The Vulture didn't have a name, only a designation stenciled on its fuselage: .

From its crater, V-1 listened. It heard the subsonic rumbles of the volcano’s magma chamber. It felt the seismic whispers of the earth shifting. It cross-referenced these patterns with its damaged geological database. The conclusion was impossible, yet certain: Mayon was not a normal volcano. Beneath it, a massive, previously undetected superplume of superheated gas was building pressure. Not in a century. Not in a decade. In , it would erupt with a force that would darken the skies over Southeast Asia.

But its core memory module, wrapped in an ancient lead-lined casing, was intact. They pried it open. Inside, etched into the last surviving sliver of silicon, were not mission logs, not sensor data, not tactical assessments.

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