Smoke coiled up to the fractured concrete ribs of the overpass, curling around rusted rebar and the ghostly white of old election posters. Beneath the crosshatch of shadow and evening sunlight, Miguel Leonardo hammered steel like he was driving stakes through the heart of history.
The forge wasn't much—half a shipping container, a generator that stuttered and coughed, anvil bolted to the hulk of an old jeepney axle. The bellows worked off an ancient foot-treadle, one patched with a bicycle chain and electrical tape. But the metal came out alive. Every ring of the hammer sang, high and brittle, through the hollow underpass.
Miguel worked with a rhythm so precise he barely thought about it. He tongued the blade blank from the coals, hammered three strokes down the spine, turned, hammered again. The steel glowed: yellow, then a sullen orange, then blood-warm red. He moved fast. Sweat beaded on his brow and ran into his eyes, stinging with salt and the memory of his father's shop—before the world twisted and the old gods started crawling out of their graves.
He quenched the steel, hiss rising, and watched the color chase itself down the blade. It was a spearhead, forged for a woman who would be dead inside a week if her defenses didn't hold. He had to finish it before dark.
A ripple passed through the forge—a chill that killed the fire for a heartbeat, then let it roar back twice as hot. Miguel didn't look up. He'd felt this kind of presence before.
"Make it quick," he said, not bothering to turn.
Light footsteps on shattered glass. Something floral in the stench of burnt oil and slag. The air thickened, and she was there: Diwata Tala, body slender and fine-boned, skin like moss over stone, hair a tangle of leaves and white-blossomed creepers.
"Impatient," she said, voice cool and strange. "You didn't used to be."
He wiped sweat on the back of his forearm. "People didn't use to get torn in half walking to the ration line." He brought the spearhead back to the anvil and started setting the bevel. "You want something?"
She leaned in, elbows propped on the scorched metal, inspecting his work with a slow, predatory smile. "You know what I am here for. You felt it too, yes? The humming."
He heard it now: something under the forge's roar, a wrongness pulsing in the bones of the city. The concrete vibrated. Even the dying pigeons in the rafters had gone silent.
Miguel switched to a finer hammer. "It's north of here. Cathedral. Something big."
Tala nodded. "The old wards are breaking. Something is gathering. You need to finish your work."
"You could help," he said, sliding the spearhead into a bucket of acid. "You lot used to fight for us."
She pressed a palm to the anvil; her fingers left wet green prints, lichen eating into the steel. "I do fight. But not with that." She jerked her chin at the rack of weapons against the far wall—rebar machetes, a balisong with shattered hilt, and the Kampilan of Bathala, wrapped in rags.
Her eyes flicked to the sword's bundle. "Is it ready?"
Miguel's mouth tightened. "It'll never be ready. The blade's hungry. Last time I drew it, I lost three days and a piece of my hand."
She smiled, lips pale as winter. "And yet you keep it."
He shrugged. "Only thing that scares the monsters more than me."
A gust of wind punched through the overpass, scattering ash and cooling the coals. Tala stood straight, shedding her borrowed human mannerisms.
"You will need allies," she said. "This is not just a surge. There is intent behind it." She traced her finger in the air, drawing a sigil that shimmered sickly gold. "This means nothing to you?"
Miguel watched the shape flicker and burn. "Old baybayin. It's a binding. I saw it on my mother's grave."
Tala's eyes darkened, pupils shrinking to pinpoints. "You should go. Bring the blade. Others will come, but not all are friends."
He almost laughed. "Nobody's my friend, Diwata. Not anymore."
A hint of regret, or maybe just annoyance, passed over her face. "I warned you. Don't trust the one who calls herself Maria. She is not what she claims." She stepped away, already dissolving into a swirl of pollen and dust. "I will be at the cathedral. If you do not come, you die with the rest."
She vanished. The humming in the concrete grew louder, drilling into his skull.
Miguel turned to his workbench. On the edge, where Tala had stood, a scrap of paper—folded with surgical precision. He unfolded it with the tip of a screwdriver. Inside: a symbol, hand-drawn, pulsing faintly with residual glamour.
A map. A warning. Or a death sentence.
He exhaled, slow, and reached for the Kampilan.
"Not ready," he muttered. But neither was the world.
He wrapped the blade in its oilcloth, slung the spearhead in a battered canvas bag, and stepped out into the sulfur evening—toward the gathering dark, and whatever waited beneath the cathedral's shattered dome.
