Wisps coiled around his boots.
They were not smoke, not quite. They behaved more like living darkness—thin, stretching strands that reached for his ankles. As they gathered, a small, hunched figure coalesced, eyes black and wide, body wrapped in trailing shadow.
Then it split.
One became five, each smaller, each darting for hiding places: under the bed, inside a broken wardrobe, behind torn curtains, under a fallen chair, near the door. From each direction, whispers rose—fragments of grief, fear, and anger layered together.
If any part escapes, it can reform.
Noctis grabbed a broken lamp from the floor, checking its fuel.
He smashed it against a stone, coaxing out a sudden flare. Light flooded the room, pushing shadows back. The wisps shrieked—an eerie, childlike wail—and their bodies blistered where the light hit.
He moved quickly, charting their patterns.
One darted for the bed—he slashed it as it dove. Another tried to slip into the wardrobe—he kicked the door shut and drove his sword through the wood. The third and fourth lunged together; he spun, blade cutting through both mid-leap.
The last fragment hurled itself straight at his throat.
He dropped to one knee, letting it overshoot, then swung upward, pinning it to the floor with a clean, decisive strike. It writhed, then dissolved. The whispers faded.
Echoes swirled around him, tinged with a sadness that lingered even as the Echoframe absorbed them.
ECHO GAINED: Shadow Dissolve +1%
Core boosted: Stealth in darkness and movement through shadow improved.
He stepped back outside.
The city's night was fully awake now. More creatures moved in the distance, their shapes half-glimpsed between broken walls. Howls and hisses echoed down corridors of stone and glass.
Noctis climbed to a vantage point—a collapsed balcony overlooking several streets.
He let his gaze travel over the alien ruin.
How many more of you were born here? he wondered. How many forms evolved in the absence of humans, left to feed on a dead world?
Every hunt, every echo strengthened him.
Each kill, though, sent vibrations through the city's ecology—warning other monsters, changing old balances, likely drawing out more dangerous forms. It was a tight rope: gain enough power to survive the next catastrophe without waking something he couldn't yet handle.
He weighed routes through the city: where resources might be cached, where architecture offered defensible ground, how quickly he could reach the tower again if needed.
Then he rose from his perch, checked the Silver Bridge at his side, and moved deeper into the dark—one more survivor threading a path through a world that had already died once, determined not to let its fate become his own.
Monster Four: The Dusk Mite
Inside a half-burned bakery, Noctis paused just beyond the broken doorway, one hand resting lightly on the frame. The air smelled of old ash and stale flour. Charred beams stretched above him, black ribs holding up a ceiling that had half-collapsed under some ancient blast. Shattered glass crunched under his boots. A rusted oven gaped open behind the counter, its interior filled with soot and the faint, sour scent of something that had once been bread.
He stilled.
Beneath the familiar background noise of the ruined district—the distant hiss of wind through cracked stone, the faint creak of warped metal—something else moved. Too soft to be footsteps, too irregular to be loose rubble settling. A faint scritch-scritch, like claws dragging along wood.
From under a shattered counter, they emerged.
Dozens of Dusk Mites poured out in a skittering wave. Each was about the size of a rat, but their shapes were wrong—too low to the ground, too jointed, too smooth in the wrong places. Leathery, purple-gray skin stretched over narrow bodies that flexed and rippled like strips of wet leather. Spines stood stiff along their backs, thin and sharp, catching what little light there was and breaking it into dull glints.
Their eyes were insect-like: clusters of tiny facets set into narrow skulls.
When the faint gleam of Noctis' lamp caught them, each eye broke the light into a thousand shifting pinpoints. It was like looking into a handful of grinding glass grains. Dozens of eyes, dozens of reflections. Not much intelligence, but a relentless, crawling focus.
Their power was not in any single bite or strike.
It was in persistence. In how they swarmed, piling over one another to reach exposed skin. In how their teeth worried flesh, again and again, injecting a slow, faint poison that was more annoying than deadly—until you were already tired and the world was already trying to kill you. Dusk Mites hid easily, scuttling into cracks and under debris, only to return when their prey relaxed. They turned rest into risk.
Noctis slid his blade from its sheath.
He did not rush forward. He let his breathing settle, his heartbeat slow just enough for his thoughts to clear. Patience, not speed, would keep him alive here. He stepped lightly deeper into the bakery and kicked at a pile of lopsided flour sacks.
They burst open in slow bursts.
Clouds of gray-white flour billowed into the air, hanging there in thick curtains. The Dusk Mites scattered at first, startled by the sudden movement and the powder rushing into their eyes and mouths. They withdrew under a rotten crate, bodies pressing close, spines bristling. He watched them regroup, the cluster pulsing as they tested the air again.
He shifted his footing, recalling what mattered.
Never let them swarm your legs. Always keep your feet clear and moving. And above all: find the queen. Kill her, and the rest will break.
His gaze swept the walls.
There—twice as large as the others, clinging to a strip of old, hardened dough that had fused to a scorched wall. The queen Dusk Mite scuttled upward, body heavier, spines longer and more pronounced. A faint, greasy sheen coated her back. Wherever she passed, the smaller mites shifted toward her without looking, pulled by something instinctual.
Noctis moved.
He pushed off the floor, using a nearby fallen beam as a springboard. In a clean leap, he closed the gap between himself and the queen. His blade flashed, cutting across her carapace. Purple-gray skin split under the strike, leaking thin black fluid that sizzled where it hit the flour-dusted wall. Before gravity could pull him back down, he brought the tip of his weapon down hard, driving it through the exposed crack and into the softer tissue beneath.
The queen spasmed once and went still.
The swarm reacted instantly.
Mites poured out from under the crate and from cracks in the floor, rushing him in a ragged wave. Tiny jaws snapped, spines rattling as they launched themselves at his boots and legs. Noctis hit the ground, knees bending to absorb the impact. He used the last of the lingering flour-clouds, kicking up more dust with sharp, sweeping motions of his feet.
The air turned thick and white.
Dusk Mites choked and hissed, their insect eyes clouding over. Their senses dulled. Noctis stepped through the haze like a shadow. His blade moved in rapid, short arcs—low, efficient cuts that sliced through bodies just above the spines. Three, four, five of them fell in quick succession, their carcasses twitching on the floor.
Spines raked across his thigh.
The cut was shallow but sharp, a line of bright pain tearing through cloth and skin. A faint sting followed, then a spreading warmth, like hot needles trying to burrow deeper. He felt the poison push against his veins. For a moment, his leg threatened to go heavy.
Then his core responded.
A familiar resistance rose from deep inside, pushing back against the venom. The burn did not vanish, but it stopped spreading. The numbness faded to a dull ache. He shifted his weight slightly, favoring the other leg, and kept moving.
Within minutes, the survivors broke.
The formation of the swarm loosened. Mites turned, losing coordination, their movements jerky and panicked. One by one, they scuttled away, vanishing into cracks in the walls and floor with faint, angry protests. Noctis did not chase them. He did not need to. The queen was dead. The nest would wither.
He sheathed his blade and exhaled.
A faint echo seeped into him from the scattered corpses—a thin, bitter tingle in his blood.
ECHO GAINED: Poison Resist +0.6%
Reward: Minor. Core adapted slightly to low-level toxins.
The gain was light, barely a ripple against the vast sea of threats that waited outside this broken bakery. But it was real. The next poison, the next sting, would find him a little harder to weaken.
Noctis accepted the slim reward.
Some nights, he knew, only patience was rewarded at all.
Monster Five: The Whisper Wyrm
He left the burned bakery behind and slipped into a collapsed library.