The countdown was getting louder.
Its been 75 days now and Kai still couldn't find out what was happening to him or better yet, in his genetics . It wasn't quite pain, wasn't quite hunger, but something that thrummed through every nerve like a second heartbeat. The genetic memory kept offering the same data: breeding cycle advancing, urgency increasing, preparation phase closing.
Something was coming. Something the ancient World Cats had been engineered to fear or prepare for or adapt to. And Kai had maybe weeks to figure out which.
This was why he'd accelerated the breeding program. Four new kits in rapid succession. Scout-designed for sensory specialization. Soldier-built for raw combat. Analyst-optimized for information processing. And Bitey, the combat specialist, encoded with aggression and speed that burned through genetic code like fire.
The problem was that accelerating breeding meant resource consumption spiked. Which meant more hunting. Which meant less time to explore, to map, to prepare for the other catastrophe.
The stones from Chapter Seven waited in their chamber, patient and unyielding and impossible to ignore. The ancient civilization's desperate warnings about water. About floods. About catastrophe cyclical enough that previous societies had learned to dread it.
Kai was supposed to be preparing for that. Instead, he was preparing for war.
Watching the younger kits hunt was supposed to be a break from strategic thinking. A moment to observe and assess. It turned into something more complicated.
Scout moved through the tunnels like water finding cracks, tracking prey through abandoned pheromone trails. Perfect specialization. Beautiful execution. And then Scout stopped mid-hunt and just... gave up. Watched the prey escape into a side tunnel like the hunt had become irrelevant.
"Why didn't you finish?" Kai asked, coming down from the observation ledge.
Scout turned, and the kit's thought-pattern came through frustrated and trapped in equal measure. I wanted to try hunting like Bitey does. Just raw speed. No planning.
"But you're not built for that."
I know. Scout's pheromone markers carried something that felt like sadness mixed with rage. That's the whole problem. I'm built for scent tracking. So when I try something else, my body doesn't cooperate. It's like being designed to run in one specific direction and then being punished for wanting to run somewhere else.
Kai had created this. Had deliberately encoded Scout with specialized capability that was simultaneously a cage.
That night, Kai found Twitchy in the main chamber reorganizing stone markers. Twitchy had a habit of moving things around when working through problems. The eldest kit looked up as Kai approached, and there was recognition in the movement. Twitchy knew why Kai was here.
"Scout's trapped," Twitchy said before Kai could explain. "I can feel it through the connection. The frustration. The anger at what they are."
The weight of it hit Kai differently now than it had in Chapter Six. Then, Kai had felt the realization like drowning. Now it felt like context for every decision that followed.
"I made them that way. Specialized them so hard they're basically prisoners of their own genetics."
Twitchy set down the stone marker carefully. The eldest kit was approaching half of Kai's current mass, growing into something that looked almost like leadership. "Did you regret it when you made them?"
Kai sat down on the cool stone. The World Cat consciousness didn't process regret the way humans did. But Kai still carried Devin's memories, still understood the concept even if the emotional weight was distant now.
"No," Kai said finally. "At the time, I thought specialization was smart. Optimization. Making each kit perfect at something. But I didn't think about what perfect means. Perfect at hunting like a scout. Perfect at fighting like Bitey. Perfect at sensing like Whisper. Which means... not perfect at anything else. And I made that choice for them before they could choose."
Twitchy came and sat beside Kai. "So what do we do? We can't un-specialize them."
"No. But maybe we can stop treating specialization like a limit and start treating it like a starting point."
They sat together in the darkness, and Kai realized something that might have surprised the old Devin version of himself. Twitchy had become someone Kai could actually talk to. Not just command or direct, but talk to. Share uncertainty with. The eldest kit understood compromise and ambiguity in ways that pure World Cat logic wouldn't.
The genetic countdown kept ticking. But at least Kai wasn't alone in noticing it anymore.
Three days later, the tunnels answered back.