They took their positions an hour before midnight, spread wide around the hidden camp in the reeds — Rathore and Farah closest to the cage itself, Dev and Ishita flanking the water's edge, Meher airborne but low, Aakash and Nasreen holding the tree line, Shyam and Anya anchoring the rear approach. No comms chatter. Hand signals only, exactly as the fog had taught them to respect.
The waiting stretched long enough that Shyam's legs went numb twice.
"You're fidgeting," Anya murmured, barely audible, crouched beside him in the dark.
"I'm existing quietly. There's a difference."
"There really isn't."
He almost laughed, caught it before it escaped, and the two of them settled back into silence, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her shoulder against his in the cold night air, neither of them commenting on it, both of them entirely aware of it anyway.
It was Farah who caught the first sign of trouble — three shapes stumbling out of the dark along the riverbank, moving fast and loud and utterly without discipline, one of them sobbing openly, all three wearing the unmistakable dark fatigues of a Delhi DARF unit that wasn't Team 7.
"Rathore," Farah breathed, the name barely a shape in the air.
Rathore had already seen them. Her hand cut a sharp signal through the dark — silence them, now — and she was moving before the gesture had even finished, scales rippling once across her skin before she vanished from sight entirely.
The three survivors never saw what hit them.
The one in front went down first, folding at the knees mid-stride as Rathore's invisible hand found the exact pressure point at his neck, no sound beyond a soft exhale as he slumped into the reeds. The sobbing one — younger, terrified, still shouting something about it's still out there, it's still out there — got two more words out before Meher dropped out of the sky behind her and clamped a hand firmly over her mouth, easing her down with a care that looked almost gentle despite the speed of it. The third tried to run and made it four steps before Anya's shoulder caught him mid-stride, driving the air out of his lungs before he could shout anything at all, and he crumpled without a sound.
Three seconds. Three bodies, unconscious, silent, safely down in the mud instead of screaming across open water toward whatever had chased them there.
"It's coming," Ishita hissed, barely audible, eyes fixed on the river. "It heard something before we got to them. It's already moving."
"Cover," Rathore's voice, still invisible, urgent. "Now."
Aakash didn't hesitate. He pressed both palms flat against the earth and something ancient and patient answered him — bark splitting up through the mud in fast, unnatural growth, roots knitting together into a low, dense screen of new-grown trees and tangled undergrowth, swallowing the whole huddled group into shadow within seconds. Shyam felt the air around them change, thicken with the smell of wet wood and torn earth, and understood, watching Aakash's face go tight with strain, exactly what this was costing him even as he held it.
The water at the bank's edge broke.
The creature surfaced slow, deliberate, searching — the long neck sweeping in a wide, patient arc, water sheeting off scales that seemed to drink the moonlight rather than reflect it. It paused, head tilting with an intelligence that felt entirely wrong on something so large, close enough now that Shyam could hear its breathing, a deep, resonant sound like wind through a cave.
Nobody moved. Nobody breathed, if they could help it. Shyam felt Anya's hand find his in the dark and grip it hard enough to hurt, and he was grateful for the pain, grateful for anything that kept his own body from betraying them with a single unwilling shiver.
The creature swept its gaze across the tree line once, twice — and found nothing. No sound, no scent it could separate from mud and river and old wood, no fleeing shape to chase. After a long, unbearable moment, it made a low, frustrated sound and slid back beneath the water, the ripples smoothing out behind it until the Yamuna looked, once again, like it hadn't held anything more dangerous than fish in a hundred years.
Aakash let the trees go all at once, sagging hard against the mud, his hands trembling violently the way his own body had warned him it eventually would.
"You alright?" Nasreen whispered, steadying him.
"Give me a minute," he managed. "Give me several minutes, honestly."
They gave him four. Then Dev raised a fist again, sharper this time, and every eye turned back toward the camp.
Two figures approached from upriver, moving with the unhurried confidence of people who owned this ground rather than trespassed on it — one broad and heavily built, the other slighter, carrying a case that clinked faintly with glass on glass.
