Reo and Luke moved with tactical precision, sliding step-for-step down the short hallway until they reached the closed wooden door.
Luke signaled with a sharp chop of his hand, and Reo pushed the handle down, throwing the door open in a fluid motion.
Inside, the room was startlingly tidy. There was no dust, no debris, and in the corner, a skin-walker was quietly making a small, neat bed using folded blankets.
When the door creaked open, the creature paused. It turned its featureless, plain face toward Luke and Reo. There was no immediate hostility in its posture; in fact, its blank expression radiated a strange, innocent confusion, as if it had simply been interrupted while doing household chores.
Reo's defensive posture instinctively lowered for a fraction of a second. But Luke remained frozen, every alarm bell in his nervous system screaming.
With a silent flick of his wrist, an earth blade materialized in Luke's hand, its jagged point leveling straight at the creature's chest.
The skin-walker didn't flinch. It blinked its smooth face and looked down at the glowing sword, tilting its head sideways with a baffled expression, as if it genuinely couldn't comprehend what a weapon was supposed to be used for.
Then, slowly, the skin-walker straightened up. It grew taller, stretching its limbs until it physically towered over both Luke and Reo. It reached out and casually tapped the edge of Luke's earth blade with a long, grey finger, as if to dismiss the weapon entirely—communicating a chilling message without words: *Mundane things like steel don't work on me.*
Luke steeled his emotions, clamping down on his rising panic. Beside him, Reo's hand twitched toward his belt to draw his aura blade.
For a terrifying heartbeat, nobody moved. A tense, suffocating standoff hung in the balance, neither side willing to throw the first punch.
Then, the skin-walker's posture snapped. Its mouth ripped open into a horrific, jaw-dislocating gape.
*REEEEE—!*
An ear-piercing shriek tore through the room, echoing down the hallway like a siren.
Luke didn't hesitate. With brutal, calculated speed, he stepped inside its reach and drove his blade across the creature's throat in a single, fluid strike.
It was already too late.
As the gurgling beast collapsed heavily onto the spotless floor, the red dot representing it on Luke's palm-rune abruptly flickered out. It was dead.
"What the hell was that for?" Reo hissed, jumping back to avoid the thick, dark blood pooling across the floorboards.
"It wasn't trying to fight us," Luke answered, his voice deathly calm as he stared at the ceiling. "It was sending out a distress call."
"How do you—?"
Reo cut himself off. On the edge of his vision, a bright red dot suddenly flashed to life on the tracking matrix, surging toward them from the depths of the city at a terrifying, unnatural speed. Simultaneously, a second red dot appeared from the opposite direction, converging on their position like a pincer.
"We have to leave. Now," Reo said, his voice tightening with panic.
"And go where?" Luke countered sharply. "If we run blindly through the streets now, we'll just attract a swarm of them. It's best if we end this here—quick and silent."
It was deeply frustrating timing. Luke was still recovering his exhausted mana reserves and couldn't trigger **Aethelgard's Mantle** without frying his core. He would have to manage this entirely on raw physical discipline and standard combat arts.
*Azula, you and the rest handle the one approaching your sector,* Luke mentally communicated through the runic network while Reo was distracted. *Don't draw attention. Finish the battle, fast and silent.*
Luke decided against battling with his earth sword. His mana still insufficient and aethelgard's mantle out of reach, it would be a liability to maintain the sword while fighting.
A new, high-grade steel sword materialized in Luke's grip where the unstable earth blade had been dismissed. The metal gleamed coldly in the dim light. His mind instantly slipped into deep, icy battle clarity, wiping away all extraneous thought.
*CRASH.*
The structural wall directly to their left exploded inward. Slabs of ancient stone shot across the room like shrapnel.
Luke ducked hard, letting a flying chunk of masonry sail harmlessly over his head.
Through the dust cloud stepped a skin-walker far taller and more heavily muscled than any they had encountered so far. Unlike its predecessor, this one possessed a single, burning crimson eye embedded right in the center of its featureless forehead—resembling a lesser variant of the Void Guardian they had fought at the gate, though lacking its reality-warping spatial aura.
The beast stared down at the slain skin-walker lying in the tidy bedroom. Then, its single red eye snapped up to fix on Luke.
With a sickening wet sound, its long arms rapidly morphed and elongated, hardening into razor-sharp crescent blades of black bone.
It swung with devastating speed.
Luke dropped low, sliding beneath the arc to target the creature's flank. His steel blade connected with its ribs, but the moment the metal made contact, the creature's skin instantly hardened into diamond-dense material, sending a violent shock up Luke's arms and bouncing the sword away without leaving a single scratch.
The beast's other blade swept low in a vicious counter-swipe.
Luke leaped upward, twisting his torso mid-air to drive a powerful, upward kick straight into the creature's jaw.
*Swish!*
Reo burst from the shadows behind the beast, driving his aura blade downward toward its spine. The glowing energy blade struck home, but only managed to carve a shallow, smoking groove into its back.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Reo cursed.
The skin-walker spun around with impossible velocity, slamming a heavy elbow directly into Reo's face. The impact sent Reo spinning wildly through the air, crashing hard through the opposite wall and tumbling out of the building.
Now, the creature's absolute, undivided malice was locked entirely on Luke.
Luke gritted his teeth, his muscles burning. This was turning into a brutal endurance match. He deliberately minimized his mana consumption, restricting it strictly to reinforcing his physical speed and reflexes.
The skin-walker lunged, a barrage of high-speed strikes turning the entire hallway into a lethal web of flashing silver cuts.
Luke weaved through the storm by a hair's breadth. Seeing a fractional opening in the flurry, he took a dangerous gamble: he hurled his steel sword straight at the beast's single red eye, while simultaneously throwing his hands out to grab the dull, unsharpened parts of the creature's oncoming forelimbs.
The raw momentum of the skin-walker's strike threw Luke backward, slamming him hard against the stone wall. The breath rushed out of his lungs in a sharp gasp.
The creature tried to tilt its head to dodge the incoming flying sword, but Luke tightened his grip like a vice, using every ounce of his remaining strength to yank the beast's arms downward, forcing its head directly into the path of his thrown blade.
*SQUELCH.*
The steel sword sank deep into the skin-walker's glowing red eye.
"It's not over yet," Luke thought, his eyes blazing.
The blinded creature went completely berserk, thrashing its limbs wildly in every direction, trying to rip itself apart to get to him.
Luke didn't hesitate. He slid low beneath the flailing arms, scrambled forward, and gripped the handle of the sword still embedded in the beast's skull. Channeling a burst of volatile fire-mana into the hilt, the blade instantly erupted into roaring, white-hot flames.
With a roar of effort, Luke ripped the burning sword upward, carving a fiery trench through the creature's head.
Just as the skin-walker tried to swing its remaining arm to cut Luke in half, Reo reappeared behind it like a ghost, driving his aura blade straight through the back of its skull.
The towering beast shuddered violently, then slumped forward onto the floor, motionless.
A second later, the red dot representing the creature on Luke's palm-rune blinked out of existence. Across the network, the other red dot vanished simultaneously.
The hallway fell back into a heavy, echoing silence.