Baelok vanished into the jagged fissures of the cavern wall with the silent, predatory speed of a ghost. He offered no path, no guiding torch, and no second glance. Down in the deep rifts, survival was not offered; it was taken.
Ren did not move. His katana remained held loosely at his waist, his dark blue eyes tracking the lightless seam in the rock where the massive orc had disappeared.
"He expects us to die in the heat," Ren remarked, his tone as flat and indifferent as the basalt around them. "Or turn back to the surface like whipped dogs."
"That's what he expects from surface nobility," Jack replied, stepping over the carcass of a cleaved rift-crawler.
Jack didn't hesitate. He didn't search for footprints in the dark. Expanding his sensory field, he tracked the faint, localized displacement of thermal energy cutting through the subterranean fault lines.
Baelok wasn't fleeing; he was drawing a line deeper into the planet's core.
