Amara drifted to the woman's side, her spirit a pale flame in the roar of battle. From here, the chaos arranged itself into meaning. The woman's voice was the center of the storm—calm, sure, cut to a sharpened edge. Each command she gave tightened the air, and the two warriors moved as if pulled along invisible lines. A word, and the spear dipped. A breath, and the blade rose. The rhythm of their strikes belonged to her as much as to their hands.
Amara's eyes widened. She isn't fighting herself… she's guiding them. Every strike, every step, it's all because of her.
Only then did she look fully upon their enemy.
The monster.
It loomed, taller than a house, its body a terrible graft of sinew and tree bark, as though a forest had learned to stand and hate. A massive log swung from its fists—no mere club, but a battering ram torn from dead wood and married to living force. Fire pulsed under the bark of its chest like a forge.
But this was no wild beast. Its movements were clean, economical, precise—like a master of combat who had rehearsed this killing dance for years. Where a brute would smash, it cut. Where chaos would flail, it chased openings with dreadful patience. Each swing traced a geometry meant to kill, each strike a problem posed and answered in the same breath. The log whistled inches from flesh and stone; survival was measured in hair's breadths.
The two men gave everything. The sword and the spear answered with a faint green glow at each impact, an after-image of light laying along their edges like a blessing. With every cut, they carved deep into bark-flesh. Thick black liquid spilled from the wounds, splashing like ink into their footprints. It hissed on the ground, a poison that smelled of hot metal and rot.
Hope rose—briefly, beautifully.
It died in the next heartbeat. The wounds closed as if fingers pinched them from the inside. Bark grew back over torn muscle in seconds, knotted and ugly, sealing where it should have bled. Cut a vein, and the vein learned to be a root. Rooted things do not die easy.
Amara shivered. This thing can't be stopped… it heals as fast as it bleeds.
She felt the woman's fear like a shift in current under her palm; it never touched her voice, but it threaded her commands with urgency. The warriors began to tire. Their steps lost a fraction of sharpness. Their guard rose a hair late. The ground under their boots remembered every missed heartbeat.
Disaster arrived with no fanfare.
The log fell.
The swordsman met it with both hands on his blade, body braced, teeth bared in a rictus that ate any sound he might have made. The impact launched him—steel sang, bones thudded—his back struck a broken wall with a crack that tasted like dust. His right hand split open along the palm. Blood flared, bright red as a flare in the dark—and at once, the black miasma ate it. It didn't drip. It vanished, swallowed mid-air by the hungry nothing that blanketed the world.
"—Tch!" He bit the sound off, rage slicing through pain. He ripped a small pouch from his belt with his teeth, fingers already slathering the wound. Powder spilled like dry snow. It drank the blood and hardened at once, sealing flesh with a chemical-laced grit. His breath hitched; he nodded at no one and everyone—and sprinted back into the killing field without a heartbeat's hesitation.
They were not alone in the woman's strategy.
From the start, Amara realized, she had sent a companion—a rittle. It was small, rat-like, with ears too large for its body, so quick it was almost theoretical. You didn't see it; you felt absence turn back into presence as it crossed your vision. Amara noticed it only as a ripple through her sight—pressure displaced, then returned. It carried a message bound in instinct, an alarm wrapped in fur.
Because the woman already knew.
They cannot kill this Hasura. It was a name, heavy and old, lying under her breath when she named the thing in her mind. At best, they could stall it. Divert it. Lure it away from the fragile, beating heart of their hidden people. If a corpse this size fell within sanctuary walls, the miasma would not just poison the soil. It would drown the air. Every breath would betray them. Children, families—everyone would die.
The battle stretched into a grind. Time lost meaning and became only cycles of breath and strike. The two men staggered back toward the woman, torn, bleeding in ways they didn't have time to acknowledge. The green flicker along their edges dimmed between movements and reappeared when blade and will found each other again. The Hasura did not slow.
Every wound given was a lesson it learned. Every step it took carved their options smaller.
Amara's heart sank. They're going to die… this fight can't be won.
Then hope returned—a small, bright thing arriving on small, fast feet.
The rittle skimmed through the rubble like a flicker of thought and leapt to the woman's shoulder. It chittered a staccato burst, claws soft on fur. The woman's jaw unclenched by a fraction. In that exact breath, the air shifted.
Someone arrived.
He did not drop. He descended—quiet as dust, slow as certainty. An old man floated down from above, framed in the broken mouth of the sky. His clothes were plain and worn, seams patched with care, the fabric the kind that knew work. Over his shoulders lay a white robe that glowed faintly with its own remembered light, as though it had been washed in starlight and kept a few for later.
