**Chapter 24: Beast Logic**
The Scavengers didn't march. They shuffled.
Forty of them, ragged shadows trailing the formation, their heads bowed under the weight of ammo crates and water drums. They made no sound other than the friction of cloth on skin and the wet cough of lungs coated in silica dust.
Su Yuan walked ten paces ahead of them, the invisible leash of the SoulNet pulled taut.
Inside his skull, the network was a low-level hum, a refrigerator noise that never stopped. The forty scavengers were dim, flickering bulbs—low voltage, high static. The fifty students were brighter, halogen-sharp, burning with anxiety and adrenaline.
He was the switchboard.
"Sector 7 approaching," Sergeant Kovacs growled over the comms. The big man didn't look back. He trusted his motion tracker more than he trusted his eyes, and he trusted his eyes more than he trusted Su Yuan. "Terrain is unstable. Watch your footing."
The terrain wasn't just unstable; it was dead. The ground here was composed of crushed concrete and the oxidized skeletons of pre-war sedans, fused together by heat and time into a jagged reef.
Su Yuan stepped over a rusted axle. His *Iron Body* adjustment compensated for the uneven ground automatically, micro-adjusting his center of gravity. He didn't stumble.
Chen, walking to his right, did.
The boy tripped on a loop of rebar, going down hard on one knee. The heavy pack slammed into his spine.
"Get up," Su Yuan said. He didn't stop walking.
"My ankle," Chen hissed through clenched teeth. "I think I twisted it."
"Walk on it or crawl," Su Yuan said. "The Scavengers are hungry. If you fall behind, they might forget I told them not to eat you."
Chen looked back. The forty porters were ten meters behind, staring with vacant, adoration-filled eyes. They looked at Chen the way a dog looks at a bone on a table—waiting for it to fall.
Chen got up. He limped, forcing his weight onto the bad leg.
"Cruel," Mei whispered from Su Yuan's left. She was scanning the horizon, her knuckles white on her rifle grip.
"Efficient," Su Yuan corrected. "Fear is a stimulant. It floods the system with cortisol. Masks the pain."
"Is that all we are to you?" she asked. "Systems?"
Su Yuan didn't answer. He was watching a shadow move in the wreckage to the north.
It wasn't a Scavenger. It didn't move with the clumsy gait of a human. It poured itself over the debris, liquid and low.
"Halt," Su Yuan said.
The column stopped. Kovacs turned slowly, the servos in his neck whining.
"You barking orders now, maggot?"
"Movement," Su Yuan said, pointing to a cluster of collapsed silos. "Biological. Large mass."
Kovacs checked his thermal. "Negative. My scope is cold."
"Your scope is looking for body heat," Su Yuan said. "Some things out here run cold."
He dropped his pack.
"Cover me," he said to the squad.
"Su Yuan, if you break formation—" Kovacs started.
"If I don't, it flanks us," Su Yuan cut him off. He stepped out of the patrol line, moving toward the silos.
The wind picked up, carrying the scent of ozone and something muskier. Urine. Wet fur.
Su Yuan activated *Resonance Palm*, but he kept the output internal, vibrating the bones of his own inner ear to act as sonar.
*Ping.*
There. Crouched behind a slab of reinforced glass.
It was a wolf. Or it had been, once. Now it was a nightmare of adaptation.
It was the size of a pony, its fur matted with oil and grey dust. One side of its face was missing, replaced by a sheet of riveted steel. Its lower jaw was synthetic, a heavy hydraulic trap lined with serrated titanium teeth. A Steel-Tooth Wolf. An apex scavenger.
It wasn't hiding. It was waiting.
Su Yuan stopped five meters away. The beast rumbled, a sound like grinding gears.
*Can I use you?*
The Logic-Core in his head spun up.
**[ TARGET IDENTIFIED: CANIS-CYBERNETICUS. ]**
**[ THREAT LEVEL: B-MINUS. ]**
**[ OPPORTUNITY: NODE ACQUISITION. ]**
Su Yuan raised a hand. He didn't reach for his weapon.
"Easy," he whispered.
The wolf lunged.
It was fast—blurringly fast. The hydraulic jaw snapped shut on the air where Su Yuan's throat had been a fraction of a second before.
Su Yuan side-stepped. *Flowing Mercury Steps.*
He moved inside the creature's guard. His hand shot out, grabbing the beast by the thick fur at the scruff of its neck. *Iron Body* engaged. His fingers became a vice.
The wolf thrashed, its claws screeching against Su Yuan's chest plate, shredding the Kevlar but failing to pierce the hardened skin beneath.
"Connect," Su Yuan ordered.
He slammed his forehead against the beast's skull.
*SoulNet: Hardline.*
He forced the bridge. He didn't ask for permission; he drove a spike of psychic will into the animal's cortex.
**[ WARNING: INCOMPATIBLE OS. ]**
**[ NEURAL ARCHITECTURE: PRIMITIVE/CHAOTIC. ]**
**[ PROCEED? ]**
"Execute."
The connection snapped into place.
