The barrier tape was wrong.
Voss noticed it three steps past the perimeter marker. Standard clearance protocol required yellow tape at cardinal points around the dome, spaced evenly, anchored with mana stakes. The eastern anchor was missing. Not removed — the ground showed no stake hole. It had never been placed.
A clearance squad that skipped anchor protocol was either lazy or rushed. Neither was Voss's problem. He was here for the bodies.
He ducked under the dome's edge. The barrier membrane was thin — cleared barriers always degraded within hours, the dome dissolving once its internal mana supply ran dry. This one had maybe two hours left before it popped like a soap bubble. Plenty of time.
Inside, the air tasted different. Heavier. Every barrier had its own atmosphere, drawn from whatever Rift had spawned it. This one carried the mineral tang of deep stone and something else. Something animal. Musk and old meat.
Six wolf corpses. The clearance report was accurate on the count, at least. Five regulars and one alpha, spread across the interior in a pattern that told a story if you knew how to read it.
Voss read it.
The five regulars had died in a rough semicircle, all facing inward. Not scattered — positioned. They'd been holding a formation when they were killed, bodies angled to protect the alpha behind them. Standard wolf behavior put the alpha at the front. These wolves had put it at the back.
He crouched beside the nearest regular and pressed his fingers to its neck. Cold. Six hours dead, consistent with the clearance time. The killing wound was a clean bisection through the chest cavity — mana blade, probably A-rank based on the cauterization pattern. One of the clearance squad's heavier hitters.
The wolf's eyes were still open. Amber. Glassy. Looking at nothing.
Voss pulled his blades and started working. Core first. The regular wolves had small cores — barely worth the extraction time individually, but six of them added up. He worked fast, his hands finding the familiar rhythm. Cut. Separate. Extract. Bag. Move on.
The second wolf was the same. Third. Fourth.
The fifth wolf was different.
He noticed it when he opened the chest cavity. The standard anatomy was there — four-chambered heart, paired lungs, the mana core nestled behind the fourth rib. But the musculature around the core was denser than it should have been. Reinforced. Like the wolf's body had built extra armor around its most vital organ.
That was C-rank physiology. In a D-rank barrier.
Voss sat back on his heels. Looked at the alpha, still untouched, twenty feet away. The alpha would tell him more. Alphas always told you more.
He'd taken two steps toward it when the dome pulsed.
Not the slow, dying flutter of a barrier losing power. A contraction. Hard and sudden, like a heart seizing. The translucent blue membrane darkened to indigo for a fraction of a second, then snapped back.
Voss stopped moving.
He counted to ten. Nothing. The dome continued its normal degradation pattern — thin, thinning, fading. Whatever that pulse had been, it was over.
He moved to the alpha.
The alpha was bigger than the report suggested. Standard D-rank wolf alphas ran about two hundred pounds. This one was closer to three hundred. Its skull was broad and heavy, the jaw muscles thick as Voss's forearms. A scar ran across its muzzle — old, healed, from a fight it had won a long time ago.
The killing wound was different from the regulars. Not a single clean cut but a cluster of impacts — fire, ice, and kinetic force. The clearance squad had hit it with everything they had. That tracked with the "unusual behavior" flag. The alpha had given them trouble.
Voss opened his kit and selected his finer blade. The alpha's hide was too valuable to rush. He found the seam, set his angle, and—
The dome contracted again.
This time it held. The blue membrane darkened to near-black and locked in place. The thin spots healed over. The degradation reversed.
Voss was on his feet before the contraction finished, blades in his hands, his body already turning toward the exit point where he'd entered.
The exit was gone. The membrane had sealed it.
He pressed his palm against the barrier wall. Solid. Not the flimsy surface of a dying dome but the dense, resistant shell of an active one. An active barrier meant live monsters inside. But the wolves were dead. He could see them.
The ground trembled.
Beneath the fifth wolf — the one with the C-rank musculature — something moved. Dirt shifted. Cracked. A shape pushed upward through the earth, through the wolf's opened chest cavity, wearing the dead animal's body like a coat.
It wasn't a wolf.
It was too thin. Too long. Limbs bent at wrong angles. The dead wolf's hide draped over it like a second skin, red muscle and gray fur stretched across a frame that was built for a different kind of body entirely. Its head emerged last — narrow, eyeless, a mouth that split its face from ear to ear in a line that had too many teeth.
D-rank. Maybe. The mana pressure rolling off it said otherwise.
Voss backed toward the barrier wall. His carving blades were designed for dead tissue. Not for this. They were sharp enough to cut monster hide but the handles were short, the reach was nothing, and his combat training consisted of exactly zero hours of formal instruction.
The thing shook off the dead wolf and stood. Seven feet tall. It moved in jerks, like a puppet with tangled strings, testing its limbs. Finding its balance.
Then it looked at him.
No eyes. But it oriented on him with the precision of a predator that had identified prey. Its mouth opened wider — the split in its face extending past where a jaw should stop — and it made a sound. Not a growl. Not a shriek. A clicking. Wet, rapid, the noise of teeth hitting teeth in a sequence that almost sounded like language.
Voss moved.
Not toward it. Not away from it. Sideways, circling, putting the alpha's body between them. The thing tracked him, head swiveling. It didn't charge. It was studying him the same way he studied a carcass — finding the seams, identifying the weaknesses.
His back hit something. One of the regular wolf corpses. He stumbled, caught himself, and his hand landed on the dead wolf's flank.
