Vampire versus werewolf. A fair fight. A mythic rivalry.

They detect each other before visual contact. The shifted Lycian's olfaction, fifteen to twenty times baseline, reads the haemophagic pheromone field and the porphyric dermal oil as a plume. The haemophage's grafted acoustic and thermal field reads the Lycian's four-second thermal flush, the keratin coat, the catecholamine factory of a body at war with itself. Neither approaches undetected at full capacity. The war is not ambush. Mutual awareness is the trigger.

Once engaged, neither can voluntarily disengage. The Lycian's drive hierarchy is aimed at the haemophage as metabolic object and territorial insult. The Archon colony reads the Lycian as an existential threat to the host and dumps the chemical hierarchy into combat posture. Casualty ratios, duration, and the environmental interventions of the Joint Quarantine Doctrine all trace to this second-by-second biochemistry. Folklore staged a rivalry. The Committee stages a reaction that, once started, has to burn fuel.