Tomos Goff, Lothar von Finsterherz, and Terry Goodman approached the plant from the far side, where the old loading ramps still jutted out like broken ribs. The air reeked of oil and hot metal, with a sweet chemical bite underneath, like solvent left open too long. Only one wing of the complex was lit. The rest sat dark and hollow, a vast steel shell with its lid shut.

  “Damn it. Where’s that giant?” Tomos spat, staring at the wrecked gate.

  “He was badly wounded. I haven’t seen him since,” Goodman said.

  “Maybe we won’t,” Finsterherz muttered.

  “Here, kid?” Goff asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll check how many are inside.”

  Finsterherz lowered his eyelids and slipped away for a heartbeat. The captain had seen it before: the boy didn’t just concentrate, he sank inward, like a diver disappearing beneath black water. A moment later, he surfaced and exhaled.

  “Eight. One of them... a lord-dragon. Like me. No. Stronger.”

  The senior deck enforcer cursed under his breath.

  “Then we do it quiet,” Tomos said. “No noise. No heroics.”

  Terry nodded. “Agreed. But if she’s stronger, we don’t get a second chance.”

  Lothar’s face tightened.

  “I can dull their senses. Just a little. Enough so she doesn’t notice me.”

  He raised a barrier, not around himself, but over the whole compound. The air thickened at once, heavy and charged, the way it feels just before a storm breaks. He flexed his fingers and pressed down on the minds beneath that invisible veil. Not crushing. Not tearing. Just muffling them, like a blanket thrown over a head.

  They moved first.

  They took four fast.

  Two on the outer walk went down before they understood what was happening. The senior deck enforcer got close enough to bury a shiv under one man’s ribs and ease him down without a sound. He dropped two more near the elevator passage with short, brutal shots to the torso, quick and practical, with no time for anyone to scream.

  Lothar stayed near the wall, holding the barrier in place. He looked pale, as if someone had drawn blood straight from his bones.

  “Keep going,” Tomos whispered. “A little more and we’re in the shop.”

  They edged toward the fifth.

  Then she stepped out of the darkness as if she had been standing there the entire time.

  A tall woman in a short jacket, her hair slicked back. Calm eyes that did not dart or flinch. She blocked the passage like she owned the place.

  “Well, well,” she drawled. “Where are we rushing off to, gentlemen?”

  Something stabbed under Lothar’s ribs, sharp as a needle.

  “That’s her,” he forced out.

  “No kidding,” Goff snapped. “I don’t like trouble and I don’t like women in my way. But this one’s not walking off.”

  Goodman glanced around. “Three against four isn’t great.”

  The woman smiled.

  “Oh, it isn’t four,” she said. “It’s eight.”

  She lifted her hand almost lazily, as if she were about to flick ash from a cigarette.

  “Resm-ārūsak.”

  And what lay on the ground got up.

  Bodies jerked like puppets yanked by strings. Necks bent at wrong angles. Feet moved in the same dull, synchronized rhythm. They came straight at them without fear, without hesitation. Empty eyes stared ahead. One of the dead still had a pistol clenched in his hand and tried to raise it with stiff, unwilling fingers.

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  “Ah, hell,” Goodman breathed, snapping up his shotgun.

  Two blasts at near point-blank range. Two puppets burst apart into meat and fragments that slapped the wall and skittered across the floor. The rest did not slow.

  He swapped magazines and fired nitrogen rounds low, taking their legs. Frost spidered across cloth and skin. The dead pitched forward and cracked hard against the concrete.

  “Frozen ones can’t move,” Goodman muttered, almost to himself.

  Then he barked at the woman. “Nice trick. Won’t save you.”

  She drew and fired at him from arm’s length.

  The bullet slammed into the field Lothar was holding. The barrier flared and bowed inward, but held. Goodman was thrown back as if a boot had hit him square in the chest.

  “Jesus,” he rasped, fighting for breath. “Thanks, kid.”

  Lothar didn’t have time to answer.

  Three living guards came at him from behind. They burst from a side door that led into a narrow corridor toward the storage bays. They must have felt something was wrong and come to check.

  He spun to meet them. His throat burned raw and hot, but he forced a word through it anyway.

  “Bandesh.”

  All three halted as if their power had been cut. One froze mid-step, one leg raised, balance held by nothing.

  Finsterherz followed immediately, quieter this time, but with hammered meaning behind it.

  “Silāh-tva bar-dā.”

