The wolf’s work didn’t leave its mark in the trail of bodies behind it, but in the absence of them.

  Collectors never showed. Enforcers vanished. Shady dens of human scum lay empty and blood-strewn.

  Rarely was a corpse found. Almost never intact enough to recognize.

  But as more and more went missing, the pattern emerged.

  Always someone everyone already hated.

  All of them… gangsters and crooks and frauds.

  The first whispers started in the absolute bottom of the third floor, among the freight tunnels and the stone mines supplying Ironheart’s domain far above.

  He only eats the bastards.

  Someone had painted a crude wolf’s head on the wall in furnace ash.

  Under it, just four words.

  BRING HIM THE WICKED.

  The wolf guided them to the odd sight.

  Emhreeil stopped in her tracks.

  A man trussed to a loading post, gagged and beaten, knees shattered, a crude sign hung from his neck.

  THIEF. FOR THE WOLF.

  The wolf turned to her, head tilted curiously as it jerked its head to the sign.

  She wasn’t quite sure what to say, even as the wolf seemed to lose interest in waiting for her reply and simply trot over to the man, who heard the click of claws and began to wail and thrash and sob.

  It ended quickly, at least.

  She stared at the sign for far too long, unsure of what to make of it.

  It was only when she grabbed a green-faced enforcer by the throat that she realized what was happening.

  His eyes bulged, legs kicked. Hands clawed at her monstrous arm, furred and plated and twisted.

  She was about to ask a question.

  “Wolf…child?” The man croaked, and stopped struggling, bizarrely. Terrified, quivering, wide eyed as he beheld her golden gaze. But not struggling.

  She paused, bewildered.

  Slowly lowered him, relaxed her fist around his throat.

  He sucked a breath and coughed, but didn’t do more than lean back, hyperventilating.

  When he asked if the wolf truly ate the wicked, she didn’t reply. She was too confused to do so.

  But she didn’t deny it either.

  Instead, she simply asked him who the ‘wicked’ were.

  And he talked. More than she even wanted him to.

  Somewhere along the way to finding Katherine, a misunderstanding must have happened.

  If it served their purposes, there was no reason to correct it, she decided.

  Madness was ordinary, down here.

  The workers who opened the sump gate had never met the wolf.

  They didn’t need to.

  They had already decided whose side it was on.

  It didn’t save their team much time or effort, in truth, but the gesture was… encouraging.

  By the second day of trying to find information on her own, she didn’t have to work particularly hard to find people willing to talk.

  As long as she found them alone, whispers of ‘wolfchild’ came before scared, erratic confessions and minutiae. She barely had to ask.

  The workers never knew much. But they knew just enough for her to piece little things together, bit by bit.

  Far above and beyond, the wolf searched for a way into the Foundry Basilica, as the miserable workmen called it.

  She didn’t quite deign to tell Fleabag the delusions of those put to work under Ironheart’s sword yet, as it wasn’t really important, but she did pressure him more and more to not kill anyone unnecessarily.

  There were plenty of offerings to keep him sated anyway.

  [Pack Hunter] lit up in pulses and sputtering fits. Short fights that all had Katherine on the defensive, almost rhythmic.

  The general location however, didn’t change. It stood out in the back of the wolf’s mind like a guiding chain whenever she got into another fight. So, bit by bit, they made their way deep into Ironheart’s territory.

  Far, far too deep.

  The closer they got to the heart of his domain, the harder it became to progress.

  The area wasn’t merely static or dense, it was heavy, thick with industry unlike anything else the wolf had seen. Every square inch was rattling, exploding, humming with pressure or hissing with leaking steam. It was an outright assault on its senses, pervasive enough for a headache to build, one that no amount of regeneration seemed fit to fix.

  Industry shifted scale. Human nests devoured by machinery, grafted onto every available inch of space.

  Shifting walls the size of buildings, grinding along tracks driven by pistons to block areas off and open other ones. Engines the size of human dwellings, vibrating the entire floor. Magical forges below, test firing into the human nest’s walls. Massive chain lifts rattling up and down without end. Entire floors of conveyor belts.

  A million little engines and grinding gears and valves, everywhere.

  The scents were much the same. Every single thing absolutely reeked of fuel, burnt soot, and chemicals, from the floor to the very air itself. It was so thick the wolf had trouble smelling anything else, much less a scent trail.

