The back chambers of The Static smelled of machine oil, ozone, and aged whisky. Mama Zero, a mountain of a woman forged from steel and will, watched as Kaelen, Anya, and Jax brought in another trembling Lycan—a young man named Cris, the skin on his knuckles raw and bloody from scraping against rough concrete.
"My place is not a menagerie, boy," she rumbled at Kaelen, though her glowing cybernetic eyes held a near-pitying look for Cris. "But leaving wounded animals outside for the predators isn't my way either."
She lumbered towards a crate, rummaged, and pulled out a dusty medical kit far older than modern nano-gels. "Jax. Hold him. This will... sting."
As Mama Zero applied a pungent, herbal-smelling salve to Cris's wounds, the young Lycan's tense muscles slackened surprisingly. The salve burned, but his beastly instincts responded to this direct, primal remedy better than it did to his fear of high-tech.
"You are a smith, Kaelen," Mama Zero said without turning, her hands steady at their work. "You broke the old chains. Good. But now you must forge new ones. You cannot lead a pack with hope and a pretty tune alone."
"We're not leading them," Anya protested, her arms crossed. "We're protecting them."
"Is the same thing," Mama Zero scoffed. "Protection requires strength. Strength requires hierarchy. Jax is their spine. You are their fist. And Kaelen..." She finally glanced at him. "He is their ears and eyes. But you are missing one thing: a heart. A reason for these broken souls to cohere."
It was then that Elara, the former bio-engineer, timidly approached. "I... I have been studying our residual genetic markers. The OmniCorp transformation process... it's unstable. Without the regular 'calibration' of the Alpha Frequency, our cells begin to... degrade. We degenerate. Go feral."
A dead silence filled the room. Freedom had a price—their sanity, their lives.
"Is there a counter-agent?" Jax's voice was tight.
"Not a cure," Elara shook her head. "A treatment. A stabilizer. But the components required to synthesize it... are heavily controlled. Only corps like Kronos or Aethel-Arms have them."
Kaelen felt a wave of nausea. They had escaped one cage only to find another locked around their own biology. They needed resources, and in this brave new world, resources were acquired through one thing: power.
Mama Zero smiled, a harsh, grating sound. "Seems you found your purpose, smiths. Not for conquest. For survival. To steal the right to live from those who see you as cattle. That heart, is the will for your pack to live. Now, go get me some medicine."