The red eyes didn’t charge immediately, and that single fact frightened Helios more than a charge would have.
A charge, he could have understood.
A charge was instinct, hunger, the same simple violence he’d already survived once at the wall.
This was something else, something that looked, uncomfortably, like restraint.
They just watched, dozens of them scattered among the bone-white ribs jutting from the basin floor, patient in exactly the way the tracker had warned them about.
Whatever coordinated this pack wasn’t panicking at the sight of intruders.
It was deciding something.
“Nobody move yet,” Kaelen said, low and even, his hand resting on his blade without drawing it.
“If that many of them wanted us dead already, we’d know.”
Somewhere behind him, one of the soldiers shifted his weight, a single small sound in the unnatural quiet, and every red eye in view flicked toward it before settling again.
One of the High Elf trackers, crouched low beside Helios, pointed with two fingers toward the center of the basin without a word.
Helios followed the gesture and felt his stomach drop.
The two missing scouts were there, slumped against one of the enormous rib-like structures, bound in something dark and fibrous that looked grown rather than tied.
Both were breathing.
Neither was conscious.
[Detected: Evo — Broodmother, Adult]
[Threat Assessment: Severe]
[Estimated Level: 22]
The number hit Helios like a physical weight.
Twenty-two.
Nearly three times the Ravager’s level, and the Ravager alone had almost taken Kaelen’s arm off before reinforcements arrived.
He didn’t see the Broodmother yet, not directly, but the ground itself seemed to be humming faintly, a low vibration under his boots that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
“There,” one of the soldiers whispered, and this time Helios saw it too.
Every muscle in his body wanted to run.
He forced himself to stay crouched, still, breathing as shallowly as he could manage.
It rose from the center of the basin the way the rest of the pack hadn’t dared to, easily three times the height of a person, its bulk supported on too many legs arranged in a way that made his eyes want to slide off it rather than focus.
Where the Ravager’s proportions had merely been wrong, the Broodmother’s were wrong on a scale that made his brain refuse to process the whole shape at once.
Along its back, dozens of smaller shapes pulsed faintly beneath a translucent membrane, curled tight, unmistakably alive.
Every few seconds one of them twitched, small and involuntary, like something inside was already impatient to get out.
“Those are eggs,” Seraphina’s second-in-command murmured from somewhere behind them, voice barely audible.
“That’s not a nest. That’s a hatchery.”
One of the Dark Elf soldiers made a low, involuntary sound of disgust, quickly stifled.
Nobody blamed him for it.
Helios felt something similar rise in his own throat and swallowed it back down.
Kaelen’s expression had gone flat and focused, the same look Helios remembered from the wall right before the first fight.
“Options. Now.”
“We can’t fight that,” one of the trackers said immediately.
“Not with seven people and a Level 3 king.”
“We’re not here to fight it,” Kaelen said.
“We’re here for the scouts.”
Helios’s mind raced through the geometry of the basin, the distance to the bound scouts, the dozens of watching eyes between here and there, the Broodmother’s bulk still rising slowly at the center like something surfacing from deep water.
Every plan he could think of ended with someone not making it back.
“So we go in quiet,” Kaelen said.
“With a Radiant Bulwark on standby in case quiet fails.”
“Exactly. You’re getting the hang of this whole strategy thing faster than I expected.”
“Low bar. I’ve had it for about an hour.”
Seraphina’s second, a Dark Elf whose name Helios hadn’t caught yet, shook his head slowly.
“First Voice gave explicit instructions. Extraction only, immediate withdrawal if the primary threat engages.”
“The primary threat is currently ignoring us,” Kaelen said.
“I’d like to keep it that way for exactly as long as it takes to grab two people and leave.”
Helios nodded, throat tight, and started forward at a crouch, moving from cover to cover the way the trackers guided him, every step feeling louder than it had any right to be against the basin’s unnatural quiet.
The Broodmother’s bulk swayed gently overhead, attention seemingly elsewhere, fixed on something Helios couldn’t see from this angle.
The closer they got, the worse the basin smelled, something between wet earth and rot that clung to the back of his throat and made him grateful, for the first time all day, that POMAX hadn’t rendered his sense of smell with quite the same fidelity as everything else.
One of the soldiers ahead of him signaled a halt with a raised fist, and the whole party froze mid-step, waiting out a long, agonizing few seconds while one of the scattered red-eyed shapes nearby turned its head slowly in their direction before losing interest and turning away again.
They made it halfway to the scouts before the eggs along its back began, one by one, to split open.
[Warning: hatching event detected.]
[Threat count increasing rapidly.]
Kaelen swore under his breath, already reaching for the nearest scout.
“New plan. Fast plan. Right now.”
The first newly-hatched shape dropped free of the Broodmother’s back and hit the ground already screeching, small and wet and furious, and every one of the watching red eyes in the basin turned, all at once, toward the sound of seven intruders standing far too close to a nursery that had just decided to wake up.
Helios’s Radiant Bulwark flared to life around his forearm before he’d consciously decided to raise it, gold light spilling into the dimming evening air, and for one suspended heartbeat, the entire basin seemed to hold its breath around him.
Then every eye in the nest came at once.