  It explained why nearly every human it had seen wore those thick metal masks. It doubted they could breathe without them.

  It took a couple light cycles of slinking through the shadows and crawling through tight shafts of steel to finally lay eyes on where exactly Katherine was held at.

  It was rather hard to miss, once one had their eyes on it.

  A monstrous building rose high above a scattered circle of pounding industry, like a clawed fist raised defiantly from amidst the red flames of forges and their drowning clouds of smog.

  A vaulted chamber far, far too tall to be practical, seemingly preserved out of spite rather than any kind of practicality.

  Old, carved arches reinforced and mangled by riveted steel, twisting around them like metal ribs, steel cables taut between capped spires like the stretch of a muscle before it snapped.

  Stone pillars as thick as buildings, girdled with metal collars.

  Stained glass, lain and arranged with care to form purposeful shapes, smashed out and replaced by thick, fogged observation panes.

  Windows and decorative openings were torn open and replaced with exhaust chutes rasping out fumes in long, rattling gasps.

  Chains seemed to move through the upper layers of the gargantuan structure, never slowing or speeding up, a steady resonating beat of crates dangling from cables and hooks. The line of endless supply snaked through too many loops and turns for it to follow, but the chains’ reach extended far beyond the range of its senses.

  And just above that opening in the building, at the very top, hanging in empty air, Katherine’s presence would flicker to life every once in a while. Fighting.

  Something about the fight, the way they moved, it just… didn’t feel right. Formulaic. Almost repetitive. Half-hearted.

  It wasn’t sure what that meant.

  Either way, a procession of people seemed to endlessly cycle through every level of the human hive, impeding its progress. Covered in masks and makeshift goggles and shuffling along like each step was physically gut-wrenching.

  The amount of light for a place so choked-out by industry was staggering. Even the most remote path had hastily put up spotlights, light crystals glimmering along shafts, hung by rope knots.

  It was then that it encountered a new oddity.

  There were… floating balls of bronze scouring every nook and cranny in a vast, random array around the building.

  It couldn’t help but stare at their bizarre meandering path, the way they moved as if swimming through the air.

  Metallic, oval-shaped. Grills and grates covered their rotund little body, something akin to metallic fins lazily vibrating and buzzing along their backs, their paths shifting as the fins did.

  The giant mechanical eye on the front of their body made them look like… one-eyed fish.

  They were slow. But there must have been nearly a thousand of them lazily swimming through the air around the surrounding pipeworks, as if trying to stay hidden and largely failing.

  Even with [Echoes of Oblivion], it became incredibly tedious to draw any closer. The closer it got the more alien-feeling metallic… fish-things seemed to pop up.

  And the fact it could only spot them with its own physical eyes made evading them infinitely harder. There were no vibrations to alert it; just empty air and the faint hollow ring of their fin plates shifting direction.

  If that wasn’t enough, there were so many humans. Everywhere. They were rappelling down shafts just to climb back up and check again, crawling and balancing across beams. Squeezing through alleys not meant to fit them. Small humans, female and male, able and not. Anyone and everything this ‘Ironheart’ could scrape together.

  None of them were dangerous. It could tell.

  It could just kill them, Emhreeil’s weird insistences be damned.

  It was what it was best at.

  But if nothing else, the wolf did its best to learn. How to survive, how to hunt, and now… how to think.

  And it had come to understand that killing things wasn’t always the solution. It needed to be more cunning.

  If it wasn’t for Katherine starting to fight, they never would have found her. The wolf would have never found her.

  Violence wasn’t always enough.

  So… the scouting parties didn’t need to die.

  They just needed to be absent from the scouting cycle long enough for someone to notice something went awry and send forces running that way. That had to be their function, right? Why else would they send out such pitiful bipeds to hunt for it? They were just there as bait.

  They kept checking in on each other with some kind of voice box, large backpacks made of metal that seemed to crackle and hiss with voices in steady intervals.

  They were, each of them, a walking little trap.

  If it could predict the reaction to tripping the trap…. couldn’t it use that?

  Silently observing from a tangle of cables barely able to hold its form and weight, ideas formed.

  It couldn’t get anywhere near close enough to scout the inside of the building in the end.

  When it got back, Emhreeil demanded that it give her everything it knew through the mental link.

  The process was long and frustrating enough to have them baring teeth at eachother at least once, but Emhreeil eventually had enough information to come up with more ideas.

