The sea fed them like an insult.
Small fish, silver and hard-eyed, flickering in the shallows like nervous thoughts. They could be caught—yes. They could be swallowed—yes. But they did not fill. They did not last. Their bones were too many, their flesh too thin, their oil too scarce.
The pack learned to eat them anyway.
Because hunger did not care what was worthy.
It only cared what was available.
Fenrik walked the tide line with wet claws and salt-cold wind in his fur, watching the dark water breathe in and out against the black sand. Behind him, the pack moved with the brittle discipline of bodies that had begun to spend more energy than they gained.
Brann still stood first when trouble might come.
Nyssa still vanished into shadow even when there was no shadow to vanish into.
Kael still paced, but his pacing had changed—less restless, more hollow, like a blade dragged dull across stone.
Thorn spoke less.
Lyra's ribs began to show.
Eira watched everything.
And Ulric—
Ulric was a mountain learning what it meant to starve.
Ulric Snowfang needed more than fish.
He needed fat. Heat. Mass. The kind of prey the ice had offered—seals with thick blubber and slow panic, grazers with heavy muscle and warm blood. The kind of prey that stayed in the body when the night came.
But here, on the ocean's edge, the world offered only thin life.
Ulric tried to hide it at first.
He stood taller than the cliffs and pretended his breath was steady. He moved slower, claiming it was caution. He did not complain—Ulric did not complain.
Yet Fenrik could feel the weakness creeping through the bond like frost under a door.
Ulric's ice answered him less.
His breath came heavier.
His movements—still disciplined—carried more cost.
Fenrik noticed.
He did not speak of it.
Not yet.
The pack began to remember out loud.
It happened on the third night by the shore, when the wind died and the ocean's rhythm grew loud enough to fill the silence with something almost like company.
Brann sat with his chin on his forepaws, staring into the dark.
"Seals," he said quietly.
One word.
Enough to change the air.
Kael's ears twitched.
"Fat," Kael murmured.
Lyra swallowed hard.
"We ate," she whispered, as if speaking of plenty might summon it.
Eira's gaze slid toward the distant treeline that marked the forest's edge far behind them, barely visible now—more memory than landmark.
Thorn's jaw tightened.
"We could go back," he said.
No one said the obvious words: We could die.
Because they all knew.
The forest was behind the ice.
And the forest had teeth that were not made of bone.
Fenrik listened without interrupting.
He let the hunger speak through them, because hunger was truth, and truth had to be faced before it could be directed.
Ulric said nothing.
But his silence weighed more than any words.
On the fifth day, they found the barge.
It lay half-canted on a bed of black sand and shattered stone where the shore curved inward, as if the ocean had tried to swallow it and the land had refused to let go. Rust ate its hull in thick scabs. Barnacle-like growths clung to its underside. Old paint peeled away in strips, revealing darker metal beneath, scored by salt and time.
It should have been dead.
It wasn't.
Fenrik heard it before he saw it—low, irregular, like a heartbeat that didn't know it had stopped.
A faint mechanical hum.
Ulric halted first, massive body stiffening.
"Metal," Ulric rumbled.
Fenrik's fire flared—small, sharp—not in aggression, but in recognition.
This wasn't Helios-77 grown wild.
This was made.
This was outside.
"Stay," Fenrik ordered quietly.
The pack froze in an instinctive ring, spacing forming without thought. Brann and Thorn flanked. Nyssa slid into shadow along the barge's edge. Kael's eyes burned with restless curiosity. Lyra pressed close to Eira.
Fenrik approached alone.
The barge was a carcass.
But carcasses sometimes held marrow.
Fenrik climbed the corroded side with careful hands, claws finding purchase in rust seams. The metal complained softly under his weight. He moved anyway, body balanced, fire held deep to keep from announcing himself to whatever might still live inside.
A hatch sat ajar.
Fenrik pulled it open.
Air rolled out—stale, metallic, faintly oily.
Inside, darkness.
Then a flicker.
A single emergency light pulsed weakly down a corridor lined with pipes and ancient wiring, as if the barge were trying to remember how to be alive.
Fenrik stepped in.
The interior smelled like old storms and broken promises.
Control panels lined one wall—cracked screens, dead buttons, corroded levers. Fenrik's eyes traced symbols he didn't fully understand but recognized as different from the researcher vaults.
Not clinical.
Not laboratory.
These symbols belonged to movement.
To travel.
To leaving.
His heart thudded harder.
He reached out and pressed a cracked panel with the flat of his palm.
Nothing.
He pressed again, harder.
A spark jumped.
The hum deepened.
Somewhere deeper in the barge, a motor coughed like a dying animal trying to rise.
Fenrik's breath caught.
It still had power.
Not much.
But enough.
He moved through the barge carefully, passing bunks coated in salt-dust, storage compartments long emptied, and a small sealed door marked with warning symbols.
He stopped there.
Listened.
Nothing moved beyond it.
Fenrik placed a hand against the door and felt vibration—faint, steady.
A core.
A battery.
A heart.
He did not force it open yet.
Instead, he returned to the main deck and looked out through a corroded window toward the ocean.
