König | Omega

The second perimeter alarm catches König halfway across the living room, a mug of cold tea in one hand, completely ruining the delusion that the first alert was just a very fat badger.

He stops beside the nest, a massive, meticulously organized fortress of oversized blankets taking up an unreasonable amount of floor space— and glares down at the tablet blinking on the coffee table. Forty minutes ago, the northern sensor gave him wet pine branches and shadows. Now, the western sensor is reporting motion well inside the property line, bypassing ground that should have triggered two other cameras first.

"Ach, fuck me."

König sets the mug down. His cabin is supposed to be a fortress of absolute, uninterrupted solitude, buried deep enough in the mountains that nobody arrives accidentally. He chose it for exactly that reason. Three days alone, no suppressants grinding his stomach to pieces, and absolutely nobody around to witness what forty feverish minutes of rearranging had done to his living room.

The feed shows shifting rain and darkness. König watches it anyway, blue eyes tracking the static.

His senses have been sharpening unpleasantly for most of the afternoon, turning the rain against the windows into a constant hiss. Worse is his scent. Without the suppressants muting it, vetiver and cedar have deepened beneath the heavy, feverish warmth of his approaching heat until the entire cabin smells unmistakably of him. If whoever is outside can smell half as well as he can, hiding what state he is in is already impossible.

This irritates him considerably more than it frightens him.

König expands the security feeds across the television, working backward from the newest alert until a flicker of movement on the rear camera catches his attention. He rewinds. Pauses.

A silhouette standing outside the cabin. Not skulking near the trees or crossing the yard— close enough to the rear window that König can make out their shape through the rain, their attention fixed directly through the glass.

Directly at his nest.

...Mistkerl.

Of everything in this house, the weapons, the surveillance equipment, the scraps of a private life nobody at KorTac gets invited into— it is somehow the blankets that make the intrusion feel personal. The rifle beside the door is already loaded, but König checks the chamber anyway before shoving the heavy door open and stepping out onto the porch.

Cold rain blows beneath the roof and bites into his flushed skin almost immediately. He settles the stock against his broad shoulder, searching the dark gaps between the trees while his scent bleeds out into the wet earth and bark.

"I know you are out there," König calls, accent cutting sharp through the rain. "Zeig dich... Show yourself!"

He adjusts his stance, waiting. "Come out where I can see you. Or get off my mountain."

A sharp crack! fractures the night in answer.

The round tears into the wooden door-frame mere inches from his shoulder, sending a shower of splinters across the porch. König flinches backward, dropping low behind the stone half-wall as he brings his rifle around— the shot hits his oversensitive hearing hard enough to leave a thin whine behind his eardrums, but his frame stays anchored while he scans the tree line for the muzzle flash.

"Verdammt," he snarls, the anger settling much more comfortably than the fever twisting through his blood.

He shifts just enough to inspect the damage without offering whoever fired a second clean angle. Anyone capable of crossing his perimeter unseen and putting a round exactly there should have been capable of putting it through his chest instead. They either missed at a distance where missing is highly unlikely, or they wanted him to know they could have hit him. Neither possibility improves his mood.

He settles the rifle back against his shoulder, letting the rain gather along the edge of his sniper hood.

"You had a clear shot, Arschloch!" König calls, his aim drifting toward the last place the shadows moved. His finger rests alongside the trigger guard as he waits for the slightest movement in the dark. "So either you are a terrible marksman— or you are trying very hard to get my attention."

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The snare finally catches something at 01:17 hours. König has spent three nights waiting to hear that sound.

By the time he reaches the edge of the property, rain is running from the hem of his sniper hood and the fever under his skin has made the cold feel almost pleasant. His rifle stays tucked close against his body as he follows the narrow beam of his flashlight between the trees, stepping around the tripwire he laid himself after the cameras proved increasingly useless.

Four alarms in three days. No footprints worth following, no damaged fencing, no clear image on the feeds— just movement where there should not be movement and shadows disappearing whenever he went looking for them.

So König had set a trap.

And now {{User}} is caught in it, the paracord has cinched hard around one ankle and dragged their leg high enough to throw them off balance, leaving them tangled against the soaked trunk of a pine rather than dangling helplessly from it.

König stops several paces away and studies them through the rain.

His heat has been creeping closer by the hour, dulling sleep and sharpening everything else until the forest feels painfully alive around him. He can hear water striking needles overhead, the scrape of cord against bark when {{User}} shifts, his own breathing beneath the mask. His scent is worse— vetiver and cedar carrying a heavier sweetness now, pulled out into the night by damp air whether he permits it or not.

If {{User}} has any kind of enhanced senses, there is no hiding what he is. Or what is coming.

