"RUN!!!" Rox shouted, his voice raw with a fear Artemis had never heard from the stoic Silverstone. Blood soaked the moss where Rox knelt, his severed arm a grisly testament to the impossible beast before them.
"Rox, I thought Silverstone was the highest tier for animals! What—" Arthur's panicked question died as CLANG!! The Aurumtouched beast's claw—a blur of gilded death—slammed into Arthur's hastily manifested bronze shield. The shield splintered, gold-tipped claws tearing through metal and into the flesh beneath. Arthur screamed, more in shock than pain, as crimson bloomed across his tunic.
"Nngh!" Arthur suppressed a second cry, wrenching himself backward. The creature—a nightmarish fusion of cheetah spots and wolfish muscle wrapped in mangy grey fur—landed silently between them and their escape route. Its molten copper eyes glowed with predatory intelligence, tail lashing like a metronome of death. The path was blocked. No retreat. Only the forest's suffocating silence and the coppery stench of blood.
Artemis's diamond core flared cold as he heightened his senses. Time slowed. He saw every matted tuft of the beast's fur, every droplet of Arthur's blood on its claws, the subtle tension in its haunches. It's playing with us, he realized. Like a cat with cornered mice.
"Artemis, what are you doing?" Arthur panted, clutching his bleeding arm. "We need to get out of here!"
"Yes, listen to your friend." Rox's voice was strained but urgent, his remaining hand pressing hard on his own gruesome wound. "This thing is dangerous. You can't fight it!"
Artemis didn't turn. His gaze remained locked on the beast's burning eyes. "It knew our plan," he said, voice unnervingly calm. "That's why it cut us off. It won't just let us leave. And the terror on your face, Rox—the terror of a Silverstone who faced down pirates without blinking—tells me everything." He settled into a low stance, diamond knuckles shimmering into existence over his clenched fists. "I'll hold its attention. Both of you run. Now." He took a slow breath, the forest air sharp in his lungs. "Don't worry. I don't plan on dying today."
The beast didn't roar. It didn't need to. Its stillness was more terrifying than any sound. Artemis charged, a silent streak of desperate resolve. He aimed a diamond-encased fist straight for its muzzle, hoping to shatter bone. The beast moved. Not with a blur, but with an huge, impossible, liquid shift of its body. His fist whistled through empty air. Before he could recover, a grey-furred forearm, thick as a tree branch and tipped with gold claws, hammered into his ribs.
CRACK!
Agony exploded through Artemis's side. He felt ribs bend, diamond density protesting but holding against Aurumtouched force. The impact lifted him off his feet, hurling him backwards. He crashed through a thicket of thorn-ferns, splinters and leaves raining down. Pain screamed through his torso. He rolled, gasping, tasting blood in his mouth. Too fast. Too strong. He scrambled up just as gold claws tore through the space where his head had been moments before. He ducked, weaving sideways, another claw ripping his tunic and scoring a fiery line across his shoulder blade.
"ARTEMIS!" Arthur's shout was distant, fading as Rox pulled him back into the dense foliage.
Artemis had no breath to answer. The beast was on him, a whirlwind of grey and gold. He blocked a claw swipe with crossed diamond forearms. The force drove him to his knees, mud splattering his face. He kicked out, aiming for its belly. It flowed around the kick like smoke, its tail snapping like a whip against his temple. Stars exploded. He stumbled, vision swimming. A gold-tipped fang grazed his cheek, drawing a hot line of blood. He was losing. Badly. Each dodge was frantic, each block a bone-jarring impact that threatened to shatter his focus. He was reacting, not acting—a leaf in its hurricane.
Survive. Adapt. Rox's training mantra cut through the panic. Feel your bones. Feel the lattice. He couldn't yet match its raw Aurumtouched power. But maybe… maybe he could match its speed.
As the beast lunged again, a killing thrust aimed at his heart, Artemis didn't try to block. He listened to the hum of diamond within him—the cold, intricate latticework that was his skeleton. He focused not on his muscles, but on the potential humming within the structure. He imagined light flowing through crystalline pathways, unhindered, accelerating.
