The facility doesn't look like anything.
Corrugated metal, a chain-link fence gone soft with rust, a row of loading bays that could belong to any warehouse in any industrial stretch of the city. No drones patrol the roofline. No cameras track us from the corners I can see. If Gwen hadn't pulled the address off a shell company three deep and a power spike that shouldn't exist, I'd walk past this place without a second look.
That's the problem.
I run my eyes along the fence line again. A padlock hangs on the side gate, and the metal still has that dull factory shine, not the scuffed patina of everything around it. Someone swapped it recently. One of the roof vents hums louder than it should for a building this size, a pitch that says more power is running through these walls than a storage unit could ever need.
Jessica keeps close to my shoulder, scanning the same rooftops I am.
"This is definitely the place," she says.
"Yeah."
"Feels wrong that it's this quiet."
"That's what's bothering me too."
Peter's satellite pull said motion sensors, new cameras, a security upgrade installed inside the last month. None of that squares with what I'm looking at right now. Either the tech's better hidden than we can spot from here, or somebody wanted this place found exactly like this. Slow. Unguarded. An open door dressed up as an empty building.
Gatomon goes still on my shoulder before I finish the thought.
Her ears flatten, and her tail stops its usual idle twitch, locked straight behind her. BlackGatomon mirrors it a second later, crouched low against the fence post, claws out against the metal.
"Something's here," Gatomon says.
"Where?"
"I don't know."
BlackGatomon's eyes stay fixed on the building. "Don't like this. Don't like this at all."
That's the least helpful warning I've gotten all week, and it still lands harder than anything concrete would.
I reach for the amulet out of habit, the same dead weight it's been since this whole case started. My fingers close around the stone.
It's warm.
Not the room-temperature warm of something that's been in my pocket for an hour. Warm like it just woke up. I turn it over once, and it pulses against my palm, faint but real, the first thing it's done since Vanko's name ever entered the picture.
I stare at it longer than I mean to.
Whatever relief I expect doesn't come. There's no map lighting up in my head, no voice, no direction. Just confirmation that something is close, and wrong, and the amulet finally cares enough to say so.
"Ethan."
Jessica's already watching my face. I don't know how long she's been watching it.
"What just happened?"
I could brush it off. She'd know I was lying inside a second, and she's made it clear exactly what she thinks about being managed.
"The amulet just did something," I say. "First time all case."
"Define something."
"It's warm. It's never been warm."
Jessica's jaw tightens, and she doesn't ask a follow-up question, doesn't need one. She just nods once, like she's filing it away the same way I am.
"Then whatever it's reacting to is close."
"Yeah."
"So we move."
We find the entry Peter flagged on the satellite pass, a service door on the north side, half-hidden behind a stack of shipping pallets someone arranged to look abandoned. The lock's newer than the rest of the door. I work it slow, listening for anything past the metal, and it gives easier than it should.
Inside, the air changes first. Ozone, and hot metal, and underneath it something that smells almost organic, which doesn't belong in a place full of machine parts.
The space opens up past the entryway, and it isn't storage. Workbenches line both walls, crowded with tools and stripped-down components, half-built rigs I don't have names for. Cables run across the floor in thick black bundles, feeding into something deeper in the building that hums louder the farther we go.
This isn't a hideout. It's a lab.
Gatomon and BlackGatomon flank me without being told to, low and quiet, the playful edge gone out of both of them completely.
We move past a bank of monitors, all dark, and past a workstation littered with sketches, technical drawings of joints and cooling systems I recognize from the suit Natasha fought weeks ago. Whatever Vanko's building here, he's still building it.
Then the hum stops being background noise.
Something shifts in the dark past the last row of benches, a weight settling, metal grinding against concrete. I put a hand out, and Jessica stops beside me.
It steps into what little light reaches this far back, and my stomach drops before my brain catches up to why.
\[MetalTyrannomon\]
\[Level: Ultimate\]
\[Type: Cyborg\]
\[Attribute: Virus\]
\[Special Move: Nuclear Laser, Giga Destroyer II\]
\[An armored dinosaur reinforced with dense plating, remodeled for pure offense. Its jaw alone can punch through armor. Nothing about its design suggests mercy.\]
It's built the way a weapon is built, not the way a creature grows. Every plate on its body reads as deliberate, engineered rather than evolved, a jaw wide enough to close over an engine block. Twin arms end in something that isn't quite a hand, built instead for exactly two purposes, and neither of them is holding anything gently.
I've read plenty of Digimon data in my life. Nothing about this one reads like the ones I know.
"That's not one of Vanko's drones," Jessica says.
"No."
"That's a Digimon."
"Yeah."
I want thirty more seconds to actually look at it, catalogue the joints, find the weak points the way I would with anything else. MetalTyrannomon doesn't give me the thirty seconds.
Somewhere above us, a camera I never clocked rotates on its mount, tracking, the small red light blinking once before going still again. I catch it out of the corner of my eye and lose it just as fast, too busy watching the thing in front of us to spend any real attention on a security light in the rafters.
MetalTyrannomon's head lowers.
The arc reactor light I mistook for part of the machinery behind it brightens instead, feeding straight into the thing's chest, and the low charge building there isn't subtle about what it means.
"Jessica."
"I see it."
"Behind me."
The jaw opens, and the light at its center flares hot enough to throw shadows across the whole room, and there's no more time left to plan anything at all.
***
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