The fortieth floor of the Kronos Spire smelled of antiseptic and avarice. That sterile quiet was shattered when Jax punched through the double-paned glass of the security station, following it with a roar that vibrated through the entire level. Alarms shrieked. Red lights spun.
The plan was in motion.
Anya moved beside him,her plasma rifle firing searing bolts not at people, but at lights, cameras, and door control mechanisms, sowing chaos and obstacles. Behind them came Finn and two other Lycans, acting as living shields and wrecking crews, scattering the responding Kronos guards.
Below the floor, Kaelen crawled through the ventilation shafts, his senses stretched to their limit. Elara was behind him, then Rorke and Cris.
"Motion sensor,ten meters left," Kaelen whispered into his mic, his voice a thread in the team's hidden earpieces. "Wait for my disruption."
He emitted a near-inaudible high-frequency burst that temporarily blinded the sensor.They slipped past like ghosts.
Upstairs, the fight was a maelstrom. Jax bore a few smoking plasma grazes, but they only seemed to enrage him. He grabbed a guard and used him as a battering ram against another group. Anya provided precise, disabling shots, disarming rather than killing. Their mission was not slaughter, but distraction long enough.
Kaelen's team reached the grate for the storage room. He carefully pried it open, and they dropped down. The room was lined with refrigeration units. Elara went to work immediately, scanning labels while Rorke and Cris watched the door.
"Found it!" Elara called out, opening a unit containing several boxes of the cellular binding agent she needed. She began stuffing them into an insulated pack.
Just then, the door hissed open. Not a regular guard, but a Kronos agent in an experimental exo-suit, its joints whining with hydraulics. He leveled a large sonic blaster.
"Contaminates! Drop the samples!" the agent boomed.
Rorke, the once-broken man, stepped forward. He didn't shift, but faced the threat, letting out a challenging roar that rattled beakers on the shelves. It distracted the agent for a single second.
Kaelen didn't try to fight. He did what he did best. He analyzed the sound of the exo-suit's motors—a unique, repeating harmonic. Then, he replicated it perfectly and phase-shifted it by 180 degrees.
The resulting resonance was devastating. The exo-suit's joints screeched, locked, then sparked and crackled. The agent cried out in pain, trapped within his paralyzed armor.
"Go!" Kaelen yelled.
They retreated through the grate they'd entered from, the precious cargo secured. Upstairs, Jax heard Kaelen's "package acquired" codeword. He let out a short, victorious roar, then he and Anya and the others broke contact, retreating down the pre-planned route, vanishing into the stairwell.
The hunt was a success. They had struck the enemy and taken what they needed. The pack, for the first time, had won as one.