Chapter 65 #2
From where he stood, he heard grotesque howls.
Five synchronized howls—hoarse, high-pitched, and drawn out.
The sound made his already racing heart hammer even harder against his ribcage.
There was no longer any doubt about what they were dealing with.
They were the chimeras. They were inside.
He had failed to capture them, and now they had come to show him the price of that failure.
Zion was gasping. Desperate, he lowered his barrier and yanked on the bond so recklessly that he crashed into a wall of bones.
“Kyller?” he called, pacing back and forth, grinding his teeth. She didn’t respond.
“Kaori, how is she?” He turned to his second-in-command.
Another flare shot up. Rarely in his life had he felt this desperate. His heart seemed to be plummeting into an abyss of fear.
“The flare isn’t hers. Kyller is in the tree, heartbeat elevated, one-forty per minute.”
“Kyller?!” he shouted in despair, punching the dome that separated him from his partner. He was certain they were the chimeras. Only they could make the cameras go dark—just like during the attack on the medical base at the border.
“I’m here, Zion.” He heard Kyller respond as she lowered her barrier. Her feelings struck him with the force of a hurricane.
Panic.
She was in a panic, gripped by fear.
His shadows climbed the barrier, devouring energy and trying to punch a hole through the defense, just as he’d done with the protection at home. But the barrier didn’t show a single scratch.
He took another deep breath. He couldn’t let himself be consumed by fear—Kyller needed him.
So he told her what was happening and, finally, dreading her reaction, shared his suspicions about the chimeras.
He was afraid she’d go into even deeper shock, but he needed his partner to know what she was dealing with so she could stay safe while he found a way to bring down the barrier.
“They’re not chimeras, Zion,” she replied, and he froze in place.
Of course they were dealing with chimeras—it was the only plausible explanation. But he wanted to hear what she thought. Through the bond, he could feel her heart pounding.
“What are they?” Zion asked impatiently. Kyller didn’t respond. He sensed her tears welling up, and her desperation threatened to drive him mad. “What are they, Kyller?”
“They’re ghouls,” she replied softly, as if she were seeing one of them.
Ghouls? Was she talking about the beasts from the book? Like the ones the archangels fought in their dreams?
“Yes,” she answered.
Only then did he realize he’d asked the question mentally. An image flooded through the bond into his mind: a twisted, disfigured monster on four legs, like something out of ancient nightmares.
He couldn’t tell if the irrational fear gripping him—or the sudden chill running up his spine—belonged to him or his partner.
“That’s not possible. Ghouls are just a legend,” he murmured to himself, drowning in his own terror as he replayed the image in his mind. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it.
“The archangels are also a legend, but somehow they live in my dreams, just like they did with my mother.”
He tried to process the information, but his mind refused to accept that kind of danger.
Finally, he realized every second counted and he was wasting too much time.
Whether they were chimeras or ghouls, he would face them.
He needed to keep his partner safe. He grabbed the psychic by the arm and headed back to the facility.
“Don’t leave the tree. The animals are in quadrant 1. I’ll handle it before they reach yours,” Zion said, already turning to the screen and studying the map.
“What’s quadrant 1, and where am I?” Kyller asked, confused. He explained how he’d divided the area like a clock face.
“Which quadrant are my friends in?” With that question, she finally seemed to be coming back to herself.
“Your friends are safe. Hiro and Aish are up a tree in quadrant 9. Breno is in area 8, passed out inside a dead, fallen tree. They’re all far from the attack zone.”
“What can I do for them?” Her voice carried that cold edge of desperation again.
Zion took a deep breath, trying to maintain his composure. It was hard to stay centered when Kyller was radiating fear.
“Right now, nothing. None of you have your gifts, and if you face the... ghouls, you’ll die before you can land a single blow. I saw what they did to the frontier medics. Fifteen soldiers with years of military training, and it wasn’t enough.”
Paralyzing terror threatened to overwhelm him as he remembered what was left of the bodies. Zion forced his attention back to what Kaori was saying, and Kyller nodded, raising her barrier again.
“The chimeras started at the center, but they’re heading toward areas 1 and 2. All the drones went down there. Three students have been disconnected,” Kaori informed him, adjusting her triple-lens glasses. She sat at the largest computer, fingers flying over the keys.
The director watched the images, his gaze darting desperately from one screen to another now that the full scope of the problem was clear. Lionel feared for Adrian, who was trapped in the dome.
“I’m racking my brain trying to understand,” Takeshi, the Vinturian team leader, murmured while piloting a drone away from the affected area, “but I don’t see how an animal could bring down our camera system.”
The other men nodded in agreement, whispering theories among themselves.
They’d apparently been waiting for permission to speak.
The tent erupted into a flurry of technical jargon that Zion couldn’t follow at all.
If he thought Kaori spoke in complicated terms, her men might as well have been speaking another language.
The woman in question cleared her throat, drawing the men’s attention.
“Do you think this is a joke?” She paused for a moment and rose from her computer, fixing the team with her fiercest scowl.
Her black hair, once cropped short for surgery, now fell to her waist and seemed to ripple with the fury the gorgon was barely containing—a warning of transformation to come.
The men fell silent immediately, eyeing her with something like fear.
“Children are dying on the other side and you’re sitting here theorizing about the camera system? You’ve got to be kidding me!”
“But this is cutting-edge technology, Miss Kaori!” Takeshi insisted. “It’s our best monitoring work. The drone security system was coded to reject external interference. Only superior technology could take it down, and there’s no better team than ours in all of Jupiter.”
This time, Zion could follow parts of the problem. If what Takeshi said was true, Interion wasn’t just facing a biological attack—it was also under cyber attack. Kaori blinked, taking it in, then glanced at the computer screen before turning to face the entire team. Then she spoke again:
“Regardless of what it is, now is not the time to discuss the whys, let alone mope about being outsmarted.” She looked at each of her men in turn, making sure they understood.
“Later, when things calm down, we’ll investigate this, and if it really is a cyber attack, we’ll find whoever’s responsible and make them pay.
But right now, I need everyone focused on saving these children.
I can’t do this alone. I need the Yamamoto team one hundred percent with me. ”
The men straightened up, some adjusting their glasses, and under Kaori's firm orders, the entire team returned to work in a determined, silent formation.
But for Zion, the cyberattack question wouldn't leave him alone.
The big question was: who would have superior technology to pull off something like this if Vinturis was the nation that controlled all the research in that area?
The chimeras came from Drutes—that was their biological technology—but the camera shutdowns made no sense at all.
“Is the lily of the field just going to stand there? You're thinking too much and doing too little!” Kaori exclaimed, looking directly at him, then delivered the final blow: “Kyller needs you.”
Zion shifted awkwardly in place, caught standing idle while the entire team worked with focus.
Still embarrassed, he shot Kaori a grateful look, which made her roll her eyes and toss her long black hair behind her shoulders.
The lieutenant had always been the army's anchor, but when she worked on something she truly loved, she became extraordinary.
“We need a blocker!” Zion shouted to the tech team. “Where's Natali Lutieve?”
On the screens, the drones in area 2 had gone dark.