The relay gate was half-torn off its track.
One side hung crooked, suspended by chain and warped metal. The other had been bent inward so hard it looked like something massive had forced its way through from below. Beyond it, the nest level opened in layers of dark steel, broken rail platforms, hanging cargo lines, and black-red light pulsing through the chamber like a slow heartbeat.
Nobody stepped through right away.
Even the big fighter had enough sense for that.
Dain stood at the threshold and read the room.
Upper chain network.
Broken left catwalk.
Main descent lane in the middle.
Old cargo rail running across the chamber floor.
Open shell units scattered near the far wall.
Black residue everywhere.
And the sound.
Scraping.
Light, quick.
Not the heavy thing from before.
Smaller threats first.
Rin noticed the same thing. "We're not alone."
"No," Dain said.
Sitha raised her pulse weapon slightly. "Movement high."
Joren's hookblade shifted in his hand. Sol moved closer to Rhett without making it obvious. The active tag under Dain's coat gave off a faint warmth now, like it was responding to the chamber around them.
Bad sign.
The black-red pulse along the lower walls flared once.
Then something dropped from the ceiling.
Not one.
Four.
The first Latch Crawler hit the hanging gate and launched straight for Sitha's face. She fired on reflex, pulse round smashing it sideways into the wall, but the shot lit the whole chamber for half a second—and in that half second they saw dozens of claw marks streaking the upper supports.
"Down!" Rin shouted.
Two more crawlers came off the right wall together. Joren intercepted the first one with a short brutal catch of his hookblade, ripping it out of the air and driving it into the floor grating. The second one got past him low.
Dain moved.
Umbra Shroud snapped open halfway as he stepped through Sitha's firing lane and cut downward in a curved black line.
The crawler split apart and hit the floor in pieces.
The fourth one hit Sol's side from above before anybody could stop it. Its claws locked onto his shoulder guard and it bit hard into the metal seam near his neck.
Sol slammed backward into the gate frame with a snarl, trying to crush it against the steel, but the thing held on and started climbing toward his throat.
Rhett reacted first.
Good.
He drove one Twin Fang Iron under the crawler's body and tore it off Sol's shoulder in a spray of black fluid. The creature shrieked and twisted in his grip, so Rhett buried the second blade into its skull and ripped both weapons free.
Sol grabbed his shoulder once, breathing hard. "Still moving."
"Obviously," Rhett snapped.
But he was rattled now.
Because he'd nearly lost Sol in one blind second.
The heavy fighter cursed and swung late at another shape moving overhead.
Nothing there.
Then three more crawlers came off the far support beam.
"Left side!" Sitha shouted.
Her pulse rounds cracked through the chamber, dropping one mid-leap. Rin slipped under the second with a low, fast lane change and cut its limbs out from under it before it touched down. Joren stepped into the third and caught it center-mass, hookblade burying deep, but a fourth one he hadn't seen yet came screaming down from the chain line above him.
Dain saw the shadow before the body.
He shifted.
Shade Drift.
A short clean burst put him on Joren's blind side. Umbra Shroud's shaft cracked upward like a bar and smashed the crawler off-course before it could latch onto Joren's head. It hit the catwalk support, rebounded, and came back fast—
Black Arc.
Dain's curved strike took it through the middle and splashed the wall behind it.
For a second, only the pulse of the nest level moved.
Then the skittering started again.
Not from one direction.
Everywhere.
Rin looked up at the support maze and swore under her breath. "Too many hiding points."
Dain listened.
Not as many as the noise made it sound like.
Crawlers used panic well. They bounced sound through metal. Good tactic against weak fighters.
He tracked the pattern.
Right wall.
Upper chain line.
Broken rail brace.
Dead light casing.
Four immediate.
Two farther back.
Maybe more waiting.
"Don't chase," he said.
The big fighter gave him an annoyed look. "Then what?"
"Make them come through center."
Sitha got it first. "Kill box."
Joren nodded once.
Rin rolled her wrist around her blade and shifted a half step inward. "Now we're talking."
Dain backed into the relay opening, forcing the formation tighter. Joren held left close. Rin took right. Sitha centered her shot lane through the middle. Sol pulled Rhett into rear-mid while the heavy fighter took the outer left only far enough to swing without clipping anyone.
No speeches.
No countdown.
Just adaptation.
The crawlers came again.
One from above.
Two low.
One off the right wall.
Another straight down the center like it thought speed would solve everything.
Sitha fired first, pulse shot punching the center crawler backward into the hanging chain line where it tangled for half a second too long.
Rin killed the right-wall one before it landed.
Joren trapped the low left crawler against the floor with his hookblade and stamped its head flat.
Dain opened Umbra Shroud wider and flicked the edge through the center lane.
Grim Thread.
Thin shadow lines lingered in the air for just a breath, almost invisible against the red pulse of the chamber.
The tangled crawler freed itself and lunged directly through them.
It came apart.
The remaining one dropped from above toward Sitha's shoulders. Sol stepped in and split his baton blade apart, one side knocking it off course, the other taking it through the rib frame as it spun past him.
Silence again.
This time, it lasted longer.
Black fluid dripped from the broken supports.
The nest pulse deepened.
Somewhere farther in, chains dragged once across the chamber floor.
Not the crawlers.
The bigger thing still hadn't moved.
Rhett wiped black residue off one blade with visible disgust. "This whole floor's rotten."
"No," Dain said, eyes forward.
"It's built."
That changed the feeling immediately.
