The aggressive young kit had a problem, and that problem was impulse control.
Kai watched from the den entrance as he has been for 107 days now, the nameless kit stalked a beetle with all the subtlety of a rockslide. The approach was enthusiastic. Loud. Completely wrong. The kit's feet scraped on stone, claws clicked at the end of each step, tail swished with excitement it couldn't hide. The beetle paused, felt the tremor, and bolted. It escaped three seconds before the kit pounced on empty stone and skidded forward with a little grunt of frustration.
"You're supposed to be quiet," Bitey called from the ledge above. The combat specialist had taken it upon themselves to mentor the younger kit, which mostly involved a lot of sighing and starting sentences with, "No, you absolute disaster."
The young kit looked up, mandibles clicking in frustration. I was being quiet.
"You announced your presence to everything in a fifty-body-length radius. That's the opposite of quiet." Bitey flattened their posture and demonstrated: slow weight shift, paws landing like breath, no unnecessary movement. "Quiet is when I stop talking and you still forget I'm above you."
The kit tried again. It lifted its feet higher than necessary, placed them down in a rhythm it thought counted as sneaky, and pressed its body low to the stone. It was determined, and determination counted for something, even if technique did not. The beetle, newly cautious and twice as fast, felt the vibration again and darted under a lip of rock. The kit slid to the edge and peered in, baffled by how prey could simply vanish.
"That lip is a kill line," Bitey said. "You force it out before you pounce. Pressure here, not there. You don't chase into a blind corner, you make it flee to where you already are."
The kit nodded like all of that sank in. It probably didn't. Not yet. Learning took repetition. Learning under pressure took more.
Twitchy emerged from the northern tunnels, back from checking the boundary markers near Scar-Mandible's territory. The eldest kit looked tired. Three days of coordinating with an ant colony that should have been their enemy was wearing on everyone. Twitchy's whiskers were dull with mineral dust, the kind that clung to fur when you crawled through old squeezes, and their breathing had that clipped sound of someone who had been moving fast for too long.
"The ants are getting nervous," Twitchy reported, settling near Kai. "Their scouts keep detecting movement in the deep water channels. Something big is moving closer to the upper system."
"Scout's been tracking it too," Kai said. The water specialist had been obsessively mapping predator movements since the alliance formed. "Multiple signatures now. At least three distinct creatures, maybe more."
"Three days until the flood," Twitchy said quietly. "Three days until everything changes."
Kai felt that truth settle the way cold settled into bone. Three days was not time. It was a countdown that let you organize your fear into lists.
Down in the training area, the aggressive young kit tried another stalk. This one was slightly better. The beetle only noticed two seconds before the attack instead of three. The kit almost timed the pounce right, but the tail twitched a heartbeat too soon, and the beetle read that twitch like a signal flare.
Progress, technically.
Bitey exhaled. "You're thinking about the pounce while you're moving. Think about the move until you're in position. Then think about the pounce." Bitey pointed at the kit's back. "Tension gives you away. Learn where to put it. Not in the tail. Not in the shoulders. Load your hips. Hold your breath at the end. Exhale on the strike."
The kit tried to mimic the posture. It wasn't pretty. It did it anyway. That mattered.
Kai let the scene play out. Raw aggression had to be paired with discipline or it burned itself out against the first real problem. Bitey was good for that pairing. Direct. Unsparing. Honest. The kit needed honest.
"Eat," Kai said gently, tossing down a strip of salamander meat once the attempts turned clumsy. "Fuel first. Then try again with a full body."
The kit snapped up the meat, swallowed too fast, blinked tears from the way it scraped the throat, and gave a fierce little nod that said it would try until it dropped.
The den around them buzzed with quiet work. Whisper had turned one alcove into a chemical mess of dried moss threads and sample markers. Dig had a scatter of sketches scratched into the stone in tiny, repeating triangles, each triangle a different angle calculation about load and collapse. Shadow lay near the entrance, crystal pulse dim, resting the kind of rest you needed after linking too many minds for too many hours. Scout was absent, which meant in water, which meant probably ignoring Kai's last four suggestions about caution.
"Check the west seep again on your way past," Twitchy murmured. "I felt a change in the air movement there earlier."
Kai nodded. The pressure sense had been subtly wrong for two days: a little more push in the cracks, a little more hum in the stone. If the system was a chest, the breath was getting shallow and fast. That was never good.
The nameless kit returned to the practice strip with new effort. It placed one paw, then stopped and felt the stone instead of rushing the next step. That pause—tiny, stubborn—was the first real improvement of the day.
"Better," Bitey allowed. "Not good yet. But better."
The kit's ears lifted. A scrap of pride was fuel; Kai let the scrap stand.
They trained until the beetle finally slipped into a fissure too narrow for kit claws to reach. Bitey called the session. The kit didn't argue. It was shaking with small muscle tremors and trying to hide that shake by standing very tall. Kai handed over a second strip of meat; the kit tried not to look grateful and failed.
"Rest," Kai said. "You listen better when you're not starving."
The kit settled near the heat of a side vent, chewing in quick bites like someone might take the food back if it looked too slow.
Twitchy leaned closer to Kai and lowered their voice. "If the ants are right, the movement in the deep channels isn't random. Patrols. Routes. The same paths every few hours. That looks like pattern, not drift."
"Pattern means intention," Kai said. "Intention means we're not dealing with mindless things."
"We already knew that," Twitchy said, flicking eyes toward the five stones lined like witnesses on the chamber wall. "But it feels different hearing ant scouts talk about organized approach vectors like it's a routine check."
"It won't be routine in three days," Kai said.
"No," Twitchy agreed. "It won't."
They let the quiet sit for a moment. The den was home in the way a place becomes home when you work on it with your hands and bleed in it and sleep hard in its corners. Losing a home was a practical problem first—shelter, heat, food cache, safe routes—then it became the other kind of problem later when the body finally had time to understand what it had lost. Kai had learned to put the first kind of problem in front of the second.
"Rotate watches," Kai said. "Short shifts. No heroics."
Twitchy's mouth twitched. "So no heroics from you, then?"
Kai snorted. "I'll schedule my mistakes like everyone else."
They both looked at the nameless kit again. It had finished eating and was kneading the stone with small, determined pushes, testing grip. It might never be subtle. It might never be quiet the way Bitey was quiet. But it was trying. Trying counted.
Far down the northern corridor, a faint vibration shivered through the stone like someone humming under their breath. Kai turned the pressure sense toward it, listened for shape and direction. Not danger. Just Scout moving water where water didn't want to move. Of course.
"Go tell Scout to report in before full dark," Kai said.
"I'll drag Scout back by the scruff if I have to," Twitchy said, and stood to go.
The kit watched Twitchy leave, then looked back at Bitey. "Again?"
Bitey sighed, but the sigh had less annoyance in it this time. "Again."
They reset. Practice. Adjust. Practice. Adjust. The work was boring in the way lifesaving work always looked to someone who hadn't needed it yet. The kit's feet got quieter a finger-width at a time. The tail went still in the last three steps. The eyes started counting exits without being told to count them.
When they finally stopped, Bitey tapped the kit between the shoulders. "You want a name someday?"
The kit straightened, every line suddenly alert. Yes.
"Then stop trying to be me. Be you, but better. We don't need two of me. We need one of you that doesn't get killed."
The kit nodded like a vow.
The water would confirm what instinct already knew.