The night swallowed sound in strange ways, stretching the clash of steel into long metallic echoes that seemed to drift through the mist like lost prayers. The basin where we stood was lit only by the faint bioluminescent glow of crawling plants clinging to stone and the sporadic flicker of distant lightning trapped behind the clouds. Those dim lights cast warped shadows that moved even when we did not, turning every jagged rock into a crouched predator and every ripple of fog into a stalking presence. The air tasted metallic and bitter, thick with the scent of blood from the fallen and the damp mineral breath of the mountains. The whispers in the mist were louder now, more seductive, threading through my thoughts with soft promises of surrender, of ending the running and the fighting and the loss. Quentin moved first.
He did not charge upright like a knight of ceremony but dropped low like a hunter. His long sword dragged along the ground as he advanced, the blade scraping stone and earth deliberately, sending a spray of dirt and splinters toward his opponent's face. The sound of metal grinding rock was harsh and grating, masking the rhythm of his steps. The enemy reacted with impressive speed, jerking his head back just enough to avoid the upward arc Quentin sent toward his jaw. Steel met steel in a sharp crack as the enemy's blade intercepted Quentin's follow-through. Sparks burst between them, briefly illuminating their visors and the tension in their shoulders. Quentin pivoted left without hesitation, using the recoil from the clash to rotate his hips and sweep again, forcing the enemy to give ground.
At the same time Sextus absorbed a strike that would have broken a lesser man. His opponent exploited the fatigue creeping into his movements, pressing him with tight, efficient blows meant to drain what remained of his stamina. I saw it in Sextus's posture the slight delay between parry and counter, the heavier breath beneath his helmet. Then something changed. The fury that had been simmering in him since our father's death, since the riot ship fell, since this mountain swallowed us, ignited all at once. It was not a scream or a roar but a silent detonation. His connection to Gunish surged violently, a primal pulse that I could feel even from where I stood. Gunish responded instantly, scales rippling as the massive serpent coiled tighter around Sextus's back, forming a living shield. When the enemy blade descended again, Sextus did not retreat. He met it head-on with his war axe, the impact reverberating like a bell struck in a tomb. Gunish's wing slammed into the enemy's flank in the same motion, sending him staggering sideways across the rock.
Sextus used Gunish's tail as leverage, launching himself upward in a sudden vertical burst that broke the enemy's line of sight. For a heartbeat Sextus vanished into mist, then Gunish lunged for the enemy's sword arm with jaws wide. The enemy reacted with brutal pragmatism, drawing a shock pistol and firing at point-blank range. The discharge cracked through the air, blue arcs of electricity flaring against Gunish's scales and forcing the serpent back with a hiss that rattled the stones beneath us. The smell of ozone layered itself over the copper of blood. While their clash raged in raw, furious strokes, the third enemy disappeared.
I felt it more than saw it. The space where he had stood seemed to empty, and the mist closed in like a curtain. My visor flickered with inconsistent heat signatures as decoy clusters landed around me, small devices bouncing off rock and erupting in bursts of sparks and crackling noise. They distorted my audio feed, creating phantom footsteps and false movement markers. The faint light from the glowing plants fractured against the sparks, casting chaotic shadows that shifted faster than I could consciously track. The whispers in the mist intensified, layered now with the soft clicking of night insects and the distant flutter of unseen wings. The taste of fear sharpened on my tongue, metallic and alive.
I moved toward the mountain wall deliberately, pressing my back against stone to narrow my exposure. The rock was cold through my armour, grounding and solid. "You thought you could escape elimination," the enemy's voice drifted through the fog, smooth and taunting. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. "You thought fate would turn blind if you ran fast enough."
I let the decoys spark and chatter without reacting to each one. Instead, I slowed my breathing and focused on the mist itself. The Cruoris Tractus was alive at night, and its currents shifted subtly when disturbed. A hunter moving through it would part the vapor in patterns too precise to be natural. I tracked those disturbances rather than the noise. "It is funny," I replied, projecting calm I did not fully feel, "how your friends cried when I tore fingers from them. How they begged for a warrior's death while hiding like vermin." My words were not only cruelty but bait, an attempt to provoke impatience. Silence followed, thick and electric.
