Get up. Get up now.
My body obeys before my vision clears. I’m on my feet, positioning myself between Soreia and the creature, even as my broken ribs grind against each other with every breath.
The abomination pauses. Studies me. Those overlapping faces track my movement with an intelligence that has no place in a monster.
It’s not attacking.
It’s evaluating.
“Kaster.”
Soreia’s voice cuts through my calculations. I don’t turn—can’t take my attention off the creature—but I register her position. Five feet behind me. Against the wall. No retreat route.
“I can anchor it.” Her words come steady despite the circumstances. “If you can bring it down, I can make the death stick.”
“It’s too fast.”
“You’ve killed faster.”
“Not this.” I track the creature’s subtle shifts. The way it’s repositioning itself. “This isn’t attacking randomly. It’s learning my patterns. Every move I make teaches it how to counter me.”
Silence from behind me. She’s processing.
“Then we need to give it an attack it can’t counter.”
“Such as?”
Before she can answer, the creature moves.
The second engagementis worse than the first.
I anticipated speed. I didn’t anticipate precision. The abomination doesn’t strike wildly—it strikes at specific vulnerabilities. The joint between my neck and shoulder. The already-broken ribs. The tendons in my wrists that control my grip.
It knows where I’m weak. It learned that in thirty seconds of observation.
I deflect what I can. Absorb what I can’t. Fire and claws and the sheer brutality that has ended every threat I’ve faced. But my attacks do less damage now. The creature’s hide has thickened where I hit it before. The joints I targeted have reinforced themselves with new tissue.
And every wound I inflict begins closing almost immediately.
Not divine regeneration like the Executors used. This is different. Faster. More relentless. The creature isn’t resetting—it’s rebuilding better each time.
An arm catches me across the face. I taste blood. Another strike drives into my damaged ribs, and the pain is white-hot, blinding.
Move.
I move. Barely. The creature’s follow-up attack whistles past my ear instead of taking my head off.
Behind me, Soreia’s magic flares. The low hum of her anchoring reaches my awareness even through the chaos of combat. She’s trying to help—trying to use her power on the creature’s discarded pieces, making the small deaths permanent.
It won’t be enough.
I drive my claws into the abomination’s midsection, searching for a vital center. My hand finds organs that pulse with divine energy, and I rip them free.
For a moment, beneath the wet heat of those organs, my fingertips brush something else. Deeper. Denser. Not tissue or divine architecture like the rest of it—something concentrated, the way coal is different from the wood. A point where all the wrongness in this creature seems to flow from.
Then new organs grow to replace the ones I tore free, and the regenerating flesh forces my arm back before I can reach it.
There.