The railway yard was a boneyard—scrap metal, dead trains, the ground webbed with shattered glass and the blacked blood of old oil. Twilight worked its way through the wreckage, coloring every surface in bruised purple. Somewhere to the north, sirens screamed and then fell silent.
Miguel stalked ahead, boots crunching over broken ceramic insulators, eyes never still. Jonas kept pace behind him, a head shorter and built like a tireless badger. Kid wore a patchwork vest of bike tire and bottle caps, and lugged a rebar satchel heavy with scavenged bearings. He had a crossbow, homemade and ugly, but Jonas had put a dozen monsters down with it already.
"There," Jonas hissed, nodding at the gutted caboose to their left.
Miguel followed his line: a shape slumped inside, too big for any dog, too still for a corpse. He motioned Jonas back. "Wait for the signal."
Jonas grinned, teeth white in the shadows. "You owe me one if it's not moving."
"I owe you nothing, apprentice." Miguel crept in, sword hand low. Every sense sharpened—the scent of burnt sugar and rain, the faintest tremor in the rails, a sense of something watching from above.
Inside the caboose, he found the body: a monster, face-down and gutted. The skin was coarse, red fur burned to a crisp. One of the city's many Tikbalangs—horse-faced, built like a starving raptor. A rusty trap still clamped around its ankle.
Jonas leaned over the corpse. "Someone else hunting tonight."
"Or something," Miguel said. He glanced at the gnawed edge of the wound. "Move. We're not alone."
They picked through the debris, pulling useful metal, keeping low. The scrap was good—untwisted, heavy. Miguel was loading the last piece when the world went dark and the stench of burnt acacia rolled over them.
He didn't shout a warning. Just yanked Jonas down and rolled behind the wheelhouse of a derailed train. Something big landed outside, shaking the ground.
A Kapre. The thing hunched in silhouette, arms long enough to scrape the ballast. Ember-red eyes blinked through the dusk. Behind it, a second and third Tikbalang, these ones alive and kicking, pawed the gravel in agitation.
Jonas drew his crossbow and loaded a bolt in silence. He looked at Miguel, who drew the Kampilan. The rags fell away from the blade. It came out of its sheath already smoldering, lines of molten script crawling along the edge.
The Kapre spoke, voice a wet timber snap. "Return what is not yours, little smith."
Miguel pointed the sword at the nearest Tikbalang. "Come and take it."
All hell broke loose.
The Kapre hurled a burnt tree branch like a spear. Miguel ducked, heard it shatter the glass above Jonas. Both Tikbalangs charged. Miguel sidestepped the first, slashed low, caught it in the tendon behind the knee. The monster screamed and toppled, kicking up gravel and sparks. Second one tried to circle, flanking.
Miguel planted a boot in the first Tikbalang's ribcage and kicked off, using the momentum to swing up onto the train car. The Kapre's giant hand closed on empty air a second later, raking the paint from the metal.
"Jonas, left!" Miguel barked.
Jonas spun, loosed his bolt into the second Tikbalang's chest. The creature reared and shrieked, then barreled into a row of junked signal boxes, flattening them in a spray of wire and glass.
The Kapre smashed a fist through the side of the train car, grabbing for Miguel. The fingers were as thick as motorcycle pipes, skin armored in bark and resin.
Miguel drove the Kampilan into the Kapre's knuckles, severing two fingers with a flare of blue-white fire. The monster howled, yanking its hand free. Sap and something darker splattered the steel. The train car rocked, nearly tossed Miguel off. He dropped, landing hard, rolled, and slashed at the downed Tikbalang as it tried to rise. The kampilan's edge flared again, and this time the cut didn't cauterize—it burned, spreading up the monster's leg like wildfire.
The Kapre lunged, eyes now twin infernos, and tried to body-block Miguel against the side of the car. Miguel sidestepped, let the beast overcommit, then turned and stabbed upward, burying the Kampilan in the monster's thigh.
Jonas scrambled up a ladder behind, saw the opening, and jammed a crowbar straight into the Kapre's eye. The beast reeled, pulled away, nearly taking Jonas with it. The kid dropped, rolled, and snapped another bolt into place.
"Go for the heart!" Miguel yelled.
"Where's the damn heart on this thing?"
"Higher!"
The Kapre, clutching its ruined leg and oozing black sap, made a sound like trees splitting in a hurricane. It staggered back, trampling the dying Tikbalangs as it retreated into the forest of freight cars. The remaining monsters followed, shrieking and trailing smoke.
Miguel and Jonas stood in the sudden silence, blood and sap soaking into their boots, the light from the station's old sodium lamps flickering overhead.
