We left at first light.
Dawn came up over the amphitheater in soft rose and gold, the mist still pooled on the ground and curling around everyone's legs like it wanted to come along. Taetigkon stood at the edge of the dais, a tiger-shaped silhouette against the sunrise, watching us form up with that quiet approval of his.
It was a real column now. Yuri's ten fox illusionists out front in their light-bending robes. Five wolf-kin trackers on the flanks — Ryn among them; she'd come back in from Mara's settlement to lead this one herself, leaving two of her pack behind to keep watch over the thirty-seven. Three rabbit runners with message satchels, already vibrating with the need to be somewhere else. And the five of us in the middle — me, Minho, Seojin, Lisa, Jiyeon — packs loaded down with condensed rations, medical kits, purifiers, and the last of the nutrient bars we'd been hoarding.
Yuri walked beside me. Light crimson leather, a curved dagger at her hip, a short bow across her back, nine tails swaying in that slow rhythm she's always keeping. No heavy plate, no show. Just a person who is very obviously good at hurting things and doesn't need you to know it.
"Ready to climb living vines, Junha?" she asked.
I adjusted the strap on my plasma lance. "Ready to meet a couple hundred people who might shoot us on sight. The vines are honestly the part I'm worried about least."
She laughed, soft and warm. "Optimist."
Up ahead, Minho glanced back from where he walked with Ryn. "Keep the illusions tight until we're off the salt flats. No sense advertising ourselves to every scavenger between here and the ruins."
So we moved out in a loose diamond, the illusionists bending the light around the whole group until, from any distance, we were nothing but a wobble of heat-shimmer drifting across the plain. We left the red rock behind and struck north-east.
The first leg was brutal.
The salt flats went on for days — cracked white as far as you could see, glittering like somebody had smashed a glass ocean and left the pieces. The air tasted like metal. The wind carried a fine grit that worked its way into your eyes and your mouth and every joint of your gear. Our boots got heavy with caked salt. The water went faster than we'd planned for. No shade, no cover, nothing but blinding light and the endless crunch of our own footsteps.
On the second day, the flats tried to eat us.
There was no warning — just a low rumble I felt in my teeth before I heard it. Then the ground cracked open in a dozen places at once and heads came up out of it. Black, glossy, each one the size of a big dog, mandibles snapping like steel traps, compound eyes burning red. Bodies followed, armored in chitin that threw the sunlight back like obsidian. Dozens of them, pouring up in a widening ring, antennae locking right onto the heat the illusions couldn't completely hide.
Ryn's lip peeled back. "Salt-ant swarm. They hunt by vibration and heat. We're too heavy. Too loud."
Minho's void-blades came out in one motion. "Form up. Protect the center. Nobody runs — you run, they chase."
"Illusions!" Yuri snapped. "Now!"
The fox cadre threw up their hands and the flats bloomed with us — five fake versions of our group sprinting off in five directions, false heat, false footsteps echoing wrong across the crust. The ants froze, heads swiveling, mandibles clacking in pure confusion.
Most of them. Not all. A dozen broke straight for the real us, fast as anything that size has a right to be.
Minho took the first wave like he takes everything — without drama. Slid past a snapping mandible, put a blade through a leg joint, took the head off the next one in a single clean arc. Bodies dropping and twitching before they understood they'd lost.
I had my lance up by then. Short bursts — I've learned not to waste a charge — punching fist-sized holes through carapace. Two went down smoking. A third came in low and I rolled under it, came up behind, jammed the barrel into the soft seam under its abdomen and triggered the overload. It came apart in a spray of superheated everything. I'll spare you the smell.
Yuri was the thing in that fight I couldn't stop watching, even mid-swing. She moved through the ants like smoke with a grudge — tails whipping out, each tip lit with foxfire that was half illusion and half real heat, so the ants flinched back from flames that mostly weren't there, and in the flinch she'd drive that dagger straight into their eyes and be gone before they could answer.
Seojin held the center, and here's a thing I didn't know he could do until that morning: gold threads ripped out of his hands and wrapped three ants around the legs — Debt Bind — dragging them down mid-charge like he'd called in a loan they couldn't pay. Turns out the merchant has fangs. Behind him, Lisa worked a scavenged pistol with these economical little shots into the joints while Jiyeon kept one hand glowing, closing our cuts before they could even properly start bleeding. The rabbits ran circles, literally, drawing the ants off and vanishing before a single mandible found them.
Eight minutes. That's how long it took. Eight ugly minutes.
When the last one folded — carapace split, ichor going everywhere — the flats went quiet again, just our breathing and the hiss of all that chitin cooling down.
Minho wiped his blades. "Everyone whole?"
We were. A few shallow cuts already sealing under Jiyeon's glow. Nothing real.
Yuri sheathed her dagger, her tails still faintly lit. "Salt-ants don't swarm that big unless something stirred the nest." She looked out across the flats. "We're being watched."
I followed her eyes to the horizon. "Constellation scouts?"
