CHAPTER 1043: DECLARATION OF INTENT (1).

Steve’s voice cut in, brittle and thin. "Lights are back. Grid’s sniffing. You’ve got maybe three minutes before the city starts asking why two blocks look like a war zone."

Cain sheathed his blade slowly, as if setting the final note in a dirge. "Let them ask," he said, voice low, even. "They won’t like the answer."

Above them, City Z stretched into dawn—its towers blind to what bled beneath. But Cain knew better. This wasn’t over. The hunt hadn’t ended. It had only uncoiled.

He wiped the black ichor from his blade with a torn scrap of his coat, watching the thick residue hiss faintly before dissolving into nothing. It left no stain on the steel, but its smell lingered—burnt iron and ash. It wasn’t the stench of death; it was worse. It was a reminder that what they fought tonight wasn’t born of flesh.

Susan stepped out from behind the shattered husk of a tram car, cloak clinging to her shoulders like shadow. Her eyes tracked the rooftops, then the alleys, every angle of escape mapped in her mind. "One got away," she said. It wasn’t a question.

Cain nodded. "Good," he replied.

Hunter tilted his head slightly at that. "Good?"

Cain’s gaze was still on the dark arterial veins of the city. "It’ll run back. Lead us where we need to go."

Susan crouched beside the corpse—or what passed for one. The phantom’s body was more suggestion than reality now, a thinning ripple of shadow barely tethered to the ground. She reached out, hesitated, then drew a thin blade and pierced what looked like its spine. The blade rang like glass struck underwater, the sound swallowed before it could echo. "They’re adapting," she muttered. "Too fast."

"They always adapt," Cain said. He began walking, his steps steady, deliberate, like someone pacing the edge of a blade. "So do we."

Above them, neon signs flickered uncertainly as the city grid rebooted section by section. Holoscreens came alive with soft static before settling into advertisements no one cared to watch. Somewhere far off, a siren began to wail—shrill, mechanical, then abruptly cut off. Emergency systems weren’t sure what had happened. The Grid never was, not with things like this. It was the people who would start asking soon.

Steve jogged up, his tech rig slung awkwardly over his back. His face was pale under the glow of his visor, the green readouts jittering like nervous thoughts. "Surveillance is sweeping already. I looped what I could, but the system will notice anomalies in two minutes, maybe less. After that..." He didn’t finish.

"Then we’re gone before then," Cain said.

Hunter glanced at the eastern horizon, where light was slowly spilling between the spires. Dawn always made the city look clean from up here. But Hunter knew the truth: the dirt just learned how to hide. "Where to?" he asked.

Cain stopped at the edge of a broken thoroughfare. Below, the city unfolded in tangled layers—bridges crossing over dead rivers, towers leaning like crooked teeth, slums knotted between the steel bones of old machines. The veins of the city were alive with motion, but down there, in the cracks where light didn’t reach, the real disease thrived.

"Deep Sector," Cain said.

Susan’s lips thinned. "We’re exposed in daylight. Moving now is—"

"Necessary," Cain cut in. "They’ll crawl back to their nest. If we wait, they bury themselves again. We move before they molt."

Steve groaned. "That’s poetic and all, but if the Grid tags us, it’s not just Watchers we’ll have to dodge."

"Then don’t get tagged," Cain said simply, and dropped into the fractured alley below.

---

The descent into the undercity was like peeling back layers of a rotting wound. Every street was a scar, every corridor reeking of rust and old rain. The air was heavy with steam rising from grates, carrying the metallic tang of something that had once been blood. This wasn’t the City Z from holovids—the clean lines and glittering rails. This was its marrow.

Cain moved like he’d been born here. Maybe he had, in a way. His boots splashed through stagnant puddles as he wove between pipes and dangling wires, Hunter and Susan ghosting behind him, Steve muttering curses as his rig scraped against narrow walls.

They reached a culvert choked with debris, a half-collapsed transit tunnel that led down into blackness. Cain crouched, running a gloved hand along the cracked concrete. The marks were faint—scratches that didn’t belong to tools, claw lines etched deep into stone.

"They passed through here," he said.

Susan knelt beside him, fingers tracing one gouge. Her eyes narrowed. "Recent."

Hunter turned his head, scanning the shadows like a hunting dog scenting the wind. "They’re close."

Steve shifted uneasily. "Close as in... a block away? Or close as in—"

The sound cut him off.

A low hum, almost inaudible, rising from the tunnel ahead. Not mechanical. Not alive, either. Something in-between, the frequency vibrating in their bones more than their ears. It made Steve gag softly. Susan’s hand went to her blade.

Cain rose slowly, eyes narrowing into the dark. "Hunter," he said, voice like a blade leaving its sheath. "Wide arc. Drive them out."

Hunter moved without a word, melting into the shadows like water poured into cracks. Susan stayed at Cain’s flank, her presence taut as a bowstring. Steve swallowed, fingers trembling over his rig as he primed a dampener field.

The hum grew louder.

Cain stepped forward, deeper into the dark, the weight of the city pressing on his shoulders like a mountain. His voice was low when he spoke, but it carried through the tunnel like a verdict.

"You ran," he said, as if addressing something already listening. "That was your first mistake."

A shape unfolded from the black—spidery limbs scraping along the walls, eyes like shards of broken glass glinting faintly in the gloom. Its body shifted as if it hadn’t decided what shape to wear yet. Behind it, more shadows twitched, alive with hunger.

Cain’s hand closed on his blade.

The hunt hadn’t ended. It was just learning how to speak.