The trip back was a silent, shuffling funeral procession for a boy who wasn't dead. Not yet.
Zane was a dead weight, a mountain of unconscious muscle and shattered pride. It took both Kael and a shell-shocked Leo to half-drag, half-carry him, while Maya scouted ahead, her movements jerky and stripped of their usual grace. Zane's body twitched with violent, uncontrolled spasms. His combat suit, Elara's masterpiece of regulation, sparked erratically, spitting miniature arcs of angry orange light—the Weaver's energy—that smelled of burnt ozone and corrupted Aethel. Each spark was an indictment. Each shudder a testament to his monumental foolishness.
Kael's arms ached, his muscles screaming under the strain. But the physical pain was a dull, distant thing compared to the cold, hollow cavern that had opened in his chest. He'd been right. The thought offered no warmth, no satisfaction. It was a shard of ice in his gut. He had warned Zane, had called him an idiot to his face, and now he was dragging the wreckage of that argument through the alien grit of the Scar. He felt Maya's gaze on him from time to time, a heavy, questioning look. He couldn't meet it. What was there to say? I told you so? The words tasted like ash.
They didn't use the main gate. A grim-faced patrol met them at a secondary maintenance entrance, their expressions a mixture of pity and morbid curiosity. The rumors would spread like a sickness. Squad Scion's first real mission. A Tier-2 Chimera. And a catastrophic burnout. They were failures. Pariahs.
Jax was waiting for them. He wasn't in the bustling infirmary or the clamor of the command center. He waited in the Forge, the cavernous training hall now silent and empty. The air was cold, the only light coming from a single, harsh work lamp that cast their shadows long and distorted on the concrete floor. He stood with his arms crossed, a monolith of scarred armor and pure, undiluted disappointment. His anger wasn't hot. It was a glacier, vast and cold and unstoppable, and they were just driftwood in its path.
He didn't speak. He just watched as they laid Zane down on a heavy-duty maintenance bench. The big man's Aethel Frame was a chaotic, flickering mess. The steady, earthy hum of his Stonetusk Boar Echo was gone, replaced by a discordant, high-pitched whine. The obsidian, vein-like lines on his skin had receded, but left behind a network of dark, ugly scars that looked like frozen lightning.
"Report," Jax said. The word was not a request. It was a hammer striking an anvil.
Maya found her voice first, a small, reedy thing in the vast silence. "We found an Ancient outpost. We were ambushed. A Tier-2 Glass Weaver."
"I read the bestiary reports," Jax cut her off, his eyes never leaving Zane's twitching form. "I know what it was. Tell me what you did."
The story came out in broken pieces. Leo, his face pale as bleached bone, mumbled his part about being pinned. Maya described the plan—Kael's plan—her voice gaining a sliver of strength as she defended it. Kael remained silent, the data slate in his pouch feeling like a lead weight.
Then came the end. The victory. The prize. Zane's pride.
When the telling was done, Jax was quiet for a long time. He walked over to the bench and placed a hand, not on Zane's forehead, but on his chest, right over his Aethel Core. He closed his eyes. Kael, through the Hound's senses, could feel what Jax was doing. He was listening. He was reading the broken code.
Finally, Jax pulled his hand away and turned to face them. His expression was terrifying. It wasn't just anger. It was a profound, weary rage. The look of a man who had seen the same stupid, wasteful tragedy play out a hundred times and was sick to his very soul of it.
"You," he said, his gaze locking onto Kael. "You were right. The plan was sound. The execution was clean."
The words should have been a vindication. They felt like a curse.
"And you," he turned to Maya, "did what you were told. You created the opening."
He looked at Leo, who flinched as if struck. "You were bait. You did your job."
Then his eyes, chips of cold obsidian, fell upon the unconscious form of their leader. "And he… he was the hammer. He saw a nail, and he hit it. And then he saw a bigger, shinier nail and decided to hit that, too, consequences be damned."
He took a step toward them, and all three of them instinctively took a step back. "You aren't a squad. You are three tools and one arrogant fool who broke himself because his pride was more important than his life. More important than your lives."
"Will he…?" Maya whispered.
