Chapter 45: The Price of Attachment
The silence was the point.
Yin Lie sat cross-legged on the cold floor of Su Li's sterile safe house, the city a silent, glittering jewel outside the panoramic window. He was not resting. He was diving. For weeks, this had been his training: to look inward, past the snarling wolf and the patient ice, and into the terrifying, alien heart of the Keystone.
It was no longer a nauseating storm of overlapping visions. With agonizing practice, he had learned to focus, to find the quiet center of the hurricane. Now, he could deliberately access the Keystone's sight. The world of matter would fall away, replaced by a sublime, terrifying web of pure energy. He could see the life force of the city pulsing through power conduits like a circulatory system, the faint, shimmering auras of the people in the spire below, and the cold, dead spots of dense, inert matter. He was learning the language of creation, one syllable at a time. It was this vision that allowed him to find the flaws in security systems, to see the stress points in a structure, to anticipate a variant's power before it was even unleashed.
He was becoming a scalpel. And Su Li was waiting to aim him.
The chime of an incoming, encrypted message broke his concentration. He opened his eyes, the world of concrete and light snapping back into focus with a faint sense of disappointment. The message was from Chen Gu, a simple string of text.
*Found the next link. First Wave Medical Outpost 12. Decommissioned. It's where they treated… early failures. Unstable variants who couldn't handle their gifts. There are ghosts there, Lie. And old data.*
A cold knot formed in Yin Lie's stomach. A place for broken things. It felt too close to home.
Before he could reply, a priority alert, hot and frantic, seared across his private network. It was a single, repeating emergency signal, broadcast on a frequency only he would recognize. It was from Dr. An.
He was on his feet in an instant, the meditative calm shattering into a thousand shards of ice and fury. He slammed his fist on the comm panel. "Dr. An! Report!"
Only static answered. But through the static, he could hear it. The sharp crackle of energy weapons and a sound he recognized with a visceral horror—the low, predatory hum of Qi Yan's anti-variant suppression technology.
He was already moving, strapping on his gear, his mind a blizzard of tactical calculations. Su Li's hologram shimmered into life in the middle of the room, her expression for once devoid of its usual placid amusement. It was sharp, cold, and analytical.
"Qi Yan's new unit. They call themselves the Purifiers," she said without preamble, her voice clipped. "They bypassed my outer perimeter alerts. They are not his usual brutes. They are fanatics. Equipped with localized suppression fields. This is not a capture mission, Yin Lie. This is an eradication."
"He's trying to draw me out," Yin Lie snarled, pulling on his gauntlets.
"He is trying to burn away your support structure," Su Li corrected, her eyes like chips of obsidian. "To leave you utterly alone. My Guardians are en route, but they will not be there in time to prevent the initial assault. The choice is yours. Go, and you walk into a perfect trap. Stay, and you lose one of the only pieces on the board who sees you as a person."
The choice was an illusion. He was already gone, smashing the emergency exit panel and leaping from the 80th floor. He didn't fall. He guided his descent, using controlled blasts of ice against the building's facade to slow his momentum, a human avalanche of controlled fury.
---
The street where Dr. An's clinic stood was a warzone. The air was thick with the smell of burnt herbs and ozone. Black-clad Purifiers, their helmets glowing with a sickening violet light, had formed a perimeter. Their suppression field was a visible, shimmering dome over the block, causing the neon signs to flicker and die.
Yin Lie landed in the alley behind the clinic, the edge of the field a palpable wall of psychic static. The wolf inside him whined, and the ice felt sluggish. This was a larger, more stable version of the field he'd faced in Qi Yan's lab.
He didn't charge in. He closed his eyes, forcing the Keystone's vision to the surface. He saw it. The suppression dome was not a solid wall, but a network of interlocking energy streams, originating from devices on the Purifiers' backs. It was a net, and every net has knots. He saw the weakest point—a junction where three streams converged, the energy fluctuating, unstable.
He moved, a shadow hugging the wall. He reached the edge of the dome. He placed one hand on the brick wall beside him, the other on the asphalt of the street. Then, he acted.
He didn't attack the field. He attacked its foundation. A web of absolute cold shot from his hands, not a wild blast, but a precise injection of entropy. He didn't freeze the wall; he made the mortar between the bricks so brittle it turned to dust. He didn't freeze the street; he turned the tar into fragile, cracked glass.
With a groan of protesting matter, a five-foot section of the building and the street beneath it collapsed inward, tearing a momentary, ragged hole in the energy net. He was through.
The clinic was a ruin, its front blown wide open. Two Purifiers stood over a shattered counter. There was no sign of Dr. An.
"He's in," one of them said, turning.
From the shadows of the dispensary, a third figure emerged. She was not a Purifier. She wore the immaculate, severe uniform of a Directorate Inspector. Her black hair was cut in a sharp bob, and her intelligent eyes held a cold, professional calm.
Inspector Kai.
"You are predictable, Frost Wolf," she said, her voice even. "Your attachments are a liability. Qi Yan knew it. And so did I."
It was a trap layered within a trap. Qi Yan's attack had been the bait, and the Directorate's top hunter was the one waiting to spring it.
"Where is she?" Yin Lie growled, his power coiling, fighting against the oppressive field.
"The old woman has been secured," Kai stated. "By my people. She is a material witness and will be treated as such. You, however, are an unregistered Alpha-class threat who has just violated a Directorate quarantine. You will come with me."
Her hand glowed with its familiar, golden light. The harmonization field. It reached for him, trying to silence the storm within.
But he was not the same man she had faced in the archive.
He met her gaze, and let the Keystone see her. He saw her power not as a void, but as an intricate, beautiful wave of energy, perfectly tuned to counter his own chaotic frequency. He couldn't break it. He couldn't overpower it.
So he would bend the world around it.
He stomped his foot on the floor. The clinic was old. Water pipes ran beneath the floorboards. With a focused act of will, he flash-froze the water in every pipe in the building.
The result was catastrophic. With a series of shrieking, explosive reports, every pipe in the clinic burst simultaneously. Shrapnel of old copper and iron tore through the walls. Geysers of freezing water erupted from the floor. He had turned the building's circulatory system into a volley of makeshift grenades.
Kai was forced back, her neutralization field flickering as she shielded herself from the chaos. In that split second of disruption, Yin Lie acted. He didn't attack her. He slammed his palms together, and the entire building groaned as a glacier of solid ice bloomed from the inside out, encasing the structure, the Purifiers, and the Inspector in a glittering, temporary tomb.
He burst out through the weakened back wall just as Su Li's Guardians arrived, their white outfits pristine against the urban decay.
"Dr. An?" he demanded, his voice raw.
"Secure," the male twin, Feng, stated. "The Mistress was… alerted to a potential complication. She moved the asset before Qi Yan's forces arrived."
Yin Lie stared at him, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, brutal clarity. Su Li had known. She had let the attack happen, let him walk into the trap, all to gauge the reactions of both him and the Directorate. She had saved Dr. An not for his sake, but to keep a valuable piece on the board under her direct control.
He had won the battle, escaped the trap, and knew his friend was safe. But in that moment, he had never felt less free. He was a wolf who had been allowed to run, only to find the spider had already built a new web right where he was going.
The hunt for Chimera was no longer just a mission. It was personal. Qi Yan had tried to take his heart. Su Li was trying to own his soul. And the Directorate wanted to put him in a cage.
A low growl rumbled in his chest, turning the vapor of his breath to smoke in the cold night. They would all learn the price of attachment.