The silence was a living thing. It had a weight and a texture, a cold, staticky quality that clung to the back of the neck. Kael had felt silence before—the dead quiet of a powered-down sector, the hushed reverence of the Forge after a long day. This was different. This was the silence of a void, the sound of reality holding its breath.
He met Maya's gaze from across the wreckage-strewn street. Her face, usually a mask of calm, was pale. The silvery light of her Aethel Frame, her Glimmer Moth Echo, wavered around her, a faint shimmer of heat-haze that smudged her outline against the skeletal ruins. It was their only defense, a cloak of misdirection woven from bent light. Against the things they now watched, it felt as useful as a paper shield against a flood.
Phase Stalkers.
The name itself was a lie. They didn't stalk. They simply… were. The pack of four moved through the administrative plaza with a liquid wrongness, their forms of smoky quartz and flickering static seeming to blur and un-blur at the edges. They weren't just predators; they were glitches in the world's code, a fundamental error made manifest. Kael, the technician, felt it on a level deeper than fear. This wasn't an animal to be hunted. This was a system-wide catastrophic failure.
His hand, held low behind a chunk of fallen ferrocrete, made a slow, deliberate gesture. Retreat. Now.
Maya's response was a nearly imperceptible nod, a tightening of the light around her. She was already moving, melting back into the shadow of a burned-out transport. Kael followed, his own movements a low, ground-eating crouch borrowed from the Hound. He switched his senses, letting Lyra's predatory awareness map their escape route while the Scuttler's instinct kept him low and quiet, a whisper in the ghost of a city. He was the zookeeper, Jax's voice a grim echo in his mind. He had two beasts in his soul, and he was learning to make them hunt together.
They moved like water, flowing from one piece of cover to the next. The trust between them was absolute, a silent language forged in the aftermath of Squad Scion's spectacular collapse. Kael was the probe, his senses the diagnostic tool. Maya was the ghost, the one who walked unseen.
They were almost clear of the plaza when it happened.
One of the Stalkers stopped. It lifted its head, a featureless wedge of obsidian. It had no eyes, no ears, no nostrils, but Kael felt its attention sweep over them like a searchlight. It wasn't a sense he could understand. It wasn't looking for light or sound. It was scanning for the steady, solid rhythm of things that belonged in the physical world. For a moment, its alien awareness passed over them, baffled by Maya's cloak of shimmering light. Then, it settled. It had found them. Not where they were, but the undeniable truth that they were.
The Stalker didn't roar. It didn't signal the others. The hunt had already begun. The silence hadn't been ignorance; it had been the patient, terrifying stillness of a trap already sprung.
The world dissolved into a chaos of impossible movement. The Stalkers didn't charge. They simply appeared. One moment, they were a pack in the center of the plaza. The next, they were emerging from the very walls around Kael and Maya. One flowed through a pile of rubble as if it were mist, its form dissolving into a translucent grey wave before re-coalescing on the other side. Another simply walked out of the solid ferrocrete wall of a collapsed hab-block, its shadowy claws leaving no mark. They were surrounded. The path back to the enclave was gone. The path forward was gone. There was only here. A kill-zone of their own making.
"High ground!" Kael's voice was a raw bark, the technician screaming a diagnostic over the Hound's instinct to either fight or flee. He pointed with his spear to a mountain of debris, the collapsed second story of an office building. It offered a vantage point. A place to die with a better view.
Maya was already scrambling, her smaller frame finding purchase where Kael's would have failed. He followed, his own Echoes a warring chaos in his soul. The Hound wanted to meet the charge, to bare its fangs at this impossible threat. The Scuttler wanted to find the deepest, darkest crack and disappear. He shoved them both down, forcing his focus onto the climb, onto the feel of shattered concrete under his gloves.
They reached the top, a precarious platform of rebar and broken plastek. Below, the four Stalkers had formed a loose circle, their movements a slow, deliberate tightening of a noose. They weren't in a hurry.
"Maya," Kael panted, his side screaming from the old Scuttler wound. "The light. Not a shimmer. A wall. Everything you have."
She didn't answer. She didn't need to. He saw the flicker of resolve in her Aethel Frame, a steadying of the silvery light. She was terrified, he could feel it, a cold hum of fear that resonated with his own. But she wasn't Leo. She wouldn't break. She planted her feet, raised her hands, and the world dissolved into a lie.
The Glimmer Moth's power erupted. It wasn't a simple flash. It was a chaotic storm of visual static, a wall of splintered light and phantom afterimages that surrounded their perch. The air warped, creating dozens of shimmering, false images of Kael and Maya. The Stalkers paused, their featureless heads tilting, their alien senses struggling to parse the contradictory data. The illusion was a firewall, and for a moment, it held.
Kael felt a flicker of hope, a treacherous, foolish thing. He raised his spear, searching for a target, for a pattern, for anything.
The hope died.
One of the Stalkers, the largest of the pack, simply ignored the illusion. It didn't try to find the real target among the fakes. It didn't need to. It took a step forward and its form dissolved. It phased through Maya's wall of light as if it were nothing more than a bad memory. The carefully woven Aethel energy of her Echo had no effect on a creature that could temporarily choose not to be a part of the world it was meant to affect.
The Stalker re-formed inside the perimeter. It was right next to her.
It was impossibly fast. A blur of smoky quartz and solidified shadow. Before Kael could even shout a warning, a single, dark claw lashed out. It wasn't a mauling. It was a precise, surgical strike. It connected with Maya's leg.
There was a wet, sickening crack that was louder than any explosion.
Maya screamed. It was a sharp, high sound of pure, unadulterated pain that cut through Kael's soul. The wall of light shattered. The illusion vanished. She collapsed, her Aethel Frame sputtering violently before shrinking to a barely-visible flicker.
The other three Stalkers now had a clear, unobstructed view of their two targets. One wounded and helpless. The other, alone on a pile of rubble, watching the beasts of his own private nightmare begin to close in. The zookeeper was out of cages. He was just meat now. And they were hungry.