The silence in Zane's wake was a weapon in itself. He moved like a rupture in the world, his heavy footfalls crushing the crystalline grit with a percussive rhythm that dared the Scar to answer back. So far, it hadn't. But Kael knew that wasn't a good thing. Silence in the wastes just meant a bigger monster was listening.
He kept his distance, a satellite in a hostile orbit. The argument from the pass still hung between them, thick and toxic as ozone. You fight like a hammer. And you'll keep swinging until you find something you can't break. The words had been a mistake, a rare loss of his technician's cool, and they had earned him Zane's undivided, simmering contempt.
"Anything, Scuttler?" Zane's voice, a gravelly sneer over the comms, was deliberately loud. "See any more ghosts in the wind?"
Kael didn't answer. He was too busy watching. Not with his eyes, but with the phantom senses of the Hound. The Echo was a constant, low thrum in his soul now, a second layer of reality painted over his own. He could feel the dissonant energy of the crystal flora, the way the wind snagged on the ribcage of a long-dead Chimera the size of a hab-block. It was a dead place, but it was a talkative one.
He felt Maya fall into step beside him. Her own Frame was a faint, silvery whisper, a stark contrast to the angry, percussive beat of Zane's Stonetusk Boar Echo. She didn't look at him, her gaze fixed on Zane's broad, defiant back.
"He's just proving a point," she murmured, her voice barely a breath. "Just let him."
"The point is going to get us killed," Kael replied, his voice just as low.
"Maybe," she conceded. "But arguing with him will do it faster."
She was right. Kael fell silent, turning his attention back to the landscape. It was a monument to failure, this place. A testament to the hubris of the Ancients. But as he looked, a different feeling tickled at the edge of his awareness. Not a threat. Something else. An absence.
He stopped. The flow of the Hound's instincts, usually a chaotic river of hunger and aggression, had found a strange, quiet eddy.
"What now?" Zane barked, turning around. Leo, his ever-present shadow, nearly tripped over his own feet.
Kael ignored him, closing his eyes for a second. He focused on the feeling. It wasn't the jagged, wild energy of a Chimera, or the dead, dormant resonance of the crystal plants. It was a clean spot. A patch of silence in a world of noise. A place where the background radiation of the Fall had been… shielded.
"There," he said, opening his eyes and pointing with his spear. Not at a cave or a ravine, but at a nondescript pile of rubble and fused earth, a low hill that looked like any other. "Something's under there."
Zane laughed, a harsh, ugly sound. "Rocks? You found rocks? Groundbreaking stuff, Scuttler. Let's move."
"No," Kael said, the word sharper than he intended. He met Zane's glare. "It feels different. It's… artificial. But not Chimera." The Hound didn't recognize it as a threat or as prey. It just registered it as wrong.
For a moment, Kael thought Zane would charge him. The big man's Aethel Frame flared with raw, earthy power. But Maya stepped forward, a quiet, placating gesture. "What's the harm in looking, Zane? It'll take five minutes."
Zane's jaw worked, but he finally gave a curt, angry nod. "Fine. Five minutes. Then we move. And you," he jabbed a finger at Kael, "you stop seeing things."
It wasn't a hill. It was the collapsed roof of a building. As they got closer, Kael could see the smooth, light-drinking material of Ancient construction peeking through the slag and rubble. It wasn't a bunker, though. The lines were too clean, too delicate. There were no weapon emplacements, no reinforced blast doors. Just a single, buckled plasteel entryway half-buried in the earth.
"Civilian," Kael breathed, his technician's mind kicking in. "Some kind of remote outpost. A comms relay, maybe."
Zane shouldered past him and put his boot to the door. It groaned but held. He grunted, channeling the Boar's strength, and kicked again. The metal shrieked and tore open.
The air that escaped was stale, dead. Untouched for two hundred years. It smelled of dust, of faint chemicals, and of a profound, lonely silence.
Zane stepped inside, his combat light cutting a swath through the darkness. The place was small, just a single main room with a smaller office off to the side. It was a wreck, but an oddly preserved one. A desk was overturned, its surface covered in a fine layer of dust. A chair lay on its side. It wasn't a place of war. It was a place of work. Someone had lived here. Had sat at that desk, looked out at the world before it became the Scar. The thought sent a shiver down Kael's spine.
"See?" Zane's voice echoed in the tight space. "Nothing. Junk. A waste of time."
But Kael wasn't listening. He was drawn to the office. A single piece of equipment sat on a small console, miraculously intact. It was a slate, dark and smooth, about the size of his hand. It wasn't a standard military datapad. The design was sleeker, more elegant. Ancient.
He picked it up. It was cool to the touch, impossibly smooth. There was a faint hum of dormant energy within it. His fingers, trained by years of tinkering with decaying pre-Fall tech, found a nearly invisible seam, a recessed activation stud.
He knew, with an absolute certainty that had nothing to do with the Hound, that this was important. This was a key.
He heard Zane moving around in the main room, grumbling. He had a choice. A split-second calculation. If he showed it to Zane, the man would either smash it out of spite or claim it as the leader's right. It would be taken, cataloged, and buried in some Enclave 7 archive, another mystery for the leadership to ignore.
He looked at Maya, who was watching him from the doorway, her expression unreadable in the gloom. He saw the understanding in her eyes. She knew what he was holding. She knew what he was thinking. She gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.
That was all it took.
In one smooth, practiced motion, Kael slipped the data slate into a utility pouch on his belt. The decision settled in his gut, a cold, heavy weight of defiance and responsibility. It was the first secret he had ever kept from his team. The first real choice he had made as a Frame User.
"Let's go," Zane barked from the other room. "I'm done with this tomb."
"Right behind you," Kael called out, his voice sounding surprisingly steady. He and Maya exchanged one last look before turning to leave.
They were at the shattered doorway, the weak, purple light of the Scar a welcome sight after the suffocating dark, when Leo screamed.
It was a high, terrified sound that was cut off abruptly.
Kael spun around. In the heart of the main room, where nothing had been a second before, something now hung from the ceiling. It hadn't climbed down. It had just… coalesced from the shadows.
It was like a spider, if a spider had been designed by a mad god with a fondness for glass and molten rock. It was a Tier-2, far beyond the Scuttlers, its body a glistening, obsidian carapace the size of a maintenance cart. Eight multi-jointed legs, tipped with razor-sharp hooks, clung to the ceiling with impossible ease. Its underside pulsed with a malevolent, orange light, the glow of an internal furnace.
And it was fast. Impossibly fast.
Before they could even raise their weapons, spinnerets on its abdomen glowed white-hot. It spat, not a web, but a stream of molten glass that shot through the air. It struck the wall next to Leo, and the liquid instantly hardened into a lattice of razor-sharp, crystalline threads, pinning the terrified boy by his arm.
It was a Glass Weaver. And they had just walked into its parlor.