Page 26 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Unfortunately, Baptiste noticed. “You’re doing it again,” he said softly.

Matt kept his eyes on the operations display this time. “If you say thinking loudly, I’m leaving.”

Keene didn’t look up. “We’re trying to manage expectations.”

Matt looked toward him. “See? That right there. You all make normal conversation sound vaguely threatening.”

“It saves time,” Keene replied.

“Emotionally, all of you are exhausting.”

For the first time since entering the command post, Vale’s mouth twitched faintly at the corner. It vanished quickly, but Matt caught it anyway. Which honestly was more alarming than reassuring.

Then Vale turned and expanded the lower excavation map across the central display while rain battered the command post hard enough to make the support poles tremble. “We descend in twenty minutes,” she said. “Primary objective remains recovery of surviving personnel. Secondary objective is identification of whatever forced the lower levels into containment failure.”

Matt frowned. “Containment failure is another phrase I would prefer never hearing again.”

“You’ll hear worse before sunrise,” Baptiste said.

“That actually feels statistically very likely.”

Keene stepped forward and placed the sealed equipment case onto the operations table. Metal latches snapped open a second later, revealing compact radios, chemical light sticks, silver-edged combat knives, and several of the matte-black motion anchors Matt had seen at headquarters.

Matt eyed them. “I was hoping those were a deeply unnecessary precaution.”

Soren adjusted his glasses. “They are not.”

“Of course they aren’t.”

Matt stared at him for a beat. “I miss regular terrorism.”

Nobody laughed this time. That caught Matt’s attention.

The mood had shifted again, losing even the thin layer of dry professionalism that had carried them through the briefing. The deeper they pushed into operational details, the more obvious it became that everyone here understood something dangerous was already moving beneath the monastery.

Vale began assigning teams with clipped efficiency. “Keene remains command-side coordinating upper relay points. Baptiste, Reynolds, and Team Two descend through level three and establish forward contact near the breach corridor.”

Matt blinked once. “I’m sorry, breach corridor sounds aggressively important.”

“It is where we lost contact with the last recovery team,” Vale replied.

“That is significantly not comforting.”

“It was not intended to be.”

One of the wolf operatives near the equipment table checked the chamber on his rifle before looking toward Vale. “Motion sensors below level four just triggered again.”

The entire command tent went quiet, and Vale looked toward the technician monitoring the excavation feed.

“What are we looking at?”

The technician studied the display. “That’s the problem. We can’t tell.”

Matt could sense the shift move through the room almost physically as the atmosphere tightened around the operations table. It was not panic yet, but urgency sharpened suddenly as another alarm pulsed across the monitors, followed a second later by another. The technician’s expression hardened as she scanned the incoming data. “Multiple sensors just triggered,” she said. “Something’s moving between corridors.”

“One contact?” Vale asked.

The woman hesitated. “I can’t confirm that.”