The air in the forward scout post was thin and tasted like iron. It was a frozen burrow dug into the side of a lesser peak, offering a gut-churning view of the massive glacier where the Vault lay hidden. Valen arrived like a storm coming to rest, his snow-runner coughing ice crystals as he killed the engine. Two trackers flanked him, hauling a heavily insulated crate between them.

The scout in charge, a wiry woman named Sera with eyes permanently narrowed against the glare, didn't salute. Out here, formality got you killed. "You're late. The Northern patrol patterns have shifted. They're antsy."

"Everyone's antsy," Valen grunted, his breath pluming. "Where's Talon?"

Sera jerked her head towards the back of the ice cave. Talon, their best forward observer, was a ghost of a man who could disappear into a snowdrift. He was hunched over a high-powered scope, his body perfectly still. Valen approached, the crate left by the entrance.

"Report," Valen said, his voice dropping.

Talon didn't look up. His voice was a dry rasp. "The main drill site. They've got it half-assembled. Looks like a metal god's tooth trying to bite the mountain. Guards are thick as flies on carrion. Shift change is in twenty." He finally glanced at Valen, his face all sharp angles and old frostbite scars. "You brought my present?"

Valen gestured. The trackers brought the crate over, opening it with reverence. Inside, nestled in heating coils, was the shield emitter. It was a humble-looking thing, a dull metal disc with a single, softly glowing crystal at its center.

Talon stared at it, then at Valen. "That's it? That's the miracle that's gonna let me tap-dance past Northern energy rifles?"

"It worked on a crossbow bolt," Valen said, his tone leaving no room for debate. "Alpha's orders. You get it to the secondary vantage." He pointed to a location on Talon's hand-drawn map, a precarious ledge even closer to the Vault's theoretical entrance. "You observe. You report. You do not engage. Your only job is to be our eye when the stasis drops and the shitstorm starts. This," he tapped the emitter, "is to make sure you live long enough to tell us what you see."

Talon's skepticism didn't fade, but a glint of professional interest sparked in his eyes. He was a man who appreciated specialized tools. He picked up the emitter. It was warm, humming with a vibration that felt more like a purr than a machine. "Battery?"

"Unknown. Don't waste it. Activate only if you have to."

Sera came over, her expression grim. "There's something else. An hour ago, we caught a flicker on the thermal. Small group, moving fast and clean from the southeast. Not Northern. Not ours. They vanished near the lower ice flows."

The Southerners. Liana's team. Valen's jaw tightened. They were here. Playing their own game. "Ignore them. They're not your concern. Talon's insertion is. Can you get him there unseen?"

Sera gave a thin, feral smile. "I know a crevasse route the birds don't even use. It'll freeze your balls off, but it's quiet." She looked at Talon. "You ready to be a ghost, old man?"

Talon was already fitting the emitter into a custom slot on his chest harness. "Been a ghost for twenty years, girl. Just getting a new set of sheets."

---

Kael felt the shift through the bond. The grim determination was still there, but layered over it now was a sharp, focused watchfulness. Lyra was observing something. Something that gave her a sliver of hope. It steadied him.

He was in the armory, a place of familiar, comforting scents of oiled leather and cold steel. He wasn't there to admire the weapons. He was there to issue one.

Ronan stood beside him as Kael opened a sealed case that hadn't been touched since his father's death. Inside, on a bed of black velvet, lay a pair of knives. They were not Silverfang design. The blades were a dark, smokey alloy, the hilts wrapped in the leather of a beast no one could name. They were taken from a Crimson Paw chieftain his father had killed in single combat. Trophies of a hated enemy.

Kael lifted one. It was perfectly balanced, a tool for killing with intimate, brutal efficiency. "Find Grynn," he said, his voice echoing in the stone vault. "Give him this. Tell him it belonged to the man who slaughtered his brother at the Battle of Blackwater Ford."

Ronan stared. "You're giving him a relic of his own defeat? A reminder of your father's brutality?"

"I'm giving him a weapon soaked in his own people's blood and pain," Kael corrected, his gaze hard. "I'm telling him to turn it on the people who truly caused that pain. The ones who poisoned my father's mind with their Purist lies and set him on that path. Let his vengeance be precise."

It was a dangerous, psychological gambit. It acknowledged Silverfang's past crimes while redirecting the rage. Ronan took the knife, the weight of the gesture heavy in his hand. "He might just use it on you."

"Then we'll deal with that too," Kael said. "But I don't think he will. The broadcast changed the math. He hates Alaric more than he hates me now. I'm just giving his hate a sharper edge."

As Ronan left, Elias entered, his face animated. "I found it! The Purist weakness!"

Kael turned. "Show me."

"It's in their early writings, before the Schism turned violent. They were obsessed with purity of lineage. With pedigrees. They kept meticulous genetic records. It was their pride." Elias pulled up a data page on a tablet. "When the war started, the Unified Council did something… insidious. They released a counter-virus. Not a biological one. A data virus. It targeted those records. It scrambled them. Created false positives, hidden crossbreeds in the purest family trees."

Kael's eyes narrowed. "So their sacred bloodlines are a fiction."

"Worse than fiction," Elias said, a grim smile on his face. "The virus was designed to lay dormant and activate generations later. To create 'Concordance Marks' in children born of 'pure' parents. To make their greatest fear bloom in their own nurseries."

