The alarm bell split the night like a blade.
I was still on my knees in Oda's command room, the dust from Nakamura's defeat hanging in the air, when the great bronze bell began its frantic tolling. Three strikes. Pause. Three more. High-tier specter.
Oda was already moving, suspicion of me shoved aside by raw survival. "Aerial or extreme speed," he said, voice flat and cold, hand closing on a longer blade. "Stay inside, foreigner, if you want to keep breathing."
BOOM.
The eastern palisade simply ceased to exist. Splinters the size of spears filled the air. A shriek followed, wind forced through a slit throat, rising until my teeth ached.
It stepped through the breach.
Night Vision painted it in merciless silver: translucent body shaped from storm, arms ending in two-meter sickle blades of compressed air. No face, just a mouth that never closed, screaming.
[Wind Blade Specter] The Ghost Stomach named its prey and roared.
An arrow flew. The thing vanished, reappeared ten meters left. Before the archer could draw again, his head was shredded into red mist.
Another soldier bisected. Armor parted like silk.
Straight lines. Murderously fast, but straight.
My stomach cramped so hard I nearly doubled over. Not fear. Hunger. The Ghost Stomach was done asking.
A guard grabbed my arm. "Inside, now!"
I tore free and ran toward the monster.
Oda's shout chased me. No one tried to stop the lunatic sprinting to his death.
The Specter noticed. Its featureless head snapped toward me. The shriek pitched higher.
It moved.
I dove sideways. Wind kissed my cheek and opened it to the bone.
Too fast. I could see it clearly, but my body was too slow.
Second strike.
This time I wasn't fast enough. The claw carved from shoulder to chest, fabric and flesh parting in a wet scream of pain. I flew, hit the dirt, rolled in my own blood.
The Ghost Stomach detonated.
I pushed up on shaking arms. Soldiers were dying around me while the creature carved through ranks like wheat.
I needed that speed. Needed it now.
A dropped spear lay nearby. I seized it, slammed the butt into the ground, angled the point, and waited.
The Specter blurred again, straight-line charge toward the western archers.
I stood in its path.
It impaled itself.
The spear punched through translucent storm-flesh. The shriek became a hurricane. Wind-blades lashed back. One opened my forearm to white bone. Another flayed my ribs. Blood poured.
I held on. Boots carved furrows in the dirt.
It weakened. I felt the essence bleeding out.
"Now—"
My jaw unhinged. The Ghost Stomach opened.
The Specter unraveled into ribbons of cutting wind and pure velocity. All of it poured straight down my throat.
I collapsed, convulsing, swallowing a condensed hurricane.
[GHOST STOMACH SYSTEM ACTIVATED] [WIND BLADE SPECTER CONSUMED] [WARNING: INTEGRATION UNSTABLE – HIGH RISK] [ABILITY ACQUIRED: RAPID MOVEMENT] [HUNGER THRESHOLD PERMANENTLY ELEVATED]
The world slammed into focus.
I stood. Blood everywhere, but the pain felt distant. New power coiled in every muscle, waiting for a single thought.
Silence.
Every eye in the compound fixed on me (on the foreigner drenched in blood standing where a high-tier specter had simply ceased to be).
Oda's whisper carried like thunder. "What… are you?"
I opened my mouth to answer.
And vanished.
Not on purpose. The ability triggered on pure reflex the instant I wanted distance. One blink: I was thirty meters away, atop the broken eastern wall.
Another blink: back in the courtyard, five steps from Oda. His sword half-drawn, frozen mid-motion.
"Captain," I said softly, and watched him flinch. "I'm not your enemy. But I'm done with cages. I need food. A mountain of it. Then I need everything you know about these things: where they come from, how many, and who's sending them."
Oda stared at the dead, at the shattered wall, at the empty air where the specter had been.
Finally his hand left the hilt.
"Kitchens. Take whatever you want." He paused, eyes sharp as broken glass. "When you're finished… I'll give you answers. You might not like what you hear."
My stomach twisted again, deeper, darker than before.
Soldiers parted like water as I walked toward the storehouses, leaving a trail of blood.
They didn't look at me with contempt anymore.
They looked at me the way men look at something that just ate their nightmare and asked for seconds.
Fear.
Raw, primal fear.
I crossed the threshold.
The Ghost Stomach purred, already tasting what was coming next.
And for the first time, I felt the truth settle in my bones.
I wasn't prey anymore.
I was the hunter.
And the hunt had only just begun.