The world outside the armored transport wasn't just a different place; it was a different set of rules. For seventeen years, Kael's universe had been defined by the hum of the barrier and the grey, predictable grit of the Scar. It was a known quantity, a familiar monster. This was something else. This was the unknown.
The convoy, six hulking land-crawlers that felt like mobile pieces of Enclave 7, rumbled forward with a ponderous, crushing weight. They were an island of loud, dirty reality in a world that felt impossibly clean and silent. Kael sat beside Maya in the cramped rear compartment of the lead scout vehicle, the rhythmic shuddering of the deck a constant companion. They hadn't spoken more than a few words since they'd left, the finality of the great gate whining shut behind them a statement too loud for conversation.
He watched the landscape unspool through the thick, plastek viewport. The Scar had been a graveyard, but this was a museum of a dead apocalypse. They passed through a forest where the trees weren't petrified wood, but a kind of opalescent crystal. They towered in silent, motionless agony, their branches intricate lattices of frozen light, their leaves thin, razor-sharp flakes that littered the ground and crunched under the transport's massive treads with a sound like grinding teeth. The weak sun, a pale disc in the bruised sky, didn't warm the land; it was caught and shattered within the trees, casting a thousand cold, colored glints that danced and died with every slight vibration. The wind, when it gusted, made a sound like a million tiny chimes, a beautiful, sterile music that made the hairs on his arms stand up.
The Hound's Echo in his soul, Lyra's ghost, was quiet. It didn't see this as a hunting ground. It felt a strange, unsettling kinship with the crystalline silence, a whisper of the world that had birthed the Chimeras.
"Ryker wants a perimeter sweep. We're on," Maya's voice was a low anchor in the hypnotic strangeness of the view.
They had halted for the night in the mouth of a canyon whose walls plunged into purple-black depths. The floor, as far as their scopes could see, was a smooth, unbroken sheet of obsidian-like glass. The convoy commander, a hard-faced veteran named Ryker who looked at Kael and Maya like they were exotic, unreliable pieces of tech, had laid out the recon pattern with curt, efficient gestures. Check the high ground. Scan for hostiles. Report back. He hadn't asked about their "methods." Jax's approval had been a shield, but a thin one. Ryker's skepticism was a physical presence.
They slipped out of the transport and into the twilight. The air was thin, cold, and tasted of dust and distance. The six transports had formed a defensive circle, their work lights cutting cones of stark, artificial yellow into the alien gloom. It was a pathetic little fortress against the scale of the world around them.
"Ready?" Kael asked, his voice a puff of steam in the air.
Maya just nodded, her face half-hidden by the collar of her combat suit. She was already working, her Aethel Frame a faint, silvery pulse. The light around them didn't change, but Kael felt it shift. The world's view of them was being subtly edited, their outlines smudged, their heat signatures woven into the background radiation of the cooling rocks. It was a masterful, delicate lie.
Kael let his own senses expand. He didn't bother with his eyes. He closed them and switched the feed in his mind. Click. The Hound.
The world resolved into a map of sound, scent, and intent. He felt the low thrum of the convoy's idling power cores behind him, a warm, steady beat. He smelled the ozone from their static shields. He felt the vast, empty space of the canyon to their right, a dead zone. And he felt the faint, chaotic energy of the crystal flora, a constant, low-grade static.
He started moving, Maya a silent shadow at his side. He was the probe, she was the cloak. They flowed over the broken, crystalline ground, their partnership a language of shared glances and fractional gestures. He would point, indicating a patch of unstable ground his senses told him was hollow, and she would already be adjusting her path. She would raise a hand, and he would freeze, letting her warp the light around a sharp ridge before they crossed it. They were no longer the broken pieces of Squad Scion. They were a single, functioning unit.
They reached the ridge Ryker had designated as their primary observation point. Below them, the land stretched out into a petrified basin, a sea of jagged, glassy shapes. It was empty. The Hound's senses told him it was empty.
But the Stalker, the cold, quiet ghost in the back of his mind, whispered a different truth. It didn't sense life. It sensed a pattern. A wrongness.
Click. He switched his focus, letting the Stalker's conceptual awareness overlay the Hound's raw data. He looked up.
The sky wasn't empty.
They were just specks, circling high above, almost lost against the fractured light of the setting sun. There were three of them. Avian Chimeras. Their forms were sleek and wrong, like shards of obsidian given wings. They weren't hunting. They were just… watching. Observing.
A cold dread, entirely separate from the feral instincts of his Echoes, washed over Kael. The Stalker didn't perceive them as a threat. It perceived them as an intellect. A hostile surveillance system. It felt their cold, passive awareness sweeping the ground below, a sensor grid he and Maya were now trying to slip through.
He felt Maya tense beside him. She'd seen them too.
He gave a slow, deliberate hand signal. Threat. High. Unseen.
Her only response was a subtle tightening of the light-weave around them. The lie had to be perfect. The slightest flicker, the slightest spike in their own energy, and those things would descend.
They spent an hour on that ridge, two statues in a world of ghosts, tracking the avian Chimeras' lazy, patient circles. They were mapping the convoy. Assessing its defenses. This wasn't a random encounter. It was the prelude to a planned attack.
Finally, the creatures peeled off, their dark forms melting into the eastern sky. The palpable sense of being watched vanished, leaving a hollow, aching void in its place.
They returned to the convoy, their report simple and terrifying. "Path is clear of ground-level threats. But we're being watched."
Ryker listened, his expression a mask of stone. He looked from Kael to Maya, then back to the dark sky. The skepticism in his eyes was gone, replaced by the grim understanding of a veteran who knew the difference between a beast and an enemy.
"Get some rest, you two," he grunted, the words a dismissal but also, for the first time, an acceptance. "Tomorrow, we move faster."
Kael and Maya retreated to the quiet of their transport. They didn't speak. There was nothing to say. They had left the cage of Enclave 7, a place of crumbling walls and buried history. They had stepped onto a larger board, filled with older, smarter monsters. Their path west was clear, but the sky above it was full of eyes. And for the first time, Kael truly understood that the secrets of the past weren't just a burden. They were a beacon, and something in the darkness had seen its light.