The Obsidian Fields were a lie. They weren't fields at all, but a geological scar; a vast, shattered plateau where the world's bones had broken through its skin. Colossal, slate-grey mesas, worn smooth by a million years of wind, stood like tombstones for a dead sky. The ground wasn't grit but a fine, dark dust that deadened sound, and the air was thin and sharp, tasting of ozone and forgotten time. It was a place of profound, crushing silence, a stark counterpoint to the layered, electronic hum of Enclave 3.
Kael preferred the silence. It was honest.
He lay flat on a high ledge, the cold of the rock seeping through his combat suit. Beside him, Maya was a motionless shadow, her breathing a slow, controlled rhythm. They'd been here for six hours, two insignificant specks in a landscape built for giants, and the flimsy permit they'd bought with a bribe and a lie felt like a joke. Out here, the only authority was survival.
"Anything?" Maya's voice was a whisper, a sound the wind stole before it could travel more than a foot.
"Patience," Kael murmured back, his eyes closed. He wasn't looking. He was listening with senses that weren't his own. Click. The Hound. The world resolved into a map of intent. He could feel the scuttling life of crystal-backed lizards in the cracks below, the lazy thermal signature of a high-flying carrion-bird, the deep, slow pulse of… nothing. The target was a creature of stone and stasis. It didn't hunt. It simply was.
This was the problem. He was hunting a rock. A very large, very dangerous rock.
He let the Hound's senses recede, the predatory edge softening. He was the zookeeper, and this cage needed to stay locked. His own energy, his Flow, felt steadier here, away from the chaotic thrum of the enclave. It was a quiet current, and he let it seep into the ground, feeling for a different kind of resonance. The data from Thorne's slate was his only guide. Designation: Adamant Tortoise. Echo Profile: [Inertial Locus]. It doesn't move much, but it displaces everything around it.
There. A subtle pressure wave in the rock. A gravitational anomaly. Something so heavy and dense it had its own weather system of silence.
"East," Kael breathed, opening his eyes. "Two klicks. It's on the move."
They found it an hour later. The word 'tortoise' was a clinical understatement, a pathetic attempt to apply familiar labels to the fundamentally alien. It was a walking mesa, a mobile fortress of obsidian-dark crystal so dense it seemed to drink the light. Its carapace wasn't a single shell, but a complex arrangement of interlocking hexagonal plates. It moved with a ponderous, geological slowness, each of its six, pillar-like legs ending in a foot that crushed the rock beneath it to powder. It wasn't just on the landscape; it was the landscape.
Kael felt a familiar, stupid urge rise in him—the need to test the machine. He hefted his kinetic spear, its weight a familiar comfort. "I'm going to probe its defenses."
Maya didn't argue. She just shifted her position, finding better cover, her hand resting on the grip of her own spear. Her trust was a physical weight, a responsibility that settled on his shoulders.
He channeled a thread of the Hound's power, not for the rage, but for the pounce. He moved, a grey blur against the grey rock, and launched the spear with every ounce of his strength. The weapon flew true, a dark streak against the bruised sky.
It struck the Tortoise's flank with a dull, pathetic thud. The spear, a tool that could punch through plastek and bone, might as well have been a pebble. It bounced off the crystalline plating, its kinetic energy simply… gone. Absorbed. Nullified. The Tortoise didn't even seem to notice. It just kept moving, its pace unchanged, a monument to the futility of direct assault.
Kael retrieved his spear, the shame hot on his cheeks. He'd known it wouldn't work. The bestiary was clear: Extreme kinetic resistance. But seeing it, feeling that utter negation of his own power, was a different kind of lesson. The hammer was useless here. He had to be the scalpel.
"The cliffs," he said over the comm, his voice tight. "The bestiary says its underside is vulnerable. It only exposes it when it climbs."
"And it's heading away from the cliffs," Maya's voice came back, calm and analytical.
"Then we turn it around," Kael said.
