Page 25 of The Hyena’s Guardian

The technician studied the display. “Still active.”

Vale folded her arms. “One contact?”

“That’s the problem.” The technician enlarged the sensor feed. “We can’t tell.”

“How can you not tell?” Matt asked.

“The signal keeps overlapping itself.” She looked up. “Either we’re tracking multiple entities moving together… or one entity moving through areas dense enough to create false returns.”

Silence settled over the command post.

“Which do you think it is?” Baptiste asked.

The technician hesitated.

Matt looked at the fluctuating signal. “I don’t know which answer I like less.”

He had spent enough years around military personnel to recognize the exact moment experienced people started mentally recalculating survival odds, and several operatives near the back of the command center had just reached that point simultaneously.

Baptiste folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t like unknowns.”

“Neither do I,” Vale said.

Matt looked between them. “You people are saying that with an alarming amount of calm.”

“We are professionals,” Keene said from near the rear table.

Matt glanced toward him. “No, professionals usually pretend things are fine right before disaster. You all have already skipped ahead to the deeply concerning acceptance phase.”

A few nearby operatives smirked faintly despite themselves, but the tension inside the command tent never truly eased.

Vale touched the display again, and a layered schematic of the excavation appeared across the central monitor. Ancient tunnels spread beneath the monastery in uneven spirals, though nearly half the lower structure remained incomplete where scans failed or simply stopped altogether.

Matt pointed toward the dark sections. “Those areas are unmapped?”

Soren answered first. “Not unmapped. Unresolved.”

Matt looked at him flatly. “You have a unique way of making things sound significantly worse. You know that, right?”

“It’s part of the job.”

Matt let out a quiet breath. “That is not the reassuring answer you seem to think it is.”

Soren adjusted his glasses before zooming deeper into the lower excavation levels. “The original archaeological team believed the monastery had been constructed atop older subterranean ruins. Subsequent scans suggest the lower structure extends far beyond the documented foundation.”

“How far?”

“We don’t know.”

Matt exhaled through his nose. “You people really need to stop saying that sentence.”

Nobody disagreed.

Outside, thunder rolled across the mountains again while floodlights flickered through sheets of rain. For a brief moment the excavation entrance became visible beyond the command post, a jagged wound in the center of the ruined courtyard surrounded by ancient claw marks and descending darkness.

Matt felt the pull toward it. Not stronger exactly. Closer.

The realization unsettled him enough that he looked away almost at once.