The first Bonebeast lunged.
Vrakon shifted.
The shrine's broken spear snapped into motion, not guided by skill, but by some instinct older than memory. He ducked low, just beneath the beast's jagged jaw, and drove the shattered metal upward—straight through its exposed throat-rib.
A shudder rippled through the creature.
Then a snap—like brittle ivory giving way.
The Bonebeast collapsed with a wet hiss, its carcass unraveling into dust-laced smoke. The Pulse inside it sputtered, fragmented. What remained of its soul drifted off like a moth's fading glow.
But two more still stalked the edges of the shrine.
Slower. Smarter now.
They had seen the kill, and something in them remembered pain.
---
These were no simple predators.
Bonebeasts were once human—once.
Their bodies corrupted by long exposure to fractured Genesis Pulse, their souls torn into marrow-husks by stormfronts or Pulse-Eaters too powerful to fully consume them. What remained was not life.
It was hunger carved into flesh.
Pulse-Tethered.
That's what Shayra had once called them. Creatures whose souls were still latched to the realm, but whose identities had already decayed.
> "Level Two," she'd whispered one night by the fire. "Pulse-Tethered things aren't dead. They just wish they were."
Vrakon didn't remember her face in that moment.
But he remembered the tone. Low. Cold. Final.
The Bonebeasts crept closer—elongated limbs scraping the shrine floor. Their ribcages flared open again, exposing a glowing, twisted knot of pulsing bone where their hearts should be.
One of them hissed.
The other charged.
---
Vrakon moved—not fluidly, not gracefully.
But deliberately.
The Pulse inside him stirred—not loud, not wild. A rhythm. A pattern. A geometry of motion. The spear shifted in his hands. His feet found new footing across broken stone. Spiral afterimage trailed behind his movements, too faint to see, but present.
He sidestepped the beast's lunge and swung.
Not wide. Not wild. Precise.
The jagged tip tore through the Bonebeast's side. It wailed—voice like cracking teeth—before tumbling against the shrine wall in a heap of twitching limbs.
But it didn't die.
Not yet.
It twisted back toward him, eyes hollow, jaw disjointed.
The other closed in from behind.
---
> Focus.
He didn't know where the whisper came from—his own mind, a memory, or something deeper. But he obeyed.
The Pulse in his chest aligned with the one in his palm. A spiral flared—not bright, but clear. And the broken spear felt different in his grip, like it remembered something from before.
He pivoted.
The second beast lunged—fangs of bone stretched open like blooming death.
He drove the spear into its chest—right into the center of that glowing knot.
There was no scream.
Just a silence that cracked.
The beast disintegrated mid-motion—its corrupted tether finally severed.
---
Vrakon stood still.
Breathing quietly.
The last Bonebeast rose again, injured but alive. It stared at him—not like prey, not like hunter. But as if it recognized him.
It tilted its head, bones creaking.
Then, without warning, it fled into the mist.
Not out of fear.
Out of something stranger.
Recognition.
---
The shrine quieted.
Vrakon looked down at his hands. The blood wasn't his. The spear's shaft trembled slightly in his grip, no longer metal—now just dead wood and rust again.
The Pulse had faded.
But he remembered the feeling.
The structure.
The rhythm.
The spark.
Mortal. Yes.
But not helpless.
Something within him was waking.
And the Spiral did not slumber forever.