The silence that followed the fight was louder than the battle itself. It was a heavy, suffocating thing, thick with the smell of ozone and the phantom chime of dissolving crystal. Zane marched at the head of their ragged formation, his Aethel Frame a low, angry thrum of contained power. He moved like a boulder, each step a conscious effort to crush the crystalline grit of the Scar under his heel. He was a force of blunt assertion in a world of sharp edges.
Kael walked a few paces behind, the kinetic spear feeling strangely balanced in his hands now, less like a tool and more like a familiar weight. He was replaying the fight, not the messy, chaotic whole, but the single, perfect moment. The pounce. The strike. The clean, surgical crack of the Scuttler's shell. A cold satisfaction, an echo from the Hound within him, curled in his gut. It was a clean kill. Efficient. He'd solved the problem. And that, he was beginning to understand, was the source of the fury rolling off Zane in palpable waves. It wasn't that Kael had disobeyed. It was that he'd been right.
The landscape was a monument to failure. The colossal skeletons of long-dead Chimeras, things that must have dwarfed the Obsidian Ravager, arched over them like the architecture of a nightmare. Their bleached, crystalline bones drank the weak, purple light of the sky. This was where the Ancients' ambition had finally broken, and the world they'd lost was still screaming in silence. Kael let his senses drift, the Hound's awareness a secondary layer over his own. He felt the dissonant hum of the crystal flora, the way the wind caught on a ribcage the size of a hab-block. It was a dead place, but it was watching them.
Leo scurried between Kael and Zane, a nervous satellite caught between two hostile planets. He kept glancing back, his own Frame a flickering, anxious light. Maya was a ghost at the rear, her Glimmer Moth Echo so faint it was barely a whisper. She wasn't looking at the path ahead; she was watching them. Watching the space between them crackle and widen.
"Up ahead," Zane's voice crackled over the comms, startlingly loud. "Chokepoint. We push through."
Kael looked. It was a narrow pass, carved through what looked like the fossilized spine of some titanic beast. Vertebrae the size of transports formed the walls of the passage, their surfaces slick with a dark, glassy moss. It was a natural funnel. A perfect kill-zone.
"We should scout the ridge first," Kael said, his voice quiet but clear over the comms. He felt Maya's attention sharpen on him. "It's a blind corner. We don't know what's on the other side."
Zane stopped and turned, his movement so abrupt that Leo almost ran into him. The look on his face wasn't just annoyance; it was a deep, profound contempt. "We know what's on the other side, Scuttler. The rest of the patrol route. We are the threat out here, not the other way around. You project strength, you push forward. You don't go sniffing around the edges like a rat."
The insult was blunt, meant to sting, but Kael felt a strange calm settle over him. It was the technician's calm, the feeling he got when looking at a busted-up machine. The problem wasn't the machine; it was the operator.
"That's one way to do it," Kael conceded, his tone even. "The other way is to not get the whole squad killed because we walked into a nest." He pointed with his spear. "The ground in there is disturbed. The wind isn't moving right. Something big has passed through here recently. Going in blind is a mistake."
"I don't make mistakes," Zane growled, taking a step toward him. His Stonetusk Boar Echo flared, a wave of dense, earthy pressure. It felt like standing in front of a moving transport. Leo flinched and took a step back.
"You fight like a scavenger," Zane sneered, his voice low and dangerous. "Slinking. Hiding. Waiting for scraps."
Kael didn't back down. The Hound in his soul wanted to snarl, to meet the challenge with bared teeth. But the technician, the part of him Jax had told him to trust, saw the faulty logic. He saw the brute force approach for what it was: a flaw in the design.
"And you fight like a hammer," Kael retorted, the words coming out colder and sharper than he intended. He met Zane's furious gaze. "And you'll keep swinging until you find something you can't break."
The air went dead. Zane's face, already flushed with anger, darkened to a dangerous shade of red. For a horrifying second, Kael thought the bigger man would actually swing at him. He could feel the raw power coiling in Zane's Frame, a chaotic, barely contained explosion.
"I am the leader of this squad," Zane said, his voice a low, shaking tremor of rage. He jabbed a thick finger at Kael. "You are the baggage. You will follow my orders. We. Go. Through."
He turned, his back a rigid wall of defiance, and stomped into the pass. "Leo, on me! Shield up!"
Leo shot Kael a helpless, apologetic look before scrambling to obey.
