Sigma Squad ran three more barriers in the next four days. Two D-rank and one C-rank. Voss carved every kill and absorbed what he could without being seen.
The trick was positioning. Tam's shield was large enough to block line of sight from behind. Kael was always on the perimeter, facing outward. Lena focused on her equations during combat, eyes on the geometric figures she was constructing. Dex was a whirlwind — once he started fighting, his attention was entirely on whatever was trying to kill him.
That left Ryn. She watched everything. Her eyes moved across the squad constantly, tracking positions, assessing injuries, calculating. Hiding Thread Sight from her was like hiding a blade under thin cloth — possible, but only if you never moved wrong.
Voss never moved wrong. He had twelve years of practice at being invisible.
By the fourth mission, his accumulated thread count was approaching triple digits. Strength, speed, defense, and mana — all significantly above his F-rank baseline. His Thread Sight range had expanded to eighteen meters. The fatigue from absorptions was becoming more manageable, either because his mana capacity was increasing or because his body was adapting to the intake. Maybe both.
He still hadn't attempted another ability thread. The forty-eight-hour cooldown from Shadow Step had passed days ago, but he hadn't found the right source. The ability threads he'd seen in C-rank barriers were specialized — burrowing, camouflage, venom glands. Useful for monsters. Less useful for a Carver with short blades and a fight style built around precision cuts to structural weak points.
He needed something complementary. Something that enhanced his mobility, his evasion, his ability to reach fresh kills while staying alive in the chaos of a live barrier.
On the fifth day, Sigma Squad deployed to a D-rank barrier in District 12 that held something unexpected.
"Shadow lurkers," Kael reported from his perimeter sweep. "Eight of them. Standard pack, no alpha. But there's something else in there."
"What kind of something?" Ryn asked.
"I can feel it. Back left quadrant. High mana signature. Not lurker-class."
Ryn looked at Lena. The mage closed her eyes, extended her hand, and traced an equation in the air. The numbers glowed briefly and vanished.
"He's right. Something in the D-rank to C-rank range. Different species from the lurkers. Coexisting in the same barrier space without predation. That's unusual."
"It's wrong," Voss said.
Everyone looked at him. He'd spoken without planning to — the observation had come out of his mouth the way his blade found a seam, automatically, because the cut was obvious.
"Different species don't share barrier space," he said. "Not at this rank. D-rank barriers generate a single Rift connection to a single source population. Two species means either a dual-source Rift or something brought them together deliberately."
Ryn's hazel eyes fixed on him. The assessment look. The one that said she was updating a file in her head labeled Voss Dren — more than expected.
"Dual-source Rifts are theoretical," she said.
"The alternative is worse."
She nodded. "Breach in sixty seconds. Dex, clean the lurkers. Kael, locate the secondary. Tam, mobile anchor — follow Dex. Lena, reserve your suppression for the unknown. Dren, stay close to me."
Not behind Tam this time. Close to her. She wanted him where she could watch him and where he could tell her what he saw.
They went in.
---
The lurkers died fast. Dex had learned their patterns over four missions — he moved through them like a butcher through a hanging room, each strike placed to maximize damage, each step carrying him to the next target. He was efficient in a way that shouldn't have been possible for a berserker. Berserkers were supposed to be blunt instruments. Dex was blunt, but he was precise about where he applied the bluntness.
Eight lurkers in two minutes. The threads bloomed around them like a luminous garden. Voss cataloged them with his eyes but didn't move to harvest. Ryn was right beside him.
Then Kael whistled — a sharp, two-note signal from the back left quadrant. Target located.
What stepped out of the shadows was not a lurker.
It was bipedal. Hunched. Six feet tall, with mottled gray skin and a face that was more insect than mammal — compound eyes, mandibles, a pair of feathered antennae that twitched in the barrier's mana-heavy air. Its arms ended not in hands but in blade-like appendages, each one as long as Voss's forearm. Chitin armor covered its chest and shoulders.
A Mantis Stalker. D-rank, technically, but one of the more dangerous variants in its class. Fast, patient, designed for ambush. They hunted by detecting mana signatures and striking from concealment. A Mantis Stalker in a dark barrier with eight shadow lurkers for cover was a nasty combination.
"Dex, hold." Ryn's voice was calm. The stalker hadn't moved. It was studying them with those compound eyes, its antennae swiveling. "Lena, suppression cage. Standard containment."
Lena's equations flared. Light closed around the stalker in a geometric lattice.
The stalker didn't resist. It stood inside the cage, absolutely still, its blade-arms pressed flat against its body. Waiting.
"Captain." Voss was looking at the stalker with Thread Sight. The stat threads were standard — strength, speed, a surprising amount of defense from the chitin. But the ability thread was extraordinary.
A thick, dark thread woven through the stalker's nervous system. Not just its brain or its muscles — its entire sensory network, the compound eyes, the antennae, the vibration-sensitive pads on its feet. The thread connected all of them into a single integrated system. A predator's awareness, refined by evolution into something that could track a target through absolute darkness by the displacement of air alone.
But that wasn't the extraordinary part.
The extraordinary part was the second ability thread. Wrapped around the first, thinner, faster, vibrating at a frequency that Voss could feel in his back teeth. A movement ability. Not Shadow Step — this was different. This was the stalker's signature skill. The thing that made Mantis Stalkers dangerous enough to earn their name.
Phase Shift. A short-range dash that passed through solid objects. Not teleportation — physical movement at speeds that exceeded the structural integrity of barriers. The stalker could move through walls, through shields, through anything that wasn't reinforced with mana. Three meters, maybe four. Enough to bypass any defense and strike from inside the target's guard.
