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The silence from the Aethelstan building was deafening. For forty-eight hours after the Odyssey's erasure, the facility went into total lockdown. No deliveries, no personnel changes, no signals. It was a ghost. Jack, Elsa, and Morbius watched from their rooftop perch, the tension stretching thin. They had successfully choked the beast, but a cornered animal was often at its most dangerous.
On the third day, the fortress gasped for air.
The activity wasn't subtle. A convoy of two black, armored SUVs sped out of the underground dock, bypassing the main gate by tearing through a chain-link fence at the rear of the property. They moved with a frantic, aggressive energy that was completely different from their previous clinical precision.
"They're running," Elsa said, her voice tight with anticipation. "They're evacuating their top-tier assets from the city. Probably heading for the hill facility in Bel Air."
Jack's focus, however, was on the scent. He filtered out the diesel and panic, searching for the specific signature he'd been waiting for. He found it in the second SUV: the lead operative, his broken wrist now in a sophisticated-looking cast, his scent a cocktail of pain, fury, and a strange, metallic adrenaline.
"No," Jack corrected her, his eyes glowing with predatory certainty. "They're not just running. They're making a delivery. He's in the second car. They're not taking him to safety. They're taking him to the place where they can fix him fastest. The 'Chimera' facility. They're going to re-arm him and send him right back out."
Morbius's form seemed to solidify, his gaze fixed on the disappearing vehicles. "Then we do not have the luxury of a slow siege. We must intercept. If they reinforce that facility, breaching it becomes impossible."
The plan was born of necessity, a high-risk, high-reward strike. They wouldn't follow the convoy on the winding, easily monitored roads into the hills. They would cut them off at the pass. Literally.
The convoy would have to take Topanga Canyon Boulevard, the main artery snaking through the mountains toward Bel Air. There was a particular stretch, a narrow pass with a sheer rock face on one side and a precipitous drop on the other, where the road doubled back on itself in a tight hairpin turn. It was the perfect place for an ambush.
They moved faster than the cars could hope to. Elsa gunned her motorcycle through side streets, while Jack and Morbius became blurs of motion across the rugged, moonlit terrain of the Santa Monica Mountains, the city lights sprawling below them.
They reached the ambush point minutes before the convoy. The air was cold and clean, scented with sage and dust. Elsa positioned herself on the cliff above the hairpin turn, her rifle ready to disable the lead vehicle's engine. Morbius melted into the shadows of the rock face itself. Jack stood in the center of the road, just beyond the turn, a lone, formidable silhouette under the partial moon.
He didn't need to hide. This wasn't a stealth mission anymore.
This was a challenge.
The roar of the approaching SUVs grew louder, their headlights cutting through the mountain darkness. They took the turn fast, recklessly.
The lead SUV's driver saw the massive, fur-covered form standing in the road and slammed on the brakes, skidding sideways. The second SUV swerved to avoid it, its tires scraping against the guardrail.
In the sudden, stark silence broken only by the idling engines, Jack took a step forward. He could smell their fear, their confusion. He could smell him.
He raised a clawed hand, pointing directly at the second SUV's tinted window.
"He's mine," Jack Russell growled, his voice echoing off the canyon walls. "The rest of you can walk away."
For a moment, there was only the sound of the wind. Then, the doors of both SUVs burst open. But it wasn't panicked scientists who emerged.
It was six figures clad in sleek, graphite-grey combat armor, their faces obscured by full helmets. They moved with a synchronized, enhanced speed that was anything but human. In their hands, they held weapons that glowed with the same malevolent green as the Ambrosia.
The lead operative stepped out last, cradling his injured arm, a triumphant sneer on his face.
"Subject Zero," he called out. "You are persistent. But you have just walked into a product demonstration."
He gestured to the armored soldiers.
"Meet the Aegis Series One. Our answer to the werewolf problem."
The Aegis Series One moved with a chilling, unnatural unison. They didn't fan out like soldiers; they flowed like a single organism, their glowing green weapons humming to life. The air filled with the scent of ozone and something else—synthetic lycanthropy, a crude, aggressive imitation of Jack's own curse.
