The charcoal wolf stood like a monolith against the jagged silhouettes of the coastal cliffs. Below, the Covenant fortress hummed with a clinical, predatory energy. Damon looked down not with fear, but with the cold, measured gaze of a storm about to break. He had followed the metallic, ancient scent of the Crimson Custodians to this very spot the entrance to the abyss where Elara, his light, was being swallowed by the dark.
His heart thrummed with a singular, lethal focus. Beneath his feet lay a hundred broken souls, and deeper still, the White Lycan. The mission had stripped away everything but the primal need to protect and the calculated need to destroy.
Damon didn't plan to kick down the front door. He was going to bleed into the system like a virus.
With a low, vibrating growl, he shifted back into his human form. The transition was seamless, a silent ripple of muscle and bone. He pulled a specialized plasma torch from his tactical gear a tool designed for silent, surgical entry. He didn't waste a second. He moved toward a forgotten ventilation shaft, a rusted artery of the facility hidden by the salt-crusted rocks.
"Surveillance is the real beast here, Alpha," Lydus's voice whispered in the back of his mind, sharp and tactical. "Cyrus has tuned his sensors to the heat of a heartbeat. If you're warm, you're dead. You must become the winter itself."
Damon closed his eyes, drawing on the Lumina Spring's gift. He didn't just still his mind; he commanded his biology. Using Lycan Thermal Control, he forced his body temperature to plummet, matching the freezing midnight air of the cliffs. To any thermal sensor, he was now as invisible as a block of ice.
He cut through the vent wall with the precision of a diamond-tipped blade. The hole was small, just enough for a man of his build to slip through. He entered the shaft, leaving behind the fresh sea air for the suffocating stench of stagnant metal and the chemical rot of Covenant serums.
He moved through the narrow pipe like oil, his movements devoid of friction. He had discarded his heavy clothing, wearing only a thin, thermal combat layer that felt like a second skin. His Lycan grip allowed him to traverse the slick metal without a single scrape or sound. He was a ghost traveling through the lungs of his enemy.
After several agonizing minutes of crawling through the dark, the shaft widened into a dimly lit maintenance tunnel. Automated emergency lights cast long, sickly shadows against the cold rock. Damon flattened himself against the stone, his breath a faint, icy mist. He checked Kruz's data-pad. The security station for The Below was just ahead.
Inside that room sat two guards and an AI Surveillance System a digital hydra with thirty eyes and a thousand biometric nerves. He had to kill the guards and blind the machine simultaneously, or the entire fortress would wake up and scream.
He waited, his senses expanded. He could hear the guards' shallow breathing. One was complaining about a missed shift; the other was scrolling through a digital feed, bored and complacent. They were waiting for a wolf to howl at the door; they weren't prepared for a shadow to slip through the cracks.
Damon launched.
He didn't roar. He didn't even breathe. He moved with a velocity that defied the frame rate of the cameras.
His first strike wasn't at a man, but at the console. Before the guards could even register a flicker of movement, Damon's hand slammed a bespoke digital virus into the core processor. In a millisecond, the AI began broadcasting a looped feed a perfect, peaceful image of two guards sitting at their desks, forever frozen in a moment of safety.
To the main tower miles away, the station was a picture of absolute order.
The guards finally looked up, their faces twisted in lazy confusion.
"Did you see"
The sentence died in a choked rasp. Damon was on them. He didn't use claws or teeth; he used the surgical efficiency of pressure-point strikes. A combination of ancient Lycan knowledge and modern combat training. Two swift, silent blows to the carotid, and both men slumped in their chairs. No blood. No struggle. Just a sudden, deep sleep.
Damon stood in the center of the silent room, the only sound the low, electric hum of the compromised system. He was now the master of their eyes.
He tapped into the internal comms, his pulse steady despite the adrenaline.
"...Transfer of Subject Prime complete," a voice crackled through the speakers, cold and detached. "Void Chamber pressure at maximum. Cyrus is demanding immediate serum analysis. Begin the harvest."
Elara. The name echoed in his soul like a battle cry.
He accessed the schematics for The Below. It was a three-level descent into madness:
Level 1 (The Depository): The liquid poison, the serums.
Level 2 (The Harvest): The prison for his kind, the living batteries.
Level 3 (The Core): The Void Chamber. His Mate's prison.
Damon's face hardened into a mask of immovable iron. He began the deliberate process of deleting the last hour of security footage, carving his existence out of their memory. Finally, he implanted a delayed command a localized power failure that would trigger in exactly ten minutes.