Voss wanted that thread.
The wanting was immediate and physical, a hunger in his hands that he'd never felt before Thread Sight. The predatory instinct of a Carver who'd found a body with something valuable inside.
"Dex. Kill it."
Dex punched through the cage. The stalker tried to Phase Shift — too slow, Dex's fist was already moving, the berserker's speed amplified by whatever edge he carried. The stalker's head caved in. Clean kill. Brain death instantaneous.
The threads erupted. Voss moved.
He crossed the distance to the stalker's body before the other threads had fully bloomed. His hands found the corpse. Thread Sight flared to full power, identifying every filament, tracing every line from anchor point to tip.
The Phase Shift ability thread. There. Woven through the sensory network, pulsing with the last fading echoes of life.
He grabbed it.
The pain was worse than Shadow Step. Worse because the thread was more complex — not a single channel but a branching network, an entire secondary nervous system that had to be ripped free and integrated into a body that had never evolved to hold it. He felt the thread fighting, resisting, the stalker's residual will contesting the absorption with animal ferocity.
Voss pulled harder. The thread snapped.
It flooded into him in a wave of freezing electricity. His nervous system lit up — every nerve ending, every synapse, every sensor in his body suddenly operating at a frequency he'd never experienced. He could feel the air displacement from Dex breathing ten feet away. He could feel the mana currents in the barrier walls. He could feel the vibration of Ryn's heartbeat through the concrete floor.
And somewhere in the middle of that sensory explosion, a new channel opened. Short-range. Three meters. The ability to move through solid matter at speeds that reality shouldn't allow.
He was on the ground. He'd fallen at some point during the absorption — his knees had buckled, his vision had whited out, and he'd dropped beside the stalker's body like a puppet with cut strings.
Ryn was over him. Her hand on his shoulder. Her eyes were very close and very focused and asking a question that her mouth hadn't formed yet.
"I'm fine," Voss said. His voice came out rough. Wrong. The words tasted like copper. "Mana surge from the corpse. Residual discharge. I'll be okay."
She didn't believe him. He could see it in the way her jaw tightened, the way the scar on her face pulled as the muscles beneath it flexed. But she didn't push. Not in the field. Not in front of the squad.
"Take five," she said. "Dex, perimeter. Kael, check the rest of the dome."
They moved out. Voss sat beside the dead stalker and breathed through the aftershock. The new ability settled into his nervous system like a tenant moving into a room — rearranging the furniture, testing the walls, finding its place. Three meters of Phase Shift. Thirty-second cooldown. Mana cost higher than Shadow Step — maybe five percent per use instead of three.
A combat ability that let him pass through solid objects. Through shields. Through walls. Through the defensive formation of any monster pack between him and their dead.
He started the conventional carving work with hands that trembled for the first two minutes and steadied after three. The stalker's cores were high-quality. The chitin armor was valuable. He worked through them with professional efficiency while his body continued to integrate a power that hadn't existed in a human before today.
When the squad reassembled for extraction, Voss had two bags of material, a clean report, and a new ability he'd test in an empty warehouse at midnight.
Ryn fell into step beside him on the walk back to the transport.
"Mana surge," she said.
"Yes."
"From a dead stalker."
"Residual discharge. It happens with high-mana specimens. The textbooks—"
"I've read the textbooks, Dren. I've also read you. And what happened in there wasn't in any textbook I know."
He said nothing. His left hand was very still.
Ryn stopped walking. The squad continued ahead — Dex loud, Kael quiet, Tam and Lena side by side. She waited until they were out of earshot.
"I don't know what you are," she said. "But you're not an F-rank Carver. You assessed that stalker's rank and internal structure from ten meters away. You reached the body faster than anyone on my squad except Dex. And whatever happened when you touched it put you on the floor."
"I'm a Carver," Voss said. "I have good instincts about bodies."
"You have more than instincts." She held his gaze. The scar on her jaw was a white line in the barrier's fading light. "I'm not going to report you. Whatever you're developing, it makes my squad better. That's all I care about. But if it puts anyone else at risk — if whatever is happening to you affects your judgment or your stability — I need to know."
"It won't."
"That's not a promise you can make."
"It's the promise I'm making."
She studied him for three more seconds. Then she turned and walked toward the transport. "Tomorrow's shift is a C-rank barrier in the financial district. Seven stone beetles, one variant. Be ready at oh-five-hundred."
"Captain."
She stopped.
"The lurkers and the stalker sharing a barrier," Voss said. "That's the third time this month different species have been found in the same barrier space. It's not random."
Ryn didn't turn around. But her shoulders shifted — a millimeter of tension that hadn't been there before.
"I know," she said. "I've been tracking it."
She kept walking.
Voss stood at the perimeter for a moment longer. The barrier dome dissolved behind him with a soft sigh, the membrane unwinding into strands of ambient mana that dissipated in the night air. The dead lurkers and the dead stalker remained inside, their conventional materials already collected, their threads long faded.
But the data remained. In his notebook, in Mira's spreadsheet, in the gray memory of a wolf alpha following orders from something vast and deep.
Different species sharing barriers. Wolves fighting in formations. Monster clusters in District 14 at seven hundred percent above normal.
Something was being organized. Staged. Prepared.
And Voss Dren — F-rank Carver, thread thief, newly equipped with the ability to walk through walls — was the only person who could read the dead well enough to prove it.
He boarded the transport. Sat in the back. Held his hands still.
Tomorrow. More kills. More threads. More data.
The answers were in the bodies. They always had been.
