Greater Khingan pretended to be only trees — until it was not.
Cloud-roses smeared themselves across the ridgeline. Trunks seemed to bend. Branches doubled and slid out of alignment, as if the whole forest had been printed on wet paper and someone dragged a thumb through the ink.
"Supernatural pressure," Aoki whispered — and he did not mean it like a tourist meaning *spooky.*
He meant weight.
The expedition cells had seen anomalies before. Often enough to stop treating awe as innocence.
Aoki ordered hold.
Observe.
Do not twitch.
From far away, through feed and distance, a beast roar slammed the valley anyway — a sound big enough to shake loose leaves and keep shaking them after the throat should have stopped.
On screen it still felt like standing inside the noise.
Ethan's brow tightened.
Burial ground for *liexian* — and now a predator soundtrack?
In this century, anything monster-sized should have tripped sensors years ago. Myth-class biology did not hide forever under tourism brochures.
The colored fog thinned.
Geometry snapped back toward normal.
Far downslope, where shadow had been only shadow, something alive filled a gap that had not been there a minute before — a mass of black muscle half-swallowed by timber, eyes catching light like dropped ice, one look toward the remote sensors, then gone.
"Blackthorn!"
Kite's voice cracked high.
Blackthorn — the man — turned his head. "What?"
Kite shook his head wildly. "Not *you.* The thing. A black tiger — five, six meters — that look could curdle blood."
Ethan had seen it too.
So had Aoki.
Stripes like charcoal scratched into charcoal. Shoulder at SUV height if SUVs could kneel.
Mythology kept trying to crawl out of the ground here.
Kite breathed harsh. "I didn't believe half of what I signed up for. Then caves. Then ash. Today— today I get a storybook tiger next to a storybook tomb."
"If it walks in Greater Khingan," Ethan said evenly, "start with an apex predator before you import dragons."
The animal had moved fast enough to deny second angles.
Aoki's voice stayed flat. "Myth, mutant Amur lineage, something we don't have a clean label for — I don't care what we *call* it. That gaze was wrong. When we close distance, nobody treats teeth like folklore."
He paused.
"Alive still means killable." He tapped the console edge. "Anything with blood, this boat can ruin."
Even if the tomb was real.
Even if *liexian* had once mattered.
Dead things stayed dead.
Whatever lived in their shadow did not automatically outrank them.
Kite muttered too loud. "What if the tiger was the immortal's pet? Thousands of years — still breathing — breathing *that* fog — maybe stronger than—"
Aoki's palm found the back of Kite's skull with affectionate violence.
"Today we brought enough iron to paste legends," Aoki said. "Save the bedtime story."
Mu leaned toward his boards. "Grayblood broke through the belly of the hill. They've been underground."
The mercenary company had arrived first — pilot rigs three meters tall chewing rock like bread.
The tiger noise pulled a knot of them back topside. Argument in miniature on thermal.
Then movement — mechs redirecting toward the ravine where the animal had vanished.
Kite's grin flashed. "Let them poke the myth first."
Finally someone else played bait.
Another roar rolled out of the seam between cliff and forest — thunder with teeth — fog pulsing as if something had slapped the air's face.
Sparks.
A line of mechs jittered, lights dying in sequence, bodies tipping like puppets with cut strings.
The tiger flashed on camera once — then timber swallowed it.
Cause and effect did not get a neat label.
Aoki's pulse jumped anyway.
Beast plus fog plus *wrong* equaled bad arithmetic.
"Mu — widen standoff," Aoki said.
If the field could cripple mechs, it could nibble a hull.
Mu never looked away from his numbers. "We're far enough. Energy signature clusters on the cleft — the glow-band, not the fur. Tiger's contribution's smaller than the grave-breath."
"So the tomb's pulse is frying boards," Aoki said.
"Mostly."
Grayblood pulled everyone out of the borehole.
A small skiff lifted — quick, mean, hunting-shaped — vectoring toward the ridge.
Elite mechs followed — bulkier frames, different shielding, blades longer than a man.
"New toys," Aoki said, tone ugly with respect. "Anti-interference chassis. New Star's answer once they learned how to *carry* supernatural residue without choking on it."
Ethan's stomach tightened.
Not a classroom rumor anymore.
The skirmish on feed turned blunt.
A mech swung an alloy saber like a lightning stroke.
The tiger twisted — not enough — a wet seam opened across its flank, bone nearly visible.
Another frame fired a compact energy lance.