Because he was right.
The shells scattered across the chamber weren't random debris.
They were arranged.
Dragged into arcs.
Stacked and split near the lower rail line.
Some almost looked woven together with chain and black growth.
This level hadn't just become infested.
It had been turned into something.
Sitha stepped forward slowly, pulse weapon still raised. "The active cargo routes all lead through here."
Sol looked at the nearest split shell. "Collection point."
Rin's eyes shifted to Dain's coat. "And you're carrying the tag."
He knew what she meant.
If the thing deeper in the chamber tracked tagged targets, then this formation wasn't just entering the nest level.
It was bait.
Good.
Bait could be useful if it knew it was bait.
Dain moved in first.
This time, nobody questioned it.
They crossed the broken gate and entered the main nest chamber in a tighter pattern than before. The floor sloped toward an open central rail bed filled with snapped cargo restraints, broken crate shells, and thick loops of chain half-buried under blackened distortion residue. Overhead, the upper supports disappeared into shadow. Red-black pulses traveled through the walls in slow beats, like the chamber itself was passing signals.
At the far end, a lower descent channel opened into a darker pocket of the room.
That was where the heavy sound had come from.
Rin spoke quietly as they moved. "You ever get nervous?"
Dain kept his eyes ahead. "Yes."
She looked at him. "You hide it well."
"No," he said. "I use it."
That shut her up for a second.
Not because she disliked the answer.
Because it was the kind of answer that only made sense if it was true.
Sitha raised a hand.
Everyone stopped.
There, near the central rail bed—half hidden by a torn cargo shell—was another body.
Not moving.
Courier uniform.
Tag bracket ripped off.
Chest cavity torn open.
Sol's face tightened. "Dead."
Joren crouched near the body without touching it. "Dragged."
The black streak under the corpse led straight toward the far lower channel.
Rhett swallowed back whatever he wanted to say.
The big fighter muttered, "This is above Dust."
"No shit," Rin said.
Then something shifted behind the far cargo pile.
Not a crawler.
Not human.
A slow rising shape.
Everybody locked in.
Dain angled Umbra Shroud forward.
At first all they saw was chain.
Hanging from something.
Wrapped around something.
Dragging.
Then the shape rose higher, unfolding out of the red-black pulse like the chamber had been growing it in secret.
A long downward skull-shape.
Hooked steel jaw.
Dim red sensor pits where eyes should've been.
A hunched mass of black metal-flesh and broken carriage plating.
Multiple chain limbs hanging from its sides, some dragging the floor, some twitching against the shell growth fused along its back.
The thing stood higher.
More of it came into view.
Cargo restraints embedded in its body.
Nest-growth twitching along its spine.
Broken crawler husks tangled in the black mass on its back like it had been carrying them there.
A chest cavity glowing faintly from inside with deep black-red light.
Rin said the first honest thing anyone could say.
"What the fuck…"
The creature opened its jaw.
It did not roar.
It sounded like a cargo gate ripping open under pressure.
The active tag under Dain's coat pulsed hot.
The thing's head tilted.
It had found him.
The whole formation felt it at once.
Not emotion.
Attention.
Sitha's voice dropped low. "It tracks the tags."
"Yeah," Dain said.
The creature took one dragging step forward.
Then another.
Heavy. Scraping. Slow.
Too slow.
That was the trick.
Dain saw the chain tension before the lunge happened.
"Move!"
It exploded forward.
Not like something that size should have been able to move.
The front chain limb lashed across the chamber in a savage arc, smashing through the split cargo shell where they'd been standing a heartbeat earlier. Metal burst across the floor. Black fluid sprayed from the thing's dragging underframe. The impact shook the whole relay bed.
Rin rolled right.
Joren cut left.
Sitha fell back into line.
Sol dragged Rhett out of the chain's follow-through.
The big fighter barely got out of the lane in time.
Dain didn't retreat far.
He wanted the angle.
The creature's speed didn't match its weight.
Fine.
That only meant its pattern would be ugly before it became readable.
The chain limb snapped back.
The hooked maw opened.
The lower side-limb shifted before the front load did.
Dain saw the first sequence.
Not enough.
Start.
The creature lunged again—this time not at the loudest fighter, not at the closest.
At Dain.
At the active tag.
Rin saw it too. "It's ignoring everybody else!"
Good.
That meant its behavior had rules.
The chain came low.
Dain stepped in instead of back.
Umbra Shroud opened and caught the drag line at an angle, reinforced ribs shrieking as the force slammed into them. Veil Lock.
The chain deflected just enough to miss his centerline, tearing sparks out of the floor instead of ripping his legs out from under him.
Joren hit the creature's side-limb immediately.
Rin cut low at the rear joint.
Sitha fired a pulse shot into the exposed chest gap.
Sol moved to cover Dain's blind side.
Even Rhett, furious and bleeding, threw himself in with a hard twin-blade rush to stop the thing from circling.
Now the chamber became real.
Not a temporary group.
Not strangers surviving near each other.
A formation under pressure.
The creature reared up, nest growth twitching across its spine, chain limbs whipping wider as the entire nest level seemed to pulse harder around it.
And Dain finally understood what they were fighting.
Not just a Distortion.
A carrier.
A collector.
A thing that had turned the route into a feeding and sorting ground.
Its jaw peeled wider.
Its sensor pits burned brighter.
The chains around its body dragged and rose like the chamber itself was handing them over.
The boss had finally shown itself.
And it wanted the tag Dain was carrying.