They stayed.

The plaza seemed to hold its breath with them. The fountain burbled. The towers stood tall and reflective. Somewhere, dishes clattered in the cafe. The world did its best impression of normal.

“Local lattice telemetry is… weird,” Megan said finally. “I’ve got micro-latency spikes stitching across the node like someone’s doodling in the margins of my graphs.”

“Define ‘weird’ in Guardian,” Ethan said.

“Like it’s not just trying to come through,” she said. “It’s… pacing.”

Ryan angled himself so he could see both the fountain fringe and the shop window in one sweep. His eyes kept dragging to the long band of tower glass opposite. The sky in it looked too still, like it was waiting to decide which way to move.

“Kyle,” Ryan said quietly. “Geometry. What happens if something can’t get a good triangle but really wants one?”

Kyle blinked, then squinted up at the building lines.

“It cheats,” he said. “If it can’t find three points on one layer, it uses more than one layer, or it bends one of the points until it fits.”

Ryan’s cuff chimed again, sharper now.

“Megan,” he said, already scanning. “Talk me through the triple rule.”

“Live reflection,” she said, immediate. “Recorded image. Human memory. When all three line up, Hunters get premium shortcuts.”

“We killed live reflection on the big stuff,” Ethan said, gesturing at the veiled fountain and the dulled screens.

“Most of it,” Megan said. “But the recorded piece is still there. The shop’s security cams are logging everything, and that kid under the TVs is going to remember ‘the day the screens went flat’ for a while.”

“And us,” Kyle added. “We’ll remember it too.”

Ryan swore under his breath.

“So it doesn’t need the perfect mirror anymore,” he said. “It can lean on the cameras and our heads.”

“Maybe,” Megan said. “Current Hunter models aren’t that good at threading all three. They mostly use one or two at a time. But…”

She trailed off.

“But what?” Ethan asked.

“New data,” Savi said. “Pattern match just pinged. That smear you saw between the screens? It’s not in the old Hunter catalog.”

Ryan’s skin went cold.

“What is it, then?” he asked.

“Early designation is Hunter-Prime,” Savi said. “Lucien-class experimental behavior.”

Before anyone could respond to that, the seam hit again.

This time it didn’t stutter the whole world. It sliced through Ryan.

For half a second, all his senses desynced—sound delayed, light overbright, his body feeling like it had been offset half a foot to the right. His vision doubled: plaza and something else, a darker overlay of the same space with different signage and different faces.

He saw the fountain twice. The towers twice. The shop twice.

And between the two layers, something slid.

It stepped out of the seam like a drawing coming off the page. Taller than the ones they’d fought before, its silhouette was less blob and more blade: long limbs, narrowed torso, tendrils gathered tight instead of spilling everywhere. Its surface crawled with shifting reflections, as if it was wearing a suit made of borrowed images from every camera feed it had ever scraped.

It did not lurch or ooze. It stepped.

Down the facade of the tower, along the wet fringe of the fountain, and up the edge of the shop window, each footfall landing precisely where three planes met. Every move closed a triangle, every triangle aimed at a point directly in front of Ryan.

“Eyes on!” Ethan shouted. “Hunter live, center plaza!”

“Neutralizer!” Rhee yelled. “Ryan—”

“I see it!” Ryan said.

He did, and he hated that part of him admired the geometry. This thing didn’t just blunder through reflections. It chose them, using the environment like a climbing wall.

“Tendril density high,” Megan said, voice higher than usual. “It’s riding recorded imagery—look at its surface, it’s cycling security cam angles.”

The Hunter’s “face” found him, or at least the region where a face might be. For a split second its surface went wireframe, sketching the outline of a familiar jaw, familiar eyes.

Ryan’s.

“Matte it!” Ethan barked.

Ryan fired the neutralizer at the Hunter’s leading edge. The veil hit its shin and crawled up, drinking reflection as it went. For an instant, that leg went dull, the crawling images extinguished.

The Hunter reacted.

It didn’t recoil like previous ones. It used the matte patch as leverage, bracing that dull limb against the world as if it had finally found something solid to push off from. Then it jumped.

