The Chronos Shaper, Professor Onyeka, was a threat unlike Fortune. Fortune was a creature of passion and chaos; Onyeka was a creature of cold, methodical, future knowledge.
"Your future is not inevitable," Samuel growled, his body coiling, ready to shift despite the confined space.
"It is, if you choose it to be," Onyeka countered smoothly. "And I know your choices, Alpha. You choose protection. You choose balance. And I know the one thing that will always distract you: a threat to the Keeper."
Onyeka moved with a sudden, temporal blur. He wasn't fast like a vampire; he seemed to move between moments. He sidestepped Samuel's lunge and was instantly at the mechanical lock on the hidden sub-basement door.
He didn't use force; he used a small, intricate device a relic of his dark future that pulsed with faint, silvery light.
"The lock," Onyeka explained, calmly manipulating the device, "is based on a temporal cipher. It recognizes the correct sequence of moments. I know the past. I know the future. Therefore, I know the present key."
The heavy, ancient tumblers of the hidden lock began to turn with a loud, grinding protest.
"Esther, the comms!" Samuel yelled, knowing he had seconds before the entire campus structure became exposed. "Alert the Pack! Full lockdown of the Senate Building!"
Esther grabbed her phone and sent the encrypted message, her hands shaking, but her mind focused.
Onyeka laughed, completely unconcerned by the impending arrival of the Pack. "The Pack will only add variables to my refined equation, Alpha. They won't stop the inevitable."
The lock clicked open. The door to the sub-basement creaked inward, revealing a spiral stone staircase descending into absolute darkness.
Onyeka bowed slightly. "I'll retrieve the seeds. But I leave you with a warning: The timeline is like glass, and you just cracked it. You will find that some elements of your past are now bleeding into your present. Uncontrolled, unpredictable."
He vanished down the staircase.
Samuel stared down the dark hole, his fury mixed with rising dread. The Chronos Shaper had knowledge of the future, making him impossibly dangerous.
The scent of pine was instantly joined by the hurried, anxious rush of the Pack. Tunde, Obinna, and a dozen other wolves burst into the room, their eyes amber with readiness.
"Alpha! What's the threat?" Tunde demanded.
"A temporal threat," Samuel ground out, already heading toward the staircase. "He's after the Folium Aethel seeds, deep below the Senate Building. Esther, stay here! Guard the blueprints. I need to descend."
"No, Samuel," Esther insisted, grabbing a heavy, iron paperweight. "He knows our choices. He'll be prepared for a solo wolf. I know the Seed Cache's design. We go together. We are the Balance."
Samuel looked at his fiercely determined Keeper, knowing her knowledge was as vital as his strength. He nodded.
"Tunde, seal the room. No one enters. If we don't return in one hour, breach the vault, retrieve the Golden Leaf Casket, and activate its full temporal pulse. It will overload the timeline, but it's the only way to stop the Chronos Shaper from exiting the building."
Samuel and Esther plunged down the spiral staircase into the absolute darkness, chasing a man from the future who knew their every move.