"—told you the sedative dose needs adjusting," the broad one was saying, low and irritated. "It's shaking off the last batch faster every time. Boss won't be happy if we lose the cage before we've even—"
He didn't finish the sentence. Rathore was already moving.
She hit him low and hard, invisible until the very last half-second, driving him face-first into the mud with a controlled violence that left him gasping but conscious. The slighter one bolted, case forgotten, and got exactly three strides before Meher dropped from above and Anya cut in from the side, boxing him in a pincer that gave him nowhere left to run.
"On your knees," Rathore said, voice gone hard and flat, no invisibility left to hide behind now that the fight was already over. "Hands where I can see them, and you might actually survive tonight."
The broad one spat mud and glared up at her. "DARF."
"Team 7, specifically." Rathore crouched to his level, unhurried now that the danger had passed. "You're going to answer some questions. How thoroughly you cooperate determines how unpleasant the next few hours are for you. That's the only choice left on the table."
The interrogation, once they'd secured both men and the rival team's still-unconscious survivors for medical transport, didn't take Dev long at all.
"He wants it kept alive," Dev reported afterward, low, to Rathore and the assembled team. "These two are contractors, not core to his operation — hired for capture expertise, paid per successful containment attempt. They don't know where he is right now. But they know what he wants, and it's worse than a quick kill."
"Which is?" Farah asked.
"Not a quick kill. Caged, sedated, harvested slowly, piece by piece over months. A living supply rather than a single meal."
"Why keep it alive instead of just taking what he needs and moving on?" Farah pressed.
"Because he's not close to done growing." Dev's expression didn't change, though something in his voice tightened. "According to these two, Zaid's already deep into Tactical class on his own account, and needs this UMA which is his prey line — the same class this creature belongs to, and the same class Raj happens to carry now, which is exactly why it's valuable to Zaid and like the investment in Raj as food. Reaching Strategic class costs meat in quantities no black market moves quickly or quietly. A single captured, controlled UMA that regenerates and can be bled for pieces indefinitely solves that problem for him entirely — no more raids, no more risk, no more waiting on unreliable suppliers."
"And once he reaches Strategic?" Rathore asked, though her voice suggested she already suspected the shape of the answer.
"Then he's not just answering to whoever's backing him anymore," Dev said. "According to these two, that's always been the actual plan. Not serving someone else's black market forever. Building his own — his own family, his own rules, strong enough that the people currently funding him become the ones who owe him favors instead."
Rathore was quiet for a moment, turning something over. "What he's attempting with that cage — sustained containment, harvested meat as an ongoing resource instead of a one-time theft — that's not black market behavior. That's what IARF does. What SIRA does. What every major agency in this world does with a UMA once they've secured it properly."
"Which is exactly what makes him dangerous," Dev said. "Most people in his position steal what meat they can carry and sell the rest up the chain to someone bigger, because doing it properly — keeping something that size alive, sedated, harvestable for months — takes real technology and real backing, not just personal strength. Zaid has both. Nobody else operating outside an actual government or agency usually does."
"He's building toward something bigger than any single kill," Rathore said quietly, following the same thread to the same uneasy conclusion. "This was never just about one creature in one river."
Nobody argued. Nobody, this time, even looked surprised.
They loaded the two contractors and the three unconscious rival-team survivors into the vehicles just before dawn, the Yamuna behind them finally, mercifully still, no long neck breaking the surface, no fog rolling in uninvited.
"We didn't catch him," Rathore said, watching the water in the grey pre-dawn light. "We didn't even confirm the creature's exact tier. But we got two live contractors, a name for what he actually wants, and every single person on this riverbank tonight walked away breathing — including three people from a team that's racing us for the same regional spot."
"Feels like a win," Ramesh offered, from beside the vehicle.
"It is a win," Rathore said, and for the first time in days, something in her voice sounded almost like relief. "Just not the last one we're going to need."