Endless black water.
Endless horizon.
And far out—barely visible through haze—the same unnatural vertical line he had glimpsed days before.
A scar in the sky.
A structure.
A boundary.
Or a way through.
Fenrik felt something ignite that hunger could not touch.
Hope.
Not soft.
Not comforting.
A blade of purpose.
"There is more," he whispered to no one.
And Helios-77, for once, did not immediately try to punish the thought.
When Fenrik returned to the beach, his eyes were brighter than they had been since the forest.
The pack felt it instantly.
Kael stepped forward.
"What is it?" he asked.
Fenrik looked at them—at ribs and hollow cheeks and disciplined silence.
"A way," he said. "Past."
Brann frowned. "Past… ocean?"
Fenrik nodded.
"Barge," Fenrik said. "Old. But alive."
Ulric's gaze lifted to the rusted hulk.
His breath came heavier.
"Food?" Ulric asked simply.
The word was not accusation.
It was reality.
Fenrik held his gaze.
"Not food," he admitted. "But… beyond. More land. More hunt."
Thorn barked a short, humorless laugh.
"Later," Thorn spat. "We need now."
The pack bond tightened.
Eira's eyes narrowed.
Lyra swallowed hard, ears flattening.
And Ulric's shoulders sagged—just slightly, but enough that Fenrik felt the cost in his bones.
That night, they ate fish again.
The fish were smaller.
Or perhaps the pack was simply hungrier.
Ulric took his share last, chewing slowly, and Fenrik watched him with a growing knot of dread.
Eira sat near Ulric, silent, watching him like one watches a failing fire.
When the pack settled into uneasy sleep, Eira rose and moved to Ulric's side.
Fenrik didn't need to hear her words to feel them through the bond—steady pressure, a spark of defiance, a question she had carried since the forest.
Ulric's response came like stone shifting.
Not anger.
Decision.
Fenrik rose, stepping out into the open air, letting the ocean wind cut through him.
He did not interfere.
He did not deny the pack the right to survive.
But his fire burned low and tight, because he could feel what was coming.
The Alpha Trial was not drama.
It was law.
At dawn, Ulric approached Fenrik openly.
The pack gathered without being called, forming a wide ring on the black sand where the tide could not reach. No chanting. No noise. Only breath and the distant crash of waves.
Ulric stopped three paces from Fenrik.
He spoke clearly.
"I challenge."
One word, spoken aloud, binding.
The pack bond snapped taut like a drawn bowstring.
Fenrik's jaw tightened.
"Ground?" Fenrik asked, voice controlled.
Ulric's eyes—pale blue threaded with ember—did not waver.
"Starvation," Ulric said.
It was legitimate.
It was undeniable.
It was true.
Fenrik nodded once.
He did not rage.
He did not plead.
He did not justify vision with poetry.
"I accept," Fenrik said.
And the ocean roared behind them like an indifferent god.
ALPHA TRIAL — RULES INVOKED
Fenrik spoke them aloud, so the pack—and the world—could hear.
"No death."
"No interference."
"True form."
"Ends on submission, incapacitation, or pack alignment."
"Strike stops at surrender."
Ulric nodded once.
"Yes."
Eira stood very still.
Kael's eyes flickered with something like fear and excitement intertwined.
Brann's posture locked into watchfulness, as if guarding the law itself.
Nyssa vanished to the edge of the ring, eyes sharp, recording everything.
Thorn bared his teeth—not at either leader, but at the hunger that had forced this.
Lyra trembled.
Fenrik saw it.
And his fire hardened.
Ulric lowered into a fighting stance that looked almost gentle for something so large—knees bent, shoulders rounded, weight distributed so the sand would not slide beneath him.
Fenrik remained upright.
Fire gathered behind his ribs, compressed, disciplined.
They stared at each other across three paces of black sand.
Fire vs Ice.
Vision vs Now.
Scar vs Shield.
Ulric moved first.
Not fast.
Inevitable.
He stepped forward and the temperature dropped, frost blooming across the sand in a spreading circle. The ocean wind caught the cold and carried it outward, making every breath sting.
Fenrik felt his fire respond.
He did not unleash it.
He shaped it.
He stepped in and—
The world snapped into the beginning of violence.
Ulric's first strike was not a blow.
It was weight.
The sand beneath Fenrik's feet hardened instantly, grains locking together as ice spread outward in a low, creeping bloom. Fenrik felt his footing betray him a heartbeat too late as Ulric's mass shifted forward, shoulder driving like a moving cliff.
Fenrik twisted, fire snapping tight around his core as he redirected force instead of meeting it head-on. Ulric's shoulder glanced off his ribs instead of crushing through them, but the impact still hurled Fenrik sideways. He hit the ground hard, skidding across black sand that smoked where heat met frost.
The pack did not move.
They did not breathe.
This was not spectacle.
This was law in motion.
Fenrik rolled and came up on one knee, palm pressed into the ground. Fire surged down his arm and into the sand, melting ice just enough to free his footing without turning the battlefield into unstable slurry.
Ulric turned slowly.
He did not rush.
He never rushed.
Fenrik moved first this time.
