The night tasted like iron.
Tobias Hale stood in the ruined train junction outside Eldoria's outer ring, breath fogging in the freezing air, heart pounding so hard it rattled his teeth. Broken floodlights cast silver dust through the dark, turning everything underwater and wrong.
Across the cracked platform, the werewolf dragged himself forward on shattered legs. Blood trailed behind him, steaming faintly. One arm dangled useless, bone gleaming white through torn muscle. Every ragged breath reopened the gashes Tobias had put in his ribs, throat, face.
Tobias looked at his own hands. Steady now, but slick and red. His forearms were shredded from claws that should have gone deeper, should have ended him. They hadn't.
Something inside him had moved too fast for thought, too fast for mercy.
The werewolf lifted his ruined head. One golden eye fixed on Tobias, bright with hate and something worse: recognition.
He knew what was waking up.
Tobias stepped forward. Heat answered instantly, coiling behind his sternum, hungry. For a heartbeat, faint golden lines flickered beneath his skin, tracing patterns no Accord serum had ever left behind.
"You know what I want, tell me now," he said, voice stripped raw.
The werewolf tried to rise, collapsed again with a wet snarl that sounded almost human.
Tobias closed the distance, boots crunching over glass and dead leaves. He crouched beside the dying wolf.
"I know you helped take her," he whispered. "Tell me where they are taking her."
The werewolf's eye sharpened, a final flare of defiance.
Memory hit Tobias like a blade: Haven-7 in flames, tiny bodies scattered in the snow, a little girl's hand reaching out before the feed cut to static. He had been too late that night.
Not tonight.
The heat surged. Gold bled across his vision. Those strange veins glowed brighter under his skin, then faded.
He wrapped a hand around the werewolf's throat, not to crush, just to feel the pulse slowing. "Tell me," He said, and the words came out layered, wrong, as if something ancient spoke with his tongue. "Tell me what you think of all you have done, all the death and hatred."
Only blood bubbled out.
Tobias tightened his grip. "Tell me," he repeated, softer, "so I know what I'm allowed to feel when I end you."
The heat inside Tobias settled, almost content.
He stood slowly, chest heaving, staring down at what he'd done. Regret twisted sharp in his gut, not for the kill, but for how easy it had felt. How right.
The night went quiet.
Then the whisper came again, intimate, shaped like his own voice but older, patient.
Let me finish it.
Tobias spun, scanning the shadows. Nothing moved.
The thing beneath his ribs stretched, tasting the air, tasting blood and freedom.
He looked at his blood-soaked hands and understood.
This wasn't just revenge.
It was the beginning of something that had waited years for him to stop holding it back.