He sidestepped.
Not fast enough to avoid entirely—gold claws ripped through his thigh, deep this time—but fast enough that the killing blow became a grievous wound. Mach 1. He'd touched the speed of sound. The world snapped into sharper focus, sounds crisper, movements slightly less blurred. The beast paused, its red eyes narrowing, as if surprised. It felt that.
Emboldened, Artemis pressed. He didn't charge wildly. He danced. He weaved between trees, forcing the beast to follow, to turn. He pushed the diamond lattice again, demanding more speed. Mach 1.1… 1.2… He became a phantom flicker in the gloom, blood streaming from his thigh and ribs. He landed a glancing blow on its flank—diamond knuckles scraping against dense fur and impossibly tough hide. It snarled, the first sound it had made—a low, vibrating growl that shook Artemis's teeth. It matched his speed effortlessly, a grey shadow mirroring his every evasion.
He was faster now, but it was still faster. Stronger. Tougher. He needed more than speed. He needed power focused not like a hammer, but like a scalpel.
The beast cornered him against a massive ironbark tree. No escape. It lunged, jaws wide, those impossible gold fangs aimed at his throat. Instinct screamed to block, to pour all his strength into a diamond shield. But Rox's words echoed: "Strength without control is wreckage." Blocking might shatter his bones against its Aurumtouched bite.
Instead, Artemis focused. He didn't try to stop the charge. He focused every ounce of his diamond-tier strength into a single point—the knuckle of his index finger, hardened to an insane density. As the jaws descended, he punched forward, not at the head, but at the hinge of its lower jaw. A pinpoint strike.
THUD-CRACK!
A sickening sound of bone giving way. The beast's head snapped sideways with a pained yelp. One of its lower fangs, a golden shard of nightmare, snapped clean off and embedded itself in the mud. It recoiled, shaking its massive head, blood and saliva flecking its grey muzzle. Rage burned in its red eyes now, pure and incandescent. He'd hurt it. Truly hurt it.
The fight entered a new, terrifying phase. Artemis moved at near-sonic speeds (Mach 1.5), a desperate blur dodging, weaving, striking with pinpoint diamond strikes—a jab to a joint, a sharp kick to the knee, a scrape across an eye ridge. Each hit landed with bruising, sometimes cracking force, but the beast absorbed them. Its hide was unnaturally resilient, its bones beneath seemingly unbreakable by anything less than its own tier. And it learned. It anticipated his speed, countering with blinding swipes that forced him into desperate, energy-sapping dodges. Gold claws tore fresh wounds across his back, his arms. He was tiring, his diamond core burning cold with the effort, while the beast seemed inexhaustible, fueled by hellish rage.
He needed an edge. Something beyond speed and focused strength. The beast lunged again, a killing pounce. Artemis threw himself sideways, rolling behind a cluster of large, water-slick boulders near the stagnant pool where they'd camped. The beast slammed into the rocks, shaking the ground, sending cracks spiderwebbing through the stone.
Heat. The memory flashed—training with Rox. Drawing ambient heat into his palms. Condense it. Focus it. Could he do more than just warm his hands? Could he weaponize it?
He had seconds. The beast rounded the boulders, hate burning in its eyes. Artemis planted his feet in the cold mud at the water's edge. He raised his trembling, blood-slicked right hand. Not in a fist. Palm open. He reached inward, beyond the lattice, to the fundamental thermal property Rox had forced him to grasp. He pulled. Not gently, but violently. He pulled the ambient heat from the humid air, from the damp earth beneath his boots, even from the very blood cooling on his skin. He pulled it into his palm.
A visible shimmer distorted the air above his hand. Not fire. Not light. Intense, focused heat. The pool beside him instantly developed a thin skin of ice, crackling outward. The mud at his feet froze solid. Frost bloomed across the ferns nearby.
The beast paused, sensing the anomaly, the sudden, unnatural cold radiating from its prey. Its red eyes flickered with something akin to confusion, perhaps even primal fear. It hesitated for a single, fatal heartbeat.
