The silence of the commercial district shattered without warning.
From the elongated, pitch-black shadows of a collapsed storefront, a figure slinked out into the pale, bruised twilight. At a glance, it wore the rough shape of a man, but the geometry was all wrong—its limbs were too long, its joints bending at sickening, impossible angles.
When it spoke, the sound was initially a cacophony of overlapping, distorted frequencies, like a radio dial spinning wildly through static and overlapping screams. *"We... u-u-n-fi-ni-shed... b-b-usi-ness..."*
Then, abruptly, the static snapped shut, smoothing out into a chillingly clear, conversational cadence.
"Our master and Luke have unfinished business," the humanoid skin-walker murmured, tilting its head until a sickening *crack* echoed through the alley. Its hollow eyes locked onto Reo. "Hand him over to us, and I will let the rest of you walk away from this dead city in peace."
Reo's heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Every instinct in his body screamed in red alert; his hands trembled uncontrollably around the hilts of his dual blades. The creature ment business and Reo wasn't ready to hand Luke over.
He had faced down elite monsters, spatial anomalies, and terrifying swarms, but standing before this creature, he knew with absolute certainty that this was the single strongest, most oppressive foe he had ever encountered.
He swallowed the lump in his throat, forcing his voice to steady. "And if we don't?" he asked, his eyes narrowing. "What happens then?"
The skin-walker let out a dry, rattling chuckle—an expression of smug anticipation, as if it had rehearsed this exact dialogue a thousand times. It casually flicked its fingers.
*Whoosh.*
Instantly, the surrounding rooftops and alleyways bled darkness. A multitude of skin-walkers—pitch-black and entirely translucent, shifting like liquid shadows—dropped down, completely surrounding the strike team.
The chaos erupted in a deafening crescendo of shrieks and flashing steel.
The humanoid skin-walker didn't even deign to join the immediate fray, watching with detached amusement as the swarm swarmed forward. Realizing they were completely outmatched in a war of attrition, Reo roared over the din of battle, barking the only order that mattered.
"Get Luke out of here! Now!"
Ingis wasted no time. Transforming instantly into her majestic phoenix form, she scooped the still-recovering Luke onto her back with a powerful sweep of her wings, rocketing straight up toward the open sky above the gateway.
*"You're not going anywhere,"* the humanoid skin-walker hissed, vanishing from the ground and reappearing fifty feet in the air.
As Ingis banked desperately to avoid a barrage of condensed void projectiles slicing through the air, the ground below retaliated. A jagged, shadow-infused spear shot upward from the earth like a striking viper, grazing Ingis's wing and sending her careening off balance. The phoenix spiraled out of control, crashing violently into the overgrown, rotting ruins of the garden they had fought the vine beast.
Back in the commercial district, Reo and the remaining members were drowning under an ocean of teeth and claws.
"Azula! Is it ready?!" Reo screamed, parrying a blow that rattled his bones.
Down in the dirt, blood dripping from her forehead, Azula was frantically carving a complex web of runes into the cobblestones. She was weaving an emergency spatial teleportation spell under heavy fire.
Just as the runes flared to life with a blinding, desperate blue brilliance—ready to swallow them whole—a massive skin-walker slammed its fist into the center of the array.
*CRACK.*
The spell detonated in a backlash of raw mana, scattering the runes and hurling the team in opposite directions. The shockwave fractured the group entirely.
When the dust settled, Azula was left isolated in the wreckage of the street. Lyra, Alpha, and Maya had been hurled together into a defensive cluster near a shattered storefront.
Reo and Silvia, meanwhile, tumbled hard, crash-landing into the very house where Reo had fought his second grueling skirmish with Luke . Panting heavily, Reo checked his rune tracker for his teammates. The holographic interface flickered to life, projecting a terrifying reality: numerous hostile red dots were rapidly converging on their separated teammates, with two distinct green dots flashing in isolated peril.
*We have to move. Our friends are in trouble.*
Desperate to reach their friends before it was too late, Reo tapped directly into his bond skill.