"Or just bad luck," Minho said. But he didn't sound like he believed it, and neither did I. "Either way. We move."
We pressed on.
The flats finally broke up into canyons — deep, narrow cuts full of black sand and twisted stone, the air going cool and the shadows going long. On the ninth day the ground started tilting up under us, gently and then not gently at all.
And then we saw them.
Vines. Thick as tree trunks, green-black, veined all through with a slow-pulsing light, rising up out of the canyon floor like cables somebody had grown instead of built. Some hung loose. Others ran taut and straight up toward shapes hanging in the sky — towers, platforms, whole broken districts suspended hundreds of meters over our heads, held up by nothing but those vines. And there were lights up there. Tiny, warm, in windows and along walkways.
Human lights.
Ryn pulled the air over her tongue. "Humans above. Many. Fear-scent. Weapon oil. Generators." Her ears flicked. "They know something's coming."
Yuri's eyes narrowed. "Weapons down. All of them. We climb up there armed, they cut the vines before we reach the first platform."
"No blades, no lances, no guns," Minho agreed. "We go up empty-handed. We show them we're not a threat before we ever open our mouths."
So one by one we stripped down — void-blades, lances, pistols, daggers, all of it stowed into the packs the rabbit runners carried. Yuri set her bow and dagger aside like it physically hurt her. Even the wolves grounded their spears.
We went to the nearest big tether — one massive vine sunk into the canyon wall, thick enough across the top to actually walk on, pulsing faint with that inner light.
Yuri laid a hand flat against it. "It's alive. It's aware. It'll feel hostility coming off you. So stay calm. No sudden anything."
Minho went first, hands open, every step slow and deliberate. The vine shivered under his boots and held. I went after him. Then Yuri, tails tucked in close. Then the rest, the illusionists feathering the lightest cloaking shimmer over us to take the edge off how we looked.
It was a slow climb. The vine swayed under us like a living bridge, the wind keening through the canyon, the salt flats shrinking to a white sea far below while the floating ruins got bigger and bigger above — rusted steel and cracked concrete just hanging there, walkways swinging between the towers, the small shapes of people moving along the railings, watching us come.
Halfway up, the vine pulsed once under our feet — a warning, I swear it was a warning — and a thinner tendril uncoiled and brushed along Minho's leg, slow, like a curious snake deciding whether to bite. He went absolutely still. The tendril lingered. Tested. And drew back.
We kept climbing.
The top of the vine sank into a wide platform, ringed all the way around with barricades thrown together out of scrap metal and sandbags. And waiting behind them was a line of armed people — rifles, spears, crossbows — every one of them pointed at us.
A tall man stepped to the front. Mid-forties, short gray beard, eyes like flint that had given up being surprised by anything. Patched-up tactical gear, and on the shoulder a faded unit patch — Republic Security Forces, from a country that doesn't exist anymore.
"No weapons," he called. "State your business. Fast."
Minho lifted both empty hands. "We're from the Kim alliance. We came to talk. We've got food, medicine, and zero interest in a fight. We just want to speak to whoever leads here."
The man's eyes went over us — the unarmed group, the beast-kin, the fox princess with the faintly glowing tails. Then he dropped his rifle a few degrees. "Names."
"Minho. Junha. The rest are with us."
He breathed out through his nose. "Captain Elias Kane. I lead this settlement. You've got sixty seconds to talk me out of cutting that vine."
I stepped up next to my brother. This part, I wanted.
"You're two hundred people," I said. "You're cut off out here. You're running low — on food, on medicine, on time. I know, because we already found another group like yours, thirty-seven of them, southwest of here. We fed them. We healed the ones who were dying. We left guards so the raiders can't come back, and we promised them a place behind real walls when they're strong enough to make the trip." I held his hard, flat stare. "We're here to offer you the exact same thing. No conquest. No tribute. No catch we're hiding. Just an alliance. Safety. A future you can actually believe in."
Elias stared at me a long, long moment, hunting for the lie. I let him hunt. There wasn't one.
Then he jerked his head at the walkway behind him. "Come up. Slow. Hands where we can see them."
We climbed the last stretch onto the platform, and the guards parted — weapons still ready, but no longer aimed at our heads.
Elias waited at the end of the walkway with his arms crossed, and behind him the whole settlement opened up: towers strung together by swaying bridges, little gardens clinging to the rooftops, generators humming somewhere underneath it all, and kids — actual kids — peering out at us from the windows.
He looked at the two of us, really looked, the way Mara had.
"You're either the most foolish people alive," he said, "or the most sincere ones."
I gave him the only smile I had left in me — small and tired and completely honest.
"We're just trying to keep humanity from disappearing," I said.
He held my eyes another moment.
Then he uncrossed his arms.
"Follow me. We'll talk in the council chamber."
He turned and walked off into the ruins, and we followed him in — no weapons on us, no steel between us and two hundred frightened strangers, guarded by nothing in the world but the thin, brand-new thread of trust we'd just started to spin.
…to be continued.