Despite his overwhelming anxiety, Raynor did not dare go near Sarah's lair. He knew that any movement toward her now would be a death sentence for them both.
Instead, he returned to his apartment in the heart of District 7—a residence far more spacious than his old hovel, complete with a private bathroom and a view of the smog-choked skyline.
Raynor locked the heavy door and activated the rudimentary security system. As per his routine, he checked the window latches and inspected the air vent filters for signs of tampering. Then, changing into loungewear, he sat in his synthetic chair and opened his data-slate.
He began scrolling through irrelevant tax policy updates and local news, even clicking on a low-budget entertainment program—Terra: A Love Story—to maintain the facade of a bored bureaucrat winding down.
While his eyes traced the flickering images on the screen, his mind was entirely elsewhere, frantically refreshing the System to monitor Sarah's condition.
He waited in the suffocating silence of his room, much like a man staring at a screen waiting for a message from a loved one that might never come.
The neon lights outside shifted from a sickly purplish-red to a somber deep blue, marking the arrival of the Hive's artificial night. Raynor fought the urge to reach out to Sarah.
"Staying still is the safest option," he whispered to himself. He believed Sarah understood the level of danger and would remain silent.
However, just as he was preparing to wash up for bed, the System flickered. Sarah's status indicators began to plummet. She was under attack.
Initially, a sliver of hope remained—perhaps it was just a skirmish with a rival swarm. Such conflicts had been common before Raynor had used his authority to clear out the competing nests near her territory.
But a cold, sinking feeling in his gut told him this was different. He tossed and turned in his bed, the sheets growing damp with cold sweat.
Across the street, hidden behind the rusted, skeletal remains of an abandoned industrial crane, Recon Soldier A watched his HUD. A sharp alert chimed inside his helmet.
"Report: There is a situation regarding the target."
Data flooded his screen. The Tech-Priest was remotely monitoring the vital signs sensors hidden within Raynor's apartment.
The timestamp on the data was damning: exactly one minute after the Sons of Medusa strike team had made contact with the Tyranid node, Raynor's physiology spiked.
His heart rate surged from 68 beats per minute to 119. His skin conductivity showed a sharp, perceptible fluctuation. The EEG readings indicated a brief, intense peak in beta-band activity, signaling extreme alertness and emotional distress. Even though Raynor appeared to be resting, his most primal biological reactions had betrayed him.
The reconnaissance soldier encrypted the data packet and beamed it back to base. Within seconds, the Cogitator Array at the stronghold completed the correlation. A labeled graph appeared before Cassius.
The Sergeant stared at the text and the rising curves of the data. His white helmet reflected the cold glow of the command terminal. He remained silent for a long moment, then, in a voice of absolute mechanical calm, ordered the monitoring to continue.
Meanwhile, the strike team had breached Sarah's lair.
Sarah's nest was never meant to be a fortress; it was a center for command, stealth, and rapid development. Despite her growth—now comparable to a Tyranid Prime—her direct defensive forces were limited.
Her carapace was thick, her four bone-blades hummed with bio-metallic lethality, and her reaction speeds were far beyond any standard Warrior, but she was facing the elite of the Imperium.
The Sons of Medusa tore through the nest's defenders with surgical ferocity. Bolters roared in the narrow tunnels, shattering swarms of gaunts into wet chunks of meat.
Melta-beams vaporized the hardened organic structures Sarah had spent weeks cultivating. A veteran Astartes led the charge, his Thunder Hammer pulverizing anything in its path with plumes of green ichor and shell fragments.
Sarah tried to close the distance, lunging toward one of the Space Marines. She was met with the crushing force of a power fist and the scorching roar of a heavy flamer. Suppressed by the overwhelming firepower, she realized the situation was terminal.
She let out a sharp, resentful hiss, but her survival instinct was absolute. Without hesitation, she commanded her remaining guardian insects to launch a suicidal charge. Moths to a flame, the creatures threw themselves at the "Angels" to buy her seconds.
A massive Maw-wyrm, nearly ten meters in length, coiled its body to shield her from the worst of the fire. Even the Astartes had to pivot and dodge as the beast spat jagged, armor-piercing barbs from its gullet.
The Maw-wyrm, along with a few surviving Neuro-gaunts, provided the only real hindrance to the squad's advance.
Sarah didn't waste the opening. She triggered the "alchemy explosives" Raynor had taught her to prepare—a volatile mixture of unstable biomass and chemical waste.
BOOM.
The explosion wasn't meant to kill the Space Marines; it was meant to cause chaos. Rock ceilings collapsed, acidic fluids gushed from ruptured glands, and a thick, choking fog of dust and pheromones filled the core.
In the confusion, Sarah moved with a dexterity that belied her size. She slipped into a pre-prepared, winding emergency tunnel—an "escape hatch" leading to a deeper geological fault.
The passage, dug by burrowing units over months, was barely wide enough for her to pass. Its walls were coated in a specialized slime that absorbed sound and dampened energy signatures.
By the time the veteran with the Thunder Hammer crushed the last guardian and breached the core, the lair was a collapsing ruin. He found only a tunnel entrance buried under tons of rubble and the lingering scent of a high-level xenos individual.
"The target escaped," the veteran growled, slamming a gauntlet against the stone wall.
But Cassius, watching the feed from the base, did not reprimand him. The objective of the operation had been achieved. He now had the data he needed.