"Did he try to pray?" I continued, allowing contempt to sharpen my tone. "Your heavenly demon with six hands. Where was he while they bled?" The mist stilled for half a heartbeat, and that was enough. A faint displacement at roughly thirty-five degrees to my right barely perceptible, but wrong. "If you come out," I added softly, "I will show you his tongue." He stepped.
I launched at the exact instant his weight shifted. My thrusters flared in a short, brutal burst that closed the distance before he could fully plant his foot. My blade drove through the seam of his shoulder plating with surgical precision, the resistance yielding beneath force and speed. His eyes widened behind his visor as the steel bit deep. "You filthy dog," he hissed, raising a shock weapon toward my abdomen. I twisted backward, letting the arc of electricity pass inches from my armour, then reversed momentum and cleaved upward, carving across his torso. The impact jolted my arms, but I did not relent. Four whistling blades left my gauntlet in rapid succession, embedding into his limbs and restricting movement just as I hurled a solar flash bomb at his feet.
The explosion of light tore the darkness apart. Every shadow vanished for a split second, revealing him fully human, young, and furious before the night tried to reclaim him. He attempted to pivot into concealment again, but the glare and embedded blades disrupted his rhythm. Around us the mountain basin pulsed with reflected brilliance, the bioluminescent plants momentarily overwhelmed by artificial day.
To my left, Quentin and Sextus moved in brutal synchronization once more, their strikes falling in high-low cadence that battered their opponents into retreat. Gunish recoiled and surged, driving the enemy backward with a hiss that echoed like a curse. For a fleeting instant I felt the relief of standing shoulder to shoulder with my brothers again, the bond unbroken despite chaos. Then the light faded, and the whispers returned louder than before.
The mist thickened, swallowing edges and dulling depth. Somewhere beyond sight, something larger shifted its weight, and the mountain itself seemed to breathe. The dread that had followed us since the riot ship's fall pressed harder now, stripping away illusions of control. We were fighting beautifully, tactically, efficiently but the land was older than our training, and the enemy within it moved with purpose. As I squared myself against the wounded man before me, blade steady and breath controlled, I understood that every victory here would be measured not in triumph but in survival measured by heartbeats.
Night in these mountains did not merely dim the world it corrupted it. The mist thickened until it felt alive, as though it had grown intent, as though it listened to breath and weighed heartbeats the way a butcher weighs meat. In pockets it turned venomous, not always visible, only betrayed by the way insects avoided it and the way the air tasted suddenly wrong and sharp, bitter, mineral-heavy, like licking cold iron. The faint lights of odd plants and burrowing glow-worms smeared across the wet stone, casting shadows that did not match the shapes that birthed them, and those shadows crawled in the corner of my vision like hands searching for a throat. Somewhere above, the Impnis circled in silent swarms, bat-things that hunted heat and sound with patient hunger, their wings whispering against the night like parchment being torn. The Cruoris Tractus did not sleep; it leaned closer, whispering in a hundred seductive voices that begged for surrender, begged for blood, begged for me to stop pretending that willpower was anything but a thin cloth against winter.
The wounded enemy bled heavily, dark and steaming in the cold air, yet he refused to fold. He moved with an odd, flowing discipline parries that didn't meet my steel head-on but slid along it like oil, dodges that looked lazy until they weren't, his sword always returning to line with a rhythm that made my instincts bristle. I heard the scrape of his boots on wet rock and the wet choked pull of his breathing through his damaged armour, and I knew he was trying to lure me into overcommitting, trying to make my anger do his work for him. Systema had taught me something my father's world rarely valued: do not fight force with force unless you are stupid or desperate; redirect it, borrow it, use it. I let my shoulders soften, let my hips loosen, shortened my steps until they were almost lazy, and then I flowed into his swing rather than away from it, cutting inside the arc where he expected empty air. My gauntlet took the sting of his blade at close range metal shrieking against reinforced plating while my sword made a small, brutal path into the soft gap beneath his ribs.
