<h4>Chapter 184: The Hunter’s Motivation</h4>


    <strong>KESTREL POV</strong>


    The dimensional barrier burst in my face.


    I threw myself backward as reality cracked like broken ss, each shard showing a different world bleeding into this one. A desert mixed with an ocean. A forest grew through a city. The confusion made my stomach turn, but I forced myself to keep watching.


    This was the seventh barrier failure in three hours. All because Lily was still jumping between worlds.


    "Sir?" My helper, Marcus, appeared beside me with his clipboard shaking in his hands. "The Council is wanting answers. They want to know why we haven’t caught the omega yet."


    I wiped blood from my nose where a reality shard had cut me. "Tell the Council that hunting someone isn’t as simple as they think."


    But that wasn’t the real trouble. The real trouble was that I was starting to understand why Lily was running, and it was making my job a lot harder.


    I’d been a Dimension Hunter for fifty years. I’d tracked down hundreds of beings who could move between worlds without permission. Most of them were criminals or monsters who used their skills to hurt others. Capturing them was easy because I knew they deserved it.


    Lily was different.


    I pulled out my tracking device and watched the small red dot that showed her position. She was three dimensions away now, moving fast. Every jump she made sent shockwaves through the physical structure, but I could tell she wasn’t doing it on purpose. She was scared and running for her life.


    "Marcus," I said, "pull up the files on omega dimensional travelers from the past century."


    "All of them, sir?"


    "All of them."


    While he worked, I thought about my talk with Lily’s son - that void entity who’d spoken with such pain about his mother. He’d called her a healer, someone who brought order to her pack. That didn’t sound like the dangerous thief the Council had described.


    Marcus gave me a tablet loaded with files. I started reading, and with each page, my blood ran colder.


    Every omega dimensional visitor in the past hundred years had been killed by Hunters. Not caught and judged. Killed. And every single one had been described the same way in their home worlds - healers, peacemakers, bridges between different groups.


    "Marcus," I said slowly, "how many of these omegas actuallymitted crimes before we hunted them?"


    He checked his screen. "ording to the reports? None, sir. They were all ssed as ’preventative threats.’"


    Preventative threats. We’d been killing harmless people because they might be dangerous someday.


    I closed my eyes and tried to push down the sick feeling in my stomach. I’d be a Hunter because I wanted to protect innocent people from dimensional monsters. What if I’d be the monster instead?


    My tracking device beeped quickly. Lily had jumped again, and this time the dimensional shockwave was huge. Reality moved around us like water, and for a moment I could see straight through to another world where giant butterflies flew through purple clouds.


    "Sir!" Marcus grabbed my arm. "Look at the readings!"


    The numbers on his screen made no sense. ording to our tools, Lily’stest jump had actually strengthened the dimensional barrier instead of weakening it.


    "That’s impossible," I mumbled. "Unauthorized jumps always cause damage."


    But as I watched, the cracks in reality started to heal themselves. The mixing worlds separated back into their proper realities. The chaos that had been growing for days started to calm down.


    "Run a full scan," I ordered. "I want to know exactly what she did."


    The results came back ten minutester, and they changed everything I thought I knew about dimensional flight.


    "Sir," Marcus said in a shocked voice, "it appears the omega didn’t force her way between worlds. She... asked permission first."


    "Exin." " The readings show she interacted with the dimensional structure itself. Instead of tearing a hole, she convinced the barriers to open freely. That’s why it fixed the damage instead of making it worse."


    I stared at the numbers, my mind running. In fifty years of shooting, I’d never seen anything like this. Dimensional travelers always damaged reality when they jumped. It was a basic rule of physics.


    Unless they weren’t really tourists at all. Unless they were something else entirely.


    "Marcus, get me a direct line to the Council. Emergency priority."


    While he set up the connection, I thought about what this meant. If Lily could fix dimensional barriers instead of breaking them, then everything the Council had told me about omega threats was wrong. They weren’t dangerous - they were exactly what reality needed to stay grounded.


    The Council’s leader showed on my screen, his ancient face twisted with impatience. "Kestrel. Report."


    "High Councilor," I said carefully, "I’ve found something important about the omega we’re hunting. Her powers don’t hurt dimensions - they heal them."


    The Councilor’s face didn’t change. "Irrelevant. Continue the hunt."


    "But sir, if she can repair dimensional damage, shouldn’t we be working with her instead of hunting her?"


    "The omega is a threat to dimensional stability," he said coldly. "Eliminate her."


    Something in his tone made me pause. "High Councilor, did you know about her healing abilities?"


    For just a moment, his mask slipped. I saw something in his eyes that made my blood freeze - not surprise, but anger that I’d figured it out.


    "Kestrel," he said slowly, "there are things you don’t understand about the bigger picture." " Then exin them to me."


    He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was different - older and more tired.


    "The dimensional structure isn’t breaking down by ident," he allowed. "We’ve been weakening it on purpose for decades. Small tears, managed damage. It gives us power over which realities live and which ones don’t."


    I felt like he’d punched me in the stomach. "You’re destroying worlds on purpose?"


    "We’re controlling them," he amended. "Reality is chaos, Kestrel. Someone has to decide which dimensions deserve to exist. We bring order to the multiverse."


    "Bymitting genocide," I whispered.


    "By making hard choices that others are too weak to make." His eyes hardened. "Omegas like Lily threaten that order. They heal what we carefully harm. They give hope to realities we’ve marked for death."


    The truth hit me like a sledgehammer. The Council wasn’t protecting the worlds from omega travelers. They were protecting their own power from people who could undo their harm.


    "I won’t hunt her," I said.


    "Yes, you will," the Councilor answered calmly. "Because if you don’t, we’ll send someone else to hunt both of you. And we’ll start with your home dimension."


    The screen went ck, leaving me staring at my own image.


    Marcus stood behind me, his face pale. "Sir? What are we going to do?"


    I looked at my tracking device. Lily’s dot was moving again, jumping to another world that would probably try to reject her. She had no idea that the organization hunting her was the same one destroying worlds across the multiverse.


    But now I knew the truth. The question was: what was I going to do about it?


    I made my choice and started typing a message into mymunicator. Not to the Council, but to someone else entirely.


    "Marcus," I said, "how do you feel about bing a traitor?"


    Before he could answer, rms started sting throughout our ship. The tracking device in my hand burst in a shower of sparks, and every screen around us went dead.


    Someone had just cut off all our contact with the Council.


    And in the sudden darkness, I heard a voice that made my heart stop - Lily’s son, the void entity, speaking from the shadows.


    "Hello, Father," he said. "We need to talk."