Dawn did not break in the Basin; the gloom merely lightened from pitch black to a sickly, oppressive grey.
The squad had spent a tortured day in the cave, their nerves frayed to breaking point.
The initial, desperate unity forged by Tarrin's plan had dissolved under the weight of exhaustion and fear.
"This is insanity," Nick muttered for what felt like the hundredth time, pacing the limited space like a caged animal.
"We're putting all our faith in a plan cooked up by a guy who can't even stand up straight."
He shot a glare at Tarrin, who was leaning against the wall, eyes closed, conserving every ounce of strength. The pain from his side was a constant, fiery companion.
"You have a better one?" Olivia snapped, her voice sharp with frustration over hearing the same thing for like the fiftieth time. "Or are you just here to narrate our doom?"
"Maybe I am! At least I'm not pretending this is going to work!"
"Enough," Tarrin's voice cut through the bickering, quiet but absolute.
He opened his eyes, the greenish light reflecting a cold, hardened resolve. "It's time. We move now, or we lose our nerve forever."
The finality in his tone silenced them. There were no more arguments left. They were a clock that had wound down, and this was the final, desperate tick.
They moved into position with the grim silence of a funeral procession. Olivia and Klein scaled a jagged outcrop that gave them a clean line of sight to the Ash-Stalker's crater.
The rest of the group, minus Nick and Tarrin, huddled at the mouth of the western escape route, their hearts pounding a frantic rhythm against their ribs.
Nick stood alone, a solitary figure between the cave and the hulking, feeding Corpse-Gorger. He took a deep breath, looked back at Tarrin, and received a sharp, single nod.
The plan began.
It was beautiful—mad, precise, and suicidal in equal measure. A masterpiece of provocation.
Nick was a blur of motion and noise, taunting the Corpse-Gorger into a frenzy, dragging the slobbering beast on a direct collision course with the Ash-Stalker's crater.
Every move was calculated chaos. Every scream, a lure.
For a moment, it worked perfectly.
Then it didn't.
With a burst of impossible speed, the Gorger closed the gap. Its cleaver-like arm came down—not at Nick, but at the ground just ahead of him.
The earth split, cutting off his escape and forcing him wide. The beast wasn't chasing anymore—it was herding him, driving him straight into a dead end.
"He's not going to make the turn!" Sabrina hissed, panic cutting through her tone.
There was no time for another plan. Only a desperate, stupid correction.
Tarrin broke from cover. Not toward Nick—but straight onto the Gorger's new line of advance. He stopped in its path, feet sinking into the scorched soil, and let go.
The Dread Aura erupted.
It didn't leak or whisper anymore—it detonated. The air twisted cold around him, reality itself bending under the pulse of his Gift.
The suffocating charm that once drew others in now reversed, collapsing inward, radiating pure, instinctive terror.
The Corpse-Gorger halted mid-charge. The smaller prey was forgotten. This new presence—this defiant, fragile thing radiating a predator's promise—was all it could see.
Its vertical slit of an eye dilated, pulsing with fury.
For a single heartbeat, they faced each other in perfect stillness.
Tarrin smiled. Calm. Almost serene. He pulled a ration pack from his Cerevault, tore it open, and tossed it straight at the monster's enormous head.
How's that for a five-star meal?
The Gorger bellowed, the sound splitting the air in rage and disbelief.
Tarrin didn't wait. He turned and ran, sprinting full-force across the cracked ground.
He wasn't faster than the beast. Not even close.
Its hot, rotten breath hit his back like steam. The ground quaked beneath each of its steps. A claw the size of his torso slashed past, close enough to shear a lock of hair into the wind.
"OLIVIA—NOW!" he screamed, voice tearing from his throat.
He didn't dodge. He dived.
The Gorger lunged after him, blind with fury, its momentum unstoppable as it hit the crater's edge.
The arrow struck first—Olivia's shot, crackling with charged essence. It buried itself high in the creature's shoulder, a stinging insult more than a wound.
The Corpse-Gorger roared, enraged beyond reason, its own weight betraying it. It stumbled forward, tumbling over the rim—straight into the waiting maw of the dormant Ash-Stalker below.
For a heartbeat, silence.
Then came the sound.
A shrieking, alien symphony of rage, echoing up from the pit like something torn from hell itself.
It was working.
But Tarrin barely registered it. He lay sprawled on the dirt, lungs burning, body one continuous ache. Every breath was a knife.
Below him, monsters tore at each other in the darkness. Above, the squad shouted somewhere far away.
He was alive—but completely exposed. The rim felt endless, the escape route impossibly far.
And for the first time, he realized just how small he was between gods and beasts.
The world became a symphony of destruction.
The Corpse-Gorger's fall had not been a clean drop, but a violent, tumbling crash that shook the very foundations of the crater.
The Ash-Stalker, ripped from its dormant state, met the intrusion not with confusion, but with instantaneous, predatory fury.
Tarrin lay on the crater's rim, gasping, his body a single, screaming nerve. He tried to push himself up, but the ground beneath him bucked violently.
