An hour later, the steel door of the bunker groaned open. Leo emerged, blinking in the dim light of the alley. He was pale and sweat-soaked, the psychic residue of the fight clinging to him like a foul stench, but he was steady on his feet. The sustained, focused effort of neutralizing four separate psychic entities had drained his mana pool almost completely, leaving him with the familiar, bone-deep exhaustion of a job well done.
Behind him, the bunker was silent. The four pods, now a dull, inert grey, no longer pulsed. Their internal light was extinguished. They were just bizarre, crystalline sculptures now, husks containing nothing but failed biology.
"Is it done?" Sarah asked, rushing to his side. She could see the toll the effort had taken on him.
"It's done," Leo confirmed. "They're just… biological samples now. No activity. No threat." He looked at the rest of the waiting team. "Maria, Grunt. Help me get them out. Let's handle them like they're fragile."
Working with a surprising gentleness, the four of them managed to detach the pods from the wall. They were surprisingly light, like dried coral. They carefully loaded the four inert specimens into the back of the Badger, packing them with discarded blankets from the Vultures' camp. To any outside observer, it would look like they were following Rostova's orders to the letter.
The journey back was quiet, the weight of their collective conspiracy settling over them. They had directly subverted an order from their commander. They were no longer just recruits; they were active dissidents, playing a dangerous game within the walls of their own fortress.
When they arrived, a dedicated Med-Sci team was waiting, along with Dr. Thorne himself, his eyes wide with academic fervor. He all but pushed them out of the way to get to the pods.
"Remarkable!" he exclaimed, running a handheld scanner over the first pod. He frowned. "There's... there's no bio-signature. No psychic resonance at all. It's just... tissue. Inert." He looked at Leo, a flicker of deep disappointment crossing his face. "What happened?"
"The parent creature must have abandoned the nest when we entered the zone," Leo lied smoothly, his face a perfect mask of professional regret. "When the psychic tether was cut, the specimens suffered a cascading biological failure. We were too late to save them as viable entities. I did, however, manage to secure them before they decayed completely. As per the Commander's orders."
Thorne's disappointment was palpable. He had been promised a living gateway into the mind of a Class-4 entity, and instead, he got four pieces of alien taxidermy. He grumbled something about "insufficient data" but directed his team to load the pods onto a cart and wheel them toward the lab.
As they were cleaning out the Badger, Grunt pulled Leo aside, out of earshot of the others.
"That thing you did back there," the Berserker rumbled, his voice low, "scrubbing their little monster brains. That wasn't on any mission report."
"Sometimes the job requires procedures that aren't in the manual," Leo replied calmly.
Grunt nodded slowly, a new, complex understanding dawning in his eyes. He looked at his own massive, concrete-and-steel sledgehammer. "My way... I hit things. Hard. They break. It's simple." He then looked back at Leo. "Your way... it's different. Sneaky. But it works." He clapped a hand on Leo's shoulder, a gesture so forceful it nearly drove him to his knees. "I still think you're a coward who's afraid of a real fight. But... you get the job done. Just try not to get in the way when the real smashing starts."
With that, Grunt turned and walked away. It wasn't an apology. It wasn't friendship. It was a demarcation. He had finally classified Leo in his own mind. Leo wasn't a threat to his dominance in combat. He was something else. A specialist. A tool for problems that couldn't be solved with a hammer. For now, they could coexist.
Later that night, Leo was summoned. Alone.
He entered Rostova's command center to find her staring at a single, large monitor displaying the data from Thorne's preliminary analysis of the inert pods.
"They're useless," she stated without looking at him. "Dead tissue. A biological curiosity, but a strategic dead end."
"The parent entity severed the connection," Leo repeated his lie. "It was an unforeseen complication."
Rostova turned away from the screen and faced him. Her grey eyes were like chips of ice. She walked toward him until she was only a few feet away, her gaze boring into his. The room was silent. She didn't believe him. He knew she didn't believe him. They both knew what he had done. But she had no proof. Just results.
"You were given a direct order to retrieve viable specimens, Custodian," she said, her voice dangerously soft. "And you failed."
"I was given an order to retrieve the specimens," Leo corrected her gently. "I did that. I also neutralized a future threat to this Foundry and brought my team home with zero casualties."
Rostova held his gaze for a long, agonizing moment. Leo felt like his entire soul was being weighed on a cold, unforgiving scale. He had subverted her, challenged her authority on a fundamental level. He had followed her orders while making them worthless. She could have him thrown out of The Foundry, or locked in a cell.
Instead, a slow, thin smile touched her lips. It was a chilling sight.
"That you did," she said. "Your mission report will state that the specimens were found inert upon arrival. Your team's performance is noted as 'highly efficient'." She tapped her tablet. "Your party's security clearance is elevated to Level 3. You now have access to the strategic planning archives."
Leo was stunned into silence. He hadn't been punished. He had been promoted.
"Grunt is a piston," Rostova said, turning back to the map table. "He is powerful, direct, and utterly predictable. I know exactly what he will do in any situation. You... you are a far more complicated tool, Custodian Miller." Her eyes gleamed with cold, calculating light. "You don't just follow orders. You interpret them. You find loopholes. You achieve the objective in ways I cannot anticipate."
"And that makes you far more useful to me," she concluded. "And far more dangerous. Dismissed."
Leo walked out of the command center, his mind reeling. He had just played a game of chicken with the most powerful person in his world, and he had won. But it wasn't a victory he felt good about. He hadn't just proven his worth. He had proven he was a useful weapon, and Rostova had every intention of aiming him at her next problem. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that the next problem would be far, far worse.