Kahn kicked the iron grate loose, exposing the dark, humid throat of Solis's sewer system. The stench clawed upward in a hot breath—human waste, industrial oil, and the sweet rot of a city decaying from the inside out.
The Guildmaster shoved me and Amber toward the abyss.
"I'm not coming with you."
Kahn's voice was the edge of a blade. He drew his longsword, the steel catching the tunnel's sickly, filtered light. "They are after the Guild. I'll draw her into the forest."
"Kahn, no!" Amber's protest died in the heavy air.
Kahn tore the heavy bronze medallion from his neck—the broken compass, the mark of the Guild—and crushed it into my palm. The metal was still warm from his skin.
"Low Harbor. Main tunnels. Always left. The Vagamundo is there, northern sector. Rurik's in command." His gaze anchored onto mine, hard and uncompromising. "Show this. Say the cargo is aboard. Leave—with me or without me."
"They'll tear you apart before they ever find us," My voice sounded foreign to my own ears—cold, like the ring of steel.
"Then run." Kahn stepped back into the shadows of the garden. "Keep the girl alive."
The iron grate slammed shut with a finality that echoed in the marrow of my bones. Kahn vanished in the opposite direction, his retreating steps deliberately loud—bait dragging the storm away from us.
We plunged into the dark.
The sewer was a gauntlet of filth. Slime-slick stone threatened to send us sprawling with every step, while the only light came from distant cracks overhead, casting jaundiced beams across black water rising to our ankles.
I led the way.
Adrenaline masked the cost for a time, but this new body was a powerful engine running on an empty tank. Ten minutes of sprinting through the fetid humidity was the limit. My breath didn't fail like my old, diseased lungs; instead, it was a total muscular collapse. Legs that had felt like forged steel turned to lead. Hunger roared—a tearing pain in my gut that threatened to fold me in half.
I stopped, bracing my hands on my knees, gasping for air that tasted of sulfur.
"Gin!" Amber was at my side, her hand hovering near my shoulder.
"I can't—" The words broke apart. My body shook, literally devouring itself for fuel.
I tried to straighten, but balance was a distant memory. Above us, the echoes of the hunt rippled through the stone. If we stayed here, we would die like rats in our own filth.
Amber looked at me. In the dimness, her green eyes carried a faint, rhythmic luminescence of their own. She saw the inhuman tremor racking my muscles, the deadly pallor creeping back into my skin.
"I'm sorry, Father," she whispered to the shadows. "You told me to hide it."
Amber pressed her hands to my chest.
There was none of the white violence from the night before. What flowed from her palms was pure, unadulterated warmth. A golden light, thick as melted honey, wrapped around my heart. It did not invade; it invited. It streamed into my chest, slid along my nerves, and settled deep in my spine, where the white creature lay dormant.
It felt like being fed after a lifetime of starvation.
The knot in my stomach went silent, replaced by a vibrating fullness. My muscles swelled with borrowed energy. My senses snapped into a terrifying focus—I heard water dripping a hundred meters away; I could see the exact, oily texture of the slime clinging to the walls.
I flinched sharply—not in aggression, but from the sheer disorientation of feeling too much.
Amber staggered back before she understood why. The ground seemed to soften beneath her feet, as if reality itself had lost density for a heartbeat. The warmth that had left her hands didn't fade into the air—it was being pulled from her. Drawn out. The current she had known since childhood, gentle and obedient, found no limit inside my body.
It was like pouring water into a bottomless fissure.
Fear struck her, dry and sudden. She wasn't in control. Something inside me had taken more than she offered—and it still hungered. Amber clenched her fingers into her palm, a fine tremor rippling up her arms. This wasn't ordinary exhaustion. It was the primal sensation of opening a door she might not know how to close.
"What did you do?" I stared at her hands. The light vanished, leaving her breathless and pale.
"I gave you some of my Breath," she said, her voice small, looking away. "Come on. Always left."
We moved again, but the rhythm had changed. It was predatory now.
I led at a speed that bordered on the impossible. Twenty minutes later, the stench of rot gave way to the sharp tang of salt and pitch. The tunnel ended in a wide mouth that vomited sewage into the northern sector of Low Harbor.
We halted in the exit's half-light. The Vagamundo was there—its sleek hull tied to the pier, a shadow of hope against the water.
But the path was blocked. Not by an army. By a man.
Kael sat atop a barrel, relaxed, a warhammer resting on his shoulder like a casual trophy. Around him, the dock was a silent slaughterhouse. Four Guild members lay scattered across the planks. None were dead.
Kael had worked with a craftsman's patience: bones twisted at impossible angles. Knees crushed into pulp. Arms reduced to useless weight. Pools of dark blood stained the wood, but the groans were low—smothered by the sheer weight of shock.
With one massive hand, he held Rurik—the first mate—by the throat, swinging him like a rag doll. The sailor's face was a mask of unrecognizable blood.
Amber stifled a scream. Her terror was palpable, a vibration in the cold harbor air.
But fear found no purchase in my chest.
I studied the scene—the exposed bone, the executioner's almost lazy ease—and something cold settled behind my ribs. This wasn't combat. It wasn't even domination.
It was a performance.
Kael didn't break bodies to win. He prolonged pain because he could. Every shattered bone was a deliberate excess, a choice made for the sake of the craft. The violence served no purpose beyond itself.
And that made Kael infinitely more dangerous than a mere soldier.
Turning his head, he smiled—a grin that never reached his empty, glass-like eyes. He dropped Rurik into the water with a wet splash and rose, his hand tightening on the hammer's handle with a slow, deliberate crunch.
"There you are, little rats," his voice sounded like a grinding stone. "Luna was right."
I crushed the bronze medallion in my fist until the metal bit into my skin. As the giant began to walk toward us, I tried to understand the reason behind such calculated cruelty.
I found none.