Page 22 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Matt glanced sideways. “That somehow sounds worse.”

“It is worse.”

Thunder rolled again overhead while Vale stepped closer to the perimeter fencing surrounding the excavation shaft. Floodlights illuminated the upper descent well enough to reveal stone stairs disappearing underground beneath reinforced support beams and temporary scaffolding installed by the excavation crews. Beyond the first thirty feet, darkness swallowed everything completely.

Matt kept staring at the entrance despite himself.

The pull inside his chest had not weakened since landing. If anything, proximity had sharpened it into something harder to ignore. The instinct did not feel aggressive exactly. Persistent was closer. Like something underground had become aware of him the moment the aircraft crossed into the mountains.

That thought should have sounded irrational. Unfortunately, nothing about this mission had behaved rationally so far.

A nearby ground operative approached through the rain carrying a waterproof tablet tucked against his chest. Unlike most of the personnel surrounding the landing zone, he looked exhausted rather than tense, with dark circles beneath his eyes and mud staining the knees of his tactical gear.

“Commander,” he said, handing the tablet toward Vale. “Updated excavation scans.”

Vale reviewed the screen briefly while Baptiste moved closer beside Matt to glance over her shoulder. Whatever appeared on the display wiped away what little color remained in the operative’s face.

Matt noticed that too. “What happened?” he asked.

The ground operative hesitated before answering. “The lower tunnels shifted again about an hour ago.”

Matt blinked once. “Shifted.”

The operative nodded uneasily. “The layout isn’t staying consistent.”

Silence settled briefly beneath the storm.

Matt looked toward the excavation entrance again. “That is significant information you probably should’ve led with.”

“We assumed it was structural instability at first,” the operative admitted. “But the internal scans don’t match previous mapping anymore. Corridors are appearing where solid rock should be.”

“That is aggressively unnatural,” Matt muttered.

“No disagreement there,” Baptiste replied.

Vale enlarged something on the tablet screen before turning it so the others could see. Matt stepped closer beneath the rain, his attention settling on a partially rendered scan of the underground structure.

The monastery foundations occupied only a tiny portion of the image.

Beneath them, the mountain opened into something vast.

Ancient corridors twisted through the rock in overlapping layers far deeper than the original excavation reports had suggested, extending downward in spirals and branching chambers that looked less like ruins and more like an entire buried complex. Large portions remained distorted or incomplete where the scans failed entirely, as though the equipment itself struggled to interpret what existed below.

Matt stared at the display for several seconds. “That wasn’t built under the monastery.”

The ground operative shook his head. “No. The monastery was built over it.”

Lightning flashed across the courtyard again, illuminating the excavation entrance behind her in harsh white light.

For a split second, Matt thought he saw something withdraw into the dark beneath the scaffolding the instant the light touched it. His pulse tightened. Then the lightning vanished, and darkness swallowed the entrance again. Matt narrowed his eyes toward the excavation shaft. “Please tell me somebody else saw that.”

Several operatives near the perimeter exchanged uneasy looks. Nobody answered right away.

Which, Matt was learning, was rapidly becoming the least reassuring response possible.

Chapter 5 - Matt

The command post occupied the shattered remains of what had once been the monastery’s outer chapel.