CHAPTER 37: THE B2 HIGHWAY

The biggest obstacle to saving the world wasn’t monsters, secret societies, or trackers implanted in your shoulder.

It was paperwork.

Rin stood at the travel authorization kiosk in the Association lobby, furiously tapping the screen.

"Reason for travel," he read aloud, "select one: Mission, Family Emergency, Medical Transfer, or Recreation."

"Pick recreation," Joy said, leaning over his shoulder, wearing oversized sunglasses and a hat that made her look like she was in witness protection, which wasn’t entirely inaccurate. "Tell them we’re going to the beach, hunters are allowed to have beach days."

"If I select recreation, they deny the armored vehicle request," Rin muttered, "and we have to take a civilian rental."

"So? It’s a three-hour drive to Swakopmund, we don’t need a tank."

"Have you seen the B2 highway lately, there was a report of Dune Stalkers near Usakos last week."

"Rin, we killed mutated slime monsters in a basement yesterday, I think we can handle a few sand dogs."

Rin sighed and tapped "Recreation," the system processed for a moment, spinning a little blue circle that mocked his anxiety.

[Request Approved]

[Travel Permit Issued: Windhoek to Swakopmund]

[Duration: 48 Hours]

[Warning: You are leaving the primary suppression zone. Emergency response times may exceed 30 minutes.]

"Thirty minutes," Tayo said, reading the screen, "so basically if we die, they’ll send a cleanup crew to mop up the leftovers."

"Optimist," Rin said, "let’s go get a car."

---

The car was a white Toyota Corolla with 200,000 kilometers on the odometer and a smell that suggested a previous renter had transported a wet dog.

"This is our chariot?" Joy asked, kicking the tire.

"It’s inconspicuous," Rin said, throwing his duffel bag into the trunk, "the Architect is looking for Hunters, Hunters drive black SUVs with reinforced plating, nobody looks twice at a Corolla."

"I look twice at it," Tayo said, "mostly to check if the engine is going to explode."

Rin took the driver’s seat because he didn’t trust Joy’s driving, too aggressive, or Tayo’s, too slow, they rolled out of Windhoek, leaving the high-rise skyline and the looming presence of the Association HQ behind.

The landscape shifted quickly, the city gave way to the scrubby hills of the Khomas Hochland, then flattened out into the vast arid expanse of the Namib Desert.

It was beautiful in a desolate "everything here wants to kill you" kind of way.

Joy connected her phone to the car’s Bluetooth. "Road trip rules, driver picks the route, shotgun picks the snacks, backseat picks the music."

"I did not agree to these rules," Rin said.

"Too late."

Pop music blasted through the blown-out speakers, Rin groaned, but he settled into the drive, the tracker in his shoulder was quiet, for the first time in weeks, he felt physically distant from the cage.

Two hours in, the monotony set in, the road was a straight line cutting through endless beige and orange.

"So," Tayo said from the backseat, turning down the music slightly, "what do we think is on the drive?"

"Volker’s blackmail folder," Joy guessed, "dirt on other Directors, maybe his secret recipe for monster mash."

"It’s heavy encryption," Rin said, eyes on the road, "Kira said the signature matched Volker’s private files, but the architecture was different, older."

[Analysis: Encryption type suggests pre-fracture military protocols modified with mana-locking]

[This is not just data. It is a key.]

Rin didn’t share the system’s input, he was trying to keep the "I hear voices in my head" thing to a minimum.

"Whatever it is," Rin said, "Kira is the only one who can crack it, if she’s even still in Swakopmund, she went dark three days ago."

"She’s alive," Joy said confidently, "paranoid people live the longest."

Rin checked the rearview mirror, the road behind them was empty, no tail, no black SUVs, just heat shimmer and asphalt.

Then the car shook.

It wasn’t a pothole, it felt like something had slammed into the chassis from below.

"Whoa," Tayo grabbed the handle, "did we blow a tire?"

Rin fought the steering wheel as the car veered left. "No, the tires are fine, something hit us."

The road ahead erupted.

Asphalt shattered as a massive armored head burst through the surface, it looked like a cross between a beetle and a bulldozer, with mandibles the size of scythes.

"Dune Stalker!" Joy screamed.

Rin slammed on the brakes, the Corolla screeched, fishtailing and coming to a stop twenty feet from the monster.

"I told you!" Rin yelled, "I told you we needed the armored vehicle!"