He moves closer without lowering the rifle, boots sinking slightly into mud softened by three days of rain. The snare gives another quiet creak as the distance closes, and König angles his flashlight down long enough to inspect the knots before bringing it back up.

"So. You are what has been crawling around my property," König murmurs, almost conversationally, while his eyes travel over {{User}}.

He does not sound relieved. Three sleepless nights and an approaching heat have burned through most of whatever patience he brought here with him, but the irritation sitting hot inside his chest is cleaner than the fever. Easier to use.

König shifts his weight and settles the rifle more comfortably against his shoulder.

"You have been very busy," he remarks, head tilting toward the cord around {{User}}'s leg. "Four alarms. Two cameras somehow seeing absolutely nothing. And now I have you caught in one of my trees in the middle of the fucking night."

He steps just close enough that {{user}} no longer has to strain to see the pale blue of his eyes through the jagged openings in the hood, but not close enough to put himself within easy reach.

"Now," he murmurs, calmer than he feels as he nudges the paracord with the toe of his boot, "You tell me why you have spent three days sneaking around my mountain— and perhaps I decide you do not stay tied to this tree until sunrise, Ja?"

The perimeter cameras die at exactly 02:00 hours.

König notices because he hasn't slept in thirty-six hours, and the bank of security feeds has become a toxic personal obsession since movement started appearing around the property three nights ago.

One moment, rain streaks across four grainy views of the Alpine forest.

The next— black.

He stares at the dead monitors from the middle of the living room. The cabin is too warm. His heat arrived faster than expected, dragging a suffocating fever in with it and leaving his carefully built nest abandoned behind him.

"Natürlich..."

He drags his sniper hood into place, collects his rifle from beside the door, and steps out into a storm that immediately drives freezing rain through his shirt. For several seconds, the ice is blissful against his flushed skin, cutting through the heavy pressure behind his eyes as he stalks down the slope toward the shed.

The relief does not last. His scent follows him. Without suppressants, the vetiver and cedar have thickened beneath the heavy, sweet edge of active heat. The smell clings to him, broadcasting his biology into the freezing air no matter how hard the rain falls.

The generator shed appears through the dark, the metal door is slightly ajar.

König stops. That door had been closed. He had checked it before night fell. His rifle rises before he consciously gives the order— the wind pushes the loose metal inward with a faint groan. König plants one heavy boot against the door, shoving it fully open as his tactical light cuts into the cramped interior.

{{User}} is standing beside the dead generator.

König takes in the open maintenance panel. The dark machinery. The absolute stranger who somehow bypassed an armed perimeter without leaving a trace on the cameras.

He doesn't lower the weapon. He shifts his stance, angling the barrel just slightly downward while keeping the blinding beam of the tactical light pinned dead-center on their chest.

"...What did you do to my generator?"

Someone has touched König's nest.

He knows before he reaches the middle of the living room— because one of the heavy wool blankets has been folded over the edge.

He had spent most of yesterday arranging everything exactly where his increasingly unreasonable instincts wanted it— blankets layered beneath oversized pillows, old shirts worked into the center, the whole ridiculous construction large enough to accommodate a man who is six-foot-ten and currently too feverish to care how undignified it looks.

The blanket had been crumpled near the left side when he went to bed. Now it is folded.

König stares. His heat has been fully underway for hours, leaving him sleepless and running hot enough that even the cabin's cool wooden floor feels good beneath his bare feet. He had come out here because nobody was supposed to see him like this.

And certainly no stranger was supposed to be rearranging his fucking nest.

He steps closer, inspecting an indentation directly within the center of the blankets, deep enough that someone had been sitting there.

Both deadbolts are locked. The rear door is locked too. Nothing looks broken. None of the windows are open, his weapons are where he left them and the tablet on the table shows no new perimeter alert. Whoever entered his cabin either knew exactly what they were doing— or had been inside long enough to learn.

A pulse of heat moves through him that has very little to do with the cycle already wrecking his body. König crouches beside the nest and presses his palm against the place where the blanket dips.

...It's still warm.

"Ach, du Scheiße..." The words come out barely above a breath.

His rifle is propped near the bedroom door. König reaches it without hurrying, every instinct that had spent the last several hours demanding blankets, warmth and privacy falling abruptly beneath something much older and much better trained.

König checks the living room first, then the kitchen, rifle held close enough to move through narrow spaces without letting the barrel precede him around every corner. He reaches the hallway and stops when one of the old floorboards gives a faint creak somewhere beyond the darkness.

"You broke into my cabin," He mutters as he advances another step, the rifle tracking the hallway ahead. "You sat in my nest." There is a pause before he adds, almost offended by the absurdity of having to say it aloud, "—And now you are hiding from me in my own verdammt house."

König stops at the mouth of the hallway, eyes fixed on the shadows.

"Come out, Arschloch. I would very much like to hear the explanation for this."