  The process was… new. Trying to come up with actual plans rather than brute-forcing the problem away.

  It was also tedious and frustrating.

  Its main idea that it had been quite proud of, was simple. It wanted to slaughter a few scouts, have ‘Ironheart’ send men out to check and look for it when they didn’t report back, then slip into the building’s top through the chain pulleys as the bipeds went running in the wrong direction.

  It had raised its head high and proud as it presented its idea.

  Emhreeil ruined it pretty quickly.

  She absolutely insisted that each and every biped was worth less than a pebble to Ironheart, and he would not even send someone to check. All it would do is notify him that they were close, put him on high alert without achieving anything in return.

  After much thinking and pacing, it had to admit that Emhreeil was probably correct and sat on the floor, wringing its brain like a wet towel.

  Not much dripped out.

  Trapper was off placing traps and securing escape routes.

  Scruffy was all frowns and focused eyes, but didn’t add anything, predictably.

  Emhreeil was sketching something on a piece of paper, refusing to answer its inquiries so she could focus.

  Eventually, she shared her plan.

  The wolf didn’t like it.

  But there wasn’t much better it could offer.

  Scruffy was the surprise, for once, interjecting with a mental push reeking of absolute certainty, croaking and gibbering as she grabbed Emhreeil’s scant supplies and turned to them, circling things and pushing out mental images with explanations.

  That massive, thumping thing with the glowing cap and hissing cooling fins? It moved the walls.

  This odd yarn of copper powered the spotlights and alarms.

  That twisted belt mechanism shifted the chains back and forth.

  Emhreeil’s brows rose with each explanation, expression shifting with newfound appreciation as she leaned in close to Scruffy and prodded her for more information.

  The wolf still didn’t really get why any of that mattered or how any of that would help them, until Scruffy was done explaining what those pipes full of coolant did for the giant fortress-cathedral.

  Piston chambers moved things. Pistons without cooling mechanisms? They melted and jammed, apparently.

  ‘Ironheart’ had laid out his territory as one large, open trap. If they just rushed in to get Katherine, it would surely snap shut around them.

  So the best course of action might just be to start gnawing on the trap itself first.

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  For the first time in a while, it pushed a sense of thankful, positive sentiment towards Scruffy, trotting over to give her a lick to the face as a reward, paired with a quick nuzzle.

  Scruffy hugged it by the neck for a bit before going back to planning with Emhreeil.

  The wolf sat, and listened, trying to keep up with the mental discussion with a solid amount of difficulty.

  It couldn’t add much to their exchange of ideas and tactics, it realized.

  It felt vaguely useless again, but… that was what a pack was for, it supposed. Covering each other’s weaknesses until they shored them up.

  Emhreeil couldn’t fight for the longest time. Couldn’t even walk or move. The wolf had covered her weaknesses until she could grow strong enough to cover the wolfs’ weaknesses right now in turn.

  Scruffy had been even less useful until now, objectively, despite her moments of brilliance.

  It seemed this was the turning point where she did the same thing Emhreeil did.

  It used the thought as a balm to its wounded confidence as the minutes ticked by and its brain began to hurt from all the mechanical diagrams in the mental link.

  The lights were first.

  Six ‘power stations’.

  They were more manned than most buildings, but not to defend, just to upkeep.

  The light crystals didn’t turn off. Ever.

  But most light crystals weren’t all that bright. They were just there so bipeds could, even if barely, see where they were going. A cheap alternative to moonlight in a cave no real light would ever touch.

  So when it cut through pipes and hooked its claws through fuel lines and wires, several hundred feet of Ironheart’s territory plunged into a dim, barely-traversible darkness.

  Blood, oil and smoke seeped through the cracks as it exited the first station.

  Commotion rose after a brief pause.

  It clawed its way back up the support pillars, and rushed for the next station.

  Across the perimeter of Katherine’s prison tower, a couple thousand feet away, Emhreeil’s presence flickered in its mind.

  She moved much faster than Fleabag could.

  The wolf wished it had [Haste] sometimes.

  Even so it took her much longer to neutralize the engine rooms of the walls, and longer still for her to plant the explosives they’d spent a half day gathering.

  Despite the bombs barely being held together with hopes and fabric scraps, they did their job a few seconds later, as in the distance, through the smog, it heard a ringing blast.