He carried no weapons. His hands were open. He did not look fierce. And yet his presence weighed the world down. The air bowed; the stone held its breath. It felt as if gravity had found a favorite for a moment and leaned in.
The Hasura froze. Its burning eyes—all ember and furnace—locked on him and held there, some animal instinct stuttering at a shape it could not classify as prey.
The old man looked back. His gaze was ancient, calm, and very sharp. The cave light tried to reflect off his eyes and failed, swallowed by attention that cut as cleanly as any blade.
Stillness fell. Even the ground seemed to stop trembling, as if honoring a ritual it barely remembered.
Man and monster stared at each other across the torn street.
The spear-bearer and swordsman reached the woman's side and didn't kneel. They planted their feet. They stole two breaths—no more. The woman rose to a half-stand, her palm still splayed on the ground, her power spread thin and ready. She did not call out. Names, here, were not for shouting. They were for knowing.
Tian stood at the lip of the cave, feeling the orb hum low in his harness where heart and hope met bone, Amara giving all the details of events happening just a few meters away from them. Beside him, Elena forgot to count Amara's pulse; for a heartbeat, awe replaced duty, and then guilt made her resume. The team inched their rifles a hair downward, as if the old man's arrival had adjusted gravity's angle.
Amara pressed deeper into her second sight until the edges of her consciousness frayed. The old man's aura did not flare like the woman's, nor thread itself into the men. It was a tide pulling back before a wave. It measured everything: the Hasura's heat, the woman's roots, the cut of the wind over broken stone, the old iron in the ground. He assembled the world in a breath and found where it would break most kindly.
This was no longer just survival.
This was the start of a first true battle in the new era—a battle of meanings, of what human could be.
The old man lifted one hand.
He did not point. He did not clench. He simply raised his palm, as if greeting a neighbor across a field. The robe's hem stirred without wind. The Hasura snarled, fire licking around its teeth, and charged—with a precision that would have cleaved a house.
The old man stepped forward onto empty air. The space held him. The ground, startled, hurried to meet his foot a fraction late, stone rising in a low, polite swell. He placed his weight, turned his wrist, and the force the Hasura hurled at him folded, redirected a finger's width off-course. The log smashed past his shoulder and kissed earth—stone shattered in a rain of shards that curved around a circle the size of his shadow. He did not look back at the ruin. His eyes never left the thing that had tried to erase him.
The swordsman blinked. The spear-bearer exhaled a sound that might have been a laugh if laughter were a blade. The woman's mouth softened—not a smile. Recognition.
The old man's fingers gathered a pinch of nothing. He set it down across the gap like a line. Amara watched the line appear in her vision—thin as spider silk, bright as law. The Hasura stepped to swing again and found its ankle caught by a thought; it stumbled. Only for a heartbeat. Only enough.
The sword leapt to the opening the way answers leap to a question finally asked right. The spear pinned the next step not to stop it but to steer it. Bark split. Black blood hissed and turned to smoke before it could stain. The old man turned his hand again and the fire plume vented upward, scalding air instead of flesh.
It was choreography, and he was not lead—he was tempo.
The Hasura roared. The roar grew teeth. It swung wide, club trailing sparks as it tore along a rib of rebar and stone. The old man blurred a fraction, an after-image that suggested he had been two places for a breath and chose the kinder one. He did not look hurried. He looked late only to violence, early to everything else.
Amara felt the strain cross the old man's shoulders like lightning. Power was not free here. The robe's glow dimmed when he turned the club aside the second time, and the line he had drawn thinned. The woman felt it too. She pressed her palm down harder. The ground answered, thickening the web beneath the men's feet. Their next steps rang truer.
They bought breaths. They traded distance. They held the boundary.
The Hasura learned again. It feinted high, rolled its shoulder, swept low—club snarling for knees, then hips. The old man's palm twitched and the sweep hit a ridge that wasn't there a moment ago. Stone, obliging, offered its back. The club skidded, lost momentum, found it again too late.
"Now," the woman said, soft and ruthless.
Two green arcs kissed the same place in quick succession. Bark tore like paper finally soaked through. The Hasura screamed, not with rage this time, but with pain that remembered it was mortal. Regeneration struggled. It stuttered. It found the pieces and tried to knit them, but the lines didn't match.
The old man lowered his hand a fraction, as if making a choice only he would pay for. The robe brightened again—just a shade, just enough to cast their shadows long.
Through Amara, through orb and earth, two truths braided.
The abyss raised monsters.
And standing at the cave mouth, orb steady against his heart, Tian understood what Amara had whispered days ago: worse exists. But so does more.
The Hasura lifted its burning eyes one last time to the old man. Something like recognition crawled across its face—resentment shaped like worship. It roared, and the roar sounded suddenly small against the quiet that had gathered.