The implications slammed into Kael. "Alaric… his fanaticism…"

"It might not just be ideology," Elias whispered. "What if the mark he's so desperate to erase from Lyra… is a ghost in his own mirror? What if the reason he sees her as such a personal abomination is because, on some level, he knows?"

The pieces clicked into place with terrifying clarity. Alaric wasn't just fighting a war. He was fighting a phantom in his own blood. It explained the obsessive, personal hatred. It made him not just a enemy, but a tragedy. And a tragedy with nothing left to lose was the most volatile thing of all.

"The broadcast," Kael said slowly. "It didn't just tell the world the truth. It might have just told Alaric a truth about himself he's spent his whole life running from." He looked at Elias. "We need to find those records. The original Purist lineages. If we can prove it, if we can show his own people that their leader carries the very 'taint' he preaches against…"

"It would destroy him," Elias finished. "But the data chip only has the Unified archives. The Purist records, if they still exist, would be in the Iron Citadel. Or deep in the Northern clan's own sealed vaults."

Another impossible task. Kael let out a slow breath. "Then we file that away. For now, we fight the monster. We save my mate. We can worry about the man's broken heart later."

---

The ice tunnel was a blue, claustrophobic nightmare. Liana led, moving with a silence that seemed to absorb sound. Finn followed, his pack of gear feeling like it was made of lead, his lungs burning in the thin, frozen air. The two other scouts, Rhen and Koro, were shadows behind him.

They stopped at a fissure in the ice. Below, through a lattice of natural blue crystal, they could see it: the power nexus. It was a squat, ugly bunker of plasteel and rock, humming with a deep, angry energy. Pipes thick as ancient trees pulsed with stolen geothermal heat, feeding into a central transformer before snaking off towards the distant drill site. Four Northern guards in full environment suits patrolled the perimeter.

"Window is open," Finn whispered, checking his modified scanner. The usual cascade of sensor data from the bunker was a confused, looping mess. "You have twelve minutes. Maybe fourteen if their sys-admin is incompetent."

"Twelve is a lifetime," Liana murmured. She nodded to Rhen and Koro. They melted away into the ice, taking up flanking positions with compact, powerful-looking crossbows.

Liana pulled a device from her pack—not a weapon, but a complex arrangement of crystals and wires. A Sun-Kissed charge. "You stay here," she told Finn. "If this goes wrong, you run. You get back to your Alpha and you tell him what we tried to do."

Finn nodded, his throat too tight to speak.

Liana slipped out of the fissure and became one with the shifting shadows of the ice field. Finn watched, his heart in his throat, as she moved from cover to cover with impossible grace. She was ten meters from the bunker wall when a guard turned, his helmet scanning the area.

Finn held his breath. Liana didn't freeze. She sank slowly down behind a wind-sculpted serac, becoming just another irregularity in the ice.

The guard's scan passed over her. He turned back.

Liana closed the final distance in a blur. She placed the charge against the base of the main power conduit, where it met the bunker wall. She set it, her fingers moving with swift certainty.

Then she was moving back, retracing her steps.

A sharp, metallic clang echoed through the canyon.

Everyone froze.

One of the other guards had kicked a loose piece of plasteel shielding.

Liana was caught in the open, halfway between the bunker and the nearest cover.

The guard who had kicked the shielding looked up, his helmeted head swiveling. His gaze locked on the figure crouched in the middle of the field.

Time seemed to stretch. Finn saw Liana's options play out in his head—run, fight, die.

She did none of those things.

She stood up. Slowly. Deliberately. She pulled down her desert scarf, revealing her face to the icy wind and the four raised energy rifles. And she smiled.

It was a challenging, defiant smile that held no fear.

The lead guard hesitated. The sight of this strange, unarmed woman smiling at them was so utterly wrong it broke his combat protocol for a critical second.

That second was all Rhen and Koro needed.

Two crossbow bolts, silent and deadly, took the two furthest guards in the gaps of their environment suits. They crumpled without a sound.

The remaining two guards spun, weapons seeking new targets.

Liana was already moving. She sprinted not away, but past the bunker, drawing their fire. Energy bolts sizzled into the ice where she'd been.

Koro's second bolt took the third guard in the neck.

The last guard, panicked, turned his rifle back towards Liana.

A final bolt from Rhen punched through his helmet visor.

Silence rushed back in, broken only by the hum of the nexus and the moan of the wind.

Liana didn't pause. She ran back to the charge, checked it, and gave Finn a sharp wave.

Get back.

Finn scrambled back into the depths of the fissure just as the world behind him flashed a searing, actinic blue-white. The sound was a deep, wet THOOM that was felt more than heard, a punch to the chest that knocked the air from his lungs. A cascade of sparks and shattered plasteel erupted from the nexus bunker. The deep hum stuttered, choked, and died.

The artery had been cut.

Liana slid into the fissure beside him, her breathing fast but controlled. She didn't look triumphant. She looked… satisfied. "Window's closed," she said. "Let's go. The hounds will be here soon."

As they fled back through the blue tunnels, Finn knew the price of their window. Alaric's drill was crippled, but he had just been shown his vulnerability. The desperate man was now a wounded, desperate man. And the clock was still ticking.

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