Deathcraven entered Hollowbrook like a maintenance ghost with a weaponized checklist. The wagon that carried him wore municipal paint and a dull tarp, the kind of vehicle Darkened patrols stopped out of habit and waved through out of boredom once the paperwork looked clean. He sat on a metal bench inside the cargo bay with his kit braced between his boots—offline storage sleeves, heat-stamp resin strips, a compact field imager, and a hush puck sealed in sterile foil. Two Death Rangers rode opposite him, faces masked, rifles broken down into quiet halves; a pair of lab-courier technicians kept their gloves on as if the air itself was evidence. Nobody talked. The Shadow liaison riding with them communicated by posture and small hand cues, directing turns at intersections without ever giving the city a voice to intercept.
Hollowbrook's streets were dense with occupation pressure. Maroon patrol lights cut across wet pavement. Checkpoints stood at predictable corners, their geometry built to make civilians feel watched and to make runners feel trapped. Deathcraven treated that geometry as cover. He watched routines, counted the gaps between patrols, and chose alleys where the cameras were pointed at the wrong problem. The target sat inside an administrative quarter grid—an AES continuity runner safehouse that had been used as a cache point for Star verification gear between escort legs. It looked like a harmless service office from the street, but the door seam was newer than the building, and the window blinds were cut too precisely to be normal.
Deathcraven halted the wagon one block out. The team dismounted into shadow lanes, moving in pairs, rifles low, fingers away from triggers until PID was clean. The Shadow liaison signed a single instruction—HOLD—then traced a rectangle in the air toward the corner building: BOX DISCIPLINE INSIDE. Deathcraven nodded and shifted his grip on the hush puck, not activating it yet. He wanted the first thirty seconds to feel normal.
They stacked on the door. Deathcraven took point. One Ranger held overwatch down the alley. The other Ranger covered the rear seam. The lab-courier technicians stayed one pace back, ready to seize objects rather than chase bodies. Deathcraven's gloved hand tapped the door twice—soft, maintenance cadence—then he breached on the third beat with a compact charge that cut the lock without blowing the frame. The door swung inward. He flowed through with a tight muzzle and a flat command.
"Down. Hands visible."
Inside, the safehouse smelled like toner and warm electronics. A Star ground operator snapped upright behind a desk, eyes widening at the wrong silhouettes in the doorway; a second operator reached for a wall console on reflex, fingers drifting toward a prompt that could have been help or poison. Deathcraven activated the hush puck. The room didn't go silent; it went late. Shouted corrections arrived a fraction of a beat behind the movement they were meant to stop. That fraction gave Deathcraven the entire room.
He used Death pressure as a tactical tool, not a spectacle. A pulse hit the operators' wrists and shoulders, knocking hands off-line without shattering bones, turning instinctive reaches into harmless stumbles. A Ranger pinned the first operator to the floor with a knee and a hard-light cuff taken from the Star kit itself; the second operator tried to pivot toward the back room, and a reanimated "corpse-drone"—a small, rigid thing that moved like a wheeled cart until it didn't—scraped under a chair and snapped its jaw on the operator's ankle strap just long enough for a controlled takedown. No screaming. No long fight. Just bodies placed where they could be seen.
Deathcraven ignored the people once they were contained. He went straight for the kit shelf. Offline verifiers sat in padded cases, tamper sleeves stacked beside them with Orinvalde microtext and seal strips meant to survive camera scrutiny. He didn't rip anything free. He treated the safehouse like a lab bench. He photographed seal lines in frame, pulled one verifier case, slid it into a Death custody sleeve, and heat-stamped the resin strip with a sterile imprint mark that would read as "handled" and "tracked" rather than "touched." A printed route token sheet lay in a tray by the door—Frostwick corridor timing, convoy leg windows, a neat list of junction boxes where the team expected to re-key guidance under escort.
Deathcraven lifted it and folded it once, clean and quiet.
"Route confirmed," he said.
