"Stand down," Rathore said, already reaching for her earpiece to relay it up the chain. "Let it run. Distance from us, distance from the crowd — it'll burn off the aggression on its own inside the hour. That's standard doctrine for Restricted-Mature, and we are not chasing a wounded animal through unlit scrubland at midnight for pride."
"Captain, wait." Shyam's voice cracked slightly on the second word, and he hated it, and pushed through anyway. "I don't think distance is going to help it. I think that's the whole problem."
Rathore's hand paused over the earpiece. "Explain. Fast."
"The soulless bodies at the terminal — three of them, which by Dr. Sen's own numbers means close to ninety minutes of sustained aggressive stress before we ever arrived. But the first civilian report only came in twelve minutes before our alert." He was talking too quickly now, aware of it, unable to slow down. "Standard doctrine assumes the stressor is external and proximate — us, the crowd, whatever's chasing it right now. But if something's been provoking this creature for over an hour before we even existed as a variable, then our distance doesn't matter. Whatever's actually causing the stress is still out there with it. Running away from us doesn't run it away from that."
Silence, for exactly as long as it took Rathore to do the arithmetic Shyam had already done twice in his head.
"The data card," she said slowly.
"The data card," Shyam agreed. "I think whoever left that behind wants a Tactical-class UMA tonight, Captain. And I think if we stand down, we're the ones handing it to them."
Rathore looked at him for one more second, then turned and was already moving, boots striking the tarmac hard.
"Belay that," she said into the comm, voice gone flat and fast. "All units, we are not standing down. Pursuit posture, fifteen minutes, non-lethal, priority is confirming its current mutation state before anything else. Move, move, move."
The ATS — Pramod's replacement vehicle, requisitioned from the DARF motor pool in under six minutes, which told Shyam something about how often this exact situation apparently happened — smelled like new upholstery and somebody's leftover paratha. Shyam sat wedged in the back this time between Farah Sheikh and a man he didn't recognize until the man extended a hand without looking away from the window.
"Devraj. Bhatt. You can call me Dev — no point being formal with someone who used a machine gun as an icebreaker." A thin, unreadable smile. "You're either very brave or you have no idea how dangerous that was. I've read your file. I'm placing my bet on the second one."
"I'll take either," Shyam said, and shook his hand, and something in his chest loosened slightly, the specific relief of finally being handed a name instead of a silhouette.
"Farah Sheikh," said the woman on his other side, without prompting, eyes still forward, voice like a scalpel laid flat on a table. "Mystic Swamp-footed. I don't make small talk during pursuit. Ask your questions now if you have them."
"I have several," Shyam admitted.
"Of course you do." That might have been the ghost of amusement in her voice. Might not have.
Up front, the driver — a broad-shouldered woman named Kajal who'd introduced herself in exactly four words before pulling out — kept the vehicle steady over the broken service road, headlights catching scrub and rubble. Over the open channel, Ramesh Chauhan's voice was still catching his breath from the earlier engagement.
"Oi, Raj. You survive your first proper scrap, and now you want to run toward the thing that already flipped one of our cars? Bulldozer's the one who's supposed to enjoy that, not the researcher."
"Bulldozer," Shyam repeated.
"Ramesh Chauhan, Lance Naik, Heterodontia. Yes, everyone calls me that, no, I did not choose it, yes, I have made my peace with it." A grunt, like he was adjusting his grip on something. "Horse and bull, mostly. Big and stupid and hard to knock down, which describes half this unit honestly."
"He's being modest," Meher's voice cut in, airy even mid-flight. "Bulldozer's prey line is Pterygota — mine. He's joked more than once that if meat ever runs short, he'll just take my heart instead. Never mind that it'd take three of me to equal one piece of actual meat. Man still owes me dinner just for the insult of proposing it."
"That's not how the food chain works and you know it—"
"It's exactly how the food chain works, Ramesh."
Shyam blinked. "Wait — you eat her class's meat to advance?"
"Every class only grows on its prey," Dev said, patient, the interrogator's patience of someone used to explaining things slowly to people who needed to understand them completely. "Heterodontia's prey is Pterygota, in the cycle. Savage hunts Heterodontia. Mystic hunts Savage. Tree hunts Mystic. Demodex hunts Tree — that's me, incidentally, hunting our tree-footed friend up ahead. Water hunts Demodex. Mirage hunts Water. Pterygota hunts Mirage. Round and round. Nobody eats their own class, and nobody skips the link."
"And the levels—"
"Junior to Intermediate, one piece of your prey's meat. Intermediate to Mature, two pieces. Mature to the next tier's Junior, three." Farah, flat, precise, as though reciting a supply manifest. "UMA meat only ever comes from UMA — there's no substitute for that. The one exception is hearts, but only from a human who's already eaten UMA meat themselves and gained power from it. An ordinary person's heart is worthless to us. A combatant's heart is worth exactly a third of a piece of meat. Three hearts, six hearts, nine hearts, same ladder. Ugly math for an ugly business."
"Which is why," Ishita's voice broke in over comms — she'd apparently rejoined the channel from Sen's recovering vehicle, voice tight with the particular focus of someone driving one-handed while checking a support brace — "half the black market in this country exists just to move the right meat to the right person. Doesn't matter how strong you are if you're stuck eating something that isn't your prey."
"Where's Aakash?" Shyam asked, realizing the youngest of them hadn't spoken since the terminal.
There was a pause. Then his voice, quieter than usual. "Here. Sorry. Just — thinking."
"About the creature."
"About how it's my own class out there falling apart in real time and none of you actually know what that feels like from the inside." Not bitter. Just tired, and honest about it. "I'll be fine, Raj. Ask me your food chain questions. I promise I'm still useful."
Rathore's voice cut through before Shyam could answer. "Command, Rathore. Status on target."
Static, brief, then the crisp, clipped voice of one of the computer operators back at base — a young man named Karan whom Shyam had exchanged exactly one nod with, back in the briefing hall, an entire lifetime ago tonight. "Captain, we have thermal confirmation, three kilometers northeast of your position, moving erratically. Mutation counter just updated." A pause that lasted a half-second too long. "That's five, Captain. Confirmed fifth consecutive mutation since first contact."
Nobody spoke.
"Copy," Rathore said finally, very quiet. "Sen, tell me you have a classification."
Dr. Sen's voice came through a beat later, steadier than Shyam expected from someone who'd been thrown across the inside of an overturned vehicle less than an hour ago. "Pulled it the second the counter hit five. Cross-referenced against the Madagascar cryptid registry, matches on morphology and behavioral pattern at ninety-one percent confidence." A breath. "Its catalogued name is Ya-Te-Veo. The man-eating tree of Madagascar."
"That's a legend," Ramesh said. "That's a — that's a story people tell tourists."
"So was Mothman, before BPRD found one standing in a parking lot in West Virginia," Sen said. "Every legend is a UMA somebody hasn't met yet, Chauhan. Ya-Te-Veo just met us."
Shyam's mouth had gone dry. "What happens when it crosses into Tactical?"
The silence that followed lasted long enough that he understood the answer before anyone said it out loud — that Rathore, Dev, Farah, all of them, every single person in this vehicle who'd spent years training for exactly this kind of night, did not currently have a comforting answer ready.
"It stops being our problem alone," Rathore said at last, voice hard and level, already reaching to key the wider command channel. "Command, this is DARF Team 7. We have a confirmed Tactical-crossing event in progress. Requesting immediate escalation authorization and backup."
Outside the windscreen, three kilometers ahead, something enormous and burning-eyed and no longer merely a legend was still moving through the dark, closer to becoming something none of them had ever actually fought before.