The Nizamuddin goods yard at half past midnight was not built for this.
Rows of stabled freight cars stretched into the dark, rust-streaked and silent, and moving among them — no longer hiding, no longer needing to — was something that used to be a wounded Restricted-Mature UMA and was now easily four stories of bark and muscle and too many limbs, uprooting a rail car from its siding and throwing it aside like it weighed nothing at all.
"Command, visual confirmed." Rathore's voice had lost its usual flatness. "Tactical-Junior Ya-Te-Veo. All units — this isn't containment anymore. This is survival. Copy?"
A ragged chorus came back, none of it steady.
Shyam stayed low behind the ATS, headset pressed hard to his ear, watching Team 7 spread out below the sodium lights like eight small, stubborn shapes against something that had stopped being a legend twenty minutes ago and started being a natural disaster.
Birju went in first, jaw already lengthening into something with too many teeth, and the creature backhanded him through a stack of shipping pallets without breaking stride.
"It didn't even—" Meher's voice cracked, climbing an octave as she banked hard overhead. "Captain, it barely noticed him—"
"Ma'am." Shyam's own voice came out smaller than he wanted. "Dr. Sen. Are you seeing this?"
"I'm seeing it." A ragged breath crackled down the line. "Raj, I can't do a damn thing from here except watch. So talk to me. Give me something I can use instead of just listening to my team get thrown around."
He forced himself to actually watch instead of flinch — the same instinct that had caught the mutation intervals back at the terminal, dragged out now by pure necessity.
"It's not tracking well." The words came faster than his own certainty about them. "Watch its head — every time it commits to hitting someone, it stays turned that way almost two full seconds before it resets. That's slow, ma'am. Not power-slow. Class-slow. Tree-footed's never had to switch targets fast before, because nothing was ever fast enough to punish it for being slow."
A beat. Long enough that Shyam thought he'd said something stupid out loud in front of the whole team.
"Confirmed." Sen, sharper now, alive again. "Rathore — hit and fade. Nobody holds its attention past one second."
"Copy." Rathore was already moving. "Farah — blind it. Meher, Ramesh, tag and swap, I don't want both of you in front of it at once. Ishita, Verma — anything, anything, between it and a straight line to a person."
"On it," Dev said, and simply came apart at the shoulders — torso dissolving into a churning mass of pale, glistening worms that flowed low along the gravel toward the creature's feet. An army where a man had been standing a second before.
It worked. For almost ninety seconds it genuinely worked — Farah's murmured curse dragging a swing a full meter wide of Ramesh's charge, Meher opening fresh cuts along its flank on every third pass, Ishita hauling a wall of water out of a drainage culvert to slow its footing while Aakash's soulless bodies — three of them now, standing eerily still at the yard's edges — pulled its head around at exactly the wrong moments.
Then it reached down mid-stride, almost lazily, tore one of the soulless bodies apart, and ate it.
Aakash made a sound that wasn't quite a scream, both hands going to his own chest.
"It's feeding on its own class-matter—" His voice broke entirely. "That's not — it's healing faster than we're hurting it, it's using the bodies I made—"
The wounds along its flank were already closing.
"Fall back!" Rathore's voice, no longer level at all — but it was already too late, the way these things are always too late. The creature's head snapped fully around, no delay this time, straight at Aakash, the one person in the yard whose class-signature it seemed to recognize the way something recognizes a smell it's hunted before.
It moved. Aakash didn't move fast enough.
What happened next happened in under two seconds: Rathore was simply there, scales flowing black across her whole body mid-sprint, visible one instant, gone the next, hauling Aakash sideways out of the creature's reach with a strength Shyam hadn't seen her use before. The branch-arm came down on empty gravel hard enough to crack it.
"Captain, that's thirty seconds." Farah's voice, suddenly urgent in a way it hadn't been all night. "Rathore. Break it off. Now. You know what happens past a minute."
Rathore didn't answer.
"She's not answering because she's not really in there to answer," Sen said grimly, over the command channel. "That's the fixation risk. Whatever she locked onto the second she went invisible — right now that's probably protect Verma — that's the only thing left driving her. If the target changes, she might not."
"Then somebody pull her out," Shyam said.
"With what?" Ramesh, bloody-mouthed, hauling himself upright. "Nobody in this yard can catch her like this. That's the whole point of the ability."
The creature reared back for another strike, bigger this time, gathering itself in a way that made the ground itself seem to brace for it, and Shyam understood, with a horrible falling clarity, that eight Restricted-class combatants and one researcher's lucky read had bought exactly as much time as they were ever going to buy. This was simply what losing looked like from the inside.
Then the air cracked.
Not thunder — something faster than thunder, a sound that arrived after whatever caused it had already passed. Where the creature's raised arm had been a half-second earlier there was now a clean, cauterized wound, sheared through by something sharper than anything Team 7 carried.
A woman stood on top of the nearest freight car, where nothing had been standing a moment before. Wings — not feathered, bladed, faintly luminous at the edges — folded halfway back along her spine. She looked about Shyam's age. She did not look remotely tired.
"IARF tactical response." Her voice carried across the whole yard without seeming to be raised at all. "Team 7, clear the perimeter. This one's mine."
She moved before anyone could answer — three consecutive air-blade strikes across the creature's flank before it had finished turning toward the first one. It roared, grabbed for her, and she simply wasn't there anymore, reappearing directly above it, both palms driving down in a strike that folded its legs like a demolished building.
It didn't get up. Not because it was dead — Shyam could see it was still breathing, ragged and enormous — but because whatever had just hit it had convinced every fiber of its body that getting up would be a mistake.
Support vehicles rolled in behind her, sedation crews already moving, and within ninety seconds Ya-Te-Veo — the man-eating tree of Madagascar, four stories of legend a few minutes ago — was chained, sedated, and being winched onto a transport by people who'd clearly rehearsed this and never once had to improvise the way Team 7 just had.
The woman dropped down, wings folding away, and walked straight past Rathore — who had finally come back to herself, scales receding, breathing hard, looking almost as shaken by what she'd nearly become as by the fight itself — without a glance in her direction.
She stopped in front of Shyam instead.
"You're the one who took the gun at the terminal."
"I — yes."
"Falguni Sen's my mother." The hard mask slipped, just slightly, into something younger. "She wouldn't stop talking about you the whole ride over. Kept saying your name like it surprised her to be saying it."
Behind her, Rathore's face had gone carefully, deliberately blank — the specific blankness Shyam was starting to recognize as her doing arithmetic on a feeling she wasn't going to show anyone in this yard tonight.
"Anya." Dr. Sen's voice, over the comm, tired and warm all at once. "You're late."
"Traffic," Anya said, still looking at Shyam. "Thank you." Quiet. Entirely sincere. Then she turned, and every trace of warmth left her voice in the same breath. "Captain."
"Sen." Rathore's voice was level. Careful. "Good work tonight."
"I heard you gave the order to leave my mother's vehicle." One wing gave a slow, involuntary flare — the kind of tell, Shyam suspected, Rathore recognized instantly, given her own class's history of being hunted by exactly this one. "Standard protocol. Correct call, by every metric you people use."
"It was."
"I know it was." Anya's jaw tightened. "Doesn't mean I have to stand here being pleasant about it, Captain. Some things don't care what's correct."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Somewhere behind them, the transport carrying Ya-Te-Veo pulled away into the dark — sedated, contained, alive, and entirely, deliberately, someone else's design, Shyam thought, remembering the data card still sitting in an evidence bag back at base, the calm man in the crowd who'd walked away from Meher Kaur like a magic trick.
They had won tonight. It didn't feel finished at all.
Next Chapter will come tomorrow