"Less ’I told you so’, more ’kill the bug’!" Joy kicked her door open.

The Stalker screeched, a sound like grinding metal, it wasn’t alone, two smaller ones burst out of the sand on either side of the road, flanking them.

"Tayo, keep the big one busy!" Rin ordered, scrambling out of the car, "Joy, left flank! I got right!"

Tayo was already moving, he didn’t have his full gear, just portable emitters on his wrists, he clapped his hands, sending a concussive boom at the alpha Stalker, the creature flinched, its carapace cracking slightly, but it kept coming.

Rin faced the one on the right, it charged, legs blurring in the sand.

He didn’t have his sword, he didn’t have backup, he had a Corolla and a pair of jeans.

’Burst practice.’

He waited, the Stalker lunged, mandibles snapping.

Rin sidestepped.

Pulse.

For a fraction of a second, his hand glowed with purple void, he didn’t try to cut the whole head off, he aimed for the joint in the leg.

Snap.

The fracture energy severed the limb cleanly, the Stalker collapsed, tumbling face-first into the asphalt.

Tracker Check: Dormant.

Rin didn’t stop, he sprinted to the fallen creature.

Pulse.

A spike of energy drove through the back of its neck, severing the spinal column.

One down.

He turned, Joy was dancing around the second Stalker, she couldn’t terrify an insect, their brains were too simple, so she was improvising, she grabbed a handful of sand and threw it, using a minor telekinetic push, a trick she’d learned recently, to blind it, then scrambled up the side of the Corolla for high ground.

"Rin! Little help!"

Rin ran, the alpha Stalker had recovered from Tayo’s blast and was rearing up to smash the car.

"Get away from the rental!" Rin shouted, "I did not buy the insurance!"

He leaped onto the hood of the car.

Pulse.

He pushed off, using a burst of energy to launch himself higher than humanly possible, he came down on top of the Alpha’s head.

Pulse.

He drove his fist into the creature’s carapace, the fracture energy didn’t just hit, it displaced the shell, forcing the molecules apart, his hand sank in.

The Stalker shrieked and thrashed.

Rin held on. "Tayo! Finish it!"

Tayo ran up, placed both hands directly against the exposed crack Rin had made.

"Frequency match," Tayo grunted, "shatter."

He unleashed a point-blank sonic vibration, the Stalker’s insides turned to jelly, it slumped to the ground, dead.

Rin jumped off, wiping ichor from his shirt. "Clear?"

Joy hopped down from the trunk, dusting off her hands, the third Stalker was twitching, legless, a few meters away.

"Clear," she said, "car’s scratched though."

Rin looked at the Corolla, the front bumper was hanging off, and there was a massive dent in the hood where he’d jumped.

"That’s coming out of my deposit," Rin sighed.

"Look on the bright side," Tayo said, kicking the dead alpha, "Dune Stalker carapace is worth money, we just paid for the trip."

"We don’t have a knife to harvest it," Rin pointed out.

"You have magic space hands," Joy said, "start carving."

---

They arrived in Swakopmund three hours later, the car was rattling, and they smelled like bug juice, but they were alive.

Swakopmund was weird, it looked like a little slice of Germany dropped into the African desert, complete with colonial architecture and palm trees, but unlike the desert, it was cold, a thick fog rolled in off the Atlantic Ocean, blanketing the streets in grey mist.

"Coat weather," Joy shivered, pulling a jacket from her bag, "I forgot how cold the coast gets."

Rin pulled up the address Kira had sent via encrypted text.

"It’s a safe house in the Vineta district," Rin said, "north side of town, quiet."

They drove through the misty streets, it was quieter here than Windhoek, fewer Hunters, fewer sirens, just the sound of the ocean crashing against the mole.

They found the house, it was a small nondescript bungalow with high walls and a security gate that looked more expensive than the house itself.

Rin parked the battered Corolla down the street.

"We walk from here," he said, "don’t spook her."

They approached the gate, there was no buzzer, just a camera lens tracking them.

Rin held up his phone, displaying a QR code Kira had generated for them.

A red laser scanned the screen, then it scanned Rin’s face, then Joy, then Tayo.

The gate clicked and slid open.

Kira was waiting at the front door, she looked worse than usual, her hair was messy, she had bags under her eyes, and she was holding a mug of coffee like it was a lifeline.

"You brought a crowd," she said, her voice raspy.

"They’re my team," Rin said, "and they were there when we got the drive."