I committed to the dangerous method Professor Dame had drilled into my bones: close, closer, suffocatingly close, where the enemy's reach becomes a liability and yours becomes inevitability. I met his next parry with my forearm, not my blade, smashing his weapon off-line with the defensive bulk of my gauntlet, and drove my sword into his abdominal cavity with the clean decisiveness of a surgeon who no longer cares about saving the patient. The resistance was thick, wet, alive; I felt it give, then I twisted. The sound he made wasn't a scream it was a shocked exhale, a breath stolen mid-thought. He collapsed forward, and I didn't step back. I spun behind him while dragging my sword free in a single smooth motion, the steel drawing a bright, obscene line through him. My blade rose again and fell once, clean, efficient, almost gentle, taking his head as though ending an argument. His body didn't even understand it was dead for a heartbeat; then it crumpled into the mist like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
I didn't grant myself the luxury of staring. The whispers in the fog would have loved that would have used that moment of pride to thread poison into my thoughts so I sprinted toward Quentin's clash the instant the enemy dropped. I could hear it before I saw it: the ringing of blades, Quentin's heavy breath, the dull grunt of impact as he got forced backward over uneven ground. When I broke through the mist's curtain, I saw the enemy pressing him with ruthless precision, driving him toward a bad angle where a single misstep would mean a blade through the throat. Quentin fought like he always did low, brutal, refusing to die politely but fatigue and the night's terror were clawing at even his stubbornness. I threw whistling blades first, not to kill but to interrupt, to fracture the enemy's rhythm, and the enemy turned on instinct to parry the incoming shriek of steel.
That half-second was all Quentin needed. He stepped back, re-centering his stance, his shoulders squaring as if the world had just reminded him who he was. I launched upward, letting gravity boots bite and then release, using the arc of my leap to drop a heavy, momentum-fed strike onto the enemy's guard. The shock of impact rippled through his arms; I felt it through my own bones as steel met steel with the violence of a bell being struck in a cathedral. Quentin moved in the same heartbeat, his blade flashing low, cutting through the enemy's right leg with a savage efficiency that made the man's body forget how to stand. The enemy dropped with a sound half pain, half disbelief, and I ended it with a single descending strike that crushed through helm and skull, splitting the head like rotten fruit. The smell of blood rose warm in the cold air, thick and coppery, and I forced myself not to breathe too deeply, not to let the taste of victory become something else. "Princess," I rasped at Quentin, my voice rough with exertion and that lingering sick sweetness the mist kept trying to feed me. "Still trying to collect my head as a trophy?" Quentin's laugh came out strained, but it was real, and that alone steadied something inside me. "If I wanted your head," he wheezed, eyes bright with manic relief, "I'd charge you rent for it first." We moved immediately toward Sextus.
We found him bathed in violence. Gunish's massive coils glistened with blood, the serpent swallowing an enemy's arm as if it were nothing but gristle. Sextus stood amid it like a war statue carved from rage, his chest rising and falling in heavy, brutal pulls, his eyes too dark, too empty, as though something inside him had been given permission to drive. The air around them felt charged, thick with pheromones and heat and the animal electricity of a bond that had slipped out of human control. I stepped forward instinctively, my mouth forming his name, and Sextus turned with a speed that made my heart jump. Gunish coiled tighter, wings flaring, scales rasping as it shifted into a defensive posture that screamed threat. "Sextus," I barked, palms lifting slightly to show I wasn't attacking. "Get yourself together. The enemy is dead." His gaze didn't recognize me. It measured me.
The whispers in the mist swelled, delighted, eager this is where brothers kill each other, this is where love becomes meat and my stomach went cold. Sextus moved, a half-step that promised an axe through my visor, and Gunish surged in the same motion, tail flexing like a siege engine preparing to strike. I jumped back just as Quentin threw himself in, slamming Sextus with the flat of his heavy sword hard enough to rattle armour and pride. "You damned Ape," Quentin snapped, voice fierce and shaking with exhausted affection. "Wake up before you bite the wrong person."
Sextus' head snapped toward Quentin, rage flaring hotter, and for a heartbeat I thought we'd lose him to it. Quentin and I lunged together, grabbing him, forcing him down with desperate hands, shouting his name like it was a rope thrown to a drowning man. Gunish reacted instantly, protective and mindless its tail slammed into us with a force that tore breath from my lungs and hurled both Quentin and me into tree trunks. Pain shot up my spine; bark and frost exploded around my shoulders. The night spun, and the mist's whispers laughed like lovers. Then Sextus' voice cut through the haze ragged, furious, suddenly himself again. "Gunish. Stand down."
The serpent froze, trembling, then uncoiled with reluctant obedience. Sextus staggered to his knees, his breathing deep and uneven, like he'd just been dragged back from the edge of something hungry. Quentin and I pushed ourselves upright, both of us staring at Gunish with the kind of respect that borders on fear. Power like that did not belong on a leash; it belonged in legends and graveyards.