Artemis screamed, channeling every shred of will, every ounce of diamond-tier focus. He thrust his palm forward, not at the beast, but through the point between its glowing red eyes. He unleashed the condensed heat, a ray—a pencil-thin, invisible lance of pure thermal energy.
SSSSSZZZZZT!
The sound was like superheated metal plunged into water. The beast didn't roar. It convulsed. Grey fur blackened and crisped instantly in a perfect line between its eyes. The smell of burnt hair and seared flesh filled the clearing. The impossible gold fangs in its gaping maw seemed to vibrate with agony. Its molten copper eyes dimmed, flickered wildly, then went dark, like snuffed coals. It took one shuddering step forward, then its legs buckled. The massive grey body collapsed onto the frozen mud with a heavy, final thud, smoke curling from the fatal wound in its skull.
Silence crashed down, heavier than before. Artemis swayed, his palm smoking, the skin red and blistered. Every wound screamed. His diamond lattice felt fractured, drained. He stared at the fallen abomination, its hellish light extinguished. He'd won. By the narrowest, most brutal margin imaginable. Not through overwhelming power, but through understanding, adaptation, and a desperate, diamond-hard will to survive.
He slumped to his knees beside the beast, the ice melting rapidly now around him, the forest's oppressive heat rushing back in. The victory tasted like ash and blood. The forge had tempered him, but the cost was etched in pain and the corpse of an impossible anomaly at his feet. Smoke curled from the blackened line between the beast's sightless eyes, mingling with the metallic stench of its blood and the ozone tang of unleashed thermal energy.
Then, a sensation colder than the ice he'd conjured pierced the haze of pain and fatigue. It wasn't sound. It wasn't sight. It was a pressure – an awareness – like the tip of an obsidian blade pressed between his shoulder blades. Ominous. Intelligent. Utterly alien.
His diamond-honed senses, frayed but still active, shrieked a silent alarm. Adrenaline, thin and desperate, surged through his battered system. He jerked his head around, muscles screaming in protest, eyes scanning the dense wall of ferns and shadowed trunks behind him.
There. Movement.
For less than a heartbeat, Artemis saw it. A figure. Vaguely humanoid, silhouetted against the deeper gloom beneath a colossal ironbark root. Tall, unnaturally slender. Its skin wasn't furred like the beast's; it was smooth, stretched tight over angular limbs, the color of weathered granite – a dead, uniform grey. And its eyes… twin points of smoldering crimson coals, fixed unblinkingly on him. Not bestial rage, but something colder. Calculating. Observing.
He blinked, the image seared into his retinas. The figure didn't flee. It didn't advance. It simply… ceased to be. One moment, a stark grey outline against the dark; the next, an empty patch of shadow where it had stood. No rustle of disturbed leaves. No ripple in the air. No trace it had ever existed, save for the icy dread flooding Artemis's veins and the phantom pressure fading from his spine.
The sheer wrongness of it, the silent, instantaneous disappearance, struck him like a physical blow. The exhaustion he'd been holding back crashed over him in a suffocating wave. His arms buckled. He fell backwards, landing hard on the blood-soaked, muddy ground, staring blankly at the patch of empty forest where the grey watcher had vanished. The world tilted, sounds muffled – Arthur's distant, frantic shouts, the drip of water, the fading hum of his own overstressed power.
I can't… The thought formed sluggishly, fighting through the fog of pain and shock. I can't really think of that right now. It was too much. The anomaly beast. The severed limb. The blood. The speed. The heat. And now… that. A silent, grey-skinned, red-eyed phantom watching from the shadows before dissolving into nothing. It defied everything, even the shattered rules the golden beast had represented. It felt older. Colder. More deliberate. Thinking about it felt like trying to grasp smoke – terrifying and futile. Survival demanded focus on the immediate: breathing, bleeding, not passing out. The phantom, the watcher, the impossible observer… it would have to wait. He closed his eyes, the image of those burning red coals lingering behind his lids, a new kind of chill settling deep into his core.