"Live?" Jax finished. He let out a short, harsh bark of a laugh that held no humor. "Oh, he'll live. The medics will stabilize him. They'll pump him full of regulators and sedatives. He'll wake up." He leaned down, his face close to Zane's. "But the Boar is gone. The Echo he absorbed tore it apart. His Frame… it's scarred. A ruin. He might, might, be able to channel enough energy to power a glow-lamp one day. His potential as a Frame User is gone. Shattered. He's a cautionary tale now. A ghost who gets to walk around and haunt the rest of you, a living reminder of the price of hubris."
He straightened up, his gaze sweeping over them one last time. "Get out of my sight. Go to your barracks. I'll deal with you in the morning."
The dismissal was absolute. They turned and fled, leaving the Forge to its silence, its ghosts, and the low, pained whine of a broken Frame.
***
Kael couldn't sleep. He lay on his cot in the spartan darkness of storage bay C-4, the silence of the room a stark contrast to the roaring in his head. Jax's words echoed. Zane's agonized scream echoed. The soft, phantom chime of the Glass Weaver's death echoed.
He was a technician who had correctly diagnosed a catastrophic system failure. He had watched the operator ignore the warnings and fry the whole machine. And the worst part, the part that gnawed at him in the dark, was the sliver of satisfaction he'd felt. The cold, hard vindication. It made him feel as monstrous as the beast coiled inside him.
He sat up, the thin blanket falling away. He needed a different problem to solve. A different machine to diagnose.
His hand went to the pouch on his belt. The data slate was cool and impossibly smooth in his hand. It felt alien, a piece of a world that had no right to exist alongside the grime and desperation of their own. It was a whisper from the past, and he was terrified of what it might say.
He ran his thumb along the side, feeling for the recessed stud he'd found earlier. He pressed it.
Nothing happened.
He pressed again, harder. Still nothing. Frustration pricked at him. Of course. It was a two-hundred-year-old piece of tech. It was dead. Just another piece of junk in a tomb. He was about to toss it aside when he remembered Jax's lesson. Stop thinking like a man trying to be a wolf. Think like a technician.
It wasn't a button. It was a contact. It needed a current.
He closed his eyes, reached inward, and found his own Aethel Core. He pulled the smallest, most precise thread of energy he could manage, his Flow, and channeled it into his thumb. He pressed the stud again.
The slate hummed to life. A soft, pale blue light emanated from its dark surface. It wasn't a screen. The light itself formed words, letters of pure energy hovering a millimeter above the slate. Most of it was a corrupted, flickering mess, lines of incomprehensible symbols and static. It was a dying machine, its memory failing. He had found a ghost.
Kael focused, using the Hound's heightened senses to see the patterns in the static, to find the fragments of stable data. His own quiet, analytical Flow seemed to stabilize the slate's energy, the flickering lessening as he concentrated. And then, a single block of text solidified. It was clear. Legible.
Log Entry 7,342. Day 45, Xylos Integration.Subject: CH-07, 'Lyra.'
Kael's breath caught in his throat. CH-07. Chimera-07?
Lyra shows remarkable progress. The base genome… a canis lupus… is adapting beautifully. Her emotional responses are becoming more complex. We may have underestimated the potential for sentience.
The words hung in the darkness of the small room, glowing with a terrible, world-shattering light. Kael stared, his mind racing, connecting the dots with the cold, horrifying precision of a technician finding the root cause of a total system collapse.
Canis lupus. The ancient, pre-Fall name for the common wolf.
He thought of the Shard Hound. The predatory grace. The pack instincts. The memory he had seen—a sky with two moons.
He thought of the name on the log. Lyra.
The beast inside him, the feral parasite he had been fighting, the source of his new, terrifying power… had a name. It wasn't just a monster born from the apocalypse. It was a creation. A subject. It had been an animal, twisted and weaponized by the very Ancients he had so often dreamed of. The forbidden history wasn't just a lie. It was a cover-up.
He looked down at his own hands, at the faint thrum of the Hound's Echo still vibrating in his bones. He had absorbed the soul of a science experiment. The price of hubris had been paid long ago. And they were all just living in the ruins of the receipt.