The King had infiltrated the castle while the enemies were still celebrating. His revenge wasn't going to be a loud explosion; it was going to be the quiet, terrifying realization that the darkness they feared was already standing behind them.
The digital timer on the stolen data-pad was a glowing, amber eye in the dark, ticking down with cold, mechanical indifference: 00:01:45. Damon didn't blink. He had less than two minutes before the localized blackout he'd buried in the system's brain would kill the primary lights and blind every electronic eye in this sector. He used those seconds to find the wound in the rock that led to the heart of the facility.
The entrance was a masterpiece of deception, hidden behind a wall of reinforced steel that mimicked a row of rusted storage lockers. Damon didn't use force. He fed the access codes he'd ripped from the AI into the keypad. The wall groaned, a hiss of pressurized air escaping as a massive, circular hatch slid back. It was a strange marriage of eras modern magnetic clamps holding fast against ancient, heavy brass locks that looked like they belonged in a Victorian asylum.
What lay beyond was not a corridor, but a throat. A steep, spiraling stone staircase plunged into a dark so thick it felt like a physical weight. As the hatch opened, a draft of air rushed out to meet him. It was freezing, stagnant, and carried a scent that made his Lycan blood boil: the sharp, copper tang of old blood mixed with the suffocating, sour stench of prolonged terror. It was the smell of broken wolves.
Damon slid his combat knife into its sheath with a metallic click. Stealth was no longer about technology; it was about the rhythm of the hunt. He needed a high-level keycard to bypass the deeper seals, and the staircase was about to provide a donor.
As he began his silent descent, his enhanced hearing caught a rhythmic vibration from below. A heavy, metal-shod boot hitting a grate. One step. Two steps. A single guard was ascending, his breathing heavy and careless.
Damon didn't just hide; he became a shadow. He pressed himself into a jagged alcove in the rock-cut wall, slowing his pulse until his body heat was indistinguishable from the cold stone. He waited; a statue carved from charcoal and rage.
The guard rounded the bend a bulky mercenary encased in tactical armor, a specialized rifle slung over his shoulder. He was humming a mindless, jaunty tune, his mind likely on his next paycheck or a warm meal, completely oblivious to the fact that he was walking into the jaws of a king.
Damon didn't give him the chance to see a face. He dropped from the ceiling of the alcove like a predatory cat.
His weight hit the mercenary's back with crushing force, but the sound was muffled by his own body. In one fluid motion, Damon's forearm locked around the man's windpipe, cutting off the possibility of a shout. Simultaneously, his other hand found the exact nerve cluster at the temple. It wasn't a punch; it was a Lycan pressure-point strike a surge of kinetic energy that overloaded the human nervous system.
The guard's body went instantly, terrifyingly limp. The heavy rifle began to slip, but Damon caught it before it could clatter against the metal grate. He stripped the man of his keycard and comm-link, then propped the unconscious form upright against the shadows of the wall. To a casual glance, he would look like a man taking a nap on his feet.
00:00:30. The clock was a silent scream.
Damon accelerated his descent, his feet barely touching the stairs. His focus was a laser, cutting through the dark toward the source of that wretched smell.
At 00:00:05, the lights above flickered, a dying gasp of electricity.
At zero, the world went black.
The primary power died, leaving only the dim, sickly red glow of the emergency lights. The staircase was transformed into a spiral of blood-red shadows, the stone walls looking like raw flesh in the pulsing light. Damon reached the bottom, and the true horror of the facility hit him like a physical blow.
The sound was the worst part. It wasn't the screaming he had expected. It was a low, agonizing chorus of whimpers and broken moans the sound of predators whose spirits had been ground into dust. The air was a thick, intoxicating fog of fear and the cloyingly sweet, chemical odor of the Lycan Serum.
He swiped the stolen keycard. An air-locked door groaned open, revealing the first sub-level: The Depository.
It was a nightmare of industrial scale. Rows upon rows of massive, translucent vats stood like silent sentinels, filled with a shimmering, mercury-like silver liquid. This was the serum the distilled essence of his kind. Thick, translucent tubes snaked away from the vats, disappearing through the floor to the levels below.
Then, he heard it.
The rhythmic, agonizing sound of a slow drip from a faulty valve. Drip. Drip. Drip. Each drop was a piece of someone's life. And beneath that sound, a voice so thin it was barely a breath, vibrating through the cold air:
"...Alpha... please... save us..."
Damon's gold eyes didn't just glow; they burned with a lethal, incandescent fury. He wasn't just here for Elara anymore. He was standing in a tomb, and he was about to wake the dead. He had found the Below, and now, he was going to make Cyrus pray for the darkness.