The humanoid skin-walker walked with slow, unhurried steps toward where Luke lay unconscious in the ruined garden.
Ingis forced herself up, her battered, broken armor groaning as rusted plates ground against each other. It was falling apart, held together by sheer, desperate will alone. Leaning heavily on her greatsword as a crutch, she planted her boots into the cracked earth, adjusted her stance, and leveled the blade at the monster.
A sudden, fierce luminescence ignited across her fractured plating. The ambient air scorched, growing rapidly heavier and hotter, while the dead vines baking on the ground began to curl and smoke.
The skin-walker paused, turning its head back to look at her with an expression of pure, unadulterated disgust.
As long as she drew breath, it would not touch her master.
Ingis erupted. Her armor burned like a molten forge; her broadsword blazed with white-hot fury; the very mana in the atmosphere ignited around her. But the skin-walker remained completely unaffected, its form shimmering out of existence.
*Instinct.*
Ingis whipped around, violently swinging her burning blade backward into the empty air. The skin-walker materialized, casually catching the edge of her flaming sword with its bare hand.
Realizing steel was useless, she let go of the hilt entirely. Every ounce of remaining kinetic force, every drop of core energy she possessed, channeled into her right arm. She slammed her fist forward.
*CRACK.*
Her metal-encased knuckles connected squarely with the skin-walker's face.
The colossal creature actually shifted its head back from the impact. It blinked, raising a hand to touch the spot where it had been struck. Slowly, its eyes bored into Ingis, its annoyance soaring past every conceivable limit.
"All that... for a scratch," it muttered, its voice dripping with venomous disgust.
Ingis stood motionless, her core flickering out.
The skin-walker flicked its wrist, casually tossing her discarded sword aside. It shifted its posture, preparing to finish her with raw, humiliating pugilism. But before she could even blink, the creature vanished, its spatial movement an impossible blur.
It reappeared inches from her chest, driving a devastating punch straight into her helmet.
The impact launched her backward like a cannonball toward a nearby building. Before she could even cross the distance, the skin-walker tore through space again, reappearing directly above her descending arc. It brought its heel down like a meteor, smashing her straight into the stone below.
A small crater spiderwebbed into the earth.
The creature offered no quarter. It rained brutal, piston-like punches down onto her helmet. With every sickening blow, fresh cracks fractured her Tatrium armor, and the ground beneath her depressed deeper into the dust. Over and over, it hammered away, showing no mercy, until Ingis was dragged right to the threshold of absolute destruction.
When it finally stopped, Ingis lay motionless at the bottom of the crater, a broken, bleeding mass of metal and ruin.
The skin-walker wiped a smear of blood from its knuckles, looked down at the wreckage, and vanished.
### The Aftermath of Silence
The garden fell back into a heavy, suffocating quiet.
Reo lay unconscious near the destroyed fountain. Ingis was broken in the crater. Silvia was knocked completely cold meters away, and Azula was disabled with a fractured neck and shattered ribs. There was no one left to bar the path.
The skin-walker materialized by Luke's side, scooped up his unconscious body with careless ease, and vanished into the shadows, leaving behind an empty, bleeding battlefield.
Minutes later, hurried, limping footsteps echoed through the rubble.
Alpha, Lyra, and Maya emerged from the surrounding alleys, battered, exhausted, and desperately clinging to consciousness. Maya clutched a violently broken hand against her chest; Lyra's staff was entirely missing; and Alpha was bleeding, its jaws lacking several fangs.
They had survived only by sheer, unmitigated luck when the skin-walkers had suddenly vanished all at once across the district. If the assault had lasted another minute, they would all be knocking on death's door.
"Maya!" Lyra cried out, her voice cracking as she peered over the edge of the central crater and discovered Ingis barely clinging to life.
Maya slid down the embankment, Alpha flanking her closely. Without wasting a second on words, she swiped her hand across the air, summoning her first-aid pack from her dimensional ring.
Her fingers flew over the contents. *Seven bottles of high-grade healing potions left.*
She grabbed three, uncorking them in rapid succession, and poured them directly over Ingis's mangled form. The broken cybernetic shell absorbed the glowing liquid, the restorative mana going to work on the catastrophic internal damage.
With a faint chime of dispersing energy, Ingis's heavy armor dissolved into ethereal balls of light, forcing her to revert to her small, fragile chick form. Maya swiftly began wrapping tight bandages around her tiny body to stabilize her broken wings.
"What... what happened here?" Lyra whispered, finally looking up to take in the full scope of the devastation.
The outer district was leveled. Rubble choked the pathways. Using their wrist-mounted rune trackers, they frantically scanned for the rest of their cohort.
The results were chilling.
Silvia was discovered embedded in the wall of a collapsed storefront. Azula lay twisted and broken in the grass. Reo was slumped unconscious over the pulverized fountain. Every single one of them was in critical condition—far worse off than Maya and Lyra.
Alpha trotted over to Reo, pressing its snout gently against his cheek, whining softly in a desperate plea for him to wake up.
Maya handed two potions to Lyra while clutching the final two to her chest. They split up immediately; Maya rushed to administer a potion to Silvia, while Lyra frantically treated Azula and poured the last drops over Reo.
As consciousness slowly trickled back into their teammates, Lyra stepped back, wiping sweat and dirt from her brow, and looked around the courtyard.
That was when the horrifying realization struck her.
"Maya... have you given Luke a healing potion yet?" Lyra asked, her voice trembling slightly as she noticed Maya holding only a single, unused bottle.
Maya paused, frowning in confusion. "I thought you went straight for him. I haven't seen him at all."
Something was deeply, fundamentally wrong. Lyra refused to believe it, her chest tightening with panic. She channeled the last dregs of her mana into the tracking rune embedded in her bracer, bringing up the holographic interface.
She counted the blinking green dots.
*Seven.*
Counting themselves, one dot was glaringly, impossibly absent.
Lyra stared at the screen, blinking back hot tears of denial. But the math didn't lie. Luke wasn't here. He wasn't in the crater, he wasn't under the rubble, and he wasn't on the tracker.
The skin-walkers had taken him.
Slowly raising her head, Lyra locked eyes with Maya, seeing the exact same look of absolute horror mirrored on her face. Lyra's knees buckled, and she collapsed backward, sitting heavily on a pile of gray rubble.
"What... what should we do now?" Lyra breathed, despair finally sinking its icy talons into her spirit. "You saw what a single encounter with them resulted in. And you know how impossible it is for us to survive this labyrinth without Luke... What are we even going to do now?"
Maya stood frozen, her gaze shifting to the empty space where Luke had lain, her hand subconsciously gripping her broken wrist. For the first time since their journey began, she had no answers.
"Right now..." Maya forced the words out past the lump in her throat, her voice hollow. "...let's focus on tending to our friends."
She tossed the remaining potion to Lyra. "Use it" she waved her hand as she walk away "You're in a much severe condition than me"