The hum was gone.
For seventeen years, Kael's world had been defined by its presence—the low, ceaseless thrum of the Aethel-Barrier, the song of the cage. Its absence was a physical void, a pressure differential in the soul. The six hulking land-crawlers of the Drifter caravan made their own noise, a symphony of groaning metal and complaining hydraulics, but it was a clumsy, temporary sound. It was the noise of machinery, not the sound of a world's law.
He sat with his back against the cold interior wall of the scout vehicle, feeling every shudder and lurch of the deck plates. They had left Enclave 3 in the dead of night, two ghosts slipping out of a city of them. Now, under a sky the color of a day-old bruise, the city was just a memory of oppressive light on the horizon, a cancer of civilization that had finally receded.
The landscape that unspooled beyond the grimy plastek viewport was a new kind of desolation. The Scar had been a graveyard, its crystalline flora a testament to a violent, failed science. This was different. This was just… empty. A vast, ochre-colored plain stretched out, cracked and dry, punctuated by mesas worn into impossible shapes by a million years of indifferent wind. The world felt bigger out here. Older. More honest in its hostility.
"They're watching."
Maya's voice was a low murmur, a sound that didn't disturb the quiet so much as become a part of it. She sat opposite him, methodically breaking down and cleaning Sil's gauntlet, the one she'd inherited from the Nomad sniper. The gesture was a ritual, a piece of familiar logic in this new, terrifyingly open space. She wasn't looking out the viewport. She didn't have to.
"I know," Kael said. The Stalker in his soul, the cold ghost of pure physics, felt it too. Not a direct trace, not the hot-blooded intent of a predator. It was a pattern. A weight. Their departure had been logged, their forged travel permits a flag in the system. The lions of Valerius and the spiders of Thorne weren't hunting them yet. They were observing, pulling at the loose thread to see what would unravel. It was a more patient, and somehow more frightening, kind of hunt.
The caravan rumbled on. Anya was in the lead vehicle with the caravan master, a hard-bitten woman named Olenna whose face looked like it was carved from the same rock as the mesas. Kael and Maya were just passengers, two more anonymous scrappers from the outer territories, their value measured in the few high-density credit chits they had left and the story they didn't tell.
The attack came on the second day.
It wasn't a roar or a shriek. It was a lie. A flicker on the short-range comms, a fragmented distress call from a caravan transponder code, old but valid. Olenna called a halt, the six crawlers forming a defensive circle, a metal island in a sea of dust. It was standard protocol. It was also the first move in a script written by someone else.
"Something's wrong," Kael said, his voice quiet. He felt the Hound stir, its predatory senses tasting the air. There was no scent of Chimera, no tang of ozone and corrupted Aethel. There was just the dust, the wind, and something else. The faint, disciplined hum of other Aethel Frames, deliberately suppressed.
"Hostiles," Maya confirmed, her own work stilled, her hands resting on the reassembled gauntlet.
Before Anya's voice could even crackle over their private comm, the world erupted. Not with the elemental fury of a Chimera, but with the cold, calculated violence of men. Explosive charges, buried in the dust, detonated in a coordinated sequence, not to destroy the crawlers, but to cripple them, to kick up a wall of choking debris.
Through the swirling brown haze, they appeared. Ten of them. Rogue Frame Users. Their armor was a chaotic patchwork of scavenged parts—a Valerius shoulder plate here, a Thorne-issue helmet there—all of it painted a uniform, anonymous dust-grey. They moved with a fluid, practiced coordination, fanning out, using the terrain, their weapons already spitting coherent light into the panicked, disorganized return fire of the caravan guards.
"Well, shit," Anya's voice cut through the comms, stripped of all her usual pragmatism and left with only a core of pure, professional annoyance. "Looks like the welcoming committee. Kael, Maya, you're with me. Time to earn our passage."
The cargo ramp of their vehicle slammed down. The fight was a different language than the one he had learned. The Chimeras were a force of nature, their attacks brutal but often predictable. These men… they were liars. They used the dust for cover, their movements designed to draw fire, to create openings. One of them shouted, a feint to the left, while two more opened up from the right, their fire focused and disciplined, targeting the joints in the caravan guards' armor. They weren't just fighting; they were disassembling.
Anya was a blur of motion, her twin pistols a staccato rhythm of death, her every shot a calculated punctuation mark in the chaos. But she was only one person. Two of the bandits broke off, their movements a perfect flanking maneuver, aiming to get a clear line of fire into the exposed interior of the lead crawler.
Kael moved. He didn't think. He let the ghosts out of the cage. He stomped.
The [Shockwave Step] wasn't a crude blast. It was a surgical tool. A focused line of concussive force ripped across the ground, not at the bandits, but at the ground in front of them. The packed earth erupted, a geyser of dust and rock that threw their aim wide and their perfect formation into a clumsy scramble.
It was a half-second. It was an eternity.
One of the bandits recovered, his face a mask of surprised fury behind his visor. He saw Kael, a lone figure in the swirling dust, and charged, his own kinetic spear held in a perfect, textbook lunge. This was a duel, a challenge.
Kael didn't meet the charge. He stomped again, this time a concussive blast into the ground beneath his own feet. He launched himself sideways, an impossible, explosive dodge that took him out of the spear's path. The bandit, his momentum carrying him forward, stumbled into the space Kael had just vacated.
And into the net of light Maya had woven there.
It wasn't a flash. It was a complex, shimmering lie, a distortion of space that turned the world into a funhouse mirror. The bandit's senses screamed with contradictory data. For a fatal moment, he was lost.
Kael landed, his body flowing from the aerial dodge into a low, ground-eating pounce. This was the Hound, Lyra's soul, unleashed and guided. He didn't feel the savage glee of the hunt. He felt a cold, quiet focus. The technician diagnosing a flaw. The man's recovery was a half-second too slow. His Aethel Frame was a standard, military-grade model. Predictable.
Kael didn't strike to kill. He struck to break. His spear, humming with its own kinetic energy, connected not with the man's chest, but with the actuator joint at his knee. There was a sickening crunch of metal and crystal. The man went down, his Frame sputtering, his leg bent at an angle it was never meant to take.
The victory was a sour, metallic taste in Kael's mouth. The man screamed, a human sound of pain and shock. It was different from the systemic shriek of a dying Chimera. It was worse.
The fight broke. The bandits were professionals, not fanatics. Their perfect ambush had dissolved into a chaotic, unpredictable brawl. They had lost their momentum, their leader was down, and two more had been cut down by Anya's relentless fire. They disengaged, their movements just as coordinated in retreat, melting back into the dust from which they had come, leaving their wounded behind.
Silence fell, thick and heavy, smelling of ozone, hot metal, and blood. The real kind.
Later, as the wounded were tended to and the convoy's outer plating was being hastily patched, Olenna approached them. The caravan master's face was a mask of grim stone, but her eyes, when they looked at Kael and Maya, held a new, grudging respect.
"You two ain't just scrappers," she grunted, spitting a stream of dark liquid onto the dusty ground. "The way you move… that ain't something they teach in the Enclaves."
"We adapt," Anya said, appearing at their side like a shadow.
Olenna just nodded, her gaze lingering on Kael for a long moment. "The Frontier's got a different set of rules. Looks like you already know the language." She turned and walked away, barking orders at a repair crew.
The words were an acceptance. A validation. They had won. They had earned their place. Kael looked at the wounded bandit being disarmed by the caravan guards, at the dark stains on the ochre-colored dust. He had hunted, he had fought, he had won. But for the first time, he wasn't sure if he had survived. Out here, the monsters had human faces. And he was just beginning to learn their language.