Su Yuan gasped.
It wasn't like connecting to a human. Humans were messy, filled with doubt, arithmetic, and language.
The wolf was a forest fire.
*HUNGER. BITE. TEAR. WARM BLOOD. METAL TASTE. PAIN. RUN. KILL.*
The feedback hit Su Yuan like a physical blow. His vision went red. A wave of pure, distilled violence washed over his frontal lobe, drowning out the cold logic of the Genesis Protocol.
He wanted to bite something. He wanted to rip the throat out of the Sergeant. He wanted to howl.
His lips pulled back from his teeth. A growl bubbled up in his own throat.
**[ CRITICAL ALERT: EGO DISSOLUTION IMMINENT. ]**
**[ PSYCHIC CONTAMINATION: 88%. ]**
**[ SUGGESTION: SEVER LINK. ]**
*No,* Su Yuan thought, clutching the wolf's fur as the beast snapped at his face. *Contain it.*
He visualized a box. A cage of blue laser grids within his mind.
He grabbed the screaming, biting red cloud of the wolf's consciousness and shoved it into the box.
*Lock.*
The red faded. The screaming stopped, muffled behind the firewall.
Su Yuan fell to his knees, panting. The wolf went limp in his grip, its eyes rolling back, drool leaking from the metal jaw. It wasn't dead, but its mind was currently partitioned, sitting in a sandbox in Su Yuan's head.
**[ CONNECTION STABILIZED. ]**
**[ PROCESSING POWER GAIN: 0%. ]**
**[ COMPUTATIONAL UTILITY: NULL. ]**
Su Yuan wiped sweat from his eyes. It was useless. The beast couldn't calculate. It couldn't process the complex algorithms required to crack encryption or run the Genesis simulations. It was just a ball of instinct and sensory input.
Wait.
*Sensory input.*
Su Yuan looked at the partitioned file.
The wolf didn't think. It *knew*. It smelled fear at three hundred meters. It felt the vibration of a footstep through solid rock. It sensed the change in air pressure before a storm.
It didn't have logic. It had intuition.
Su Yuan stood up. The wolf scrambled away, whining, tail tucked between its legs. It looked at Su Yuan with the terror of a creature that had touched god and found him cold.
"Go," Su Yuan murmured.
The wolf bolted.
"Su Yuan!" Kovacs shouted, racking the slide of his cannon. "Why did you release the target?"
Su Yuan turned back to the squad. His head was pounding, but a new file was compiling in his directory.
"It wasn't a target," Su Yuan said, walking back to the formation. "It was a scanner."
He tapped his temple.
"System," he subvocalized. "Isolate the sensory subprocess from the wolf's node. Strip the aggression. Keep the alert triggers."
**[ COMPILING: DAEMON_INSTINCT.EXE ]**
**[ FILE SIZE: 4 MB. ]**
**[ FUNCTION: PRECOGNITIVE THREAT ASSESSMENT VIA SUBCONSCIOUS CUES. ]**
He had built a digital gut feeling.
He looked at the students. They were huddled together, eyes darting at every shadow. They were reactive. Slow. By the time they saw a threat, they were usually dead.
"Check your HUDs," Su Yuan said aloud.
"What is it now?" Chen asked, rubbing his ankle.
"Software patch," Su Yuan said. "Version 2.0. Install it."
**[ UPLOAD: BESTIAL_SENSE. ]**
The students hesitated. They were already running *Ghost_Walker*. Adding more foreign code to their neural implants was risky. It violated every protocol in the Academy handbook.
But then they looked at the dark ruins ahead.
One by one, the "Accept" icons blinked green.
Mei frowned, touching her ear. "I don't see a new menu. What does it do?"
"Nothing you can see," Su Yuan said. "Just walk. And trust it."
Kovacs spat on the ground. "Stop playing with your toys, cadet. Move out. We lose light in two hours."
The column lurched forward again.
Su Yuan walked in the center. He felt the new layer of the network settle over the squad. It was different from the logic-grid. It was a web of nerves.
Ten minutes passed. The silence of the ruins was heavy, pressed down by the low clouds.
Su Yuan watched Chen.
The boy was walking with his head down, watching his feet. Suddenly, Chen's head snapped up. He stopped.
"Something's wrong," Chen whispered.
"What do you see?" Mei asked.
"Nothing. I just..." Chen rubbed the back of his neck. "My skin feels... tight. Like static electricity."
Su Yuan checked the System.
**[ THREAT DETECTED VIA NODE: CHEN. ]**
**[ SOURCE: ABOVE. ]**
**[ TYPE: AERIAL. SILENT. ]**
Su Yuan smiled grimly. It worked. The wolf's instinct, running on human hardware.
"Eyes up," Su Yuan said calmly.
"I don't see anything," a student named Lars said, scanning the sky with macro-binoculars. "Blue clear."
"The sky is blue," Su Yuan said. "The clouds are grey. The shadows are black."
He pointed a finger straight up.
"Those aren't shadows."