His veins burned with liquid fire. His speed magnified fivefold in a single heartbeat, and his physical form completely phased out of the visible spectrum. Cloaked in invisibility, he dashed forward like a streak of phantom lightning toward the green dots—leaving Silvia behind for a split second as he crossed the distance.
At the crashed site in the overgrown garden, Ingis had already shifted back into her towering, heavy Tatrium knight form. She was barely holding her ground.
Combat against the humanoid skin-walker had reached a nightmarish extreme. In this world, the longer skin-walkers survived and hunted, the higher their chance of mutation—and this particular monster had evolved the most lethal power of all: **spatial dominance**.
It didn't just move fast; it rewrote the distance between them.
Ingis swung her colossal greatsword with enough force to cleave a boulder in half, but the blade cleaved nothing more than empty air. The skin-walker simply wasn't there anymore. It flickered, reappearing a fraction of a second later right inside her guard, delivering a devastating, momentum-heavy blow straight into her chest plate.
*Clang-BOOM!*
The sound of shattering metal echoed. Ingis coughed up a spray of metallic fluid inside her helm, her knees buckling. Her heavy armor was dented inward, spiderweb cracks webbing across the sacred Tatrium metal. She could barely stand. Her vision swam, the edges of her consciousness fading to black.
*I won't let you pass,* she growled internally, her core burning with absolute, unyielding loyalty. *To reach my master, you have to turn me to dust.*
"Persistent little toy," the skin-walker sighed, raising a hand edged in razor-sharp void energy for the killing blow.
Suddenly, the air behind the creature warped.
Reo, still invisible and burning through his bond-boosted stamina, dropped out of the air like a falling star, his dual blades descending in a silent, lethal arc aimed straight for the skin-walker's neck.
*Clang!*
With casual, almost lazy indifference, the skin-walker vanished a millimeter before the steel connected.
Reo's eyes widened in sheer horror. Before he could readjust his momentum, a heavy foot slammed into his ribs.
*Gasp!*
Reo flew backward like a shattered ragdoll, crashing straight through the stone basin of the garden fountain, sending debris exploding into the air.
Before the spray could even hit the ground, emerald green vines violently erupted from the soil beneath the skin-walker, wrapping tightly around its ankles and torso to lock it in place.
The skin-walker strained its muscles. With a sickening sound of tearing fibers, it simply flexed, snapping the reinforced vines like dry thread.
It turned its cold, dead eyes toward someone in the sky.
Suddenly, a fierce gale of razor-sharp wind shrieked through the garden—Silvia unleashed a tempest to cover their retreat.
The skin-walker didn't even flinch. It vanished into a fold of space.
*Thud.*
It reappeared directly behind Silvia in mid-air. Before she could react, the creature drove its elbow downward with cataclysmic force, connecting squarely with the back of her head.
Silvia's eyes rolled back. She dropped like a stone, plunging straight down and smashing hard into the stone foundation of a nearby building meters away, lying motionless in the rubble.
Silence swallowed the garden, save for the crackling of dying mana.
The skin-walker landed casually on the blood-stained grass, taking a slow, unhurried step toward the unconscious form of Luke lying by the edge of the crater.
Only Ingis stood in its path.
Her armor was a mangled wreck, her internal core flickering like a dying candle. Irritated by her bottomless stubbornness, the skin-walker raised its hand, intending to drive its fist straight through her chest and end the charade once and for all.
It materialized behind her in a blur of spatial displacement, its hand glowing with lethal void-light.
*Swish.*
It lunged forward—and stopped.
A bloodied, trembling hand had reached out from the side, gripping the skin-walker's wrist with desperate, ironclad strength.
Azula, coughing up warm blood, held onto the creature's arm with everything she had left. It was a futile gesture, an act of sheer, irrational defiance that bought Ingis barely a split second of time.
That split second was all the knight needed.
Ingis violently twisted her body, throwing herself sideways just as the skin-walker's other elbow drove forward, slamming into her stomach with enough force to crack her armor clean in half.
As Ingis collapsed into the dirt alongside Azula, the path to Luke lay completely open.