve a handful of passable roads through the island's safer zones.
The jeeps barreled along muddy tracks until they reached the island's far western edge. Here, a relatively narrow mountain pass had been fortified by the Iwi using stone, heavy timber, and rope into a gate-wall that served as the perimeter of their settlement.
Since Old One-Eye's team had discovered Skull Island, most of the indigenous Iwi had been relocated. Only a handful of elders had refused to leave.
Standing before the wall—five meters high, a hundred meters long, its face bristling with countless wooden spears—Bella pulled out her digital camera and asked Dr. Graham to snap a few photos.
The wall was strikingly well-built. That savage, ferocious energy rivaled the gates of Orgrimmar.
"The last woman who brought a camera and joined me on this island—do you know what happened to her?" Old One-Eye drifted past Bella and said lightly, "She's gone."
Please. Who was he trying to scare? Give it another ten years, and he'd be flat on his belly under a car screaming "Go get Captain Marvel!" Bella was unmoved. She took a few photos of Dr. Graham for good measure.
The group entered the Iwi settlement. Located on a South Pacific island, the exact ethnic classification of the indigenous people was unclear. Their language was extremely rudimentary—a vocabulary of only a few words. Neither Monarch nor S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel had bothered learning it. There was no point.
"A thousand years ago, they probably had a civilization of their own," Dr. Graham said, sharing what she knew. "But the creatures that surged up from below destroyed it. They were forced to retreat into this one corner of the island, and everything declined from there."
As they walked through the settlement, Bella noticed traces of the Iwi's former civilization. They could craft pottery, build houses, weave cloth, and cultivate crops. They possessed basic architectural knowledge. But beyond that, there was nothing more to see. The group searched the entire settlement without finding a single Iwi.
Food still sat on tables. Tools lay scattered in the fields. The remaining dozen or so elders had all vanished.
It was as if one moment they'd been going about their daily work, and the next they'd set everything down and hurried away.
Dusk was closing in. On an island crawling with hidden dangers, recklessness was a death sentence. Rest when you needed to rest—Skull Island at night was far more perilous than during the day. They set up camp in the Iwi settlement.
While the others settled in, Bella wandered the perimeter with her digital camera, photographing any scenic spot she came across.
A clever wife was hard enough to keep happy. A clever wife who also happened to be pregnant? Exponentially harder.
If Natasha ever got a random notion to ask, "Hubby, what were you doing on such-and-such date at such-and-such time?"—Bella could whip out the photos immediately, proving she'd been at this or that location and had definitely not been out drinking with Heather or messing around with some sketchy woman. See? Photographic evidence.
Skull Island at night was beautiful, and quiet.
An ordinary girl would have been hiding in her tent long ago. Bella was fine. The shrieks echoing through the ravines, the rustling in the trees—none of it fazed her. As the leader of the Vengeful Ghost Alliance, she'd seen every kind of demon and specter there was. Courage wasn't an attribute she needed.
Without the dead weight tagging along, she felt considerably lighter. She bantered with angels and demons alike, hopped around the timeline when the mood struck—she hadn't gotten so reckless as to lose all caution, but she didn't need to be excessively careful either.
She was going to conduct a nighttime reconnaissance of Skull Island and find out what secrets it was hiding.