The sector was called the 'Shattered Core.' A name that, according to the pre-Fall maps Kael had studied in stolen moments, was brutally literal. It was the heart of an old city, a place of glass towers and mag-lev arteries that had been hit so hard during the cataclysm that reality itself had come undone at the seams. The Scar was a graveyard; this was a wound that never stopped bleeding.
"You're not a squad," Jax had said, his voice flat and final in the debriefing room. He hadn't been looking at Maya or Leo. He had been looking at Kael. "You're a liability and a potential asset. Let's see which one you are today."
He'd tossed them the mission slate. Reconnaissance. No engagement. Just look, listen, and get the hell out. Their target zone was a nest of instability where standard sensor sweeps returned nothing but noise. It was a job for the Aethel Frame. For a pair of them.
"She's quiet," Jax had grunted, a grudging explanation. "You're quiet. Maybe you two can manage not to get yourselves killed by announcing your presence to every damn thing in a five-mile radius."
He was right. The silence between Kael and Maya was different from the strained, angry quiet that had defined Squad Scion. It wasn't an absence of words; it was a shared language. They moved through the skeletal remains of an overpass, a concrete spine picked clean by time, and their communication was a ghost in the air. A slight dip of Maya's head, a flicker of her hand. Kael's almost imperceptible change in posture, a subtle shift of weight.
He led, but not like Zane had. He wasn't a battering ram. He was a probe, a diagnostic tool. He let the Hound's instincts flow, a low, constant current that mapped the world in vectors of threat and prey. The Scuttler's Echo he kept coiled tight, a secondary process, the instinct to hide and ambush a tool he could select, not a state of being. It was Jax's final, brutal lesson: be the zookeeper, not the animal.
Behind him, Maya was a whisper made manifest. Her Glimmer Moth Echo didn't just create flashes anymore; she had learned to weave the light. She pulled the dim, purple glow of the sky around them, bending it, smudging their outlines, turning them into heat-haze and tricks of the eye. They were two ghosts haunting a city of them.
The air felt thin, sharp. The energy of this place was different. The Scar's hum was a steady, dissonant chord of corrupted flora. Here, the Aethel-scape was a staticky mess of spikes and dead zones. It felt like walking through a machine that had been shattered, its components still sparking with residual, chaotic power.
Kael raised a hand, a clenched fist. The signal for 'halt.' He didn't look back. He knew Maya had stopped, had melted into the shadow of a rusted-out transport. He closed his eyes, tilting his head, letting the Hound's senses take over completely. He felt the wind, a physical pressure carrying microscopic shards of glass and the scent of ancient decay. He felt the low thrum of a still-active power conduit buried deep beneath the ferrocrete, a dying heartbeat.
And he felt something else. A flicker. Not a presence, but the echo of a presence. A ripple in the static.
He opened his eyes. He wasn't just Kael the technician anymore. The two Echoes, the wolf and the spider, gave him a new kind of logic. He saw the street not as a street, but as a kill-zone. The skeletal buildings weren't just cover; they were ambush points. The flaw in this system wasn't a broken part; it was an active, intelligent predator.
He gave a slow, deliberate hand signal. Threat. Unseen. High potential.
Maya's response was a subtle warping of the light around a collapsed storefront to their left, a visual question mark. Direction?
Kael focused, letting the Hound track the ripple. It wasn't a sound. It wasn't a scent. It was a wrongness. A patch of reality that felt… thin. Like a signal dropping out. He pointed toward a multi-story administrative building a hundred meters ahead, its face a shattered grin of broken windows.
They moved. It was a crawl now, a painstaking, silent flow from one piece of cover to the next. The trust between them was absolute, born from shared failure and the grim understanding that they were all the other had. Kael was the sensor, the one who could hear the approaching code anomaly. Maya was the stealth field, the encryption that hid them from the system. It was the antithesis of his dynamic with Zane—Zane had been a hammer looking for a nail; Maya was a scalpel waiting for a diagram.
They reached the shadow of the target building. The feeling was stronger here. A cold spot in the world. It made the Hound's Echo bristle, a low growl of unease, not aggression. This wasn't prey. This wasn't a rival. This was a glitch in the universe.
Kael gestured for Maya to stay put, flattening himself against the cold wall of the building. He drew on the Scuttler's instinct, the part of him that knew how to be small, how to hide. He peered around the corner, his eyes seeing one reality while his other senses screamed of another.
He saw it. Them.
A pack of four. They were beautiful, terrifying things, built with the lethal economy of a panther but made of smoky quartz and flickering static. Their forms seemed to waver, to blur at the edges as if they weren't entirely anchored in the physical world. Their claws weren't crystal; they were slivers of solidified shadow. They moved with a liquid grace, sniffing at the rubble, their heads low. Phase Stalkers. A name Kael had only ever seen in a high-threat bestiary file he wasn't supposed to have access to. Tier-2.
One of them stopped. It looked directly at a thick ferrocrete wall, the remnant of a collapsed adjoining structure. It didn't try to go around it. It didn't try to climb it.
It walked through it.
The process was sickeningly quiet. The Chimera's form dissolved into a wave of translucent, grey energy, a distortion like heat rising from asphalt. The wall didn't break. The wave simply passed through the solid matter as if it weren't there, and coalesced on the other side, its physical form reasserting itself without a sound.
Kael felt a wave of cold dread wash over him, so potent it was almost physical. He pulled back from the corner, his heart hammering against his ribs. His technician's mind frantically tried to process what he'd just seen. It wasn't just invisibility. It wasn't teleportation. It was a temporary, localized rewriting of physical laws. How do you fight something that can ignore cover? How do you build a cage for a thing that can walk through the bars?
He looked at Maya, who had seen the look on his face. Her own was pale, her light-weaving faltering for a second. She knew.
They were so far out of their depth they were drowning. Their mission profile was a joke. 'Observe, do not engage.' You couldn't observe a thing like this. To be seen by it was a death sentence. Their stealth, their one advantage, felt like a child's blanket held up against a tidal wave.
One of the Stalkers on the street lifted its head. Its form flickered. It didn't have eyes, not in the traditional sense, but Kael felt its attention sweep across the area. A cold, alien awareness that wasn't looking for movement or sound, but for the steady, solid rhythm of things that belonged.
And in that moment, Kael knew. They had already been detected. The silence wasn't ignorance.
It was the patient stillness of a predator that had already cornered its prey.