Alexei’s ice lines thickened to two fingers deep.

The fifth truck that tried to gun its way through met them like rails and found itself sledding sideways into the fence instead of sprinting into the yard. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Metal shrieked.

Weeds bowed.

The driver beat the dash with a fist, then stopped beating anything at all when a round from Elias cut through his throat and rearranged his priorities.

"Seven and eight just crested," Elias warned. "Brass on the hood. Those are not raiders."

"Cartel hunters," Alexei confirmed, voice gone colder. "Dogs in the back of seven."

Luci didn’t growl, but his ears flattened. Sera put her palm to his skull and leaned pressure until he breathed deeper and his mouth shut. He would launch when she let him. He would not waste energy before.

"Hold them," she told her horde, and the words tasted right.

The seventh truck nosed the gate with dogs frothing in a welded cage in the bed—lean shapes with scarred muzzles and eyes too wide.

They barked themselves hoarse at the smell of wolf and woman, then hit the end of chains and choked. The driver tried to angle for a clean lane; there wasn’t one.

He looked left and found Zubair’s face. He looked right and found Sera’s. He picked Zubair because men like him always did.

Wrong choice.

Zubair lifted his palm from the bin and spread fingers like a conductor telling a section to stand.

Heat rolled out like it had an agenda of its own.

The air over the gravel shimmered and turned waves under a hot wind that didn’t exist.

The dogs went quiet for a breath, noses full of something they couldn’t process. The driver lifted a hand to shield his eyes and lost half a second that he couldn’t spare.

Lachlan took the passenger door off with the machete’s back edge and reached into the cab with blue-lit hands to pull the man out like trash.

"Eight," Elias clipped. "Pushing the mouth. Back left."

Sera stepped forward two paces and threw the second flare like a dart into the gap between trucks. It landed in a tangle of old grass and caught.

Zubair leaned that flame left; Alexei iced the right. Fire and cold built a corridor nothing sane would drive into.

The eighth driver drove into it.

The hood blew steam, then smoke, then a little fire that tried to be brave. Elias gave the engine block a mercy round.

The truck died quiet with a hiccup and a smell of hot metal. The men inside beat the windows like fists made glass more forgiving. It didn’t.

Sera met the first hunter who made it on foot. He was a lean man, his harness tight, and a knife he loved too much.

He lunged low, trying to catch her off guard.

She stepped to the side and used his shoulder as a shelf to pivot. Her heel met his ear. He went boneless and took his knife with him to the gravel. Luci launched past her into a second who thought he had distance.

He didn’t.

"Two more behind," Elias warned, voice clipped short as a fuse.

Sera lifted her chin and scanned over the gate to the road that had offered them to this. Heat haze made enemies waver and stutter.

The creature under her ribs purred like a machine with clean oil.

She checked the mirror of the world behind everything and watched the ninth truck crest the hill with something heavier in its bed under a tarp—shape of a tube, weight of a bad decision.

"Launcher," she noted, already moving for cover.

"Mine," Zubair answered, body angling toward it, hands opening.

Lachlan laughed and charged the men foolish enough to spill out of the third cab.

Alexei raised his palms and laid another line of ice where tires would be in one beat.

Elias drew a careful breath, settled the stock, and tracked the tube with a patience that turned into bullets when it mattered.

Luci’s ears cut air.

The ninth truck reached the gate and the tarp peeled back.

Sera angled off the pad and reached for the flare in her pocket, a second motion already starting for the space behind her where she kept better toys.

The yard held its breath.

And the next second, hell broke open.

The tarp peeled back and the tube came up on the shoulder of a man who thought a rocket would fix his day.

Zubair moved before the breath finished.

Heat climbed his arms like a fast tide. He opened his hands toward the truck and pinched the air around the launcher’s tip. Metal glowed dull first, then a bright cherry red color.

The gunner tried to track past the shimmer, jaw set, one eye scrunched to sight. The round stuttered inside the tube and a thin thread of smoke leaked back across the man’s cheek.

"Drop it," Zubair warned, voice too low to carry; the heat carried for him.

The gunner flinched at the sizzle and yanked the trigger anyway.

Backblast flowered wrong, the tube coughed not kicked. The warhead lurched a foot, jammed, and burned hot where it shouldn’t.

The man screamed and threw it. It landed short on the gravel and spun like a bad coin. Elias put a round into its casing and turned it to a brittle carcass that hissed out on its own heat.

The ninth truck’s driver mashed the brake and tried to reverse out of the mess.

Alexei lifted both palms and laid a glaze of ice across the back tires so thin it was just insult. The truck slid, fishtailed, and kissed the gatepost hard enough to bend the hinge and shower rust.

Doors flew open as the Cartel hunters spilled out of the vehicles. Their hair was short, their harness webbing tight, rifles high, no wasted motion.

It was clear they were a cut above the raiders. They were too good to be amateurs.

Dogs erupted from the cage in seven’s bed—blue-gray, long-limbed, scars at muzzle and neck where chain rubbed to callus.

They hit gravel and fanned as a pack, heads low, bodies spring-wound and smart.

Luci didn’t bark. He rolled to his feet at Sera’s knee and set his weight forward, silent and ready. Sera’s flare burned under Zubair’s palm like an obedient sun.

"Dogs," Elias clipped from the scale house.

"Mine," Zubair answered, already moving.