Kira eyed Tayo and Joy, then stepped back. "Get inside, the fog messes with the sensors, but I don’t like you standing on the porch."

The interior of the safe house was basically a server room with a bed in the corner, monitors lined the walls, cables snaked across the floor, and the air conditioning was set to arctic.

"Did you bring it?" Kira asked, extending a hand.

Rin pulled the hard drive from his pocket, it was wrapped in an anti-static bag.

Kira took it like it was a holy relic, she immediately walked to her main rig, a monstrosity of cooling fans and GPUs.

"Volker encrypted this himself," she said, plugging it in, "but he’s arrogant, he used a variation of the Association’s black-box protocol, I wrote the patch for that protocol three years ago."

She started typing, lines of code cascaded down the screens.

"How long?" Rin asked.

"Usually? A week, for me? An hour."

Rin, Joy, and Tayo sat on a lumpy couch, waiting, the only sound was the click-clack of Kira’s mechanical keyboard and the hum of the servers.

"So," Tayo whispered, "does she ever sleep?"

"I can hear you," Kira said without pausing, "and no, sleep is for people who aren’t being hunted by shadow governments."

Forty minutes later, a green light flashed on the main screen.

"Got it," Kira exhaled, "encryption bypassed."

Rin stood up. "What is it?"

Kira opened the root folder, it wasn’t research data on monsters, it wasn’t financial records.

It was a list.

Thousands of names, scrolling down the screen, photos, dates, locations.

"What is this?" Joy asked, stepping closer.

"It’s a database," Kira said, her voice trembling slightly, "look at the headers."

**Subject Name**

**Awakening Potential**

**Fracture Compatibility**

**Status**

"Status," Rin read the column.

Observed.

Recruited.

Terminated.

Harvested.

"Harvested?" Tayo felt sick, "what does that mean?"

"It means Volker wasn’t just making monsters," Kira said, "he was farming people, looking for specific traits."

She typed a search command. "Matsuda."

Rin’s file popped up, it was extensive, photos of him from high school, medical records from his coma, surveillance shots from the last week.

**Subject:** Rin Matsuda

**Classification:** Tier 0 (Unique)

**Compatibility:** 100%

**Status:** PRIORITY ACQUISITION. DO NOT TERMINATE.

"Priority acquisition," Rin read, "they want me alive."

"Look at the others," Kira said.

She clicked another file.

**Subject:** Fiona Treacher

**Classification:** Tier 1

**Status:** Recruited (Volatile)

**Subject:** Leo Penzerio

**Classification:** Tier 2

**Status:** TERMINATED (Interference)

Rin stared at Leo’s face on the screen, the red "TERMINATED" stamp felt like a punch to the gut.

"Scroll down," Rin said, "find the Architect."

Kira searched. "No file for ’Architect’, but..." She opened a system log. "This drive wasn’t just storage, it was a communication node, it was sending data somewhere."

"Where?"

"Coordinates," Kira said, pulling up a map, "deep in the Namib Desert, no roads, no settlements, just sand."

A red dot pulsed on the map.

"That’s where the data was going," Kira said, "that’s where the orders were coming from."

"The Architect’s base," Rin said.

"It’s in the middle of the Sperrgebiet," Tayo noted, "restricted diamond mining area, nobody goes there without government clearance."

"Or," Joy said, "unless they have a base hidden where nobody looks."

Rin looked at the map, it was hundreds of kilometers south, a fortress in the sand.

"Can you copy this?" Rin asked, "all of it."

"Already doing it," Kira said, "but Rin, this list? It’s global, there are names here from Tokyo, New York, London, the Collective isn’t just a Namibian problem, it’s worldwide."

"One problem at a time," Rin said, "right now, I just want to know where the head of the snake is."

He looked at the pulsing red dot.

"We found him."

[Quest Updated: The Architect]

[Location Discovered: Coordinates 26.6° S, 15.1° E]

[Objective: Confront the Source]

Rin felt the tracker in his shoulder, it was quiet, but looking at that map, he knew the silence wouldn’t last.

"We can’t go there," Joy said, reading his mind, "not alone, if that’s their main base, it’ll be crawling with S-ranks or worse."

"We’re not going alone," Rin said, "we’re going to give this to Tau, we’re going to force the Association to act."

"And if they don’t?" Kira asked, turning in her chair, "if Tau is compromised too?"

"Then," Rin said, his eyes reflecting the map’s glow, "we burn it down ourselves."