Nolan had not fallen into the blood thirst. He was not losing himself to it. This was deliberate, controlled, a test of the Gene Detection Neural Network's practical function and nothing more. He also wanted to know whether what had happened to these internet celebrity heroes matched what David had theorized.
The interrogation process, the capturing and questioning, he skipped entirely. This was faster.
The blood was hot and salt-sharp against the back of his throat, carrying with it the faint iron of torn flesh. The Gene Detection Neural Network stirred in response, and then the memories began to surface.
They came in fragments, non-linear, overlapping at the edges the way memories always do.
A young girl running through dense tropical forest, the air thick and humid around her, a group of ragged children at her heels, all of them laughing. A childhood memory. Distant and warm at its edges.
Then it shifted. A harsh fluorescent interior. A middle-aged man with a sour expression standing over four people in mismatched clothing, voice raised, threatening to send them all back to whatever rural origin he seemed to think was an insult. One of them, a broad-shouldered older man with a white beard, started to rise from his seat. Seiryu put a hand on his arm and stopped him without a word. The career was stalling. The management was turning.
Then a different memory, quieter. The same white-bearded man, Byakko, speaking close and serious.
"Seiryu. What we are trying to find is something that has been spoken of for hundreds of years at least. If it doesn't exist, then everything is fine. But if it does..."
Seiryu's answer came through clearly, her voice steady even as the weight of it showed in the set of her jaw.
"Byakko. There is no other path. Either we walk into that office and end this on our own terms, and become exactly the kind of people we always said we would never be, or we risk everything on the chance that what is sleeping out there will hear us. The four of us. The Four Sacred Beast."
The memory dissolved.
More fragments followed, vaguer, harder to hold, less coherent as pictures. Nolan moved through them quickly, scanning. Then his consciousness stopped.
He reversed the current, pulling backward through the stream of images until he found it: a single frame caught at the periphery of a memory, half-formed, the kind of thing a person registers without meaning to. The back of a tall man. Long hair. And in his two arms, running up each one in sequence, ten metal rings pulsing with a steady purple light.
Nolan opened his eyes.
"Ten rings," he said quietly. "Now I know who is behind this."
He released Seiryu. Her body, broken in several places, dropped to the forest floor. Her breathing was shallow and uneven, barely present.
He turned toward the tree line, already composing what he needed to tell David.
The sound behind him was almost nothing. A whisper of gathered energy.
He turned back.
Seiryu, flat on the ground and barely conscious, had drawn something up from whatever was left in her. A massive phantom was forming above her body, vast and coiling, assembled entirely from blue energy and shaped unmistakably into a dragon. It expanded rapidly as it rose, pulling mass from somewhere, growing larger with each second.
Nolan pulled the Heart of the Furnace and fired.
The plasma bursts hit the phantom and passed through it, blooming and spreading into a wide tide of burning energy. The phantom absorbed it without slowing. It grew larger still, fed by the plasma rather than diminished.
"David. Bring the Thunderhawk back now."
He gestured for the nearest Scyllax unit to retrieve his helmet from where it had fallen, his eyes not leaving the phantom.
He braced for the detonation or the strike, whichever was coming.
Neither came.
Instead, the little finger of his left hand, buried under the vibranium shell, ignited. Not pain exactly, but an insistent burning heat paired with something that felt absurdly like a heartbeat pressing outward through the metal.
The protective talisman. The one Ancient One had given him.
He had not finished processing the thought when the dragon phantom contracted. The enormous coiling shape folded inward on itself, collapsing from the outside in, shrinking down to a thread of blue light and then pouring directly into the talisman on his finger.
Then his palm lit up.
Strands of blue energy ran between the gaps in the vibranium shell, threading across the back of his hand and curling around his fingers, flickering with something that was not quite fire at its edges.
Nolan held his hand up and looked at it.
"This is not the seiryu's power," he said to himself, more than to David. "It never was a power. The mythology around the Four Sacred Beast is real."
He turned and looked at Seiryu, collapsed in the wet undergrowth, chest barely moving.
He reached into the storage compartment at the back of the power armor and took out a capsule of panacea. Then he walked to her and crouched down, the armor's servos whirring softly in the quiet forest.
"David. Contact all other combat teams immediately. When the targets approach critical condition, there is a high-energy counterattack response. Change the mission parameters: make the other three fully unconscious. Hands and feet can be broken if necessary. The body and the brain need to stay intact."
"My lord." A brief pause. "Did you find something out?"
"Unclear. That is why we are keeping the four sacred beasts alive. I need to ask them questions."
"Understood. Orders have been resent."
The panacea worked quickly. The worst of the damage knitted back, color returning slowly to Seiryu's skin. David came down in the Thunderhawk once the forest gave enough clearance, the cargo ramp lowering as the craft settled. He stepped out holding an energy-blocking collar, and took custody of the unconscious woman without comment.
Nolan sat in the cabin as the Thunderhawk lifted again, one hand resting palm-up on his knee. The blue energy circled slowly across the vibranium surface when he directed his attention to it, and faded back when he let his focus drift. He ran it through a few more times, watching it respond.
From what the Azure Dragon power was communicating, vaguely, in the way that absorbed energy sometimes did: the four sacred beasts each carried a different divine power. When all four were brought together, an ancient entity called the The Empyrean Qilin would fully wake from wherever it had been sleeping and bind itself to whoever had gathered them.
Nolan looked at the energy curling across his palm.
"The Empyrean Qilin," he said quietly.
The forest passed beneath the aircraft and fell away behind them.