CHAPTER TWO: THE HIVE

The Shrieker hive pulsed in the ruins like a rotten heart, its rhythm syncopated with the groans of collapsing infrastructure. Kael counted twelve distinct tremors in the past hour—each one sending fresh cascades of rust flakes snowing from the factory's skeletal remains. He adjusted his crouch on the I-beam, feeling the Creeper-hide scarf tighten around his neck in response. The Nsibidi glyphs stitched into its lining prickled against his skin, their warning clear: *The hive knows you're here.*

Below, the Shriekers moved with the eerie coordination of a single mind. Their numbers kept shifting—fifteen, then eighteen, then back to twelve as scouts vanished into the ruins. Bone-white talons left phosphorescent trails in the dust, marking paths only they could follow. The nest itself was a grotesque parody of human engineering: the husk of a UWN carrier, its thorned-circle insignia half-melted, now webbed with strands of bioluminescent mucus that throbbed like exposed nerves.

"Remember." Madam's voice crackled through the comm bead in his ear, distorted by Abyssal interference. "Spine shots only. No theatrics." A pause. "And Kael? Try not to get swallowed this time."

He exhaled through his nose. The last hive had cost him a boot and nearly a foot when a dying Shrieker's maw snapped shut on his ankle. The scar still ached when it rained.

Kael dropped without acknowledging the order.

The fall lasted just long enough for his machetes to clear their holsters—twin arcs of blackened steel singing through the chemical haze. The first Shrieker died cleanly, its scream cut short as the blade severed the neural cluster between its third and fourth thoracic segments. The second came at him sideways, talons extended in a vicious horizontal slash. He ducked beneath the strike and bisected its knee tendons, then pivoted to drive his other blade through its eye socket as it collapsed.

Chaos erupted behind him. Madam's enhanced squad breached through a collapsed wall, their modular armor humming with the telltale whine of capacitor banks charging. Electric rounds turned the air ozone-sharp, stitching precise patterns across the Shriekers' formations. Private Vasquez's flash-charge detonated near the nest entrance, temporarily blinding three scouts—their shrieks spiked at a frequency that made Kael's teeth vibrate.

He barely registered it. The Contract was awake now, its black tendrils squirming beneath his skin, drinking in the violence. His vision tunneled to the next target—a Shrieker perched on the overhead scaffolding, its distended abdomen pulsing with fresh eggs.

Shadow-walk.

The world dissolved into static for half a heartbeat as the scarf's glyphs flared. Then he was behind it, left machete pinning its thorax to the beam while the right carved upward through the jaw. The Shrieker's mandibles spasmed, spraying acidic blood in a wide arc. Most sizzled harmlessly against his treated leathers, but a single drop caught his cheekbone. The pain was exquisite—a white-hot brand that cut through the Contract's haze just long enough for him to notice the aberration.

This Shrieker's blood wasn't the usual oily black. It shimmered.

The realization came too late. Pain detonated along his spine as the Contract *reacted*, veins blackening like ink spreading through water. His muscles locked, then released in a violent spasm that sent him crashing to the factory floor between two advancing scouts.

They screamed in unison.

Kael answered with steel.

The next five minutes existed only in fragments:

—A blade buried to the hilt in chitin, twisted to scramble the nerve cord beneath.

—The wet pop of a Shrieker's air bladder rupturing under his boot.

—Vasquez shouting a warning as friendly fire grazed his shoulder.

—The hunger, always the hunger, gnawing at the edges of his control.

"Kael!"

Madam's gauntlet closed around his wrist with enough force to fracture unenhanced bones. Her ocular implant cycled through diagnostics, the red glare highlighting the fresh cracks in her armor's left pauldron. "It's over."

His machete was already at her gut, its edge kissing the vulnerable gap between her chestplate and abdominal plating.

She didn't flinch. "Look around, kid."

The battlefield resolved into clarity. Twitching Shrieker corpses. Vasquez kneeling over a wounded trooper, her medkit spraying coagulant into a thigh wound. The nest's bioluminescent webbing dimming as whatever passed for a hive mind died with its queens.

And the smell—ozone and acid and something sweetly rotten, like fruit left to ferment in a sealed room.

Movement near the collapsed conveyor belt. A scavenger emerged, his patchwork armor cobbled together from UWN surplus and Shrieker carapaces. The man's hands shook as he reached out, his voice cracking on the oldest plea in the Dead Zone:

"P-please... you're human, right?"

Kael stared at the outstretched hand. He could count the bones through the man's papery skin.

Their fingers brushed—

The scavenger recoiled as the Contract's markings surged up Kael's arm, their pattern resolving into the unmistakable sigil of an Abyssal pact. "N-no, you're—"

Madam stepped between them. "Camp's twelve klicks northeast. Pray nothing picks up your scent before you get there." She tossed him a spent charge pack—barely enough scrap to trade for half a meal.

The walk back was silent but for the wind combing through the ruins. Kael monitored the scavenger's limping progress until he vanished behind a dune of collapsed roofing. The scarf's glyphs flickered intermittently, reacting to something even the Nsibidi couldn't quite conceal.

Then his machete pulsed.

Not the steady glow of residual charge, but a staccato series of flares—three long, two short. A pattern.

The earth trembled in response.

---

**Dead Zone Outskirts**

The wounded Shrieker dragged itself through the corpse of a pre-Collapse skyscraper, its shattered hind limb leaving a trail of iridescent ichor. The substance hissed where it pooled, eating through concrete like acid through parchment.

Above, the fog stirred.

First came the sound—a subsonic rumble that sent rubble skittering across the ground. Then the shadow, vast enough to eclipse what remained of the street. Obsidian plates ground together as the titan lowered its head, twin embers burning where eyes should be. Its breath smelled of molten metal and something older than language.

The Shrieker had just enough time to raise its remaining talons in futile defense before the foot came down.

The impact registered on seismographs three sectors away.

As the titan withdrew into the mist, a single obsidian scale clattered to the ground beside the Shrieker's remains. The ichor avoided it entirely, flowing around the fragment like water repelled by oil.

Kael's blade went dark.