The first Protoss Jake killed on Monlyth never saw him.
A Tal'darim zealot stood at the edge of the temple's outer perimeter, psi-blades ignited, attention fixed on the canyon approach where Raynor's forces were pushing hard against the defensive line. Jake had worked his way along the eastern ridge until he was above and behind the zealot's position—elevated, cloaked, with a clear sightline to the base of the warrior's skull where the helmet met the neck seal.
He took a breath. Let it half out. Held.
Squeezed the trigger.
The C-10 barked once. The penetrator round crossed two hundred meters in a fraction of a second and punched through the zealot's plasma shield at the weakest point—the junction where mobile shielding overlapped during head movement. The shield flared, absorbed most of the energy, but the slug was designed for exactly this kind of work. It carried enough mass and velocity to breach a weakened barrier and continue into the target.
The zealot dropped.
Jake cycled the bolt, chambered another round, and shifted position before the body had finished falling. Standard Ghost protocol: fire, relocate, leave nothing for them to trace back to your firing point.
But the Protoss were faster to react than Dominion soldiers.
Within seconds of the kill, Jake felt a ripple spread through the Tal'darim psionic network—a pulse of attention, sharp and focused, that swept across the ridgeline like a searchlight. They hadn't seen the shot. They'd felt their brother die. The severance of one mind from their collective network was an alarm that no amount of sound suppression could prevent.
Jake pressed flat against the rock and pulled his senses inward, making himself as small as possible in the psionic landscape. The Zerg-patterned part of his neural architecture actually helped here—its frequency was so alien to the Protoss that it didn't register as a human psionic signature. He was a dark spot in a field of light. Present, but unreadable.
The searchlight passed over him.
Moved on.
Jake exhaled and started moving again.
Below, Raynor's assault was in full swing. The Raiders pushed through the canyon in a wedge formation, vehicles leading, infantry advancing in their wake. The Tal'darim met them head-on with the kind of commitment that only zealots could muster—no retreat, no conservation of forces, every warrior engaging as if death in defense of the temple was the highest honor available to them.
Which, for the Tal'darim, it probably was.
Jake worked down the ridge toward the temple, using the chaos of the main engagement as cover for his approach. He paused twice to take shots—both long-range, both on priority targets. A high templar building a psionic storm above the Raider advance got a penetrator round through the shoulder that broke his concentration and dropped the forming storm before it could discharge. A stalker—a mechanical walker chassis piloted by the essence of a dead Protoss—took a round to the joint housing of its forward leg, buckling the limb and dropping it to the ground where Raider fire finished it off.
Each shot cost him position. Every time he fired, the Tal'darim network pulsed again, searching for the source, tightening the net of attention across the dig site. He could feel them narrowing the search area with each kill.
He reached the temple's outer wall and dropped from the ridge to ground level. The fall was twelve feet—enough to jar a normal person's knees badly. Jake's legs absorbed the impact like coiled springs, the enhanced muscle and bone density the Zerg had built into him converting what should have been a hard landing into a controlled crouch. He was moving again before the dust settled.
The structure was massive up close—Xel'Naga architecture, older than anything the Protoss had built, carved from material that didn't match any geological survey of the planet. It hummed beneath his feet, a vibration he felt through his soles and deeper, in the parts of his nervous system that responded to psionic energy the way a compass responded to magnetic north.
Something was inside that temple. Something powerful. He'd felt the first artifact through two bulkheads back on the Hyperion. This one was stronger. Closer. Louder.
Jake moved along the outer wall until he found an access point—a gap in the stone where excavation equipment had been set up and abandoned. He slipped through, cloak still active, and entered the temple interior.
Inside, the air changed. Cooler. Heavier. Charged with a density that pressed against his senses like standing at the bottom of a deep pool. The Xel'Naga construction amplified whatever energy the artifact was producing, channeling it through the walls and floor in patterns that made his teeth ache.
Two Tal'darim guards stood in the corridor ahead. Both armed, both alert, their psi-blades casting blue-white light across the ancient stone.
Jake reached for an EMP charge on his belt.
The device was small enough to palm. He armed it with a twist of the cap, counted to three, and rolled it along the floor toward the guards.
The EMP detonated with a flat, electric crack that killed every energy field within fifteen meters. Plasma shields collapsed. Psi-blades flickered and died. The corridor lights went dark.
