The outpost gate came up before the front of the column reached it.They didn't wait for the transports to stop. Soldiers came out through the gap while the wheels were still turning, and the first man to reach the lead cart had a crate open before anyone told him he could. He wasn't looking for food. He pulled out two sealed jars of wound medicine, checked the wax on both, and turned and ran back through the gate with them under one arm.Nobody stopped him for that either.The feed went straight into troughs. No storeroom, count, or waiting — handlers cut the sacks open on the ground and poured them out, and the outpost's animals were on them before the sacks were empty. One of the beasts had ribs showing through its coat in a way Knox hadn't seen on a military animal before.He passed a bench near the inner wall where three soldiers sat with their arms out for a medic. The bandages coming off two of them had been washed and reused enough times that the stain had gone brown all the

The light crept across the disc and disappeared.Two of the soldiers holding the net shifted their grip. One reached toward the disc, but Mercer stopped him before his hand got close."Nobody touches it.""Sir—""You don't know what it does when someone holds it." Mercer placed the disc on the lid of a crate, well away from anything living. "Neris, finish checking its neck."Neris was already kneeling beside the hound, one sleeve pushed up.Knox stayed where he was. His attention remained on the beast, not the disc.Only minutes ago, it had been desperate to reach the medicine. It hadn't merely fought against the net. It had kept driving its shoulder into one corner, again and again, even with its breath coming in broken gasps and one front leg refusing to bear its weight. It hadn't seemed to care what happened to its body as long as it reached those crates.Now it wasn't moving at all.Its eyes roamed across the storehouse while it lay on its side beneath the net, panting. After a wh

Knox had been carrying an idea of what would come through that drain since Neris found the scar, and none of it had looked like a man.The beast came out behind him.It poured out of the channel rather than climbing from it, long and low and black, built for going up things. Four hooked claws on each forepaw. Its fur took the lamplight off the eastern wall and gave nothing back at all, so the edges of it kept disappearing and the shape had to be guessed at.【 Voidclaw Lynx 】【 Level: 11 】【 Rank: Rare 】【 Attribute: Shadow/Void 】Four claws, Knox thought. Evenly spaced. Lying down easy beside a man’s bootprint on a ridge.The lynx came out and looked at its summoner first.It waited until the man made two quick signs with his left hand. Nothing dramatic, only two small movements of his fingers, but the beast understood them at once. It slipped across the yard, stopped where he wanted it and looked back to him for the next command.Something tightened in Knox’s stomach.The Ridgehide Ho

Knox pushed the perception out further and got the wiring.The lines ran from the core out along the buried cables to every disc on every wall, and he could feel where they went and how they branched and none of that told him one useful thing about how to break them. He was looking at a road map. What he needed was a weak point."The rods."Neris had come up level with him. She wasn't looking at the figure at all."Three of them. Inside the ring, at the base." She pointed with two fingers, low. "They light up before the pulse. Every time. Watch the next one."Knox watched the next one.Three narrow uprights standing between the ribs went pale a fraction of a second before the floor moved under his boots."Ignis."The drake was already turning.Heat. All of it. The nearest one.Ignis planted and opened his jaws and put out a concentrated blast of white-edged heat that lit the whole chamber, and it went into the base of the rod and stayed there.

The horns hadn’t stopped.They’d been going since Laura gave the order, one tower picking up where the last left off, so there was never a stretch of quiet long enough to get used to. Knox stood outside the command building with his back to the wall and watched Blackridge stop being a garrison.The main gate was open and staying open. Patrols that should have been processed one at a time were coming through four abreast, and nobody was checking anything. A summoner went past with a hound limping on three legs and a man’s coat tied around its middle. Behind him came two more with nothing beside them at all.The recovery pens filled up and then kept taking animals anyway.A healer worked her way down the line outside them with a roll of red cloth, tearing strips and tying them around forelegs, and she was moving fast enough that she didn’t stop to explain any of it. Knox counted six red strips before he stopped looking.“They’ve run out of stalls,” Neris said.In the middle of the yard,