Outside, Hollowbrook reacted the way cities always reacted when their routines were punctured. Radios snapped alive. Patrol lights turned. A few Blackened ground teams began to drift toward the quarter, drawn by the smell of contact. Deathcraven did not linger for the thrill of pursuit. He ran the exfil the way he ran entry: bounded, controlled, corners owned before feet crossed them. One Ranger moved while the other held overwatch. The lab-couriers stayed shielded inside the wedge, the verifier case never leaving the custody sleeve, the route sheet tucked flat against Deathcraven's chest.
"Left," Deathcraven ordered. "Alley seam. Two seconds."
They cut through a service corridor where dumpsters formed a channel and moved into a back street just as a Darkened patrol vehicle rolled into the intersection, turret light sweeping. Deathcraven raised his palm and sent a thin necro-mist at streetlamp height—not a fog bank that swallowed the neighborhood, a tight haze that dulled the beam's reach at exactly the wrong angle. The patrol vehicle slowed, uncertain, and in that hesitation the Death team crossed the lane and vanished into the next seam without firing a shot.
Frostwick's rail-side service road gave them speed and fewer witnesses. They reached it with the hush puck still active and the verifier case sealed, moving into the Briarhatch–Alderstead forest belt where the terrain turned convoys into predictable math. Here, Deathcraven built a temporary encampment that looked like nothing from outside: two concealment hides, a fallback lane, a single contact line marked by silent cues only his team understood. The Shadow liaison signed the forest's timing with two sharp taps—HALF-HOUR SEAM—then pointed to a bend where the road curved and the trees swallowed line-of-sight.
Deathcraven placed the procedural trap instead of an explosive. A false "quarantine safe access" beacon went into a roadside cabinet, tuned to present a calm operator-tier prompt shape when viewed by vehicle console optics. It wouldn't detonate. It would slow decision-making by persuading a disciplined crew to argue with itself about whether to stop. That delay was the kill box.
He checked his team's sectors. He checked their spacing. He checked the verifier sleeve again and resealed it with a second stamp. He did not allow the stolen object to become loose just because the forest was quiet.
The convoy arrived on time, and that punctuality irritated him almost as much as it impressed him. Vehicles moved in mixed escort formation—Star Rangers enforcing box discipline even on dirt roads, Solar Marines holding the hard perimeter, rifles angled to deny flanks rather than chase ghosts. The lead vehicle's console camera caught the beacon's prompt and threw it onto the dash in the calmest language possible.
SAFE ACCESS REQUIRED
OPERATOR TIER
CONFIRM AUTHORITY
The green confirm pulsed. The driver's hands tightened. The lead Ranger's voice carried down the lane.
"Hands off green. Maintain movement. Boxes hold."
Deathcraven opened contact with controlled fire at vehicles, not to burn the convoy to ash, to stop it in the pocket of terrain he had chosen. Rounds bit into tires and engine housings in short bursts that made the lead truck yaw and lock. The second vehicle braked. Spacing collapsed by necessity. Solar Marines attempted to fan out and reassert perimeter geometry. Deathcraven hit them with pressure pulses that punished bunching—forcing bodies to cluster, then punishing the cluster with disorientation, turning disciplined footwork into a brief shuffle of uncertainty.
The Death Rangers exploited the shuffle in fast, brutal micro-engagements. They took one fire team off the line, then another, moving laterally through the brush with muzzle discipline, never overextending past their hide line. Reanimated drones crawled into cross lanes and tripped motion sensors, pulling Solar attention toward false contact points. Shadow bends flickered at the forest edge, briefly shortening sightlines so AES overwatch couldn't see the shooter who mattered.
Deathcraven moved straight toward the secure crate. He didn't celebrate bodies. He didn't waste seconds clearing every threat. He created a narrow corridor of control—pressure pulses to knock rifles off-line, a hard command to his couriers, and a single objective repeated like code.
"Crate. Now."
