Azula kept staring down at the glowing communication rune embedded in her skin, the harsh blue light painting her pale face in stark relief. The horrifying truth crashed over her like a freezing wave: Maya had sold them out. The sanctuary they thought they had was a cage, and right now, a horde of skin-walkers was marching directly toward them to slaughter everything in their path.
She whipped her head toward Reo, stark terror carved into every line of her expression.
"What is it, Azula?" Reo asked, instantly dropping his guard as he saw her panic.
She stammered, fighting to force the words past her constricted throat. "Silvia... Maya... they're gone. And skin-walkers... a whole horde of them. They're coming to kill us."
Reo frowned, his tactical instincts flaring. "How could you possibly know that?"
Taking a ragged, stabilizing breath, Azula forced her panic down and spilled everything—Maya's betrayal, the active frequency, the warning.
Reo didn't hesitate. He pushed himself off the floor, his jaw set in grim determination. "Then let's go. We can still outrun them if we move now."
Azula caught his arm, her grip iron-tight, pulling him back. "No... Reo, we can't." Her voice broke, a bitter tear spilling over her lashes. "Maya was right. Sometimes... you have to make sacrifices just to survive this place."
Reo turned, staring at her in disbelief.
At that exact second, the building shuddered. The windowpanes rattled violently in their frames. Reo instinctively flicked his wrist, pulling up his holographic tracking bracer.
His blood ran cold.
Dozens of angry, glowing red dots were rapidly converging on their position, forming an inescapable ring of death.
"You see? We can't escape," Azula whispered, watching as Reo's face contracted in absolute horror. "Even if we miraculously break through the perimeter... how long do you think we'd last out there alone, injured, and hunted?"
Reo kept his mouth clamped shut. He knew she was right in his head, but his heart violently refused to acknowledge it. He wasn't going to leave her here to die alone.
"Reo, run," Azula pleaded, her voice cracking. "I'll try to buy you time."
"I won't—" Reo started, stubborn fury burning in his chest.
*Whoosh.*
Azula channeled the absolute remainder of her mana into a sudden spatial thrust, activating an emergency displacement card. The shadows beneath Reo swallowed him whole before he could finish his sentence, violently spitting him out through a dark alleyway far, far away from the encroaching horde.
Instantly, Reo summoned his holographic screen back up with trembling fingers.
The red dots were already closing in on the safehouse. A few red markers flickered and vanished from the grid—indicators that Azula was fighting back with everything she had. But a cold knot twisted in his stomach: she was completely out of mana. She had expended every last drop of her energy to shove him away. She was weak, battered, injured, and entirely alone against a stampede of monsters.
Activating his bond skill, Reo shoved past his own physical limits, sprinting frantically back toward her location. He poured everything into his stride, covering vast distances in agonizingly short stretches, but his heart hammered against his ribs with a sickening realization: *I'm not going to make it.*
Back at the safehouse, the front wall was entirely obliterated.
Azula stood amidst the rubble, barely able to keep her posture upright. A handful of weaker skin-walker corpses lay scattered around her boots, proof of her fierce resistance, but her arms trembled so violently she could barely keep her sword pointed forward. She leaned heavily against the flat of her blade, panting for air that tasted like ash.
From the shadows below, a skin-walker launched itself upward.
She dodged by a hair's breadth, but the evasive maneuver left her entirely exposed. A second creature lunged from her blind spot, hurling its massive, razor-sharp claw straight at her midsection.
*CRASH.*
The blow hit her square in the chest, sending her flying backward like a ragdoll. She collided violently with the inner stone wall, her body slumping downward.
Before she could even catch her breath, the first skin-walker followed up, driving a brutal, clawed fist straight into her ribs.
*CRACK.*
The sickening sound of bone splintering echoed through the ruins as her torso twisted at an unnatural, horrifying angle. The momentum hurled her bodily through the remaining backing wall into the alleyway outside.
As she hit the dirt, a massive, grotesque maw lunged from the shadows below, snapping shut around her lower torso, rows of jagged, predatory teeth sinking deep into her stomach.
"Stop."
A single, commanding voice cut through the air like frozen steel.
The snapping jaws instantly froze inches away from tearing her apart. The swarm of skin-walkers crowding the alley began to violently tremble, dropping their heads in sheer, instinctual terror.
Azula coughed up a dark spray of blood, her vision blurring at the edges as she forced her heavy eyelids up.
Standing casually atop a nearby crumbling roof, the towering, humanoid skin-walker stared down at her with cold, indifferent eyes. It didn't even look at the creature holding her.
"Master has a use for her," the alpha skin-walker stated, its voice carrying an eerie, absolute authority that echoed across the ruins. "Bring her to him alive."
At its command, the lesser beasts backed away, terrified to even draw breath in its presence. With a lazy, dismissive flick of the creature's fingers, the entire horde dissolved into the shadows, vanishing into the mist as if they had never been there at all.
Reo arrived at the location. The place was destroyed, rubbles scattered all over the place yet there was no one in sight.
He summoned the holographic screen, Azula, Luke and Ingis were surrounded by swarms of skin walkers at the center of the city.