The animal bellowed, hole through muscle and pride, staggered, fell.
A third step in heavy boots.
Saber arc.
The massive head came off.
Blood painted understory red in a single obscene pump.
"Dead," Kite said, small. "Like that. *Dead?*"
Blackthorn — the operative — exhaled through his teeth. "Bad omen."
Ethan stared.
Myth or mutation, the thing had not been immortal.
It had been meat.
Fast meat — still meat.
Grayblood advanced into the canyon throat.
Fog thickened again.
Light churned inside it — pretty and hostile.
The small skiff opened fire. Earth ripped apart. Stone face sloughed. The gorge reshaped under punishment.
Then glare answered from deeper in the cut.
The skiff lurched, rocked, clawed for distance.
Elite mechs stuttered — fewer than before, but enough failures to paint a pattern: not immunity, just *resistance.*
"Radiation spike," Mu said. "Canyon's vomiting supernatural load. That's what's biting hardware."
Shapes moved in the haze — tall, heavy-shouldered, black-furred *apes* rushing on knuckles like hammers.
Grayblood's rear contingent — suited humans — peeled back.
Covering skiffs stitched beams through bodies.
Animals became soup.
Mu's frown deepened. "Something's off."
The apes died too clean.
Weapons worked *too* well.
The real problem remained the pulsing light — unsustainable by the way it guttered — a flare that could wound machines without sparing flesh.
"The dead are dead," Aoki murmured. "Even immortals, once they're actually in the ground."
His handset chirped — secure line, priority.
He answered.
Ethan stood close enough that upgraded hearing did the unethical thing without asking permission.
A voice slid through — elderly, unrushed, each syllable given time to settle.
Familiar in a way that made Ethan's skin prickle.
His mind jumped — improbable, absurd — to a design-branch office: a fifty-something man on a thirty-minute call, booking a weekend fishing trip like the world owed him leisure.
Same cadence.
Same patience.
No scrambler — or trust thick enough not to bother.
Aoki's spine went straight. "Sir."
"Your cloak is good," the voice said. "Your hull hardening is better. Take both to maximum. Now."
"Meaning?"
"Grayblood's second wave is in transit. Medium warship. They intend to bracket you, open sky, finish what a rifle team started in the city."
Aoki's color drained.
Ethan's hands found the strap-rail.
They had chased a lead — and become the thing chased.
That warm voice kept speaking as if reading weather.
"You stirred Grayblood hunting them. They leaked you on purpose. Pull your people in — then erase you from orbit so no one asks follow-up questions."
"Old Earth is *not* a shooting gallery—" Aoki began, teeth bared.
Ethan listened and felt something cold spread through his ribs.
Golden Body layer three — still laughable against a warship's math.
The voice softened — which was worse.
"Don't panic," it said. "We planned for this. Agencies are already up. Go maximum stealth. Watch the horizon."
"Planned *what?*" Aoki demanded. "Who knew? Who didn't?"
Far beyond the forest — so far it should have been irrelevant — light stitched the sky.
Detonation bloom.
Then another.
Then a chain of them, too fast for separate screams.
On passive sensors, signatures vanished in clusters — Grayblood air assets turning into metal rain.
"What," Aoki said, voice hollow, "was that?"
The elder — still mild — explained.
A powerful New Star-linked institute had dug in Greater Khingan years ago. Secret work. No honest filings to Old Earth oversight. The tomb rumor — the "immortal" bait — became an excuse for multiple parties to poke the same wound.
Authorities chose cooperation with select expedition leadership from the start: strike Grayblood, seize evidence, corner the rogue lab, and remind mercenary outfits that Old Earth still had ceilings you did not test without paying.
Grayblood had been fed enough truth to rush in as disposable probe.
They had only committed a fraction of their strength — cautious as always — which meant someone had to stay visible.
"Bait," the voice said, almost apology without apology. "You drew eyes upward and outward. Messy. Necessary."
Aoki's breath shook once — rage, not fear — and he swore until the cabin ran out of air.
Ethan stayed silent.
Out the viewport, the forest looked the same as yesterday.
Under that disguise, Old Earth was not a backwater.
It was a chessboard — and he had just learned which piece he had been wearing when he clocked in at Interstellar Group.
The fishing guy with the long phone calls.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Either way, someone in a quiet office knew how to sound harmless.
And someone over encrypted lines knew how to burn warships out of a sky.
Ethan filed both facts in the same drawer — the one labeled *do not trust the surface.*