The lead operative smirked from behind his human wall. "Genetically enhanced strength and reflexes, courtesy of your unique cellular profile. And their weapons are tuned to deliver a neuro-inhibitor derived from the Ambrosia. One shot, and your beast goes to sleep. Permanently."
Before the last word had left his mouth, the night erupted.
A high-powered round from Elsa's rifle, positioned on the cliff above, struck the lead SUV's engine block with a deafening CRACK. The vehicle died instantly, its electronics fried, blocking the road behind them.
Simultaneously, Morbius detached from the shadows of the rock face. He didn't attack the soldiers. He became a vortex of darkness, flowing past them, his target the smug operative. But as he reached for the man, two of the Series One soldiers reacted with impossible speed, their armored forms intercepting him. A gauntlet crackling with green energy slammed into Morbius's chest, throwing him back with a pained hiss. The energy wasn't lethal, but it was disruptive, a shock to his vampiric system.
Jack didn't wait. He charged.
The first soldier raised its weapon. Jack didn't dodge. He met the blast head-on. A wave of nauseating cold washed through him, and for a heart-stopping second, he felt the beast within him stumble, its connection faltering. It was like the suppressor, but cruder, more painful.
But Jack was ready. He had spent days fortifying his mind against this. He focused on the spark of human will, the memory of his mother's face, the promise he'd made. He gritted his teeth and pushed through the inhibition.
He slammed into the soldier, his claws screeching against the advanced armor. He felt the metal buckle under his strength. The soldier was strong, but it wasn't alive. It lacked the instinct, the raw, adaptive fury of a true predator. Jack grabbed its weapon arm and twisted, the sound of tearing metal and synthetic tendons a satisfying crunch.
But the others were on him. A blast from the side caught him in the ribs, and this time the cold was a spike of agony. He roared, stumbling back. They were too coordinated. They were designed to fight him, to counter his every move.
From the cliff, Elsa fired again, but the soldiers' armor deflected the rounds. She was providing distraction, but she couldn't penetrate their defenses.
Morbius recovered, his eyes burning with fury. He changed tactics, using his mist form to confuse them, but the green energy fields their weapons projected seemed to disrupt his intangibility.
They were losing. The Consortium's "product demonstration" was working.
Jack took another blast to the shoulder, the numbness spreading down his arm. He was being herded, cornered against the guardrail. The Series One soldiers advanced, their movements a perfectly choreographed dance of death.
The lead operative laughed. "You see? This is progress. You are obsolete."
In that moment, surrounded and outgunned, Jack realized brute force wasn't the answer. He had to be smarter than the machine. He had to be more unpredictable than their programming.
He looked past the advancing soldiers, to the operative. Then he looked up at the cliff face above Elsa's position. He saw the loose shale, the precarious boulders.
He stopped fighting back. He dropped his guard.
And he howled.
It wasn't a roar of rage. It was a specific, piercing frequency, a call he had learned from the dying Drifter—a sound that resonated not with flesh and blood, but with unstable matter.
He was howling at the mountain itself.
The sound that tore from Jack's throat was not his own. It was a distorted, multi-layered frequency, a sonic key copied from the Dimensional Drifter's final, reality-rending scream. It was a sound that should not exist in a stable universe.
The effect was instantaneous and localized.
The air in the mountain pass shimmered. The Series One soldiers, their systems tuned to biological and energy-based threats, had no protocol for this. Their synchronized advance faltered. The humming of their Ambrosia-powered weapons stuttered, the green glow flickering erratically.
But the primary target was the mountain itself.
The sheer rock face above the convoy vibrated. Loose shale and dust trickled down, then became a cascade. A massive, precariously balanced boulder shifted with a groan of grinding stone that drowned out all other sound.
On the cliff above, Elsa didn't need an explanation. She saw the ripple effect of Jack's howl and understood. She fired two rounds from her rifle—not at the soldiers, but at the key fracture points holding the boulder in place.
The world seemed to hold its breath for a single, silent second.
Then, with a roar that dwarfed the gunfire and the engines, the cliff face gave way.
It wasn't a full-scale avalanche, but a targeted, brutal landslide. Tons of rock and earth poured down onto the road, a deliberate, crushing wave aimed squarely at the center of the convoy. The lead operative's triumphant smirk vanished, replaced by pure, undiluted terror.
