Rain didn't fall in the Undercity, it bled. It was a constant, greasy weeping from stained pipes and weeping walls, a drizzle that smelled of ozone, rust, and recycled air. Down here, in the city's guts, was a maze of dead maglev lines and humming server farms. This was where Nocturnal Shadows did its real business, in the flicker of rogue data streams and the shadows of forgotten tunnels.
Yin Lie wore the darkness like a second skin. The months on the run had stripped him of everything but the essentials, honing him into something sharp and cold. The panicked boy from the docks felt like a ghost from another lifetime, a story someone else had lived. He moved through a makeshift market buzzing in a cavernous, derelict station, his long coat hiding the scuffed, hardened armor beneath. His silver eyes, now a flat, icy grey unless he was provoked, swept the crowd, not just seeing, but feeling.
The wolf in his blood was a low, constant hum, a predator's certainty that tasted the air and felt the vibrations through the soles of his boots. It picked out the tremor in a junkie's hand, the sour tang of a liar's sweat. The ice in his marrow kept him invisible, a thin, subconscious shimmer of cold that bent light and distorted heat signatures, making him a void where a man should be.
He wasn't hiding anymore. He was hunting.
His prey was a data-wraith called Echo, a ghost who lived in the city's digital trash heaps. The meet was a synth-noodle stall, the air thick with the smell of scorched oil and cheap soy. The code was simple, mundane.
"Noodles are cold tonight," Yin Lie said, his voice a low rumble that was barely heard over the sizzle of the wok.
The owner, a wiry man whose face was a messy roadmap of old data-jack scars, didn't bother to look up. "Fire always dies eventually." He slid a takeout box across the greasy counter. Inside, nestled beside the lukewarm noodles, was a sealed data-chip.
The moment his fingers brushed the container, his world went sideways.
It wasn't one thing, but two, hitting him at the same instant. A whiff of something clean and sharp cutting through the market's grime—military-grade stimulants. At the exact same moment, three distinct heat signatures detached from the background noise of the crowd, their movements too clean, too purposeful.
Ambush.
He didn't think. He reacted. His leg snapped back, kicking the entire noodle stall over. The wok flipped, sending a shower of sparks and hot oil into the air. The vendor screamed, a mix of surprise and pain. In that single, fluid motion, Yin Lie spun, his hand slicing through the air. A shard of sub-zero air, almost invisible, shot across the space he had just been standing in.
SHINK!
One of the ambushers, a man in black tactical gear, choked out a curse as the ice-blade sheared clean through the barrel of his rifle, the metal instantly frosting over like a dead thing.
"It's him! The Frost Wolf!" another one yelled.
The name they'd given him. A name he was starting to hate.
He gave them no time to recover. The wolf wanted to tear and rend, but the ice gave it focus. He slammed his palm flat on the wet concrete. A wave of treacherous black ice shot out. Men shouted curses as their feet went out from under them. One of them, quicker than the others, leaped onto a stack of shipping crates, leveling a pulse pistol.
He never got the shot off. Yin Lie was a blur, his lupine strength eating the distance between them. He didn't attack the man directly. He ran past, and as he did, his hand, wreathed in a faint, killing-blue light, didn't so much touch the metal supports of the platform as it leeched the life from them.
CRACK-GROAN!
The metal, made instantly brittle by the absolute cold, buckled and tore. The gunman cried out as the platform collapsed beneath him, sending him crashing down into the web of fractured ice his partners were still struggling in.
Yin Lie was already gone, vaulting a pile of junked electronics and melting into the maze of alleys, the chip clutched in his fist. Faint sirens began to howl, but they weren't the Directorate's. They were private. Someone's personal army.
He found a defunct server room, a tomb that smelled of dust and dead dreams. He jacked the chip into his device, his heart hammering a slow, heavy rhythm against his ribs. The data decrypted.
It wasn't a simple intel file. It was a memory, ripped from the cybernetic eye of a dead man. The last few seconds of the scholar from the docks, "The Nail."
The image resolved: a man's face, handsome and cruel, filled with a chilling ambition. Qi Yan. He stood over The Nail's cooling body, his men sweeping the area. But they weren't focused on the broken metal case on the ground. Qi Yan himself was holding a scanner, and he was sweeping it over the empty air, a deep frown of frustration on his face.
Then came the voiceover, a recording from Echo.
"You got it all wrong, Wolf. Everyone did. That case wasn't the prize, just the battery pack. The 'Keystone'… it ain't a thing. It's a key, a sliver of something ancient. And it's not in the box anymore. When that battery cracked, the Keystone jumped ship. It needs a host, see? A vessel with enough raw juice to hold it. See where I'm going with this?"
The recording ended with a click.
Yin Lie stared at the dark screen, at the ghost of his own reflection. The surge at the docks, the static in his head, the constant war inside him. It wasn't just his own power awakening.
A jolt, cold and hot at once, went through him. He was the case. The Keystone was inside him.
That's why Qi Yan's men weren't Directorate. He knew. Qi Yan wasn't just hunting a variant. He was hunting the goddamn key.
A dread colder than his own power flooded his veins. Being the Frost Wolf was a curse. Being the living lockbox for a power that could start a war was something else entirely.
A sharp, stabbing pain lanced through his skull. The revelation had agitated the unwelcome guest, and its hosts were rebelling. It felt like his own soul trying to reject a poisoned transplant. The wolf snarled, sensing a parasite in its den. The ice tried to encase the foreign energy, to smother it in a tomb of absolute zero.
He bent double, a strangled gasp tearing from his throat as his vision stuttered between the world of heat, the world of cold, and something else—a terrifying, geometric landscape of pure energy. The curse Chen Gu warned him of, the slow erosion of self, had never felt so real.
He pushed himself up, his breath pluming in the cold air as he leaned against a server rack. The hunt had changed. The stakes had been raised. Qi Yan wanted to rip his soul out to get the Key. The Directorate just wanted the monster in a cage. Su Li… Su Li probably wanted to see what would happen if she turned the key herself.
Everyone wanted a piece of him.
Fine. A low growl, more beast than man, rumbled in his chest. A promise.
Let them come.