By six in the morning, Nyx no longer fit anywhere in the apartment except the middle of it.
Aiden stopped in the hallway and looked at the problem.
Nyx had folded himself across the kitchen threshold with the composure of a creature unwilling to admit that architecture had inconvenienced him. One wing covered most of a chair that had stopped being a chair sometime before dawn. His tail blocked the refrigerator.
Iris looked up from the table.
"He grew again."
"I noticed."
"You say that like this is manageable."
Nyx opened one eye.
"It is manageable. Your furniture simply lacks discipline."
"You broke a chair before breakfast," Iris said. "That feels less like growth and more like harassment."
Aiden stepped over the ruined leg on the floor and opened the refrigerator. The better cuts were almost gone. Meat packs. Eggs. Fruit. Two delivery containers from last night. One sealed tray Iris had labeled for humans in black marker.
Nyx lifted his head at once.
"That one."
"No."
"You opened it."
"That isn't consent."
Iris almost smiled.
Aiden set a cheaper pack on the counter. Nyx stared at it, then at the one still in Aiden's hand.
"You insult me often for someone who sleeps inside my radius."
"Eat the insult."
Nyx accepted the meat with visible contempt.
Iris put her cup down.
"Hana called at five thirty. She said if he gets any bigger before payroll stabilizes, she's putting him on the expense sheet under hostile logistics."
"Fair."
"She also said you were supposed to be at the office early."
"I know."
He had been awake before the call. Sleep had changed lately. He still got some. It just never felt complete. Pipes in the wall. Someone crossing the hall. A scooter outside. The building settling in the cold. Every ordinary sound reached him too clearly now, and once it did, it stayed.
Somewhere below, a dog barked once.
Then again.
Then stopped altogether.
Aiden glanced toward the kitchen window before he meant to. Nyx noticed.
"That happened yesterday too," he said.
"It heard you."
"No." Nyx lowered his head again. "It heard you."
Aiden shut the refrigerator a little harder than necessary.
He cut fruit for Iris because otherwise she would decide coffee counted as breakfast. He set the plate in front of her without comment. She looked at it, then at him.
"You should sleep tonight."
"We have routes."
"That isn't an answer either."
He looked at her properly then. The color had returned to her face over the last few days, but recovery still showed in the small things. The slower way she stood. The way she sat carefully when she thought he was not watching. The way she changed the subject before discomfort could become visible.
She caught him seeing it and objected on principle.
"I'm coming to the office today," she said. "If Hana tells me to rest one more time, I'm rearranging her filing system."
"She'll kill you."
"Then she'll have to do it alphabetically."
Nyx ate in silence. Aiden packed his gear one-handed, checked the edge on his knife, and let the morning fall into routine.
It should have felt ordinary.
Instead it felt like ordinary life had started listening for something too.
The ARES office sat over a parts warehouse that smelled permanently of damp cardboard, oil, and old rain. Their van was already open in the loading bay. Do-yun stood beside it tightening the left strap on his shield harness. Min sat on a crate with coffee in one hand and a field med kit in the other, considering both with equal distrust.
Hana did not look up when Aiden walked in.
"Three minutes late."
"Traffic."
"You live twelve minutes away."
"Exactly."
Joon sat at the folding table with route sheets spread around two tablets and a phone he had already stopped trusting.
"Morning," he said. "You look rested in the same way knives look rested."
Nyx came through the half-open door behind Aiden, and the room adjusted around him at once.
Min looked up first.
"No," he said flatly. "Absolutely not. That's larger. You were smaller yesterday. I would testify to that in court."
"You would perform badly," Nyx said.
"He's right," Joon muttered. "This has stopped being subtle."
Hana finally raised her eyes from the paperwork. Her gaze stopped on the frayed edge of one wing membrane where Nyx had clipped a doorframe on the way in.
"New rule," she said. "If he destroys rented property, it comes out of Aiden's share."
"Biased accounting," Min said.
"Accurate accounting."
She slid the top sheet across the table.
"Two official clears today. One private posting I'll ignore until I run out of self-respect."
Joon tapped the first page.
"Maintenance nest under a municipal fitness center. Low rank. Clean enough to keep us paid."
The second.
"Flood-channel service route. Private side. E-band on paper, better pay than it deserves, no district stamp."
Aiden looked at the second sheet.
"Who sent it?"
Joon leaned back.
"A materials handler I know by name and distrust by instinct. Another team entered, heard movement deeper in, and decided to remain alive."
"Exact wording?" Min asked.
"Structural uncertainty."
Min drank coffee.
"Professional language for somebody got scared in a hallway."
Hana capped her pen.
"We clear the official route first. If the day stays normal, we discuss whether the private posting deserves our attention."
"Nothing about us is normal anymore," Joon said.
"Then let's at least be expensive," Hana replied.
Aiden kept his eyes on the flood-channel sheet. Too many clean forms had started appearing around them. Too many routes posted just badly enough to be tempting. If they slowed down, people would call it hesitation. If they kept working, people would call it appetite.
Either way, someone was writing.
He pushed the second sheet back across the table.
"Later."
That was enough for now.
