Page 24 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Matt studied the rotating map again while something uneasy tightened beneath his ribs. The lower chambers no longer resembled ruins the longer he looked at them. They looked organized. Intentional. Like something had designed the structure beneath the monastery according to rules no human mind fully understood anymore.

And somehow the worst part was that none of the people in the room appeared surprised by that conclusion.

Dr. Petrescu enlarged one section of the map near the center of the display. “This chamber sits approximately three hundred meters beneath the excavation site. It is the deepest point we’ve managed to scan reliably.”

The highlighted chamber dwarfed the corridors surrounding it.

Matt focused on the display. “And what’s in it?”

“We don’t know that either.”

Baptiste folded his arms across his chest. “You sent recovery teams into an unstable underground structure without identifying the primary site first?”

“We identified enough,” Vale answered before Dr. Petrescu could respond.

Matt looked toward her. “That sounds like the kind of sentence people say right before everything goes catastrophically wrong.”

Vale met his gaze evenly. “You are beginning to understand Valker operations.”

“That is not comforting.”

“It was not intended to be.”

A nearby monitor crackled suddenly with static. Everyone in the room looked toward it at once.

For several seconds nothing happened except interference and distorted audio hiss. Then a burst of sound cut through the static hard enough to silence the entire command post.

Heavy, uneven breathing crackled through the static, and Matt could feel the hyena surge instantly into alertness. The audio lasted barely three seconds before dissolving back into silence. Afterward, nobody moved or spoke.

One of the technicians near the monitors swallowed visibly before adjusting several controls with unsteady hands. “Signal spike from the lower relay station,” he said. “Same as before.”

Matt turned toward him. “Before?”

Dr. Petrescu looked exhausted suddenly. “We’ve been receiving intermittent audio from below level three for the last sixteen hours.”

“Why was that not included in the briefing?”

“Because most of it sounds like this.” The technician replayed the recording.

Static filled the room again before the breathing returned, low and distorted beneath layers of interference. This time, though, Matt caught something underneath it. Not words exactly. More like movement.

Slow, measured footsteps echoed through the recording before cutting off abruptly halfway through the playback. Matt felt the hyena sharpen instantly at the sound, every instinct locking onto the silence that followed.

Around him, the room had gone perfectly still again. Not from fear alone. Everyone was listening.

Baptiste spoke beside him without taking his eyes off the monitor. “That is closer than it was earlier.”

Nobody contradicted him, and honestly that was worse than the recording itself.

Vale muted the recording, but the silence left behind sat heavier than the audio itself. Rain hammered steadily against the tarps stretched overhead while static hissed faintly through the surrounding equipment, and for several long seconds nobody inside the operations center spoke.

Matt leaned back from the monitor, more aware now of how crowded the command post had become. Operatives lined the outer tables reviewing sensor data and excavation maps while technicians monitored motion readings from deeper beneath the monastery. Several people kept glancing toward the excavation entrance visible through the partially open chapel entrance, as though expecting something to emerge from the darkness at any moment.

Commander Vale rested both hands against the edge of the operations table. “Timestamp?”

One of the communications specialists checked the scrolling data beside the waveform display. “Transmission came through nineteen minutes ago,” she answered. “Level four relay picked it up for approximately seven seconds before the signal collapsed again.”

“Movement?”