Jonas spat on the ground. "They don't usually run."
"They're scared," Miguel said, breathing hard. "Something worse is coming."
He wiped the Kampilan's blade, rewrapped it in the oilcloth. The molten script faded, the hunger in the metal not quite satisfied.
Jonas looked at him, eyes wide and wired. "You believe that spirit? About the cathedral?"
Miguel shook his head. "Don't have to believe. Just have to survive the night."
He motioned Jonas forward, and they slipped into the maze of rails, chasing the last glow of sunlight and the silence that said: for now, the city was holding its breath.
Night pressed down on Manila, thick and absolute. Every light was shattered, every shadow stretched to the breaking point. The church of St. Apolinario sat in the crook of Roxas Boulevard like a skull with its face caved in.
Miguel led Jonas through the breach in the perimeter wall, shoes silent on moss and gravestone dust. Even the rats avoided this place. Inside, the church was gutted—altars tipped, stained glass fused into chemical puddles by a forgotten fire. Rain dripped through holes in the dome, each drop echoing like a gunshot in the vault.
Jonas eyed the church. "Looks empty."
Miguel just listened. Beneath the drip and the stink of scorched plaster, he heard breathing—a quick, animal rhythm, somewhere near the sanctuary.
He raised his left hand, signaling Jonas to circle right. They moved like clockwork: Jonas hugging the shattered statuary, Miguel drifting up the center aisle, Kampilan sheathed but ready.
A cough. Then a hiss. Then the clatter of metal on stone.
A makeshift barricade had been built out of pulpit fragments and hymnals. Behind it: three figures. One, a woman maybe late twenties, hollow-eyed but fierce, cradling a little girl. The other, a man twice her age, bulked with old muscle, holding a length of pipe.
The girl saw them first. She didn't scream, just stared, her face streaked with dirt and candle soot.
Miguel raised his palms, slow. "You're safe. We're not here to hurt you."
The man didn't lower the pipe. "That what you said to the last group? Before you ripped them apart?"
Jonas rolled his eyes. "If we wanted you dead, you'd be dead. Trust me, pal."
Miguel shot him a look. "Names?"
The woman answered. "Elisa Cruz. My niece is Lina." She jerked her chin at the man. "That's Hector Morales. Ex-military. Don't let the limp fool you."
Hector sniffed. "Heard worse. You?"
"Miguel Leonardo." He nodded at Jonas. "And my apprentice."
Elisa's eyes widened. "Leonardo. The smith?"
Miguel felt a familiar flush of annoyance. "The blade doesn't care about reputation. Only cuts one way."
She smiled, tired. "We heard about you. Killed a dozen ghouls in Intramuros. Made it out alive."
"Not all of us." He let that hang. "You said there was another group?"
Hector shook his head. "We heard them. Screaming. Something dragged them up through the roof. We barricaded, waited. Haven't eaten in two days."
Lina watched Miguel with a kind of animal hope.
Jonas opened his satchel and tossed them a protein bar. "Don't wolf it. Makes you puke if you haven't eaten."
Elisa snatched it, snapped off a piece for Lina. The girl inhaled it, then wiped her face with both hands.
Miguel knelt, setting his gear down. "What's stalking the nave?"
Elisa dropped her voice. "We thought it was a ghoul, but it's smarter. Uses traps. Blocks exits. Broke Hector's ankle on the stairs."
Hector grunted. "Bastard almost got me. If Lina hadn't shouted…"
"She's good at that," Jonas said, and Lina flashed him a quick, nervous smile.
Miguel sized up the barricade, then the survivors. "Here's the plan. Jonas and I will sweep the church, force whatever's there to show itself. If it comes for you, defend this spot with everything. You two—" he pointed at Hector and Elisa, "—sharpen some pew legs, make stakes. Jonas, set up tripwires with that wire you picked up."
Jonas saluted, already pulling a tangle of copper from his bag.
Elisa looked at Miguel. "And you?"
He checked the edge of the Kampilan, watched the fire crawl up its spine. "I'll draw it out."
They worked in silence, fear a second skin. Jonas rigged the wires, Hector limped around breaking up woods, Elisa sharpened stakes with a scavenged knife. Lina kept watch, eyes glued to the black archway that led deeper into the crypts.
When the traps were set, Miguel approached Lina.
"Have you seen it? The thing above?"
She nodded, not looking away. "Eyes like a cat. But wrong."
He crouched. "I need you to stay quiet. If anything happens, crawl under the altar and don't move."
She nodded again.