  The shifting walls around the cathedral ground to a halt along their tracks.

  Emhreeil’s form flickered out of its mind, already dashing through the streets again.

  It did the same.

  It helped the wolf understand, thinking of machinery like biology.

  Biology was familiar.

  And it was starting to grasp the concept.

  Engines were hearts.

  And every time it cut a fuel line, it was severing another little artery feeding those hearts.

  Every time they regrouped for Scruffy to tell them what to hit next, they were revisiting what organs did what.

  Every clockwork relay the wolf cut was one less mechanical fish-eye floating through the air, another secondary eye with its nerves cut.

  Every group of Ironheart’s men rushing to a location due to false signals was another clump of cells chasing an infection that could dodge them with ease in the dark.

  Scruffy completed her role with perfection. She understood machinery. Mechanisms and twisting lines.

  Emhreeil’s turn to fill her role came soon after.

  Extracting information. Planting it. Managing it.

  Ironheart’s power wasn’t merely in his territory, she argued.

  He had lieutenants, overseers. Something like competent pack members, ones that ordered and guided the rest.

  [Psychometric Vision], a few radios repeating names and locations, and according to her, a strange amount of cooperate captives, and she found them pretty quickly.

  Not all of them. There were hundreds, leading thousands. Too many for them to properly fight.

  But she found the most important ones.

  Trapper’s role was subtle but impactful, and it took them a while to figure out he was even doing anything, so little of him did they see. Only sometimes would they find him back at their temporary hideout in that cramped room above the clocktower, making things.

  The wolf slowly realized what he was doing, beyond ensuring their retreat: he ensured no repairs could be done. Not with any speed nor with any safety.

  They mostly saw his work in the form of traps snapping shut around men trying to repair damage, rebar spikes falling onto groups that didn’t notice the string snap beneath their boots. Pressure plates releasing walkways into the abyss. Fuel tanks snapping open over men with torches raised high. Tripwires clicking, followed by explosions.

  Trapper wasn’t just teaching Scruffy it seemed, Scruffy was also teaching him.

  The workers were terrified. Repairs were made at the end of a sword or not at all. A few times, riots erupted, little pockets of rebellion borne of fear. They rarely lasted long, and even more rarely stay unpunished.

  Even when the workers did as told to however… materials were needed for repairs.

  Finally, it was time for the wolf’s best talent to be brought to use.

  Combat.

  The supply lifts were guarded. Nobody that felt or looked too dangerous, but too many for Emhreeil to easily deal with in a timely manner.

  Once Emhreeil spotted their main lift, it only took a short extermination of the guard team and a few swipes of its claws with [Edge Projection] active to snap the chains and detach the support cage.

  The tumble the enormous lift took on its way to meet the base plate far below was spectacular enough to have the wolf sit and watch. The cloud of dust and the scream of rending metal was viscerally satisfying.

  Slowly, the safe perimeter around the cathedral grew smaller and smaller.

  Something strange was happening with increasing frequency.

  Emhreeil would descend to the workers.

  And she would simply speak.

  Then, she would return.

  With overseers, criminals. Enforcers.

  Tied in ropes she hadn’t brought, and beaten with too little damage to be done by her hand.

  Offerings, she explained.

  The wolf decided that humans made no sense for the hundredth time, and simply descended to watch, once.

  A lash too quick to strike. A trap waiting in every corner, too dangerous to approach, yet forced to by a waving machete and barked commands.

  Exhaustion. Fear.

  That was usually all it took for violence to erupt among the loose pack that Ironheart led.

  “Better the wolf than the furnace…” scared, shaking forms would whisper in the alleys as they dragged yet another enforcer to the edge where the shadows consumed all light, and hurriedly left.

  The wolf still didn’t understand, but it was starting to grasp why Emhreeil didn’t want it killing random labourers.

  They were feeding it.

  They earned a pass for that, it supposed.

  There was a ploy Emhreeil wished to try and mix into their assassinations of Ironheart’s lieutenants.

  Fear.

  The wolf didn’t feel like it would make a difference. They were short on time and running out of options to weaken Ironheart before they would simply have to storm his fort of spite.

  But she insisted.

  So, she led him to one of the most hated ones.

  The wolf watched, bored, as a slow worker was beaten, then dragged over to the man’s feet, ordered to lick his boots clean as apology. The man slowly set to doing as told to.