Jake fired twice. Two controlled bursts from the C-10, muzzle flash illuminating the corridor in brief, harsh pulses.
Both guards fell.
He advanced through the temple's interior, navigating by a combination of the structural layout and his spatial perception. The artifact's energy signature grew stronger with every step—a pulsing, rhythmic broadcast that resonated somewhere deep in his brainstem.
Then something changed outside.
A new presence slammed into his senses like a wall of static—massive, distributed, and horrifyingly familiar.
Zerg.
Jake stopped dead in the corridor. His Zerg-patterned architecture lit up before he could stop it. The swarm was approaching from the north—hundreds of signatures, moving fast, pouring over the terrain in a wave of chitin and hunger and collective purpose.
They weren't here for the Raiders.
They were here for the artifact.
Outside, the battle transformed. The orderly engagement between Raiders and Tal'darim shattered into chaos as Zerg forces hit both sides simultaneously. Jake could hear it through the temple walls—the screech of zerglings, the heavy impact of roaches breaching defensive lines, the sharp crack of Protoss energy weapons redirecting toward the new threat.
Raynor's voice crackled over the comm. "Jake, we've got Zerg incoming from the north. Whole damn swarm showed up for the party. Tell me you're close to that artifact."
"Inside the temple. Close."
"Then move faster. We're not going to hold this position much longer."
Jake broke into a run.
The temple's inner chamber was a vast, circular space with a ceiling that vanished into shadow. Xel'Naga glyphs covered the walls—angular, precise, cut into the stone with craftsmanship that made them look more grown than carved. In the center of the room, mounted on a pedestal of the same alien material, sat the artifact piece.
It was smaller than the first one. Maybe two feet across, asymmetric, glowing with a pale gold light that shifted in slow, organic patterns across its surface. The energy it produced was enormous relative to its size—a concentrated broadcast that filled the chamber and pressed against Jake's skull.
Three Tal'darim stood guard inside the chamber. Two zealots with active psi-blades. One high templar, robed and radiating psionic energy, standing directly in front of the pedestal.
But Jake's attention was on the walls.
Lining the chamber at regular intervals, set into alcoves carved from the Xel'Naga stone, stood statues. Protoss figures, twice life-size, crafted from a dark crystalline material that absorbed the artifact's golden light rather than reflecting it. They stood in warrior poses—blades raised, stances wide—and they were old. Older than the Tal'darim. Older than the temple itself, maybe.
Horner's briefing echoed in his mind. Guardian constructs. Activated by proximity to the artifact or attempts to remove it.
Jake counted six of them.
The high templar's head turned toward Jake's position. Toward the empty space where Jake stood, cloaked and silent. The templar couldn't see him. But he could feel something—his eyes narrowed in concentration, psionic pressure tightening as he extended his perception outward, searching.
Jake didn't have time for subtlety.
He pulled two EMP charges from his belt, armed both, and threw them in a spreading arc across the chamber. The first landed near the zealots. The second rolled to a stop at the base of the pedestal.
Both detonated.
The chamber went dark. Shields collapsed. Psi-blades died. The high templar's gathering energy dispersed in a crackling wave that grounded itself into the stone.
Jake decloaked and fired.
The first zealot took a penetrator round center mass before his shields could regenerate. The second charged—fast, terrifyingly fast, even without psi-blades, closing the distance with raw physical speed that no human could match.
But Jake wasn't a normal human anymore.
He sidestepped with reflexes that operated faster than conscious thought, the Zerg-enhanced neural pathways firing his muscles before his brain finished processing the threat. He put two rounds into the zealot at close range. The first hit armor. The second found the gap at the shoulder joint and the warrior went down.
The high templar raised both hands. Even without his full power, the psionic energy that gathered between his palms made Jake's skull ring like a struck bell. The Zerg pathways in his brain screamed in protest—raw, biological rejection of the Protoss frequency at close range.
Jake leveled the C-10 and fired three times. The first two rounds staggered the templar. The third punched through the weakened point where his barrier was still reforming after the EMP.
The templar fell.
Jake moved to the pedestal. Blood ran from his nose—the biological friction of operating his modified brain inside a space saturated with Protoss energy. His ears rang. His vision was edged with a bright halo that pulsed in time with his heartbeat.
He reached for the artifact.
The moment his fingers touched the surface, two things happened simultaneously.
The artifact's energy detonated through his neural pathways.
And every statue in the chamber opened its eyes.