Kael stood his ground, his heart hammering against his ribs. He had pushed, and he had lost. He watched them disappear into the boneyard, a hammer and his trembling anvil, and felt a profound sense of dread.
Maya came to stand beside him. She didn't say anything. She just watched the mouth of the pass, her silvery Frame pulsing with a quiet, worried light.
They waited. The silence stretched. One minute. Two.
Nothing happened.
Zane and Leo emerged from the other side, their forms small in the distance. Zane turned and put his hands on his hips, a clear posture of smug triumph even from a hundred meters away. His voice came over the comms, dripping with condescending victory. "See? Nothing. Just a bunch of old bones. Try to keep up, Scuttler."
Shame, hot and bitter, washed over Kael. He had been wrong. He had challenged the leader, questioned his authority, and had been proven a paranoid fool. He trudged forward, his earlier confidence dissolving into dust. He kept his eyes on the ground, unable to meet Maya's gaze.
They took their next break an hour later, nestled in the lee of a massive, crystalline rock formation that looked like a frozen wave. Zane was pointedly ignoring Kael, talking loudly to Leo about combat techniques, his voice full of the easy confidence of a man who had just been vindicated.
Kael sat apart from them, cleaning his spear with a strip of cloth, the repetitive motion a small anchor in his churning thoughts. Was he just paranoid? Was the Hound's Echo making him see threats where there were none? Maybe Zane was right. Maybe the simplest answer—overwhelming force—really was the best one.
A small pebble skittered to a halt near his boot. He looked up. Maya stood before him, her expression as quiet and unreadable as ever. She held out a ration bar.
"You didn't eat," she said. It wasn't a question.
He took it, mumbling his thanks. They sat in silence for a moment, the only sound the incessant, whispering wind.
"You weren't wrong," Maya said suddenly, her voice so low he barely heard it.
Kael looked at her, confused. "He was right. There was nothing in there."
"This time," she corrected. She picked up a small, sharp shard of crystal and began turning it over in her gloved fingers. "Zane thinks in straight lines. He sees a wall, he smashes it. He sees a threat, he charges it. His Echo is all about force. It's simple." She looked from the crystal shard to Kael. "Your Echo is different. It's about angles. Weak points. Patterns. You don't see a wall; you see the cracks in it."
She paused, her gaze flicking over to where Zane was demonstrating a clumsy spear thrust to a wide-eyed Leo. "He's stronger," she admitted, her voice a whisper of forbidden truth. "His Frame has more raw output. If you two fought, he would probably win."
Kael's shoulders slumped. He already knew that.
"But," she continued, her dark eyes meeting his, "the way you think makes you more dangerous. A hammer is useless if it can't find the nail. You see the whole board."
She stood up, brushing the grit from her knees. She'd said her piece. The small act of solidarity, of validation, felt more significant than any victory in the training yard. It was a single, steady note in the chaotic symphony of his new life.
He watched her walk back to her spot, and a tiny bit of the steel that had melted from his spine began to reform. He might have been a scavenger. He might have been a coward. But someone else saw the pattern, too.
His gaze drifted back toward the boneyard pass, now a dark slash in the distance. His analytical mind, momentarily buoyed, re-engaged. Why had he been so sure? It was a feeling, a deep instinct from the Hound. The subtle change in the air. The wrongness of the silence. Zane's charge had proven it empty, but it hadn't proven Kael's senses wrong. An animal doesn't stay in its den when a hammer is coming. It slips out the back.
Letting his senses expand one last time, he focused on the memory of the pass. He pushed past the triumphant noise of Zane's comms chatter, past his own shame, and just… listened. And there it was. A trace. Faint, almost gone, trampled under the brute-force passage of his squad leader.
A track.
It wasn't a Scuttler's. It was huge. A single, deep impression in the crystalline soil, the edges already crumbling. The track of something heavy. Something powerful. Something that had been there right before they arrived, and had quietly moved on. Something that Zane, in his haste to prove a point, had completely and utterly missed.
Kael took a slow breath, the cold air burning his lungs. He looked at the track in his mind's eye. Then he looked at Zane. He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it again.
What was the point? He was just the scavenger. The boy who saw ghosts.
He kept the secret to himself, a cold, heavy stone in his gut. The squad was more broken than he'd thought. And out here in the Scar, there were things much, much bigger than hammers.