The herding was a slow, agonizing exercise in patience and precision. They couldn't startle it. A creature that large and powerful, if panicked, could shatter the very ground they stood on. They had to nudge it, to suggest a new path with stimuli so subtle the beast would think it was its own idea.
It was a silent, intricate dance. Kael would use the Hound's senses to map the terrain ahead, finding patches of unstable scree or narrow passages. Maya, her Glimmer Moth Echo a masterpiece of delicate control, would weave tricks of light and shadow. A flicker in its peripheral vision. A patch of ground that seemed to shimmer with unnatural heat. A shadow that wasn't there a moment before.
They weren't trying to scare it. They were trying to annoy it.
Hours crawled by. The pale sun began its slow descent, painting the stone behemoth in hues of blood and rust. Their energy reserves dwindled, each use of their Frames a costly expenditure. Kael's body ached with a bone-deep weariness, his mind a frayed knot of concentration. The three ghosts in his soul were a low, grumbling chorus. The Hound was bored. The Scuttler was terrified. The Stalker was… learning. It watched the Tortoise not as prey, but as a fascinating, complex system of defense. It approved.
Finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the Tortoise changed course. It turned its massive body, the movement a slow, grinding pivot, and began its ponderous march toward the sheer cliffs that marked the western edge of the plateau.
They had it.
They gave it a wide berth, letting it reach the cliff face on its own. It paused, its massive, featureless head tilting as if considering the obstacle. Then, with a sound like a mountain shifting in its sleep, it began to climb.
This was the moment. The opportunity the data slate had promised. As the Tortoise hauled its impossible weight up the vertical rock, the plates on its underbelly shifted, separating to allow its legs a greater range of motion. It exposed a network of softer, fibrous crystal and, if Thorne's schematics were right, a series of small, recessed nerve clusters.
"I'm going in," Kael said, his voice a dry rasp.
Click. He switched off the Hound. The world of sound and scent vanished. Click. He switched on the Stalker. Reality flattened into a blueprint of pure, cold physics. He saw the Tortoise not as a creature, but as a machine. He saw the faint, pulsing energy of the nerve clusters, the weak points in the design. He saw his own body as a temporary state, a collection of particles that could be rearranged.
He reached for the Stalker's core ability. He sent the command. Un-exist.
The world went thin, a nauseating lurch into a state of dissociation. He moved, a ghost taking a stroll through a gravestone, and phased his arm directly into the stone of the cliff face beside the climbing Chimera. There was no resistance, only a profound, intimate cold and the screaming wrongness of it. He held onto his focus, to the technician's logic. The cage was open, and he was walking the most dangerous beast of all.
He reached through the rock, his intangible hand emerging into the open air just inches from the Tortoise's exposed underbelly. He could see it now, a small, glowing node, a nexus of Aethel-biological wiring. He gripped his spear, the physical object a strange, solid anchor in his ephemeral state. He pushed it through the last few inches of rock.
Click. He switched back.
The recoil was brutal. Reality slammed back into him with the force of a physical blow. Pain, hot and absolute, exploded in his arm as his atoms violently reasserted their right to exist in a space not already occupied by stone. He screamed, a choked, guttural sound, but he held on.
His spear, now fully solid, was embedded deep in the creature's vulnerable flesh.
The Adamant Tortoise went rigid. The ponderous, geological rhythm of its climb simply stopped. For a silent, impossible moment, it just hung there, a mountain clinging to the side of a cliff. Then, with a deep, grinding groan that was the sound of a world breaking, it fell.
It didn't shatter. It just crashed, its immense weight hitting the plateau floor with a cataclysmic boom that shook the very sky. A cloud of grey dust billowed outwards, and then, silence.
Kael collapsed against the cliff, his arm a useless, screaming agony. He looked down. The beast was dead. And where its soul had been, a new light was beginning to pulse. A quiet, steady, impossibly stable light. The first ingredient. He had it. And it had only cost him a piece of his own soul.