A shockwave of force from below sent him sprawling again, dirt and shattered rock spraying over him.
He was not a spectator. He was a flea on the hide of two fighting titans.
A whip of solid shadow, tipped with searing red, lashed upward from the pit. It wasn't aimed at him, but it passed so close he felt the heat of it singe the air, the crack of its passage deafening.
It wrapped around the Gorger's raised cleaver-arm. There was a sizzling sound, a shriek of tearing chitin, and the Gorger bellowed in a mix of pain and rage.
Then the Gorger retaliated. It drove its bulk forward, slamming the Stalker against the crater wall. The impact was a deep, resonant BOOM that traveled up the rock and into Tarrin's bones.
A fissure split the earth a hand's breadth from his face. He scrambled backward, his injured side shrieking in protest, as a shower of stone and black dirt cascaded into the churning pit.
He was too close. He had to move.
Pushing to his feet, he took a lurching step toward the distant escape route. He never made the second.
The Gorger, reeling from a draining lash across its rubbery chest, staggered back and slammed its bulk against the crater's edge—right where Tarrin stood.
The world upended. The ground dissolved beneath his boots. He was falling, not into the pit, but with a section of the collapsing rim.
He hit the sliding earth hard, his breath blasted from his lungs. He slid downward in a torrent of scree and dust, tumbling uncontrollably until he slammed against a jutting rock ledge a few meters below the top.
The impact was brutal, lighting new fires of agony along his ribs. He was now trapped on a precarious shelf, halfway into the hell he had created.
Below him, the fight was a blur of nightmare physics. The Ash-Stalker was a dancer of death, its four insectoid legs skittering with impossible speed, its whips a blur.
One lanced out, spearing the Gorger's distended belly. The red tip flared, and a patch of the grey skin instantly withered, crumbling to dust.
The Gorger roared, swinging its cleaver in a wild, sweeping arc. The Stalker leaped back, but the very tip of the bone blade caught one of its spindly legs.
The sound was like a tree snapping. The Stalker shrieked, a sound of pure, intelligent agony, and its flawless coordination faltered.
In its blind pain, the Gorger thrashed. It stomped a massive foot, and the shockwave was the strongest yet.
The ledge Tarrin was clinging to trembled violently. A rock the size of his head broke free from above and slammed into his shoulder.
He cried out, his grip faltering. He slid another foot down the loose slope, now terrifyingly close to the combat zone.
The smell was overwhelming—ozone from the Stalker's whips, the rot of the Gorger's innards, and the hot, metallic scent of his own fear.
He was close enough to see the intricate cracks in the Stalker's carapace.
The Ash-Stalker, enraged by its broken leg, became a vortex of focused violence. It ignored the Gorger's clumsy, cleaver-swiping attacks.
Instead, it lunged, driving its body forward like a spear. The two whip-tips, glowing like embers, plunged deep into the Gorger's torso, seeking its core.
The Corpse-Gorger froze.
A terrible, gurgling sound escaped its head-slit. Its massive body shuddered once, twice, as the Stalker' draining whips pulsed with stolen life.
Then, with a final, wet sigh, the colossal beast collapsed, its weight hitting the crater floor with a final, definitive thud that rained dirt down on Tarrin.
Silence, for a single, breathless moment.
Then, the Ash-Stalker slowly retracted its whips from the Gorger's corpse. Its glossy head, a nightmare of sharp angles, turned. Its multifaceted eyes, each a pinprick of cold intelligence, fixed on Tarrin.
He was pinned by that gaze. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe. The Dread Aura around him felt like a pathetic shield against a predator that had just felled a mountain.
Is this it? The thought was strangely calm, an icy clarity in the midst of the terror. After all that… to end as a footnote to its real meal.
A sound cut through the heavy air—not a shriek or a roar, but a series of sharp, concussive BOOM… BOOM… BOOM.
The Ash-Stalker's head twitched, its attention wavering.
From the crater's rim above, a figure plummeted down. It was Celith, her face a mask of agony and determination, using controlled kinetic blasts from her feet to slow her descent.
She landed hard on the slope beside Tarrin, the impact jarring a hiss of pain from her lips.
"Up. Now," she grunted, her voice strained.
She didn't wait for a reply. Her hand, slick with sweat, clamped around his forearm like a vice. With a guttural cry, she channeled her Gift.
A massive kinetic blast erupted from her free hand, aimed directly at the ground.
The world became a violent lurch.
The force wrenched Tarrin's shoulder and sent a white-hot spike of agony through his side, but it launched them both upward, out of the pit in a shower of rubble.
As they cleared the rim, tumbling onto solid ground, Tarrin's last look back wasn't at Celith, but into the crater.
The Ash-Stalker was already turning away. Its brief curiosity was gone, replaced by the more pressing need to feed and tend to its own wound.
As Tarrin watched, it plunged its whip-tips back into the Gorger's cooling body, already dismissing the two insignificant creatures that had escaped.
They were safe. For now.