The rain over the old Med-Tech district was a drizzle of liquid static, blurring the neon signs into watercolor smears. Down here, in the concrete skeleton of a forgotten age, progress had rotted, leaving behind a graveyard of abandoned clinics and research labs. This was Yin Lie's hunting ground.
He stood on the edge of a crumbling rooftop, a ghost in the downpour. The months since the archive heist had been a relentless education in survival. The chaotic war within him had forged a new, terrifying synthesis. The wolf was no longer just rage; it was the engine of his will, a predatory instinct that saw the world as a network of threats and opportunities. The ice was not just a shield; it was a scalpel, capable of surgical precision. And the Keystone… the Keystone was his third eye.
His vision was a constant, controlled overlay of three realities. He saw the world in the wolf's thermal reds, the ice's monochrome of structural integrity, and the Keystone's shimmering, geometric web of pure energy. It was a symphony of information he had learned to conduct, not just endure.
"Status, Lie," Chen Gu's voice, a gravelly whisper through his encrypted comm, was the only anchor to his old life.
"I'm in position," Yin Lie replied, his gaze fixed on his target: The Synapse. A First Wave Neuro-Archive, a place where data wasn't stored on silicon, but in vast, silent vats of bio-engineered neural gel. "The last listening post. If Chimera's location is anywhere, it's in there."
"This is Su Li's intel," Chen Gu warned. "It could be a cage. Be ready for the door to lock behind you."
"Every door is a cage, old man," Yin Lie murmured, and pushed off the roof.
He fell into the chasm between buildings, his coat flaring like a raven's wing. A precisely aimed sliver of ice shot from his fingertip, striking a rusted fire escape and creating a perfect, silent anchor point. He swung, using the momentum to crash through the reinforced window of the Synapse's fifth floor.
Inside was a cathedral of dead science. The air was cold and smelled of antiseptic and ozone. Massive glass vats, filled with a faintly glowing, milky gel, lined the cavernous chamber. Within the gel, phantom shapes of light pulsed and danced—the ghosts of stored information.
Yin Lie moved with a silence that was absolute. The Keystone's vision showed him the energy conduits in the floor, the faint bio-signatures of the gel, the dormant security systems. He was a virus slipping through a sleeping network.
He reached the central core, a massive cylindrical vat where the primary data was held. Following Chen Gu's instructions, he placed a neural interface spike against the glass. "I'm in. Beginning the data siphon."
"Careful," Chen Gu's voice crackled. "The core's defense system is psychic. It will try to pull you in, drown you in dead memories."
The moment the connection established, the pressure hit. A wave of disembodied emotions and fractured memories washed over him—fear, joy, scientific curiosity, the terror of a test subject's last moments. He braced himself, letting his own internal ice form a firewall around his consciousness, a shield of cold logic against the storm of ghost data.
The data transfer crawled. Ten percent… twenty percent…
A soft, clear voice cut through the silence of the room. "The gravitational anomaly is stronger here. The ghost is in the machine."
Yin Lie's head snapped up. Standing at the far end of the chamber, her form-fitting Directorate uniform untouched by the dust of the ruin, was Inspector Kai. She wasn't holding a weapon, only her small, advanced scanner. She had made no sound. Her energy signature was a placid, controlled void. She had hunted him not by his power, but by the fundamental truth of what he was.
"Inspector," Yin Lie said, his voice flat. He didn't break the data siphon. "You came alone. That's either brave or foolish."
"It's efficient," Kai replied, taking a slow step forward. "My squad would only get in the way. This isn't about force, Yin Lie. It's about a fundamental disagreement on the nature of order. You represent chaos—a loose variable that threatens the entire system."
"I represent freedom," he countered, the ice around his mind holding steady against the psychic onslaught from the core. "Your 'order' is just a prettier cage."
Fifty percent…
"A cage protects," she said, her voice still unnervingly calm as she advanced. "It contains. That thing inside you, the Keystone… it's a spark. You are a walking powder keg in a city made of gasoline. My job is to disarm you before you burn everything to the ground."
Her hand glowed with its familiar, faint golden light. The neutralizing field.
Yin Lie felt the subtle shift as she drew closer. The connection between his three powers began to fray. The wolf snarled, the ice wavered.
He couldn't fight her. Not head-on. So he would have to change the battlefield.
Seventy-five percent…
"It's over," Kai stated, now only twenty feet away. "There's nowhere to run."
"You're right," Yin Lie said. And with a roar that was a mix of human will and lupine fury, he didn't pull his power back. He pushed it forward. Not at Kai, but through the spike, deep into the neuro-archive's core.
He wasn't just downloading data. He was uploading chaos.
The central vat, which had been glowing with a soft, ethereal light, flashed a violent, angry crimson. Alarms that had been silent for decades shrieked to life. The ghost data in the core, force-fed a cocktail of primal rage and absolute cold, began to corrupt, to break down. The disembodied memories began to manifest, lashing out like psychic tentacles.
Kai cried out, staggering back as a wave of pure, unfiltered terror—the memory of a dying soldier—washed over her. Her neutralizing field flickered as her concentration was shattered.
Ninety-eight… ninety-nine… one hundred percent.
Yin Lie ripped the spike free, the downloaded data secure. The Synapse was in its death throes. The vats were cracking, weeping glowing gel onto the floor. The psychic shriek from the core was now a physical, deafening roar.
"This is illogical!" Kai yelled, shielding her face from the psychic fallout. "You'll bring the whole structure down!"
"I told you," Yin Lie shouted back over the din, already sprinting for the shattered window. "I'm not a variable. I'm the chaos!"
He dove out into the rain-swept night just as the core behind him overloaded, blowing the top of the Synapse skyward in a silent, beautiful, terrifying eruption of phantom light.
He landed hard on a lower roof, rolling to absorb the impact. A sleek, black stealth hovercraft, completely unmarked, decloaked beside him—Su Li's extraction. The side door hissed open.
He climbed inside, his body screaming with exhaustion. He looked back at the Synapse, now a burning torch of light and memory, before the craft banked and shot into the clouds.
He was safe. He had the data.
He plugged the spike into the craft's terminal, his hands trembling. The file opened. It was another log, but this one was different. It was video. A panicked, haggard scientist stared into the camera, alarms flashing behind him.
"It's not a matriarch, Chen Gu!" the scientist on the screen screamed, his words a ghost from two decades past. "We were wrong! It's not a source, it's a… a lock. A prison. Chimera isn't the name of the specimen. It's the name of the cage. And what's inside… God help us, Chen, what we've locked away wants out."
The recording cut to static.
Yin Lie stared at the screen, the hum of the hovercraft's engines fading into nothing. The entire hunt, the entire purpose, had been a lie. They weren't racing to find a god.
They were racing to a prison. And he was carrying the key.