"They're guarding the medicine because it's clean," Leo whispered, his mind racing. He was looking at the problem from the wrong angle. The Sentinels weren't just an obstacle; they were a system with rules. And their primary rule was: Protect the Purity.
"So we can't touch the antibiotics without fighting them," Sarah concluded, peering through the grimy skylight. "And fighting them risks damaging the supplies." It was a tactical catch-22.
"No," Leo corrected her softly. "They're guarding the cleanest thing in the room. We just need to give them something cleaner to guard."
Maria and Sarah looked at him, confused.
Leo didn't waste time explaining. He swung his pack around and pulled out one of the white canisters of Aqueous Foam Cleanser. He looked around the rooftop. Near the edge was a large, covered ventilation shaft that likely led down into the pharmacy's back stockroom. Perfect.
He instructed Maria, "Pop that vent cover. Be quiet about it."
Maria, trusting Leo's bizarre logic, went to work. With a few expert twists of her pry bar, she silently lifted the heavy grate, revealing a dark, rectangular shaft.
Leo knelt at the edge of the opening. He took the heavy canister of foam cleanser, aimed the nozzle down into the darkness of the vent, and pulled the trigger.
He didn't unleash a massive, room-filling flood as he had in the Summit tower. He used a controlled, five-second burst. A disciplined plume of the high-density foam shot down the shaft. He wasn't trying to create chaos. He was delivering a package.
He, Sarah, and Maria crept back to the main skylight and watched.
A few moments later, a cloud of pristine, shimmering white foam billowed out from a vent in the back stockroom below. It oozed onto the floor, expanding into a silent, clean, beautiful drift of pure, sterile nothingness. It absorbed every speck of dust in the air. It was, on a microbiological and supernatural level, the most impeccably clean thing for miles in any direction.
The effect on the Sterile Sentinels was instantaneous and absolute.
The lead Sentinel, which had been patrolling the medicine cache, stopped dead. Its single eye-stalk swiveled, twitching. It perceived the new, overwhelming source of pure, unsullied order. Its simple, bio-programmed brain short-circuited.
Its old objective, Protect the Cache, was overwritten by a new, more powerful one: PROTECT THE ULTIMATE CLEANLINESS.
It let out a series of high-pitched clicks and abandoned its post, scuttling silently toward the back room. One by one, the other Sentinels followed suit, their programming compelling them to abandon the merely sterile for the absolutely pristine. Within a minute, the entire swarm had relocated, forming a tight, defensive perimeter around the ever-expanding pile of janitorial foam in the stockroom. They had a new god, and it was made of soap.
"You have got to be kidding me," Maria breathed, a look of pure astonishment on her face. "You just... distracted them with tidiness."
"Professional courtesy," Leo said with a thin smile. "Now let's go. The clock is ticking."
The infiltration was textbook. They attached their lines to the rooftop's steel frame and rappelled down through a large skylight, landing as quietly as ghosts on the pharmacy floor. The air inside was cool and sterile. The path to the medicine was completely clear.
The prize was a single, large palette, shrink-wrapped and insulated, containing dozens of crates of Ciprofloxacin. It was far too heavy for the three of them to haul back to the roof.
"Okay, so how do we get this out?" Sarah asked. "We can't carry it, and the front door leads to the Street-Maw."
"We don't go out the front," Leo said, already scanning the layout of the building. His eyes lit up as he saw it. In the back, near the stockroom where the Sentinels were still worshipping the foam, was a large, roll-up loading bay door. And parked right next to it was a powered pallet jack.
He walked over to it. The key was still in the ignition. He turned it. A small, green light on its console blinked to life. It still had a charge. The Vulture team must have used it to get the palette ready for transport before they met their end.
"Maria, get that loading bay door open," Leo ordered. "There should be a manual chain-pull."
"On it," she said, disappearing into the back.
Leo expertly maneuvered the pallet jack's forks under the medical cache, the machine's electric motor making a low hum. He lifted the entire palette with a satisfying hydraulic hiss. He now had the asset and a vehicle, albeit a very slow one.
A moment later, a loud, grinding rattle echoed through the warehouse as Maria began to raise the heavy metal door. It opened onto a back alley—a narrow, debris-choked passage that ran behind the main street. It was a clear path away from the Street-Maw.
It was all going too smoothly.
As the loading bay door reached its apex, revealing the full alley, Leo's blood ran cold. The alley wasn't empty. Standing there, as if waiting for them, was Grunt. He wasn't alone. His two remaining soldiers stood behind him, their rifles leveled. But they weren't aiming at the Custodians.
They were aiming at a new threat, one that was slowly, deliberately advancing on Grunt from the other end of the alley.
It was one of the Tunnel Gnawers they had seen evidence of before, but this one was huge. An Alpha. It was the size of a grizzly bear, its chitinous hide thick and scarred, its mandibles dripping with a viscous fluid that steamed where it hit the ground. Its small, black eyes were fixed on Grunt with a hateful, predatory intelligence.
Grunt turned as he heard the loading door open. He saw Leo on the pallet jack, the mission objective secure. A flash of furious resentment crossed his face, quickly replaced by a feral grin as he turned back to the advancing Alpha Gnawer.
"Looks like your shortcut led you right into the party, cleaner-boy," Grunt yelled, his voice echoing in the confined space. He spat on the ground and hefted his concrete sledgehammer. "Stay back. The real work is about to begin. I'm going to turn this bug into paste."
He was about to charge. But Leo, his eyes wide, saw what Grunt didn't. He saw the shimmering, acidic slime dripping from the Gnawer's mouth. He saw the corroded, pitted asphalt around its feet. This wasn't just a big bug.
His System confirmed his horrifying realization.
[Lvl 15 Alpha Gnawer (Brood-Mother)]
[Traits: Chitin-Melting Acid, Subterranean Network, Pheromonal Command... Symbiotic Host.]
[Host Organism: Street-Maw (Juvenile Colony).]
The Gnawer wasn't just living near the Street-Maw. It was the other half of the monster. The walking, mobile part of the trap. The part that herded prey onto the dormant street.
And Grunt, in his blind rage, was about to hit it with a kinetic-force weapon that would cause it to rupture, showering the entire alley, and his team, with chitin-dissolving acid.