The transition was a silent, jarring shock to the senses. One moment, Lin Feng was breathing the dry, warm air of the Egyptian desert, the scent of ancient stone in his nostrils. The next, he was hit by a wave of cold, damp air, the smell of pine and wet earth filling his lungs. The silver portal shimmered behind his last soldier and then folded in on itself, vanishing with a soft, final hiss, leaving them in the profound, predatory silence of a German forest at night.
They were behind enemy lines.
"Vanguard, status report," Lin Feng's voice was a low, calm whisper in their earpieces, the only sound in the darkness.
One by one, twelve green icons lit up on his helmet's HUD. ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL.
"Intel is live," Jack Wilson's voice crackled from a world away in Giza. A glowing green topographical overlay of the forest floor materialized in their visors. "Adler's got the whole forest wired. A web of thermal tripwires, bio-acoustic sensors, and seismic plates. You sneeze too loud, he'll know you're there."
"We will not sneeze, Doctor," Lin Feng replied, his voice flat. He turned to his team. "We move like ghosts."
They began to advance, not as twelve men, but as a single, dark organism. They did not walk; they flowed, their new symbiotic armor a silent, black extension of their own disciplined movements, its advanced material absorbing both sound and heat.
They came to the first sensor line, a dense, invisible web of infrared beams marked in red on their HUDs. It was impassable.
"Commander," Ivan Petrov's voice, a low, gravelly rumble, came over the comms from his station in the Arctic. "I have a lock on your position. Projecting a cold zone... now."
A wave of unnatural cold, a subtle but profound drop in the ambient temperature, washed over the section of the forest before them. The infrared beams on their HUDs flickered and then vanished, temporarily blinded by the sudden thermodynamic shift.
"Window is open for sixty seconds," Ivan stated.
The team flowed through the gap, a river of shadows in the cold.
They had bypassed the technology. Now came the biology.
From the darkness ahead, a low, guttural growl echoed, a sound that was half animal, half machine. A patrol. Six figures emerged from between the ancient pines. They were Chimeric Wolves, monstrous fusions of wolf and steel. Their hides were a patchwork of matted grey fur and dull, armored plates, and their eyes glowed with the twin red dots of cybernetic infrared lenses.
The Vanguard team did not flinch. They did not raise their weapons. They simply stopped, melting into the shadows of the trees, a part of the forest's darkness.
"Blaze," Lin Feng whispered. "Create a diversion. East."
The American pyrokinetic, a man who had once been a font of uncontrolled rage, now acted with the precision of a surgeon. He held up a single, gauntleted finger. A tiny, silent ball of superheated plasma, no bigger than a marble, formed at its tip. He flicked it. It shot through the trees, landing on a damp patch of moss a hundred meters to the east. The moss instantly flash-vaporized, creating a brief, intense thermal bloom on the wolves' infrared sensors.
The pack's heads swiveled in unison, their attention drawn to the false heat signature. They began to lope towards the decoy.
"Frost," Lin Feng commanded.
The Russian cryo-kinetic placed his palm on the damp forest floor. The ground in the wolves' path did not frost over; it simply lost all friction, a patch of perfect, unnatural black ice forming in an instant. The lead wolves hit the patch at a full run and their legs went out from under them, sending them crashing in a confused, sliding heap.
"Echo," was Lin Feng's final, quiet command.
The German teleporter, a phantom in their midst, vanished. In the next second, he appeared as a flicker of distorted air behind the fallen, scrambling wolves. In his hands were six small, hypo-syringes. He moved with a speed that was a blur even to his teammates' enhanced senses, a silent, efficient dance of neutralization. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Six darts, filled with a potent neurotoxin developed by Sophia, found their marks in the soft flesh behind the wolves' armored skulls.
Echo reappeared beside Lin Feng a second later, just as the last of the wolves collapsed into a silent, unconscious heap.
The entire engagement had taken less than ten seconds. Not a single shot had been fired. Not a single alarm had been raised.
They reached the edge of the forest. Before them, camouflaged into the side of a granite cliff face, was a single, massive, reinforced blast door. The secret entrance to the serpent's lair.
"We are at the door," Lin Feng whispered into the comms, his voice a flat line of success. The first test was over. They had passed.