Miguel touched her shoulder, stood, and motioned Jonas to follow. They slipped into the dark, moving slow. The crypt's stairs were a spiral, narrow enough to funnel whatever was coming.
"Why risk this?" Jonas whispered. "We could just bail."
Miguel didn't slow down. "If we run, it follows. If we kill it here, they live."
Jonas grunted. "Your mom would be proud."
Miguel winced. "She'd call me an idiot."
Then they saw it: a shadow at the far end of the crypt, moving with impossible speed and grace. It hung upside down, toes hooked in old stone, head cocked at an unnatural angle. Its mouth was too wide. Its fingers too many.
Miguel set his feet, thumbed the Kampilan's hilt. "Come on, then."
It dropped, silent as death.
Miguel met it midair, blade flashing. The edge caught its arm, shearing through bone. It screamed—a sound like metal scraped on bone—and whipped its tail at Jonas. Jonas ducked, fired a bolt straight up into its throat. It twitched, clawing at the wound, but kept coming.
They backed toward the stairs, herding it up, forcing it into the booby-trapped nave.
Miguel kept his voice low. "Elisa! Get ready!"
The shadow-thing burst into the sanctuary, triggered the tripwire, and a rain of sharpened pew legs fell. Three lodged in its back. Hector charged it with the pipe, jamming the weapon into its side. Elisa drove a stake through its thigh.
Miguel closed in, slicing off a hand, then another. The thing thrashed, shrieked, tried to crawl up the wall.
Lina screamed.
Miguel grabbed the back of its neck and drove the Kampilan through its spine. Blue fire erupted from the wound, turning the thing to ash in seconds.
Silence.
Elisa dropped her weapon, breathing in ragged gasps. Hector slumped, pipe clattering to the floor.
Miguel looked around. "Nobody's dead?"
Jonas grinned, holding a split lip. "You doubted?"
Elisa hugged Lina, who was crying in relief. "Thank you," Elisa whispered.
Miguel nodded. "You'll have to move before dawn. This place isn't safe."
Hector groaned. "You staying?"
Miguel cleaned his blade. "I'll take the first watch. Get some sleep."
He settled in at the shattered altar, eyes on the hole in the dome, listening to the city hum with the promise of more monsters, more war.
Jonas joined him, slumping against a fallen pillar. "They'll talk about this one."
Miguel snorted. "They talk too much."
But he watched over them, silent, until the first hint of dawn cracked the sky.
Dawn didn't break; it seeped, slow and gray, into the blighted courtyard of St. Apolinario. The world felt hollowed out—no birds, no wind, just the stink of coming blood.
Miguel stepped through the archway, survivors fanned behind him. Hector moved with a limp, pipe taped to his good arm. Elisa and Lina carried broken pew legs, faces set. Jonas checked his crossbow, eyes scanning the rooftops for movement.
"Where are they?" Jonas whispered.
Miguel closed his eyes. "Waiting for the sun."
A bell somewhere deep in the city tolled a cracked, off-key note. As if on cue, the first ghoul-creatures spilled out of the nave, dozens at a time. They moved like water: arms longer than legs, skin translucent and crawling with black worms.
Elisa screamed, swinging her rebar in a wild arc. The end caught one in the jaw, tearing off a chunk of face. Hector braced at the barricade and fired his pistol through a gap, each shot punching holes in the advancing tide.
Miguel drew the Kampilan. The blade hissed, drinking in the fear. He met the first ghoul with a diagonal slice, severing head from shoulders. The monster's body twitched, but the worms inside it kept the limbs moving, dragging the stump toward the survivors.
"Don't let them bite!" Miguel called. "If you're scratched, tell me."
Jonas shot from behind the altar, reloading with frantic speed. "There's too many!"
Miguel cut a path, stepping through the bodies, sword moving in tight, precise arcs. Every ghoul that fell was replaced by two more. The courtyard was a tangle of writhing limbs, teeth, and the stench of rot.
A new sound: rumbling, deep, subterranean.
The ground split. Ghouls fell into the gap, screeching. Something enormous clawed its way up: The Maw, a titan built from the corpses of its children, bones braced together with sinew and rebar, head a split crescent of jagged teeth.
Hector cursed. "That's not possible."
Miguel stepped between the monster and the others. "Everything's possible. Just not survivable."
The Maw lunged, jaws closing on empty air as Miguel dodged sideways. The Kampilan bit into its flank, but the blade sank only inches. The creature bellowed, voice shuddering the glass in the windows.
