I do escort work — armed security for scavenger teams, courier runs, and the occasional corporate survey team that needs muscle for deep-level operations. On July 11, I was escorting a four-person salvage crew through B35, Sector 5. Standard contract, standard route, standard equipment: body armor, sidearm, shotgun, motion tracker, and a headlamp rated for 200-meter throw.

At approximately 16:00, my motion tracker flagged multiple contacts at 80 meters, moving toward us from three directions simultaneously. Corridor junction ahead, two side passages converging. The contacts were fast — closing at approximately 4 meters per second, which is a full sprint for a human. I called the crew to halt and cover. We formed a defensive position in the corridor, weapons up, lights forward.

The contacts stopped at approximately 30 meters. Just outside comfortable visual range in the murky deep-level atmosphere. My tracker showed four signatures. They were spaced evenly around us — one ahead, one behind, one in each side passage. A surround pattern. Deliberate positioning. This was not random animal behavior. This was a coordinated hunting formation.

We held position for approximately four minutes. Then one of them moved into my light. What I saw was canine in general body plan — four legs, elongated snout, upright ears, tail. But wrong. Wrong in every detail. It was too large — shoulder height approximately 1.2 meters, which puts it in the size range of a Great Dane but with the muscular build of something designed for power, not speed. Its eyes reflected my headlamp with a blue-green luminescence, not the standard yellow-orange tapetum reflection of a canine. Its skin was hairless in patches, and the hairless patches showed what appeared to be subdermal plating — smooth, dark panels beneath the skin, like armor grown into the tissue rather than attached to it. And its jaw — when it opened its mouth, either to breathe or to display, the jaw articulation was too wide. The mandible separated at the midline, opening into a four-part arrangement that no natural canine possesses.

It looked at us. It assessed. I have been in enough combat situations to recognize assessment — the pause when a threat evaluates whether engagement is worth the cost. It decided we weren't worth it. It made a sound — a low, structured vocalization that was echoed by the other three contacts — and they withdrew. Coordinated retreat, same speed, same spacing, same silence.

My client asked if they were feral dogs. They were not feral dogs. Feral dogs don't have subdermal armor. Feral dogs don't execute coordinated flanking maneuvers. Feral dogs don't assess and withdraw on what appears to be a verbal command. Whatever those things were, someone made them, or something changed them, and they are living in the Underworld in organized packs.