  Hate and resignation shimmered in the workers eyes who glanced at the spectacle between flashes of welding arc.

  Emhreeil wanted it visible.

  No better time to do it than now.

  It shifted.

  [Echoes of Oblivion] curled along the grains of its fur.

  It let go.

  A shadow slammed into the ground behind the lieutenant, hard enough to crack the floor.

  A black blur shot through his legs before he was even done flinching, slicing clean through, splattering blood over the man who lapped at his muddied boots.

  A head the size of the man’s chest snapped shut around one armoured shoulder before any of the dozen guards could even react.

  [Bloodrush] activated, and the wolf darted off into the darkness of an alley before scrambling back upwards, the man’s screaming echoing down through pipes and metal pillars as its tentacle grabbed two grasping arms and twisted them clean off with the wet sound of tearing cartilage.

  Emhreeil reached out through the link.

  The wolf paused its ascent.

  Then, it began to tear.

  Slowly.

  Enough to make the man’s screaming turn nearly inhuman with agony. Shrill and desperate.

  Until the wolf grew annoyed with the sound and crushed his head against the wall it was hanging off of.

  It dropped the body for them to find later, at Emhreeil’s insistence.

  It didn’t know what a ‘district marshal’ was, but they weren’t very powerful, apparently.

  The next kill was a ‘master foreman’.

  The next was a ‘general’.

  By the end of the day, cohesion and structure in the human swarms seemed to almost magically fray.

  Everything slowed, lagged, caught.

  Workers refused to go into the dark, to fix anything beyond the walls that had frozen on their tracks.

  Scouts shook and quivered, faking route completions, lying to the chattering boxes on their backs.

  The wolf began to understand.

  Fear was an individualistic emotion.

  It broke a pack’s cohesion with startling ease.

  Emhreeil forced Fleabag into a quick, grumbling hug, kissing its bloodsoaked forehead before peeling back to stare out at Ironheart’s capital territory.

  It had only taken a couple days to dismantle his entire outer perimeter.

  They’d removed Ironheart’s information and scouting network.

  Destabilized his chain of command, gutted his leadership.

  Fuel and production had ground to a halt. Anything beyond the Foundry Basilica’s inner ring was dark.

  Workers and fighters were terrified and beyond reluctant to do anything but hide and huddle.

  There was a trade-off for everything, however.

  Ironheart’s little empire hadn’t been destroyed, it had been forced inward like a wounded animal curling up to heal.

  Concentrated into the Foundry.

  They might have made it infinitely easier to get to the actual building, but the resistance waiting inside was bound to be even more brutal now that he’d pulled his forces inward and knew they were here.

  Her eyes glanced to Fleabag as he stretched with a long, wide-jawed yawn.

  He could handle a lot…

  But one didn’t become a Dungeon Baron by being weak.

  Her gaze slid to the contemptuous peak of the cathedral, where Katherine was being held.

  She tried not to think about what Ironheart was doing to her.

  Tried not to think about why they hadn’t felt her get into a fight again since they began their campaign of sabotage.

  Her upper body twisted with her neck, eyes sliding over warped iron floors, stairs, hanging chains and scraps strewn everywhere until they found the duo of tinkerers in the back.

  Scruffy was pantomiming something to Trapper. Seemingly teaching him how to make a sparking mechanism for all the flash-crystal powder Emhreeil had brought them.

  She still didn’t trust the strange creature in that armour, whatever it was, but she couldn’t deny his usefulness.

  Her spine twisted back forward, eyeing Fleabag’s form as it sat still on the ledge, the spikes lining his shoulders shifting and scraping against eachother, tails curling and uncurling.

  Staring at the Foundry with three sets of eyes.

  Thinking in silence.

  He was doing a lot more of that lately.

  She pushed a bundle of ideas and thoughts to him that vaguely translated to ‘let’s plan’, and walked to join him on the ledge.

  Wordlessly, she tilted her body to lean on his shoulder, head dropping to lay on a spike.

  Please be safe, both of you, she thought, and pushed away the doubts and fear with sheer will, taking a deep breath.

  Fleabag turned his head as if he could read her mind, rubbing his snout along her head in a clumsy nuzzle.

  She scratched at a bulging forearm in reply.

  Then they planned how best to jump into the waiting jaws of a trap.