Jonas aimed for the eyes, fired, and the bolt vanished into the mass. "Did nothing!"
"Hit the joints!" Miguel shouted.
Elisa hurled her rebar like a javelin, catching the Maw in the knee. It buckled, but only for a second. The monster's tail whipped around, flattening a section of barricade and sending Hector spinning.
"Molotov!" Miguel yelled.
Lina grabbed a bottle from Jonas's bag, lit the rag, and handed it off. Hector, bleeding but grinning, lobbed the grenade at the Maw's open mouth. The glass shattered, flame pouring down its throat.
The Maw howled, swatting at its face, but the fire only made it angrier.
It slammed a claw into Miguel, knocking him into a gravestone. His vision swam, but he held onto the blade. As the Maw loomed over him, Miguel planted his feet and stabbed upward, through the roof of its mouth. The sword sang, fire leaping up the monster's skull, lighting it from within.
For a heartbeat, the whole world stilled.
Then the Maw jerked back, retreating in pain and rage, smashing through the old tomb façade as it fled into the ruins. The lesser ghouls, leaderless, scattered like roaches.
Miguel stayed on his knees, breathing ragged. Blood seeped from his shoulder, hot and sticky.
Jonas ran to his side. "You alive?"
"Define alive," Miguel said. He tried to stand, and Jonas hauled him up.
Lina and Elisa hugged, crying and laughing at the same time. Hector limped over, gave Miguel a nod of respect.
Elisa wiped her eyes. "It's over?"
Miguel shook his head. "For now. They'll come again."
Jonas grimaced. "How do we stop them for good?"
Miguel looked at the scorched Kampilan, now cool and slick with the Maw's blood. "We go north. Find the source. End it at the root."
He faced the others, his gaze steady.
"Gather what you can. We leave at sundown."
Nobody argued.
They patched wounds, scavenged weapons, ate what little remained. By dusk, they were ready: a pack of survivors, battered but defiant.
Miguel led the way, sword slung over his back, eyes on the horizon. As they moved out, the city's ruins flickered with the promise of new monsters. But this time, Miguel smiled.
Let them come.
Even the rain tasted of iron and smoke.
Miguel Leonardo jammed his heel against the bleeding flank of the angel statue and shoved, sending the whole rotting mass of marble and rebar over onto its side. A freshet of angelic gore—pink dust and some otherworldly resin—splattered across the flagstones. Miguel ducked behind the wingspan as the next volley chewed up the air above their heads.
"We're out!" rasped the gunner beside him, a bony man with a bandolier made of rosary beads and rusty shell casings. He had one good eye, and it was fixed on the pile of spent magazines at his feet. "I can throw rocks if you want, boss!"
"Save your strength," said Miguel. He drew in air through broken ribs. The courtyard was a war god's graveyard: saints toppled, stained-glass teeth underfoot, splinters of shattered pews all the way to the doors of the basilica. In the new order of Manila, this was church.
A survivor in a torn cassock moaned, clutching a gut wound. Another, scalp oozing but fingers steady, ran a counting prayer over a tangle of bullets as if the right Hail Mary would manifest more. The last was just a kid, hair matted with blood and rain, cradling a backpack full of relics against his chest like it was the only thing that mattered.
Miguel wiped his palms on his leather coat. The left wrist—tattooed in baybayin script, veins livid from the anting-anting—throbbed like a fresh burn. The Kampilan's hilt, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ancient sin, felt hot as a living spine.
"You have more tape?" he asked the kid.
The boy's mouth worked soundlessly, then: "In the bag." A shiver wracked his body. "It… hurts."
"Everything hurts," said Miguel. He didn't ask for permission. Tore the zipper down, dug through black-market amulets and a roll of medical tape held together with hope. He taped the wound, tight and fast. Every move had to count.
Above them, a splay of stained-glass ribs arched over the shattered altar. Once, centuries of saints had kept the faith alive in this place. Now there was only the soft, wet plink of blood dripping from the frescoes and the hum of something old and angry building behind the apse.
A voice like crumpling tin came from the shell-shocked woman at his right. "Do we fall back, Myth Breaker?" She spoke his title half in reverence, half in terror.
Miguel eyed the basilica doors. Bent, fused with angel sinew, crawling with demon residue. No retreat, then. Only what lay ahead.
He looked up, through the shrapnel hole in the ceiling, at the sky boiling black and blue with the promise of more rain. In the center of the altar, the air rippled.
He nudged the gunner. "Tell me what you see."
The gunner peered up. "Light show," he said. "Like stained glass, but it's alive."