It was too late to linger. The night grew heavier, the mist more predatory, the whispers more intimate promises of rest, of giving up, of letting the cold take over and make everything simple. I forced my focus onto action, onto procedure, onto anything that wasn't my mind being tugged by invisible hands. "Scan," I ordered, voice hard, and linked Sextus' spike to mine and Quentin's with shaking fingers. The connection pinged in my visor real, measurable, sane expanding our search radius into something that felt like control. "Check for wounds. Markers. Anything they planted on you. Loot what you can from the bodies. Five minutes."
Gunish took watch, coiling near a massive tree like a living wall, wings half-spread, eyes locked on the darkness. Quentin and Sextus moved quickly through the dead, retrieving three shock pistols with a dozen rounds between them and scavenging six enemy gravity-boot energy cells, but there was nothing else no data hubs, no markings, no insignia, no easy answers. It was as if these men were built to die without leaving a trail, as if even their silence had been engineered.
We had just dropped to rehydrate, the cold water tasting of stone and fear, when Gunish's telepathic warning hit Sextus like a spear. Move.
I didn't have time to ask why. A massive rock an entire slab came whistling through the mist with an ugly sound like the sky itself being torn. Sextus hesitated for a fraction of a second, unsure which direction was safe, and Gunish acted without waiting for human indecision. The serpent dropped, coiling around the three of us, scales and wings forming a shelter just as the rock slammed into the ground beside us with catastrophic force. The impact shook the mountain's bones. Dirt and shattered stone blasted outward, the vibration punching through my armour and into my teeth. Gunish roared not a hiss, not a warning, but a pain-fueled bellow that sounded like something ancient being wounded.
The ground began to rumble unevenly after that, not like an earthquake but like footsteps. Something massive was running. The mist trembled with each impact, and the whispers turned ecstatic, as if the land itself was hungry to watch us scatter.
"South," I snapped, voice raw. "Fast and low. Constant short-comms checks. Eyes on movement anything that flickers, you call it." Quentin and Sextus nodded without argument. We ran, cutting through terrain that tried to trip us bones the size of pillars, thorn-plants slick with venom, frost-slick stones that threatened to steal our footing. Behind us the rumble grew closer, faster, heavier, and the air seemed to compress as though whatever pursued us carried its own gravity.
"Two kilometers," I panted into the comms, visor flickering with imperfect readings. "Sharp turn southwest. There's a ridge we launch off it and pray whatever's behind us can't follow clean." the words felt heavier with step step, "Copy," Quentin replied, voice tight, breath ragged. "Two klicks, sharp turn." the pain in his voice becoming more evident, then "Copy," Sextus echoed, steadier now but still carrying the tremor of what he'd almost become.
We hit the turn like blades snapping. We sprinted harder, lungs burning, legs screaming, mist tearing at our vision. The ridge rose ahead like a dark mouth, and just as we reached the point of launch, two figures appeared overhead leaping across our path in a blur heading straight toward the thing chasing us. I skidded to a stop, heart punching my ribs, and checked the map with frantic focus, trying to decide if we'd been intercepted or saved.
A horrible noise erupted from the mist behind us fast movement, deep roars, the sound of flesh meeting stone and something cracking that should not have been able to crack. Then, abruptly, silence. A dead, swallowing hush. The uneven rumble returned a moment later, but now it was moving away from us, retreating into the mountains as if chased by something worse. I held my breath so hard my chest ached.
Out of the darkness and mist, two shapes emerged first the silhouette of a beast, then the man beside it and the sight hit me like grief made physical. Whitescale and Odowah stepped into the faint glow of night-plants, covered in scars and blood, moving with a calm that did not belong to the world we were in. Around Odowah's neck hung a rope of heads of the enemies and broken creatures' horns worn like trophies, like warnings, like offerings. Whitescale's face remained partially shadowed, his eyes unreadable, his presence so primal it made even Gunish still. For a heartbeat I couldn't tell if he was salvation or a new nightmare wearing a familiar name. Then Whitescale spoke, voice low and urgent, and the mist seemed to recoil from it.
"Good," he said, as if surviving was an inconvenience he'd expected us to manage. "You're alive. Now move. We have a big problem."