The heavy iron side-gate slammed shut with a finality that made Drex's heart skip a beat.
He was outside.
The air here tasted different—stale, metallic, and thick with the musk of a thousand unwashed bodies. Above him, the stone walls of the Arbalest estate loomed like a cliff face, the runes humming faintly in the twilight. Ahead of him, the ruined town was a landscape of shadows and silence.
But it wasn't empty.
Drex could hear them. The dry, rhythmic scraping of chitin against stone. The wet clicking of mandibles. The monsters were everywhere—clinging to the sides of buildings, coiled in alleyways, burying themselves in the dirt.
Drex swallowed hard, tapping the small comms earpiece Lucianna had given him.
"Sai," he whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "Are you sure this is going to work?"
"Of course," Sai's voice crackled in his ear, sounding casually bored. "It's a standard aggro-pull strategy. Do not worry. Just stick to the route."
Drex let out a shaky breath. "Okay. Okay, I can do this."
He crouched low, preparing to activate his skill.
"By the way," Sai added, his tone conversational. "I forgot to ask earlier. What are your abilities exactly?"
Drex froze. He stared blankly at the dark alleyway ahead.
"You..." Drex hissed, clenching his empty fists until his nails dug into his palms. "You sent me out here as bait without knowing if I could actually survive?"
"There's no way a Hero of the Goddess is weak enough to die easily here," Sai said, waving him off over the comms. "Just make sure you survive with whatever abilities you have. I'm hanging up now."
The line went dead.
Drex wanted to scream, but he knew that would just ring the dinner bell early. He gritted his teeth, focusing inward.
[Skill Activated: Shadow Manifestation]
Darkness erupted from his skin. It didn't just coat him; it solidified. Thick, inky tendrils of shadow coiled around his legs and torso, hardening into a jagged, translucent exoskeleton. He felt the immediate drain on his mana reserves—a sharp tug in his chest—but strength flooded his limbs.
The sudden flare of mana acted like a beacon in the dark.
From the shadows of the nearest building, three heads rose up. They were segmented, armored, and hideous. Hundreds of legs rippled in a wave as the millipede-like creatures turned their eyeless faces toward him.
Then, a screech tore through the silence.
SKREEEEEEE!
It started as a ripple and turned into a flood. The ground began to vibrate. From the rooftops, from the sewers, from the cracks in the pavement—they poured out.
"Come and get me, you ugly bastards!" Drex yelled, spreading his arms wide.
He kicked off the ground.
With the shadow exoskeleton reinforcing his muscles, he shot forward like a fired arrow, tearing down the main street that circled the estate walls.
Behind him, the world dissolved into noise. The millipedes crawled with terrifying speed. The sound was like a heavy rain of stones—millions of sharp legs scratching against the cobblestones as the swarm surged forward.
Drex didn't look back. He could feel the vibration in his bones. He sprinted along the base of the massive outer walls, rushing past the eastern guard tower with the wind roaring in his ears. He was a beacon of pure, concentrated mana in the darkness, and every monster within a mile was answering the call.
"Keep them tight, keep them tight," he chanted to himself, gritting his teeth against the hollow ache spreading through his chest. He could feel his reserve draining fast, but he forced himself to keep moving, hugging the curve of the estate's boundaries as he pushed through the halfway point of the lap.
He rounded the final corner, drifting on the slick pavement, and sprinted toward the main plaza directly in front of the estate's front gate.
"Sai!" Drex screamed into the dead comms. "I'm bringing them in! Get ready!"
He burst into the open plaza. He spun around, skidding to a halt, his chest heaving.
The sight nearly stopped his heart.
The street he had just exited was gone. It was completely choked by a wall of black chitin. Thousands of them. They spilled over each other, a tidal wave of gnashing teeth and legs, all rushing toward the single point where Drex stood.
"Now!" Drex screamed.
He had known from the start that outrunning the monsters was only half the battle. The real problem was escaping the blast radius.
He had to test a theory he had only ever visualized in his head. A move that was either going to look incredibly cool, or get him killed instantly.
He abruptly cut the flow of mana to his exoskeleton, letting the hard shell crumble away instantly. He needed every drop of energy for what came next.
He looked at the long, dark shadow cast by the gatehouse wall and forced his mana to invert. Instead of projecting darkness out, he commanded his body to sink in.
It felt wrong—a sickening, unnatural vertigo, like stepping off a cliff in a dream.
The biting cold of the void rushed into his lungs, replacing the air. The sensation of his own weight vanished, replaced by a slippery, fluid freedom.
He became a streak of ink, sliding effortlessly through the gloom, untethered by friction or gravity. He slipped into the safety of the wall's darkness just as a crushing force obliterated the physical world he had just left behind.
High above on the gatehouse wall, a lone figure stepped onto the ledge. Sai looked down at the writhing ocean of monsters with cold indifference. Reaching deep into his archive of skills, he simply raised one hand and pressed his palm downward, offering no chant or technique name.
[Skill Activated: Atlas Press]
The air in the plaza shrieked as the spell triggered a massive implosion.
For a split second, the gravity in the center of the plaza increased by a factor of five hundred. The atmosphere warped, bending light around the kill zone.
CRUNCH.
The sound was wet and sickeningly final.
The front wave of the swarm—hundreds of the massive millipedes—was instantly flattened. Their armored shells shattered like glass. Their bodies were compressed into the pavement so violently that the stone beneath them cracked and sank three feet into the earth.
The creatures behind them crashed into the invisible wall of gravity, crumpling under their own momentum before being crushed by the spell's expanding radius.
The crushing roar vanished as quickly as it had arrived, leaving a ringing silence that pressed against the ears.
The shadow on the inner wall rippled violently. It spat Drex out like a rejected stone. He hit the pavement hard, tumbling across the stone as his mass slammed back into him, the air rushing back into his lungs in a painful gasp.
"Okay," he wheezed, sitting up and wiping dust from his face. "That... was awesome."
A few stragglers at the edges of the plaza screeched, confused and disoriented.
Bang. Bang. Thrum.
From his high vantage point, Sai watched the aftermath unfold across the district.
Streaks of luminescent bolts cut through the darkness like tracer fire. The Arbalest soldiers were moving through the ruins in tight formations, the heavy thrum of their enhanced crossbows echoing off the stone. Others advanced with glowing swords and spears, cutting down the confused stragglers that tried to flee into the alleys with brutal efficiency.
Drex stared at the carnage near him, then looked up at the central ledge. Sai was already turning away, his coat flapping in the wind.
"Phase One complete," Sai's voice came through the earpiece, sounding bored. "Get ready, kid. We're moving to Phase Two."