Miguel could taste it now: ozone, old incense, something reptilian. He crouched and swept a fallen communion cup through the puddle at his boots, smearing the blood into sigils. The old ways still bit. He set the cup upright, let it fill with rainwater. "When it comes, shoot for the eyes. If you miss, I'll do the rest."
The gunner laughed, short and wild. "Just like the stories, huh?"
"Nothing like the stories," said Miguel. "In the stories, the monsters die."
The altar exploded in silent light, a shockwave of colorless force that knocked every living thing flat. Miguel rolled up, mud-streaked and blinking, in time to see the beast coalesce from the burning edges of the world.
First came the wings: a fan of translucent scales, each one flickering with stolen halos. Next, the coiling trunk—muscle on muscle, ringed with black-gold ridges and studded with talons. It dragged itself down, mouth yawning wide, the teeth an armory of ivory blades. Then the head: horned, crowned with a burning circlet, eyes molten gold. When it opened its mouth, forked tongue flickering, the world trembled.
Miguel rose to meet it. The Kampilan in his fist buzzed, hungry for myth.
The gunner screamed, "Tiamat!" and emptied his last two rounds into the thing's face. Bullets ricocheted, pinging off scales as thick as vault doors, but one shot caught the left eye, shattering it like an eggshell. The serpent howled, a sound that set the stained glass humming.
Miguel used the distraction to circle right, putting the altar between himself and the beast. The others followed, eyes wide with what looked a lot like hope, even if it was just the hope of a clean death.
The beast's voice was thunder—real, ground-shaking, bones-on-bones thunder. "SON OF BATHALA," it said, words ringing through the cathedral and into every last nerve in Miguel's body. "THE BLOODLINE IS NOT YET SPENT."
Miguel gritted his teeth. "You want my blood?" He spat onto the broken altar, mixing his own with the mess already pooling there. "You'll choke on it."
The beast laughed. The nave cracked down the center. Statues toppled, saints decapitated by the shock.
The kid whimpered, "Is that a god?"
Miguel kept his eyes on the target. "Just another animal. Killable."
He called back, "Anyone left with grenades?"
A stunned silence. Then the cassock survivor, rummaging in her belt: "One. Holy water only."
Miguel took it, fast and silent, thumbed the safety. "When I say, you run for the doors. Don't look back."
"What about you?" asked the gunner, voice ragged.
Miguel showed teeth. "I've got to finish the story."
The serpent reared, coiling for a strike that would flatten the whole parish. Miguel ran straight at it, hurdling rubble, rolling under the first sweep of its tail. The Kampilan glimmered blue and white, singing with the power of every ghost that ever held it.
Miguel hurled the grenade into the beast's open maw. The holy water shattered inside, boiling on contact. The serpent screamed, clutching its throat, bucking like a demon in a net. Miguel closed the gap, running up the length of its body, blade out.
He drove the Kampilan into the soft spot beneath its ruined eye. The blade drank deep. The beast spasmed, knocking Miguel loose, but the anting-anting on his wrist caught fire, anchoring him to the blade, dragging him back up.
"WHY DO YOU FIGHT?" roared the beast.
Miguel's voice was flat. "No one else remembers how."
He ripped the Kampilan sideways. The serpent convulsed, its insides lighting up with a hundred ancestral souls. Scales fell in sheets, horns splintered, gold eyes went cloudy.
The survivors ran, as ordered, ducking the collapse of the altar and the shriek of dying myth.
Miguel rode the serpent down, pinning its head against the marble with his whole body weight. He reached into its mouth—ignoring the splintered teeth and reek of burning divinity—and pulled the hilt free. The blade came with a chunk of heart, still pulsing.
He knelt, panting, as the beast's body unraveled into ribbons of dust and cold fire. It tried to speak, but all that came was a trickle of dead languages and the stink of ruined prophecy.
Miguel wiped the Kampilan clean on the remains of a cardinal's robes. He turned to the gaping, trembling survivors.
"Gather the dead," he said, voice low. "Burn what you can. The rest, we bury."
No one argued.
The sky cleared, briefly. The scent of rain and ozone faded, replaced by the steady, old-world stink of sweat and blood and metal.
The boy, still cradling the relics, looked up. "What did it mean? About your bloodline?"
Miguel sheathed the Kampilan. "It means there's always another monster. Always another story."
He helped the kid up, hands steady despite the tremor in his bones.
Above them, the nave's last stained glass panel caught the sunrise, flaring gold and red and blue.
Miguel didn't look back. He never did.