Not through a reflection. Not along a tidy line. Through the seam.

The air in front of Ryan tore like stretched film. The Hunter smeared from one side of him to the other in a blur of dark and borrowed light, leaving a streak of wrongness in his vision like an afterimage you couldn’t blink away.

It was behind him.

“Blink analogue,” Savi snapped. “It’s trying to copy our traversal.”

Ryan spun. The Hunter was already mid-step onto the fountain’s outer ring, using the patch of un-veiled fringe like a launch pad.

“Fringe!” Ryan yelled. “Kill the fringe!”

Ethan had already moved. He slammed his cuff-hand down toward the wet tile, firing a point-blank neutralizer burst. The colorless veil snapped over the water and up the Hunter’s legs in one rapid wash.

For a heartbeat, the entire lower half of the creature went matte. Its tendrils flared, scrabbling for any remaining shine.

“Now!” Rhee shouted.

She fired a narrow-beam neutralizer shot from her rig, catching the Hunter full in what passed for its chest. The beam hit like a silent impact, no light, just instant absence: its torso went flat, like someone had cut a Hunter-shaped hole out of reality.

Ryan expected it to collapse.

It didn’t.

Instead, it let go of the surfaces entirely and plunged sideways into the nearest camera.

The shop’s tiny dome cam above the door popped like a bubble—no sound, just a spray of plastic and glass as its shell inverted. At the same time, every TV screen on the back wall of the shop flared, images stuttering through a rapid-fire sequence of views:

The plaza from above.

The fountain at dawn.

The three of them stepping through the portal earlier.

Lucien, in the Labyrinth, staring up into a camera with that faint, unreadable not-smile.

“That’s not fair,” Kyle said. “It’s cheating.”

The Hunter reconstituted half inside one of the screens and half out, its tendrils bridging the distance between the physical shop and the broadcast world. It wasn’t just using reflections anymore. It was using recordings as anchor points, each frame a foothold.

“Field team, fall back!” Megan snapped. “Get away from any clustered screens.”

“Working on it,” Ryan said through his teeth.

He grabbed Ethan’s sleeve and yanked him away from the shopfront as another seam-stutter rattled the air. Kyle was already moving, hauling the headphone kid by the collar toward the nearest aisle.

“Sorry, buddy,” Kyle said as the kid yelped. “Emergency sale on not dying.”

The Hunter flared taller, stretching its limbs across multiple screens at once. Every time it extended a tendril, another camera in the shop overhead sparked and died, the feeds snapping to static as it passed through.

“Megan,” Ryan shouted. “Can we cut the power to this place?”

“I’m on it,” she said. “Local grid, shop subset—routing… now.”

The lights flickered. The TV wall went black.

For half a second, the Hunter was fully exposed, its body a patchwork of half-formed faces and places in the absence of fresh imagery. Then it found a new route.

“Back wall security feed,” Megan gasped. “It’s jumping to external cams. It’s not staying in one system—it’s chaining.”

Outside, up on the tower, a big digital ad screen on the corner façade glitched. The smiling model holding a soda flickered into static, then into a smear that looked a lot like the Hunter’s silhouette.

“It’s going up,” Ethan said. “It’s leaving.”

“Good,” Rhee said. “Let it go.”

“Not good,” Savi said. “It’s not retreating. It’s sampling.”

Ryan watched, helpless, as the smear on the tower screen elongated and then poured itself sideways into the building’s mirrored corner. From there it stepped up, stride by precise stride, every move landing in places that had seen them before—past reflections, recorded angles, remembered views.

It was literally walking on their history.

“Console,” Ryan said. “Tell me you’re getting this.”

“Oh, we’re getting it,” Megan whispered. “I’m tracing every step.”

The Hunter reached the top of the tower. It paused there, looking out over the nearworld.

Then it turned the region of itself that might have been a head toward the sky and stepped into nothing.

The seam opened for it like a door.

Reality didn’t stutter this time. It just accepted.

The Hunter was gone.