Leonora's ship, the Millia, descended slowly through Khalil's monstrous atmosphere, cutting at last through the veil of wind and gas that wrapped the entire planet before finally breaking clear of the carnage zone. Once through, the Millia was greeted by the only true light on the whole surface of the world: Khalil Fortress itself, rising out of the endless ice and darkness like a giant rectangular blade driven into the ground. Its surface pulsed steadily with red and white running lights as the roof split open along mechanical seams, panels folding back to clear a path for the ship's descent. The landing was flawless — the enormous vessel settling onto the fortress's docking platform without so much as a shudder.
Every ranking officer stationed at Khalil had turned out to line the red carpet laid down for the occasion, assembled to receive the Prime Minister and the Duchess in person. Benjamin stood at the head of the formation, his face carefully arranged into nothing at all. The Millia's doors hissed open, its boarding platform easing down to meet the deck, and Alan stepped out first, hands clasped behind his back, unhurried. Leonora followed just behind him, head held high, her silver hair catching the artificial light in a way that made half the assembled officers forget, briefly, to keep their eyes forward. The rest of the Millia's crew came after — high officers and the soldiers assigned to escort them.
Benjamin bowed low before Alan. "Prime Minister. It's a pleasure to have you here."
Alan rested a hand briefly on Benjamin's shoulder as the director straightened. "I see you're keeping things running well," he said, glancing around at the assembled ranks with evident approval.
Benjamin turned next to Leonora and offered her a crisp salute. "General. It's been a while."
Leonora studied him for a long moment, her dark eyes as unreadable as his, and said nothing at all in response. She simply walked past him, offering only a single word as she went. "Where."
"Perhaps you're asking after Subject 105?" Benjamin said, falling into step just behind her.
Leonora turned her head just enough to fix him with a glare from the corner of her eye, her voice cutting and precise. "He has a name. And don't imagine for a moment that someone of your standing has any business looking down on a man of higher nobility, whatever circumstances he's fallen into."
Benjamin bowed again, deeper this time. "Forgive my rudeness, General. From this point forward I'll address him by his proper title." He straightened, then took the lead. "This way. We've sent the Duke down to the Pit." As he turned to walk on ahead of them, his eye twitched once — the single crack in an otherwise perfectly composed face.
Deep within the Pit, Youri lay in the hollow dark, eyes closed, though closed or open made no difference down here. He was stretched flat against the cold stone floor when a presence brushed against his senses and he sat bolt upright. The darkness around him remained total, but that didn't mean he was without options. Years of hard experience had sharpened every sense he had beyond what sight alone could offer, and he'd learned long ago that relying on vision in a place like this was its own kind of blindness.
He turned instinctively to his left, and there, in the far corner of the chamber, a faint red glow had begun to bleed into the dark. Every instinct he had told him the same thing at once: whatever this was, it hadn't come looking for company. The glow gathered itself, sharpening into a shape — the unmistakable silhouette of a wolf, its outline cloaked in that same dim red hue. He was face to face, for the first time, with a Necro Wolf.
He could feel the hunger radiating off it before it made a single move. A closer look confirmed what he already suspected — the creature had no physical body at all, nothing solid enough to call flesh. It crept forward, a faint, keening cry rising from somewhere inside it, and Youri had nothing to do but assess. He had no idea, in that moment, exactly what he was up against. What he did have was total familiarity with the chamber itself, every angle and edge of it memorized during the hours he'd already spent locked inside.
The Necro Wolf lunged without warning, its form stretching and splashing outward wide enough to swallow him whole in a single motion. But Youri caught the faint disturbance in the air a half-second before the strike landed, recognized it as the creature reshaping itself mid-lunge, and threw himself hard to the left. A second later, another ripple moved through the air exactly where he'd been standing — and the section of rock wall behind that spot simply disintegrated, eaten away to nothing. Whatever this thing was, it was no ordinary predator. If anything, it reminded him of Altopereh — and the comparison made an uncomfortable kind of sense. A being with no fixed body, capable of consuming almost anything it touched.
One question nagged at him even as he kept moving: how had the creature gotten into a sealed stone chamber without tearing through either the rock or the reinforced glass? The answer, once it came to him, was almost disappointingly simple. In its gaseous state, the Necro Wolf could slip through nearly any gap that existed — and it had done exactly that, sliding into his chamber through a hairline crack in the rock too fine for any guard to have noticed.
The creature reformed into its original shape, coiling low — and then, without warning, one of the lights beyond the chamber flickered to life outside, its dim red glow catching against the glass. The instant the light touched it, the Necro Wolf recoiled toward the darkest corner of the chamber, shrinking back from the light until it faded entirely from view, swallowed by the shadows it had come from.
Youri remained standing exactly where he was, breathing hard, utterly baffled by the thing he had just faced.