Light.
Not from the barrier. Not from the thing. From the wolf.
Threads of light rose from the corpse. Thin, luminous filaments, drifting upward like heat shimmer made visible. They were beautiful. Soft gold, the color of morning sun through dust. They rose from the wolf's body in dozens — no, hundreds — each one anchored to a different part of the animal's anatomy. Muscle threads. Bone threads. Core threads.
Voss stared. His hand was still on the wolf's body. The threads responded to his touch, bending toward his fingers like iron filings toward a magnet.
The eyeless thing charged.
He grabbed.
His fingers closed around the nearest thread — a thin gold filament rising from the wolf's shoulder musculature. It resisted for a fraction of a second, then snapped free and sank into his hand.
Heat flooded his arm. Not painful. Deeper than pain. It went through his skin and into the muscle beneath and the muscle changed. Tightened. Grew denser. Stronger. He felt it happen in real-time — his forearm, his bicep, his shoulder, his chest, his legs. A five-percent increase in raw strength across his entire body, delivered in the time it took to draw a breath.
The thing hit him.
A backhand strike that caught him across the chest and threw him into the barrier wall. He hit hard enough to see white, hard enough that the old Voss would have cracked ribs and stayed down. The new Voss — the five-percent-stronger Voss — hit the wall and kept his feet.
The pain was real. His chest burned where the thing's clawed hand had connected. But his ribs held. His lungs worked. He could move.
The thing came at him again, that broken-puppet lurch covering ground faster than it looked like it should. Voss dove left, rolled across the wolf alpha's body, and came up with his blades in a grip that was wrong for carving and wrong for fighting but was the only grip he had.
He needed more.
The dead wolves. The threads. He could see them now on every corpse — luminous filaments rising in the still air of the sealed barrier, fading even as he watched. Dissolving. The light was getting dimmer. Whatever window existed for grabbing those threads, it was closing.
Voss ran for the nearest wolf. The eyeless thing cut him off, moving with that jerking speed, and he feinted right and Shadow Stepped—
No. He didn't have Shadow Step. He didn't have anything. He was an F-rank Carver with two short blades and a six-hour-dead wolf between him and a monster that was very much alive.
He feinted right. Went left. The thing's claws raked across his back — shallow, burning, three lines of fire from his shoulder blade to his hip — and then he was past it, slamming his hands onto the next wolf corpse.
More threads. He grabbed two at once. One gold from the chest. One gold from the hind leg. Both snapped free and poured into him, and the strength came again. Two jumps this time. Ten percent total.
The thing screamed. That clicking sound, louder, faster, reverberating off the barrier walls. It rushed him.
Voss moved to the next wolf. Grabbed threads. Moved again. The thing was faster than him but it was clumsy, still adjusting to its body, and the wolf corpses on the ground made obstacles it had to navigate around while Voss navigated over them. He knew where every body was. He'd cataloged their positions when he walked in, the way he always did. Professional habit. The habit was saving his life.
Four wolves. Sixteen threads absorbed. His body hummed with stolen strength. Twenty percent above his baseline. Not enough to fight this thing head-on — it was still bigger, still faster, still had claws that could open him from throat to hip. But enough to survive.
He reached the alpha.
The alpha's threads were different. Thicker. Brighter. And there were more of them — a dense forest of luminous filaments rising from the massive body. Voss plunged both hands in and grabbed everything he could.
Strength hit him like a wall. The alpha's threads were premium quality — each one worth three or four of the regulars'. His muscles swelled. His bones ached as they hardened. His vision sharpened until he could see the individual hairs on the eyeless thing's head from twenty feet away.
The thing charged. Last time.
Voss met it.
Not because he was brave. Because the barrier was sealed, the exit was gone, and the only way he was getting out of here was through whatever had crawled up from the dirt wearing a dead wolf's skin.
He ducked its first swing. The claws passed over his head close enough to tug his hair. His right blade found the inside of its elbow — he knew where the tendons were, knew where the joint would flex, knew the angle that would sever the connective tissue because he'd cut that same joint on a thousand dead monsters.
The thing's arm went slack. It screamed.
Voss cut again. Left blade across the back of its knee. Same knowledge. Same precision. The thing buckled, dropping to one leg. He drove his right blade up through the base of its skull — the brainstem, the kill switch, the one cut that stopped everything.
It dropped.
The barrier dome overhead flickered. Brightened. The black membrane flushed back to pale blue, then began to thin. Whatever had reactivated it, the death of this thing had turned it off.
Voss stood over the body. His hands were shaking. Not from fear — from the threads. Twenty-five percent stronger than he'd been ten minutes ago, and his muscles were still adjusting, still tightening, still finding their new shape.
He looked at the dead wolves. The threads were almost gone now — the last faint filaments dissolving into the air like smoke. Ten minutes. Maybe less. That was the window.
He looked at the thing he'd killed. Different anatomy. Different everything. And rising from its cooling body, threads he hadn't seen before. Not gold. Darker. Thicker. Pulsing with something that wasn't just physical strength.
The barrier wall thinned enough to see through. Emergency lights outside. Voices. The RDC had detected the barrier reactivation.
Voss knelt beside the dead thing and reached for its threads.
His blades were wet. His back was bleeding. His sister needed eight hundred thousand credits and he'd just discovered that the dead had more to give than cores and hides.
He pulled the first dark thread free. It burned going in.
He pulled another.