High above, circling in the blind spot of the sun's glare, five specks broke formation. They didn't flap. They folded their wings and dropped like stones.
"Contact!" Mei screamed, her voice cracking. "High vertical!"
Cyber-Vultures.
They were nasty pieces of work—scavenged biological birds, stripped of feathers and organs, stuffed with rotors and mono-filament blades. They didn't eat; they harvested.
The screech hit them a second before the birds did—a digital shriek designed to overload audio dampers.
"Defensive circle!" Kovacs roared, his cannon spinning up.
But the students were already moving.
Before the order was given, before the birds were even in effective range, the squad had scattered.
Chen dove behind a slab of concrete a split second before a Vulture slammed into the ground where he had been standing. The bird impacted with the force of a mortar shell, its rotors screaming as it chewed up the rock.
*Instinct.*
"Fire!" Su Yuan commanded.
The students popped up from cover. They didn't aim with their eyes; they fired where the sickness in their stomachs told them to fire.
Plasma bolts crisscrossed the air.
One Vulture took a hit to the turbine. It exploded in a shower of gore and sparks, spiraling into a rusted water tower.
Another banked hard, razor-wings extended, aiming to decapitate Mei.
Mei didn't see it. She was reloading.
But she *felt* it.
She dropped flat onto her stomach. The wing sliced the air inches above her helmet, severing the radio antenna.
She rolled onto her back and fired her sidearm upward. Three shots. The Vulture's sensor array shattered. It crashed blindly into the dirt, thrashing like a broken toy.
"Keep firing!" Kovacs bellowed. "Don't let them regroup!"
Su Yuan stood in the open.
He watched the data stream. It was beautiful.
Usually, a squad of green cadets panic under ambush. Their heart rates spike, their accuracy drops, they freeze.
But today, their heart rates were synchronized. The *Bestial_Sense* bypassed the panic center of the brain and wired directly into the motor cortex. They weren't thinking about dying; they were reacting to the predator.
A Vulture dove for Su Yuan.
He didn't move. He watched it come.
Ten meters. Five.
He could see the camera lens swiveling in the bird's eye socket. He could smell the rancid lubricants heating up.
At the last moment, he stepped left.
Not a jump. Just a single step.
The bird whistled past his shoulder.
Su Yuan reached out. *Iron Body.*
He grabbed the trailing edge of the metal wing. The momentum was massive, enough to tear an arm out of its socket.
Su Yuan planted his feet. The ground cracked under his boots. He swung the bird like a flail, slamming it into the concrete pillar beside him.
*CRUNCH.*
Metal twisted. The bird went limp.
Su Yuan dropped the wreckage.
Silence returned to the ruins.
Five dead Vultures lay smoking in the ash.
The students slowly stood up. They looked at their hands. They looked at each other. They were shaking, not with fear, but with the adrenaline crash of survival.
"I... I didn't even see it," Chen stammered, staring at the crater where he had almost died. "I just knew to move."
"Me too," Mei whispered. She touched the severed antenna on her helmet. "It felt cold. Right here." She touched the back of her neck.
They turned to look at Su Yuan.
He stood over the broken bird, wiping oil from his gloves.
"What did you do to us?" Lars asked. His voice was trembling. "That wasn't training. That wasn't me."
"It was survival," Su Yuan said. "You're welcome."
Kovacs stomped over, kicking a piece of Vulture wing aside. The Sergeant's faceplate was retracted. He looked at his squad—alive, unhurt, and frighteningly efficient.
He looked at Su Yuan. There was no mockery in the Sergeant's eyes anymore. Only calculation.
"You're turning them into something," Kovacs said quietly, so only Su Yuan could hear. "They aren't cadets anymore. They're a hive."
"Better a live hive than dead heroes," Su Yuan said.
"Is it?" Kovacs lit a lho-stick, shielding the flame from the wind. "The Spire doesn't like hives. Unless they hold the remote."
"The Spire isn't here," Su Yuan said. "We are."
He checked his internal clock.
**[ NODES ACTIVE: 90. ]**
**[ SYNC RATE: 100%. ]**
**[ PROTOCOL OMEGA: WATCHING. ]**
The *Bestial_Sense* had done more than save them. It had lowered their mental defenses. By accepting the instinct, they had opened their root directories to him. They were relying on his code to tell them when to duck, when to run.
Dependency.
Su Yuan felt a pang of something human—guilt, perhaps. He pushed it into the sandbox with the wolf.
"Form up," Su Yuan ordered.
This time, Kovacs didn't correct him.
The students fell into line immediately. The movement was fluid, unconscious. Even the Scavengers behind them seemed to stand a little straighter, sensing the change in the pack dynamic.
Su Yuan looked north. The Refinery loomed in the distance, a fortress of pipes and smokestacks belching black poison into the sky.
"We have an hour," Su Yuan said. "Stay sharp. The hunger is still there."
He started walking.
Behind him, ninety souls followed in perfect step.
In the deep recesses of his mind, the Genesis Protocol allocated a tiny fraction of processing power to a new folder: *Project: Pack Alpha.*
It approved.