The first site sat under a municipal fitness center that should have smelled like chlorine and rubber. Instead it smelled of mold, rust, and the cold mineral damp of a dungeon that had pushed up under the service level and refused to become anyone's priority.
A junior evaluator waited by the barrier with a tablet in hand and the expression of a man trying not to become memorable. He confirmed the team count, then looked at Nyx longer than he meant to.
"Familiar entry approved under existing file," he said.
"He's not paperwork," Min said as they passed.
The evaluator pretended not to hear.
Inside, the dungeon had eaten the service corridor in quiet, ugly ways. Concrete sweated black water. Pipes crossed overhead in rusted bundles. The floor sloped toward a drain that no longer belonged to the building. Somewhere above them, treadmills were still running in the real world, and the faint vibration in the ceiling made the whole place feel wrong in two directions at once.
Do-yun took point at the first fork. Min shifted back and left. Aiden moved half a step ahead of the line without thinking. Nyx vanished up into the pipe-shadow overhead.
The first creatures came out of the runoff channel.
They were scavengers, pale-backed and low to the ground, built to rush in groups and die in useful numbers. The lead one hit the concrete, skidded, and came straight at Aiden.
Then it stopped so hard its claws screamed across the wet floor.
Not a slip.
Not confusion.
Its whole body had tried to stay out of his reach.
The hesitation lasted less than a second. Its mouth opened. The sound that came out had more alarm in it than threat.
Then instinct beat whatever had interrupted it, and it lunged anyway.
Aiden met it before the jump finished. His knife went under the jaw and through. He turned with the body, let it slide past him, and drove his shoulder into the second creature before it could cut across toward Do-yun's blind side. Do-yun crushed the third against a pipe support. The fourth dropped from overhead and never reached the ground. Nyx hit it in the throat mid-fall and slammed it into the wall hard enough to spray black blood across wet concrete.
The corridor went quiet again almost immediately.
Too quiet.
Min looked toward the dead lead scavenger, then at Aiden.
"That thing braked."
"Wet floor," Aiden said.
Min opened his mouth.
Do-yun spoke first.
"No."
That was all.
But his eyes stayed on the body.
He had seen it.
They kept moving. The core chamber sat two turns deeper in, weak crystal spread around fused lockers and old maintenance cabinets. Two more scavengers tried to hold the room and died for it. Aiden broke the Core with the short blade he kept for crystal work.
The chamber shuddered once.
The pressure in the air collapsed with it.
Joon's voice came through the comm.
"Seven minutes. That's becoming offensive."
"Your paperwork lacks stamina," Nyx said.
Outside, the junior evaluator recorded the clear time with fingers that moved too quickly to look natural. He kept glancing from the bodies to Aiden and then away again.
He still did not ask questions.
That was worse.
By noon, the sky had gone from rain to glare without fully deciding which one it preferred. They parked under an overpass while Hana argued with a broker through one earpiece and rewrote a supply order on her tablet with the other hand. Min came back from a corner shop with lunch for everyone except Nyx, who corrected that mistake by taking half of Aiden's chicken before the bag was fully open.
"He keeps doing crimes with eye contact," Min said.
"Then stop holding food like prey," Aiden replied.
Iris's face appeared on the video call propped against the dashboard.
"Humans cook meals," she told Nyx. "Try gratitude once. It might improve you."
Nyx looked at the screen.
"No."
She smiled anyway.
From the angle behind her, Aiden could see the office table. Receipts. Utility totals. Fuel costs. Barrier fees. One highlighted line item labeled special feed requirement with Hana's note beneath it: this is the dragon.
"How bad?" Aiden asked.
Iris angled the phone so he could see more of the mess.
"You're not poor," she said. "You're annoyingly close to stable, which is worse because Hana can now explain exactly how stability dies."
From somewhere off-screen, Hana said, "Mostly through appetite."
Min leaned into frame.
"Ask her whether the dragon can be depreciated."
"I heard that," Hana said.
Aiden let them keep talking and looked through the windshield instead. On the far side of the service road, a woman was walking a small white dog. The dog stopped, lifted its head toward the van, and went rigid.
Then it pulled hard in the opposite direction.
The woman frowned, tried once to correct it, then crossed the street instead.
Aiden said nothing.
Nyx, eyes half closed, said, "Again."
The word stayed in the van after nobody answered it.
Back at the office, the light had already started going thin around the loading-bay door. The sealed case from the clear sat by the van. Hana was inside with Iris and three open spreadsheets. Do-yun had gone quiet in the particular way that meant he was still thinking about something from the field.
Aiden was halfway through cleaning his knife when Joon's phone rang.
He looked at the screen once.
Then again.
The change in his face was small.
Enough.
Hana noticed it from inside the office.
"What."
Joon answered the call without taking his eyes off the screen.
"Yes," he said. "Still here."
He listened for five seconds.
Then eight.
Min looked up from the crate.
"That expression means either money or a problem."
"Same industry," Joon said.
He lowered the phone a fraction and looked at Aiden.
"Private-side posting," he said. "Twelve-hour response. Old wholesale district metro spur. D-band provisional review."
Hana was already moving.
"Who."
Joon listened one beat longer, then covered the mic.
"Daesung."
Hana said no before he finished lowering his hand.