They found the commander where the river turned into swamp: a low valley that held fog like a held breath. Greybridge's forward line had marked the place with crude stakes and the ghost of a trap—nets, shallow pits lined with sharpened wooden stakes, nothing dramatic, only the sort of small engineering that separated survivors from prey. The fog rolled low over it now, winking and withdrawing as if the land itself were pulling its cloak tight.
Ethan stood at the edge of the clearing with Harlan beside him and Reyes behind, all of them small silhouettes in the washed light. The tamed men—now a ragged, organized cohort rather than a prison of captured armsmen—moved with purpose. Ethan had taught them to carry packs lightly, to keep spare weapons blunt for minimalism, and to read a line of motion rather than a face. The Panel hummed faintly in the back of his mind; it no longer felt like a tool at his wrist but something sewn into bone and muscle.
"Commander," Harlan muttered under his breath, then spat. "If that thing's what I think—"
"Don't call it a thing," Ethan said. His voice was low but steady. "Commander or not, it hunts like a predator. Keep the nets quiet. Don't let it smell the effort."
He'd briefed them twice, drilled silence into the men until the word became a rib in their bodies. Now that training mattered. The nets were in place; the pits sat ready. The plan was modest: bait, pin, and force enough light to hold the creature in a shape the tethers could accept. Ethan did not plan to kill—his tether worked better on prey than on bodies—but he knew the rules he'd bent. He had removed the safety of mandatory consent in the Taming Space; once the leader fell, it would be bound and—if it survived—reprogrammed into the camp's chain. That knowledge sat in his chest like an iron coin.
They walked in a line, two by two. Reyes moved with the quickness of someone who had once been watched for a different reason—eyes always sliding, feet ready to depart. Ethan kept his own steps measured, feeling the air for the things his eyes couldn't read. Predator Insight hummed up faintly—short, cold flashes of intuition. The fog thickened like wool pulled across a mouth.
It arrived without an animal's sound. The fog itself became limbs—a man-shaped absence that unmade the shape of shadow. At first it was only a disturbance: a darker pressure in the gas. Then eyes arrived—lantern or abyss—it was impossible to tell. The thing stepped forward on a sound of no feet and the world seemed to tilt toward its center.
"Now," Ethan whispered.
Reyes threw a rock; petty echo, intentional. The rock slammed into the air and disappeared. The commander answered with a motion like peeling back a membrane; frost-light lined its arm and a concussion rolled out over the grass. The net to the left shivered as if kissed by wind.
Ethan moved first. Not with speed the way a thief moves, but a speed folded into intent. He used Soulstep—a careful, compact drift—closing distance while his peripheral charts tracked the creature's convergences. The fog tried to swallow his silhouette; Alpha Sense sketched the vectors and told him where the commander's hunger leaned. He stepped to the flanks, avoiding the arc of its reach.
The commander attacked with more than force; its blows came barbed with the sensation of being unmade—little parts of hearing that blinked out, a shadow that left a cold bite on the skin. Harlan took it across the shoulder and the man staggered as something inside his vision dimmed. Ethan slammed an elbow into the creature's flank—solid contact. The fog recoiled like smoke against a hand. For a beat the commander was a body, something that would take a cord and be counted.
Then it answered with teeth made of night. A thin, black maw leapt out from the fog and snapped at Reyes—faster than a blink. Reyes dove and rolled, scraping the dirt; the maw closed on air. The tethers hummed in Ethan's mind. He saw the opening and slid his hand toward his taming line without thinking—the Panel's subroutines had begun to re-route in response to the battle, nudging permission into faster lanes.
"Hold it in the pit!" Ethan barked. "Drive it low!"
The men executed like they were learning geometry: a shove here, a brace there, a levered tree branch slammed into the fog's path. The commander split and reformed; one instant it was a cowl of gloom, the next a set of hands. The first net snagged—then shredded on contact, the fibers dissolving like wet paper. The commander was not just physical; it devoured the world's definitions and spat them out as nightmares.
Ethan adapted. He cut his breath short and threw a short, half-step of Fold Slip—micrometers of space; he never used long slips in open battle because the field's noise whispered back to him. He repositioned behind the creature, and for a second it felt like threading a needle. He drove a heel into the commander's spine while the volley of men flooded the circle. Harlan and two others pinned a shoulder; they were the human hum that mattered.
Something changed then. The Panel, observing the evolving organization—how Ethan used small teams, re-trained former enemies, coordinated supply, and reinforced perimeter—triggered an upgrade in its own right. It pushed a module into his perception with a polite green light: Command Network (temporary, experiment).
A tight band of awareness clicked into place. Ethan could feel the men around him like points on a live map—Harlan one, Reyes two, the Beta wolves clustered three and four. The Command Network offered one blunt, precious thing: synchronized micro-commands. Ethan breathed a sequence and the men's motions smoothed. The numbers leaned.
"Bind prep," he said in a single knot of thought. The Panel relayed the idea as a tactical whisper to his tameds: small vibrations, the smell of the river, the sound of a pocket-watch. The tamed men found the rhythm and built a wall of weight.
A Beta—one of the wolves born from the armored van episode, tall and shaded and obedient—slid like a shadow between Ethan and the commander's flank. The animal lunged, teeth finding something not quite meat. It recoiled and then darted back, marking a line. The commander hissed, a sound like gravel and returned rainfall. It extended a hand and the wolf froze, mid-air—its muscles slackening as if pulled by invisible strings. Ethan's stomach clenched. The thing could not merely be held by bone.
"Now!" Harlan roared, voice hoarse.
They pushed. Nets, ropes, branches—all they could gather—came together in a clumsy weave. The commander fought like frost: fists edged with the absence of color, lungs breathing in the fog. Its anger was a pressure that made the night shimmer. Men were struck down, not killed but knocked into dull, dangerous unconsciousness; Lewis—a young man with a scar along his temple—took a slap to the head and crumpled like a rag.
Ethan saw the slit: the commander's core, an implausible lantern beneath the fog. He slid in with Soulstep at the same time as the net closed. For a moment, everything centered—breath, rope, the smell of resin and fear. He put both hands on the commander's core, feeling the reishi like a live wire. His Pressure Guard rose like a skin. He could have attempted a large extraction then—pulled the creature's vector into a fragment and stored it—but the Panel's ethics layer hesitated. The prior removal of consent in his taming line gave him the latitude to bind; taking a fragment of a living, semi-sentient commander risked echo effects: call it theft with consequences.
He chose the bind. He invoked the Taming Space.
The Suite no longer existed as a separate module in his mind; only Taming Space did—thin, efficient, brutal when it needed to be. He opened it and folded the commander's reishi into a bowl. The creature roared, fury and hunger and the smell of old roads crashing into the fold. The men around the net tightened with instinct and fear; some began to chant the old, simple words Ethan had taught them—redundant patterns that held like keels against wave.
The bind took. The commander's howl choked off into a sound like a small animal whining. For a heartbeat Ethan felt the thing's mind brush his—a map of pack raids, of teeth and missing caravans, of something older that had seeded itself into other woods. No names, only instincts.
He sealed the tether.