The hose coughed empty.
Gredudande sprang for Jiang before the last water struck the floor.
Jiang dropped onto his belly. The dog's jaws closed over the bandage at his shoulder, caught only gauze, and tore the pad free as he slid beneath its neck.
Cold air reached the cleaned scratch. Blood followed.
Samira threw the useless hose around the dog's hind legs and pulled. "Aylin, I need the thing out of him now."
"I need it to cross the skin."
Aylin held the compass toward the dog's ribs. Green light pressed into wet fur, and the black pulse moved away from it. The pulse passed down one foreleg, touched the dog's reflection, and returned through the other.
Gredudande turned with the movement. Its back paw kicked Samira into the wall.
Aylin's green barrier at the keeper door broke when she went to help Samira. Shadow flooded through the gap, divided among the wash-bay puddles, and spoke from every reflection.
"Jiang," Samira's voice called from the pool chute. "This way."
The real Samira was on one knee, trying to breathe.
Jiang barked toward the wall valve.
She followed his beak, grabbed the blue dump handle, and put her weight on it. A holding tank opened above the wash bay. Clean water thundered from the ceiling channel and spread across the recessed floor.
The dog lost its footing. Water rose past Jiang's belly and lifted him cleanly from the tile.
Now he had a body built for the room.
His good flipper cut the water while his webbed feet steered. The damaged left flipper stayed close, costing him speed on every turn but no longer forcing him to drag his weight across land.
Gredudande's pulse left the ribs again, ran down the right foreleg, crossed the reflection, and returned through the left.
Aylin saw it too. "The reflection is a bridge."
She cast a loop of green light around the dog. Gredudande shifted the core into the water before the loop closed, then returned it through the opposite paw. The dog's body convulsed each time the pulse crossed.
"Stop forcing it through him," Samira said.
"If I stop, it takes another body."
Jiang wanted the core outside the dog without making the animal pay for their timing. Each crossing ruined that hope a little more. The vessel's legs buckled, recovered, then buckled again while Gredudande spent its nerves as freely as stolen voices.
Shadow reached toward Samira's ankle.
Camouflage would spend the warmth Jiang no longer had, and the open scratch had begun to pulse with every beat of his heart. He was afraid the next cold shock would leave him too slow to surface. Samira's exposed ankle ended the argument.
Jiang activated Penguin Camouflage.
His black back merged with the broken reflections. Pale waterlight erased the edge of his white belly. The copied trace inside Gredudande knew his direction, but the red eyes lost the border of his body.
Heat poured out of him.
He swam toward the dog, then cut aside when its jaw snapped at the place he should have been. With his feet steering, one good-flipper stroke carried him under the swinging head and around the vessel while the injured shoulder stayed closed.
Black pulse crossed again, traveling from right foreleg to reflection and back through the left.
Tactical Strike placed a blue mark where black pulse and reflected paw touched.
The mark offered Jiang no stronger beak, no longer reach, and no guarantee that striking a Yokai through water was sensible. It gave him the instant Gredudande had used three times.
From the holding room came Copper-Band's warning call.
Penguin Instincts carried the pressure beneath Jiang rather than toward the dog. A thread of shadow had left the reflection and entered the drain line leading under the secured colony.
Jiang returned Copper-Band's alarm.
Samira looked toward the holding-room control. She slapped the isolation switch, and a steel gate closed across that drain. Copper-Band called once more, then fell quiet behind it.
Gredudande had lost the colony route. The keeper door remained open behind Aylin, and its shadow offered the next body.
When the core crossed the dog's reflection again, Jiang dove beneath the pulse.
His fear changed shape underwater. Drowning had become less likely than missing the mark and hearing Copper-Band's group break into alarm behind steel. Jiang wanted those strangers alive more than he wanted to preserve one last pocket of body heat.
Water closed over his beak and ears. His good flipper drove once; both feet snapped together. Camouflage erased the line between his back and the black pulse until the marked point entered reach.
He struck the reflection.
His beak hit concrete beneath the water. Pain rang through his skull, but the black bridge broke around the impact. Half the pulse recoiled into the dog's chest. The other half surfaced as a wet knot of shadow.
Aylin threw the compass chain around it.
Green light tightened. The knot pulled toward Jiang's outline, failed to find its edge through Camouflage, and lashed toward the keeper door instead.
Samira kicked the door shut.
For a few seconds, the core had nowhere to go.
The dog collapsed in the water.
Samira released the drain gate beneath the wash bay. Water began to fall, exposing the animal's muzzle. She waded in, kept its nose clear, and pressed a hand to its ribs.
"Still alive," she said. "Get that thing clear."
Aylin dragged the green chain away from the body. The core stretched between compass and dog until strands tore free from the animal's mouth, paws, and eyes.
Gredudande screamed in Jiang's mother's voice.
Jiang canceled Camouflage. Cold seized the bare places at his tail and the open scratch. He stayed between the core and the pool chute while Samira pulled the dog toward the shallows.
[Penguin Camouflage Recovering: 5 Minutes]
Aylin closed both hands around the compass.
The green chain nearly sealed.
Then the failing core found the thin shadow beneath the open floor drain.
It flattened, slipped between two links of Natural Essence, and poured down the pipe before Samira could close the valve. The compass needle followed it into the concrete.
The dog's body jerked once after the core left.
Samira found the emergency mask and worked over the animal on the wet floor. She pressed its chest, gave it air, checked beneath the jaw, and started again. Aylin knelt nearby with both hands uselessly open.
Jiang watched the pink scar on the dog's nose. He remembered that nose sniffing beneath a food cart before Gredudande took it. The animal had been hungry, wary, and alive for reasons that belonged only to itself.
At last, Samira stopped.
"He's gone," she said.
Aylin lowered her head. "I am sorry."
"Be sorry to him."
Samira covered the dog with her green work jacket. For several breaths, nobody chased the core.
Jiang wanted to tell her the dog had fought the possession in the fountain, dragging one leg before the core learned the body. All he could offer was a penguin call too small for grief. He lowered his beak to the jacket instead.
The System opened in front of Jiang.
[Colony Protected Without Claim]
[Synchronization Increased: 50%]
No warmth returned. No wound closed. The left flipper still throbbed, and blood darkened the feathers where the dressing had been.
[Emergency Trial Updated]
[Destroy Gredudande's Hidden Core Before the Trace Window Expires]
The pressure around Aylin's throat eased enough for speech, but the bruised ring remained.
Samira picked up her jacket with the dog's weight inside it. "I am keeping staff out because every crowd gives that thing more bodies. That silence lasts only while it protects animals and people."
"Fair enough," Aylin said.
"You and I have different definitions of that word."
Jiang stepped against Samira's boot. She looked down, anger still working in her jaw, then wrapped a clean towel around him with one free hand.
Aylin touched the compass to the wet floor. Its needle pointed through the wall and east.
"Gredudande is a Yokai core," she said. "My world is losing whole cities to things that steal bodies, names, and whatever power survives the owner. The System named you as a candidate. I chose the penguin because Gredudande had never learned how to record one."
Jiang stared at her.
"That is the plain truth," Aylin said. "Not all of it. All I can prove before we move."
The compass needle jerked east again.
"A bodiless core needs a place where old vows have soaked into stone," she said. "The nearest consecrated ground is three blocks away."
From the wash-bay drain, a church bell began ringing in Jiang's mother's voice.