The violet sky did not brighten. It deepened instead.
The bruised purple sky swallowed what little memory of light remained and the temperature at the base of the obsidian mountain dropped fast.
Grey stood with his back still close to the cold glassy stone, knife in hand, watching the shadow at the treeline.
His body was making its complaints known all at once.
Ribs bruised from a Neridian boot that felt like it belonged to a different lifetime.
His stomach was a hollow, aching void. His throat burned like hot ash, and his legs trembled with the frail weakness of muscles that had been given just enough sustenance for months to keep his heart beating and nothing more.
The Interface flickered in his peripheral vision.
[Status: Critical dehydration]
[Mana Circulation: 0.02% — Stagnant]
[Advice: Exertion without sustenance will lead to system collapse in 140 minutes.]
'I know,' he thought. 'One problem at a time.'
Deep inside his spirit seed, Kaz was there but silent.
The rescue from the burning lab had cost the great bat considerably, his energy spent in redirecting a Void Rift and wrapping a half-dead boy in shadow long enough to pull him through the cold nothing between worlds.
He had retreated into the deepest part of the seed to rest, adjusting to Grey's spirit the way something ancient and enormous takes time to settle into a new and considerably smaller space.
Grey pressed a hand briefly to his chest. The warmth was there, faint and steady, but the silence where Kaz's dry commentary usually lived had its own particular weight.
'Rest up,' he thought. 'I'll handle the first watch.'
The shadow at the treeline moved.
It detached from the roots of a massive gnarled blackened tree and came toward him with the low jerky gait of something that had forgotten what natural movement looked like.
The Interface surged without him asking, a pulse of blue-grey light scanning the approaching shape.
[Identification: Mist-hound | Aberrant (Corrupted)]
[Current Rank: F]
[Attributes: Blighted Fangs / Shadow-step]
[Threat: Lethal — In Host's Current Condition]
The creature stepped into the dim violet light and Grey took it in properly.
A hound in the vaguest sense, its fur matted with a black tar-like substance that dripped onto the soil and sizzled faintly on contact.
Where eyes should have been, two pits of flickering red madness that swallowed the light around them.
It didn't have a lower jaw. In its place a mass of blackened prehensile tongues licking at the air, tasting him.
An Aberrant. A creature the madness had taken completely, the mind long gone, leaving only a hunger that didn't end.
He had heard about them in the village but he had never stood in front of one before.
His knuckles went white around the hilt of the chipped knife.
'F-Rank,' he told himself. 'Just an F-Rank. You stood in front of a two-hundred-metre bat and didn't run. You broke divine chains. You can handle this.'
The system's warning sat unmoved in his peripheral vision.
'Lethal.'
He exhaled slowly.
'Fine. This game... I'll play.'
The Mist-hound made a sound that was not a howl. It was the sound of a woman screaming behind thick stone, muffled and distorted and deeply wrong in a way that bypassed the ears and went straight to somewhere older. Then it lunged.
Grey threw himself left on pure instinct, his shoulder slamming hard into the obsidian-rich dirt.
The hound soared over him, tongues snapping at the air where his throat had been a moment ago, and landed with a heavy thud before spinning back with the mindless focus of something that had nothing left in it except appetite.
He scrambled upright. His legs protested immediately and he ignored them.
He could feel the spirit seed pulsing near his heart, trying to feed him energy, the power pressing uselessly against a dam with no outlet.
Without an active node it was potential going nowhere, a river with no channel. He pushed the frustration aside and kept his eyes on the hound.
It crouched low. Its body shimmered at the edges, fur dissolving into black oily smoke that drifted and spread until the creature was gone entirely.
Grey whirled around, knife thrust forward, his breath caught and held tight in his chest.
Left. Right. Behind. The silence of the metallic forest pressed in from every direction, the only sound the faint clatter of blade-like leaves in the wind. The hound could be anywhere. It could be beneath him. It could be—
The Interface flickered. A jagged blue-grey line appeared in his vision, the predicted path cutting not to his sides or behind him but directly downward, beneath his feet.
He didn't question it. He dropped to one knee and drove the knife straight down with everything his malnourished arms had.
The blade sank into something soft and strangely resistant. The hound reappeared as it solidified beneath him, the knife buried deep at the juncture of its neck and shoulder, and the shriek it produced tore at Grey's eardrums and made his vision swim at the edges.
The blackened tongues lashed out immediately, wrapping around his forearm like caustic whips, the acidic burn cutting through his sleeve and into skin with a speed that suggested they had done this before.
He bit down on the scream trying to come out of his mouth and did not let go of the knife.
He twisted the blade and leaned his full weight forward, pinning the creature to the ground, teeth clenched tight.
The hound thrashed violently beneath him with a strength that surprised him for something marked as F-Rank. Its claws raked across his chest, tearing three shallow furrows through the thin fabric of his ragged tunic.
His blood and the beast's black blood pooled together in the dirt, mixing into something that smelled like burnt copper and rot.
'Don't let go,' he told himself through the white-hot flare of the acid burn climbing his arm. 'Don't you dare let go.'
"Die," he wheezed, forehead nearly against the cold matted fur. "Just die!"
The red pits flickered. Once, then twice.
The tongues loosened their hold. A final, violent shudder rippled through the hound's body, and then it fell completely still.
[F-Rank Aberrant exterminated]
[Experience Harvested: Trace Spirit Energy]
[Soul-fragments Recovered: 1/10 — Node 1]
Grey collapsed on top of the carcass and lay there, chest heaving, arm burning where the blisters were already forming along the acid marks.
He was covered in soot, black blood and things he preferred not to identify.
The violet sky above him pulsed with its low frequency hum, indifferent and unhurried and completely unbothered by what had just happened down here.
He waited for the Merry Child to show up. For the boy who had cried over a dead ferret at the edge of the forest at eight years old to surface and make himself known.
He didn't come.
The grief was there. He could feel its shape, enormous and patient, held behind the fog like water behind a dam.
In its place was only the cold clarity of someone who has survived something and is already calculating what comes next.
He sat up slowly and looked at the carcass.
[Identification: Edible protein — Tainted]
[Advice: Purify with fire before consumption. Aberrant meat carries high risk of soul-corruption.]
Grey stared at his trembling hands. No flint and no wood. Only a chipped knife.
He reached for a sharp piece of obsidian from the ground beside him and began the slow grim work of butchering his first kill.
He would find water. He would find a way to make fire.
He would find something else to kill tomorrow and the day after and however many days it took until Kaz woke and he was strong enough to do what needed doing.
He pressed his free hand briefly to his chest. The warmth behind his ribs was small and steady and asleep.
"I'm going to make it," he said quietly. "I'll handle it until you're back."
The first hour was over.
He was still alive.