  Two guns clattered to the floor. The third guard, tougher or simply better trained, twitched hard, fingers shaking, but did not let go.

  The woman watched without hurry, as if she were observing a training exercise.

  “Well then,” she said. “Young and already skilled.”

  He snorted and wiped blood from his mouth.

  “I’m always happy when a woman compliments me. Yours just makes my skin crawl.”

  “Then I don’t have a choice,” she replied.

  She stepped forward, and she did not go for Tomos or the captain.

  She went straight for Lothar.

  He understood at once. She was striking where they were weakest.

  The air beside him seemed to collapse. The barrier over the plant shuddered. Something inside his skull clicked. A foreign hand had found the knot, the place where he held the whole structure together.

  She didn’t shout. She didn’t perform for effect. She only looked at him as if his face meant nothing, as if she could already see the framework inside him.

  “You’re pressing on their minds like a blanket,” she said, almost conversationally. “Light pressure. Student work.”

  Lothar clenched his teeth. His throat burned so badly he wanted to cough blood.

  “Don’t come closer,” he managed.

  She came closer anyway.

  Then she hit him without touching him, not with muscle, but with intent.

  His mind slammed into something hard. He staggered. The barrier above the plant wavered for a heartbeat. The frozen dead Goodman had stopped crackled and twitched again. They did not rise, but they moved. They were trying.

  “Terry!” Tomos shouted. “She’s breaking him!”

  Terry didn’t waste time posturing. He put a burst into her chest.

  The rounds curved away.

  Not ricocheted. Not deflected.

  The air itself seemed to guide them aside.

  She didn’t blink.

  “Practical captain,” she said to Terry. “You shoot when you’re scared. Good habit.”

  The senior deck enforcer swore and lunged low with his shiv, aiming for tendons.

  She turned toward him and simply lifted her palm.

  He was driven down to the floor. Not crushed. Not broken. Just pinned until his knees hit the concrete with a hard crack.

  “Stay down,” she said. “I’ve seen your kind of tricks. Chukur is full of men who think they’re clever.”

  Lothar felt something inside him strain against chains.

  Not his own thought.

  Something else.

  Something delighted.

  Something hungry.

  Give me, a voice slid through him, dark and wet, as if it rose from the bottom of a well.

  He swallowed and held it back.

  “No,” he whispered, mostly to himself. “Not now.”

  The woman tilted her head, listening.

  “Well,” she said softly. “That’s interesting. So you’re not alone.”

  Terry stepped in, shoulder to shoulder with Lothar, putting himself between the boy and her.

  “Get away from him.”

  “Or what?” she asked calmly. “You’ll freeze me with nitrogen? I’m not one of your dolls.”

  Finsterherz knew exactly how this ended if he slipped. She would tear his barrier apart, then lay them out across the concrete with cold precision. No one would even know they had come.

  And she knew it too.

  He gathered what little air and strength he had left. Not for an attack. For time.

  He pulled his inner shield tight, like a strap cinched across his chest, and pushed a word at her that still did not come clean.

  “Bandesh.”

  Not as strong as it had been under Wuilt’s hand. Not as pure. But the meaning landed.

  Stop.

  For a fraction of a second, she froze.

  Only the smallest pause. Her fingers twitched, as if something had caught her by the wrist.

  It was enough.

  Goodman fired nitrogen at her feet, not to kill, but to break her rhythm. Ice bloomed across the floor and one of her boots slid half a step.

  Goff, freed, surged upright with a wolfish grin.

  “Now we talk,” he hissed. “Or you really planning to put all three of us down?”

  She looked at them and smiled, thin as a blade.

  “I will,” she said. “It’s only a question of when.”

  Then the smile vanished.

  “But if you’re here, it means you found something. And I don’t like that.”

  Above them, Lothar felt his barrier creak and split at the edges. He was dizzy. Sick. Barely standing.

  But he stayed on his feet.

  Because if he fell, they were finished.

  She knew that.

  The barrier smothered the signal, but it still got through.

  An alarm.

  A warning pulse, muffled and ugly, spreading through the plant.

  Too late for quiet now.

  The stealth phase is over.

  Lothar is starting to run into enemies who understand exactly what he’s doing and how to dismantle it. That makes every fight more dangerous, especially when he’s already exhausted before the real battle even begins.

  Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the chapter.

  Если хочешь, я могу сразу сделать ещё и более “Royal Road punchy” версию, то есть:с более жёсткими абзацами, более цепляющим opening hook и чуть более сериализированным ending line.