Page 30 of The Hyena’s Guardian

Matt kept staring into the shadows anyway. His pulse had started climbing hard enough that he could feel it in his throat, but his hyena’s reaction felt sharper than fear alone. Instinct pressed insistently toward the darkness ahead, focused with the same terrible certainty that had followed him since first seeing the excavation entrance from the aircraft.

Something was there. And somehow it already knew he was looking for it.

Commander Vale motioned two wolves forward. “Advance carefully.”

The operatives moved suddenly, rifles raised as they pushed deeper into the corridor with disciplined precision. Mounted lights swept across the walls, illuminating faded carvings buried beneath centuries of water damage and mineral deposits.

Matt noticed fresh claw marks. Not the massive gouges near the surface. These were smaller.

Long grooves scored through the stone pillars lining the corridor at shoulder height, deep enough that fragments of pulverized rock still littered the floor beneath them.

One of the wolves near the front crouched beside the gouges, running gloved fingers lightly along the fractured stone. “These are fresh.”

Nobody liked that statement.

Vale stepped forward beside the operative while Baptiste remained near Matt at the center of the formation. “Keep moving,” she ordered.

The team advanced deeper underground.

The corridor narrowed gradually as they descended, forcing the formation into tighter spacing while the excavation supports became less frequent around them. Ancient architecture overtook the modern reinforcement structures until the tunnels no longer resembled an archaeological dig at all.

They looked inhabited. Not recently, but repeatedly.

Matt caught the shift once he stopped looking at the walls individually and started seeing the tunnels as a whole. Sections of collapsed debris had been cleared aside too deliberately to be natural cave-ins. Dust patterns looked disturbed in uneven paths across the floor. Even some of the claw marks overlapped older damage in ways that suggested movement through the tunnels happened often enough to create familiar routes.

The realization crawled unpleasantly beneath his skin.

“These tunnels are being used,” he said.

Baptiste glanced toward him. “Yes.”

Matt looked sideways. “You say that like you already knew.”

“I suspected.”

“That feels like information you should lead with.”

Before Baptiste could answer, one of the wolves near the front suddenly raised a fist. The entire formation stopped instantly.

Matt heard it a second later. Breathing. Closer now.

The sound drifted faintly through the darkness ahead of them, low and uneven beneath the distant drip of water echoing through the tunnels. It did not sound rushed or aggressive.

If anything, the slow rhythm made it worse.

Like whatever waited ahead felt no need to hurry.

Vale motioned the formation tighter while one operative adjusted the beam on his rifle-mounted light toward the far end of the corridor.

The breathing stopped.

Silence crashed through the tunnel hard enough that Matt became abruptly aware of every tiny sound around them. Water dripping somewhere deeper underground. Fabric shifting softly as operatives adjusted their stance. The faint electrical buzz from the portable floodlights mounted farther back along the excavation route.

Then something moved behind them so fast Matt barely registered it before one of the rear operatives shouted. He spun in time to see a shape explode from the darkness along the ceiling and drop into the rear formation hard enough to slam an operative sideways into the wall.

Gunfire erupted instantly.

Muzzle flashes strobed violently through the corridor while wolves shifted partially mid-motion, teeth bared as chaos detonated through the tunnel.