A Star Ranger attempted to block him, stepping into a visible stance and raising a weapon with disciplined hands. Deathcraven closed the distance under a moving shield made of reanimated barricade mass—ugly, rigid, functional—absorbing the first shots without presenting a human body to the muzzle. He hit the Ranger with a precise wrist pulse that made the barrel lift and waste itself into the tree canopy, then drove a knee into the Ranger's center to fold them and cuff them without breaking their spine. He needed one live operator. He took one.
The lab-courier technician cut the crate seal with a tool and removed a second offline verifier kit and custody sleeves, sealing them immediately into Death-marked tamper cases. Deathcraven photographed the crate serial, the cut line, and the seals in frame—proof for his own chain-of-custody, proof for Deathwing's lab, proof that the theft was measured rather than chaotic.
AES reinforcements began to converge. You could hear it before you saw it—the change in comm cadence, the tightening of movement, the sense of a larger lattice pressing the forest into predictable lanes. Deathcraven didn't wait for the net to close. He ordered break-contact the moment he had what he came for.
"Move," he snapped. "Fallback lane. No trophy stops."
They pushed out of the trees into vehicles and drove hard toward Ravencrux, choosing industrial routes to avoid civilian spillover. The city rose ahead as an ugly silhouette—freight spurs, warehouses, concrete channels—terrain that turned street fights into corridor fights. A cutout warehouse near a relay-adjacent staging node waited for them with doors already unlatched and a back ramp staged for an offshore handoff. Deathcraven dragged contact toward that warehouse on purpose. He wanted the fight inside controllable geometry where the stolen objects could be packaged and transmitted without ever touching a live network.
AES pursued aggressively, squads pushing street corners, trying to isolate the stolen evidence and rescue their captured operator. Fire snapped in the open lanes, and Star hard-light boxes began to appear on asphalt, forcing their own feet into disciplined rectangles even while they ran. Deathcraven let them commit to their rules. He used the warehouse threshold as a hinge.
Inside, he turned the space into a kill box. Reanimated barricade "shields" slid into place to absorb entry fire. Necro-mist deadened shouted coordination in the first ten meters so commands arrived smeared, forcing AES to rely on hand signals and pre-briefed drills. Deathcraven used pressure pulses to knock rifles off-line at the moment they would have found a clean lane, not flattening the building, just stealing the exact angles that made entry fast.
He triggered a second procedural trap on a warehouse relay cabinet: another calm operator-tier prompt, another green confirm, another invitation to make the wrong click in the wrong second. He watched how the AES lead reacted—how they boxed the console, how they kept hands visible, how they used paper tokens and offline verifiers even while bullets chewed concrete. He recorded their sequence with timestamps.
That was his second product: signature mapping.
While the fight stayed contained to the warehouse lanes, Deathcraven transmitted only metadata pings to Doctor Deathwing's shipboard lab through a narrow, pre-arranged window: seal photos, timestamps, observed escort geometry, the precise behavior of AES call-and-response under hush delay. No payload content. Nothing that could be intercepted and turned back on him. The stolen devices remained air-gapped in sealed cases, braced in a cradle by his couriers.
A Blackened fire-support craft appeared offshore for one brief minute, throwing bombardment rhythm into the horizon and pulling pursuit eyes outward. Shadow operatives bent camera lines at the nearest intersections, turning obvious exits into blind seams. Deathcraven moved his team out under that cover, the captured Star operator restrained and visible, the verifier kits sealed and stamped twice.
As they cleared the city's industrial edge, the next half-hour window began, not politely, not loudly—by blinking on every surface that wanted permission. Orinvalde feeds started to pulse with a calm, coercive overlay aimed up the chain, trying to centralize authority "for safety" at the exact moment AES would want to brief the public about a theft. The civic backbone blink didn't chase a neighborhood this time. It reached toward continuity authority, toward the people who would decide what "proof" meant when cameras rolled.
Deathcraven didn't look back at Ravencrux. He looked down at the sealed cases between his boots and at the restrained operator's hands, because hands were always the point.
"Window's open," one Ranger said.
Deathcraven's cross-shaped pupils held steady. "Good," he replied. "Let them choose under pressure."
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