Speed was his advantage—always had been. He closed the distance in a blur, fire igniting along his limbs in controlled bursts that propelled him forward rather than outward. His claws slashed toward Ulric's legs, not to sever, not to cripple, but to test balance.
Ulric answered by dropping his center of gravity.
Ice surged up his legs like armor, thickening muscle and locking joints into brutal stability. Fenrik's claws sparked against frozen hide, heat hissing, ice cracking—but holding.
Ulric swung.
A massive backhand meant to end the exchange.
Fenrik ducked under it, heat flaring as he passed close enough to feel the cold burn along his spine. He drove a flaming elbow into Ulric's side, pouring heat into the ice plating there.
The ice cracked.
Ulric grunted—just once—and responded by grabbing Fenrik mid-motion.
The world compressed.
Ulric's grip was not a squeeze.
It was constriction.
Pressure applied everywhere at once, crushing breath, freezing muscle, dragging Fenrik out of momentum and into stillness.
Fenrik snarled, fire roaring outward instinctively—
—and he cut it back immediately.
No killing force.
No loss of control.
Instead, he focused the heat inward, superheating the air between them.
Ulric hissed as steam exploded outward, grip loosening just enough.
Fenrik wrenched free and kicked off Ulric's chest, flipping backward and landing in a crouch several paces away.
Both paused.
Both breathed.
Both assessed.
The pack felt it.
Not who was stronger.
But how they fought.
Ulric absorbed and advanced.
Fenrik adapted and redirected.
Hunger growled through Ulric's massive frame now, no longer hidden. Each movement cost him more than he wanted the pack to see. Ice answered slower, thicker, less fluid.
Fenrik saw it.
And it hurt.
Because it meant Ulric was right.
Ulric charged again.
This time he committed fully.
Ice surged outward in a wave that rolled across the sand like a freezing tide, locking Fenrik's legs in place up to the knees. Ulric followed immediately, massive fists slamming down like falling towers.
Fenrik barely got his arms up in time.
The impact drove him to the ground.
Sand exploded outward in a frozen halo.
Ulric pressed down, pinning Fenrik beneath his weight, ice locking Fenrik's joints as cold seeped deep into muscle and bone.
Fenrik's vision narrowed.
His fire screamed.
End it.
The instinct was ancient and terrible.
He refused it.
Instead, Fenrik did something quieter—and more dangerous.
He stopped fighting Ulric.
And fought the ground.
Fire surged downward into the sand beneath Ulric's footing, not melting it fully, but weakening it unevenly—just enough.
Ulric's weight shifted.
The ground gave.
Ulric stumbled forward a fraction of an inch.
Fenrik twisted, driving a knee into Ulric's abdomen, heat flaring precisely where ice had thinned from hunger and fatigue.
Ulric staggered back, breath knocked from his lungs in a harsh, involuntary sound.
The pack gasped as one.
Not in triumph.
In shock.
Ulric straightened slowly.
Ice crawled back into place, thicker now, jagged, less refined. His breath came harder.
"Again," Ulric rumbled.
Fenrik rose.
Fire licked along his arms, not bright, not wild—focused to knife-edges of heat.
They circled.
Waves crashed.
The barge hummed faintly behind them like a reminder of choices beyond violence.
Eira's hands clenched at her sides.
Nyssa watched everything, eyes flicking between leaders and pack alike.
Lyra trembled openly now.
Ulric struck with his knee, faster than expected.
Fenrik took it full in the ribs.
Pain exploded.
Something cracked.
Not broken.
But close.
Fenrik slid backward, coughing, blood tasting like copper and salt.
Ulric did not press.
He waited.
A chance for surrender.
Fenrik spat blood into the sand and stood anyway.
"No," Fenrik said hoarsely.
The word was not defiance.
It was refusal to abandon the future.
Fire surged again.
Not outward.
Upward.
Fenrik leapt, twisting mid-air, coming down hard with a heel wrapped in condensed flame that slammed into Ulric's shoulder.
Ice shattered.
Ulric roared—not in rage, but in pain—and grabbed Fenrik by the leg mid-strike, swinging him violently and throwing him across the beach.
Fenrik hit the ground and rolled until stone stopped him.
He did not rise immediately.
The pack leaned forward instinctively.
Ulric stood there, chest heaving, ice flickering dangerously, hunger gnawing at his core.
He could finish this.
Incapacitate.
Win.
Take the pack.
He did not move.
Fenrik pushed himself up slowly, shaking.
His fire was dimmer now.
His breath ragged.
But his eyes burned with something Ulric could not freeze.
"This," Fenrik said between breaths, "is why I lead."
Ulric said nothing.
"Because when the world starves us," Fenrik continued, "I will not eat the future to survive today."
Ulric's jaw clenched.
"And when the future never comes?" Ulric demanded.
The question cracked through the beach harder than any blow.
Fenrik had no answer.
Not yet.
They charged each other simultaneously.
Fire and ice collided in a blinding explosion of steam and force that rocked the shoreline and sent waves crashing higher up the sand.
The pack staggered back.
The ocean roared.
And neither alpha fell.