The back rooms of The Static now felt more like a field laboratory than a hideout. Elara worked over patched-together equipment loaned by Mama Zero, mixing the stolen precursors with purified samples taken from the pack members. The air hummed with ozone and strange chemicals.
"It's not enough," she finally announced, her voice hoarse with fatigue. "Even with this, I can only synthesize a few doses of the stabilizer. And the effects are temporary. We need the primary component: a proprietary cellular binding agent only produced in Kronos's flagship bio-lab."
Jax slammed a fist onto a metal table, leaving a dent. "So we risked our lives for a few weeks?"
"What we bought is intelligence," Kaelen said calmly. He pulled up a schematic of the Kronos Spire, a composite he'd built from fragments of city databases and the patchy memories of the pack members about their captivity. "We know the target. And we know how they operate: using fear and division."
He turned to the pack. There were eight of them now, including Rorke, still wrestling with his demons, and the young Cris. They were a ragged, misfit group, but a common resolve burned in their eyes.
"We can't operate like a commando unit anymore," Kaelen continued. "We need to act like a pack. Like a single force."
He laid out his plan. It wasn't an assault, but a coordinated diversion. Jax and Anya would lead a part of the pack in a loud, violent feint on the lab level, drawing Kronos's guards.
Meanwhile, Kaelen would use his sound-dampening field to lead a small team—including the slight, agile Elara—through the ventilation shafts directly into the storage room. Their success hinged not on force, but on Kaelen's ability to guide them past acoustic motion sensors and patrols.
"We're not soldiers," Cris whispered, looking at his still-bandaged hands.
"You don't need to be soldiers," Jax said, his voice resonating in the confined space. "You need to be pack. Your anger? Channel it. Your fear? Use it to be alert. Fight for me. For Anya. For the person standing next to you. That is what a pack is."
It wasn't a rousing speech. It was a battle lesson. It was a strategy that used their unique strengths: Kaelen's finesse, Anya's tactics, Jax's raw power, and the pack's newfound, wild instincts.
They were no longer a group of individuals. They were an organism of different parts, preparing for its first true hunt. The objective: to steal the medicine for their survival from the belly of the beast.