Aria Chen's POV
Brynn was twenty-three years old and dying by inches.
Aria could see it the moment she entered the tent — the way his body had stopped fighting and started simply enduring. Mana corruption worked like that. It didn't kill fast. It hollowed you out slowly, turning your own power against you, until there was nothing left worth saving.
He was one of Kieran's warriors. That much was obvious from the build, the weapons beside his cot, the way the other fighters standing around him held themselves — rigid, helpless, hating the helplessness.
Aria knelt beside him without being asked.
"How long?" she said to the room.
"Three weeks since the first signs," Tobias answered from the tent entrance. "Accelerated overnight."
Three weeks. She was surprised he was still conscious.
She reached into the pendant, pulled a Shadowmend root, and crushed it directly against Brynn's palm, pressing his fingers closed around it. Then she placed both her hands over his and pushed mana through — slow, deliberate, the way the cultivation manual described for channel repair.
The warrior hissed through clenched teeth.
"I know," Aria said quietly. "Hold on."
She felt the corruption resisting — thick and dark, like trying to clear a blocked drain with bare hands. She pushed harder. Sweat broke along her hairline. The pendant burned against her collarbone.
Three minutes later, Brynn's breathing changed.
Five minutes later, the grey-green tinge left his skin.
He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling like a man surfacing from deep water. "What—"
"Don't sit up yet." Aria sat back, exhausted. "Give it an hour."
The tent was completely silent.
She looked up.
Every one of Kieran's warriors was staring at her. Twenty hard, scarred, suspicious men — and not one of them was looking at her like she was a fragile princess anymore.
Kieran stood at the tent entrance.
He had been there the whole time. Watching.
His expression gave nothing away. But his amber eyes were doing something complicated.
He didn't leave.
That was the first surprise.
Aria had expected him to take the demonstration, nod once, and disappear back into the Borderlands to brood. Instead, he stayed on the edge of the camp — not involved, not helping, just present. Watching from a distance with those glowing eyes while she moved through the day's work.
She learned his warriors' names and used them. She asked about injuries, families, how long they'd been in the Borderlands. At first they answered in monosyllables. By the second day, they answered in sentences. By the fourth day, two of them had started helping with the camp's water system without being asked.
Tobias pulled her aside on the fifth evening. "You know Kieran's watching you."
"I know."
"It's making his men nervous. He doesn't watch things unless he's deciding what to do with them."
"Good." Aria kept sorting herbs. "Let him watch."
What she didn't say — what she wouldn't say out loud — was that she was aware of him every single moment. Not because he was frightening, though he was. Because that electric thing from the handshake hadn't fully faded. It sat in her palm like a memory her skin refused to forget.
She didn't have time for that. She had an empire to build.
She told herself that firmly. Frequently. It helped less each time.
The attack came on the seventh night.
No warning — razor-spine monsters didn't give warnings. One moment the camp was quiet, the next the perimeter guards were screaming and something enormous was tearing through the eastern fence like it was paper.
Aria was on her feet before she was fully awake.
Not because she was brave — her hands were shaking so hard she nearly dropped her blade. But people were screaming and she was the one who had told them this place was safe, and that meant the screaming was partly her responsibility.
She ran toward it.
The razor-spines were fast and vicious — armoured bodies covered in quill-like spines that fired on impact. Her combat training from the spatial manuals was basic at best, more theory than muscle memory. But she knew angles. She knew how to read a moving threat and get out of its path.
She fought clumsy and she fought smart, which was enough to stay alive but not enough to be effective.
Then she heard a child screaming.
A small girl had been separated from her mother, backed against a storage wall by a razor-spine that had broken off from the main attack. The creature's spines were raised, quivering, ready to fire at anything that moved.
Aria moved.
She didn't think about it. She crossed the distance in seconds and threw herself between the girl and the monster. The spines fired.
Four of them hit her across the left side — shoulder, ribs, hip, thigh. The pain was blinding, immediate, the kind that white-outs your vision and takes your breath as a toll.
She stayed on her feet. Barely.
She kept the girl behind her.
The razor-spine reared back to strike again—
And then it was gone.
Not retreating. Gone. Launched sideways through the air like it weighed nothing, hitting the ground twenty feet away and not getting up.
The creature that had thrown it was not fully human.
Seven feet of fused beast and man, dark fur across shoulders and arms, hands that ended in claws, amber eyes blazing in the dark. The remaining razor-spines took one look at Kieran's beast form and scattered. Not retreating strategically. Running in blind panic, the way prey animals ran from something they knew they couldn't survive.
The screaming stopped.
The camp went quiet.
Kieran turned.
He crossed the distance to Aria in four strides, and she genuinely thought for one dizzy second that she was about to be yelled at. Instead he dropped to one knee in front of her — this enormous, terrifying half-beast man, kneeling — and looked at the spines embedded in her side.
His jaw tightened. Something moved through his expression that he clearly didn't want there.
"You could have died," he said.
"But the child didn't." Aria coughed. Something warm moved in her chest that she was fairly sure was blood. "That's what matters."
His eyes came up to hers. They were still glowing amber, still carrying the heat of the fight — but underneath that, something quieter and far more dangerous.
"That logic is idiotic," he said.
"It worked."
"You're bleeding internally."
"I've had worse." She hadn't, but the point stood.
He made a sound — not quite a growl, not quite the noise a person makes — and then she was off the ground. He lifted her as though she weighed nothing, one arm under her knees, one behind her back, her head against the solid heat of his chest.
Every one of her people was watching.
She should protest. She was the leader. Leaders didn't get carried.
She didn't have the energy.
"Healing hall," she managed. "Second tent on the left."
He was already moving.
They were halfway there when he spoke, quiet enough that only she could hear it, his voice stripped of all the roughness and contempt it usually carried.
"You're going to be the death of me, woman."
Aria's eyes opened wider.
Because she knew that voice. She'd heard that voice before — in boardrooms, in hospital rooms, in her own chest during the worst months of her first life.
That was the voice of someone who was terrified of caring about something they couldn't afford to lose.
She looked up at his jaw. Set hard. Eyes forward. Carrying her like it was the most natural thing he'd ever done while pretending it meant nothing at all.
Oh, she thought. Oh, this is going to be complicated.
But before she could decide what to do with that realisation, Lyra appeared in the healing hall entrance—her old face pale, hands twisting together, which Aria had never seen before.
Lyra, who was unshakeable. Lyra, who had stitched wounds and set bones and delivered terrible news without flinching once.
"We have a problem," Lyra said, her voice stripped down to its bones. "While the attack was happening — someone used the distraction." She swallowed. "The eastern supply stores. All of it. The medicine reserve. The cultivation resources. Everything we spent three weeks building."
She stopped.
"Gone," she finished. "Someone robbed us. And Aria—" Her eyes moved to the tree line. "The tracks lead north. Toward Asterian territory."
Aria went very still in Kieran's arms.
Someone from Asteria had been inside her camp.
Which meant someone from Asteria knew exactly where she was.
Which meant the attack hadn't been random at all.