Vol 2: Chapter 55

The Roost's landing bay opened for them before the Mule had fully touched down, staff already spilling out onto the platform. Seraphine had the Warden's weight braced against her shoulder before the ramp finished lowering, her free hand moving over him in that same counting-by-feel rhythm she used on her own kit.

"Get me a stretcher and a clean table," she called out. "He's stable, but he needs fluids and warmth, now."

Two staffers in grey jumpsuits broke off from the crowd and jogged toward her. The rest didn't move. They stood at the edge of the platform, staring past Seraphine entirely, at the Liger Zero settling its weight onto the deck plating with a low mechanical groan.

Alex climbed down from the cockpit while Seraphine disappeared through the inner doors with the Warden between the two staffers. Fia dropped from the Mule's hatch a step behind him, rolling one shoulder, and Lyra followed at an angle that put her eyes on the room instead of the machines.

Korrin reached them first.

Korrin stepped closer, her eyes scanning the Liger Zero's armored plates instead of the wounded man. Two junior researchers followed her, clutching digital tablets and peering at the Zoid's joints with a hungry sort of intensity.

"The reaction time on those missile pods was impressive," one of the researchers said.

"It was actually quite fluid," Korrin added. "The way you coordinated the Lanstag's suppression with the Liger's advance... that was a textbook example of multi-unit synchronization."

"We definitely need more telemetry on that last engagement," the second researcher noted. "The way the Liger's servos handled the sudden weight shift from the module was something else."

Alex nodded while he reached up to rub a smudge of grease from his thumb.

"We'll get you the data logs," he replied.

The conversation drifted toward technical specifications and engagement windows, but his mind remained on the ridge. He kept seeing the way that Lynx had moved. It hadn't charged the Rams to kill them, and it hadn't fled from the Zoids. It had just... organized them.

"You're not really listening, Alex," Ziya said.

He blinked, realizing he had been staring at a blank patch of hangar floor for several seconds.

"Sorry. I'm just thinking about the Lynx," he muttered.

"The Lynx?" Fia asked.

"It was acting strange," Alex said. "It wasn't hunting the Rams. It was using them."

He didn't elaborate. There was no way to explain the feeling that the predator was actually acting as a shepherd.

A staffer hurried toward them from the medical wing, looking breathless.

"The Warden is awake," the staffer announced. "He's asking for the people who saved him."

Alex followed the staffer into the Roost's medical wing, the others trailing behind him in a loose knot. The room was small and functional — a single cot against the far wall, a monitoring station with a cracked screen, cabinets full of bandages and sealed vials. The Warden sat up on the cot, a blanket pulled across his shoulders. He was pale, and his hands rested on his knees like he wasn't sure what to do with them.

He looked at the group as they filed in. Recognition took a moment — his eyes moved across their faces, cataloging, placing. Then they settled on Alex.

"Right," he said. His voice was hoarse but steady. "You're the ones."

He straightened his back, the motion reflexive, drilled in. "Dallin. Rank 6, Ironwood detachment. Ridge Line patrol."

He said it the way a Warden says their name when they don't have anything else to hold onto — a formal tether in the middle of a fall.

"I appreciate what you did out there," he went on. "I was... I wasn't going to make it back on my own."

He paused. His fingers tightened on his knees, then loosened.

"The rest of my patrol. Did anyone else...?"

The question hung in the air. Nobody answered.

Dallin watched their faces, reading the answer in the silence before anyone could form the words. His expression didn't collapse. It just went still, the way a surface does when something underneath it stops moving.

He nodded once. Small. Final.

Then he looked down at his hands.

Anya stepped closer to the cot, her posture softening as she leaned against the wall near the bed.

"We need to know what actually happened out there, Dallin," she said.

The Warden stared at his hands. He seemed to weigh the cost of the words, his eyes clouding as if he were looking through the walls of the clinic rather than at the people in the room. He swallowed hard, his throat working visibly.

"It was... it wasn't a normal hunt," Dallin began. He gripped the edge of the thin blanket, his knuckles turning white. "We were just moving through the ridge terrain on a routine sweep. Everything seemed normal until the sky started moving."

He paused to draw a shallow breath, the effort of speaking clearly taxing him.

"It wasn't just one Titan," he continued. "They came from everywhere. We had an Obsidian-Wing Petras diving from the high thermals, and then a pack of Duskfang Jackals surged from the scrub below. But it wasn't a collision of different species. They were... they were working together."

He looked up, and the blankness in his eyes sharpened into a look of pure, cold confusion.

"They were closing in on us from multiple directions at once. It wasn't a chaotic scramble for prey. They moved like they had a plan, like they were herding us into a kill zone. I saw a group of Rams being pushed right into the path of a Serpent. They weren't fighting each other. They were just... coordinating."

Dallin’s gaze drifted toward the window, his voice dropping to a hollow murmur.

"The others... they didn't stand a chance. The coordination was too perfect. I only got out because I was on the perimeter. I saw the first strike and I just ran. I didn't look back. I couldn't look back."

The silence that followed was heavy and absolute. Nobody in the room spoke. The only sound was the rhythmic, mechanical hum of the Roost's life support systems.

Anya and Lyra exchanged a long, meaningful look. Lyra shifted her weight, her expression unreadable.

"This isn't the first account like this we've heard," Lyra said after a long moment. "We've had reports from other Warden teams in other sectors. Different species, different zones, but the same pattern. Titans that should be rivals or predators of each other are working together instead of fighting."

Rhian went quiet. She pulled her knees up to her chest on the chair next to Alex, her eyes fixed on the floor. She had seen the Liger Zero fight, and she had seen the Arosaurer's weapons in action, but this was different. This was the reality of the men and women who didn't have a sixty-ton machine to hide behind.

Alex noticed her stillness. He moved away from the group and knelt beside her, his hand resting briefly on her shoulder.

"It's just the grim reality of things," Alex said.

She didn't look up, but she leaned slightly into his touch, a small, silent acknowledgment that she heard him.

Dallin sat up a little straighter, his eyes clearing as the adrenaline of the memory faded into a dull, heavy pragmatism.

"Can anyone go back for them?" he asked. "Not to save them... I know there's nothing left to save. But I want to bring back what's left. Their gear, their identifiers. Their families deserve to have something to bury."

He looked at the group, and his expression carried the weight of a man who knew he was asking for a favor that most people wouldn't dare attempt.

Ziya shook her head slightly.

"We have a very narrow weather window to hit the Ashwing," she pointed out. "If we take a detour into the foothills for a recovery mission, we lose precious time. It adds a massive amount of risk to the main objective."

The group fell into a brief, intense deliberation. They weighed the necessity of the Ashwing mission against the moral weight of Dallin's request.

"We'll do both," Alex decided, his voice leaving no room for argument.

He looked at Ziya, then back at the group.

"We'll fold the recovery into the route. We'll hit the ridge, secure the gear, and then we head straight for the Ashwing. We'll have to move faster and more precisely than we planned, but we aren't leaving them out there."

The decision was made, but the cost of the added pressure sat visibly on everyone's faces. They stood up to prepare, the tension in the room shifting from grief to the grim, focused energy of an upcoming deployment. They would face the Ashwing, but the mystery of the coordinated Titans remained a silent, growing shadow over the mission.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.