The Series One soldiers, programmed for combat, had no instinct for self-preservation against a act of geological violence. Two of them were simply erased, buried under the crushing weight of stone. A third was thrown over the guardrail by the impact, its silent form tumbling into the darkness below.
The remaining soldiers were scattered, their perfect formation broken.
In the chaos, Morbius moved. Freed from the coordinated pressure, he became true death. He flowed through the dust-choked air, a phantom of vengeance. He didn't try to disable them. His hands, sharp as scalpels, found the seams in their armor, tearing out wiring and vital components with brutal efficiency. The green glow of their weapons died, one by one, as he dismantled the Consortium's toys.
Jack ignored the soldiers. His eyes were locked on the lead operative, who was scrambling over rubble, trying to flee back toward the damaged SUV.
Jack leaped over a fallen soldier, his path clearing as Morbius systematically destroyed the others. He landed in front of the operative, blocking his escape. The man looked up, his face a mask of dust, sweat, and utter defeat. The arrogance was gone, burned away by the raw, untamable power he had sought to own.
"You wanted to see the product in action," Jack said, his voice a low growl that vibrated through the settling dust. He gestured to the buried cars, the shattered androids. "You're looking at it."
He reached down, not with a clawed hand, but with a human one. The fur receded, the bones shifting back until it was just Jack Russell's hand that closed around the man's throat. He didn't squeeze. He just held him, forcing the man to meet his gaze.
"Now," Jack said, his voice cold and flat. "You're going to tell me everything about the 'Chimera' facility. And this time, you're not going to leave anything out."
The siege was over. The hunter had become the interrogator.
The operative, whose name was revealed to be Liam Shaw, broke faster than the mountain had. Stripped of his armor, his technology, and the illusion of control, he was just a man—a terrified, pain-wracked man who now understood that the asset he was sent to manage was, in fact, his executioner.
He talked. He told them about the Chimera facility's layout, its security systems that relied on motion-sensing lasers and DNA-locked doors, its power core that was a smaller, stabilized version of the Odyssey's harvesting operation. He gave them the access codes, the shift-change schedules, the location of the central server room.
Most importantly, he gave them the facility's purpose: it wasn't just a lab. It was an archive. The sum total of the Aegis Consortium's research on him. Every scan, every genetic map, every simulation of his behavior under the suppressor—it was all stored there. It was the central brain of the entire Los Angeles operation.
"If you destroy it... you destroy their understanding of you," Shaw panted, clutching his broken wrist. "You become an unknown variable again. It would set them back years."
Jack looked at Elsa and Morbius. This was it. The winning move. Not just another skirmish, but a decapitation strike.
They left Shaw tied up in the back of the remaining functional SUV for the authorities to find, along with a digital packet of incriminating data Elsa prepared. The Aegis Consortium could try to silence him, but the evidence would already be in the wind.
The journey to Bel Air was a silent, focused pilgrimage. They used Shaw's codes to bypass the outer perimeter, moving like ghosts through the manicured estates and silent, wealthy streets. The Chimera facility was disguised as a private, ultra-exclusive medical spa, nestled behind high walls and immaculate gardens.
From a ridge overlooking the property, they saw it was on high alert. Patrols of Series One soldiers marched the grounds, their movements more fluid and confident than the ones in the canyon. The place was a fortress, but they held the blueprints in their hands.
"The server room is in the sub-basement," Elsa whispered, studying the layout on a tablet. "Heaviest security. It's the heart."
"Then that is our target," Morbius said. "We do not engage the guards. We infiltrate and destroy."
Jack nodded, his gaze fixed on the compound. This was the culmination of their war. The Patent, the cold, scientific desire to own and replicate his curse, was housed in that building. He could feel it, a cold, humming pressure against his senses.
He thought of the Dimensional Drifter, farmed and exploited. He thought of the suppressor's soul-crushing silence. He thought of being called "Subject Zero."
A deep, resonant growl built in his chest, not of mindless rage, but of cold, absolute resolve.
"Let's go erase our file," Jack Russell said.
And the three of them moved down the hill, into the belly of the beast.
To Be Continue...