Training had become routine.
Three days of brutal drills. Thess pushing them until they broke, then pushing harder. Wings flickering for seconds at a time. Marcus learning to use 5% strength without terror. The seven of them slowly becoming something that might survive.
Yuna's body had adapted. The constant ache faded to background noise. Her wings manifested more reliably now, appearing when she focused on fear or desperation, holding for ten seconds before guttering out.
Not enough. Never enough.
But progress.
She was mid-drill when the alarm sounded.
The sound cut through everything.
Not a bell. Not a horn. Something deeper, vibrating in her chest like her bones had become tuning forks. The geometric patterns on the courtyard cobblestones flared crimson instead of their usual gold.
Thess appeared without walking. One moment absent, the next standing in the center of the training grounds, her face hard.
"Breach at the eastern wall. Void-hound. One confirmed, possibly more."
The seven summons froze.
"This is not a drill," Thess continued. Her voice carried command that made Yuna's spine straighten automatically. "You've trained for three days. That's not enough. But the wall guards are down and reinforcements are ten minutes out."
She looked at them. Really looked, with those ancient-young eyes that had seen too much.
"You're what we have. Move."
They ran.
Yuna's legs burned. Her shoulder still ached from yesterday's training. But adrenaline flooded her system, pushing everything else aside.
Real. This is real. Not training. Not simulation.
The eastern wall rose ahead. Thirty feet of dark stone, torches flickering along the top. Guards usually patrolled there, watching the Ashfall Reach for threats.
No guards now.
Just silence. And a hole in the wall the size of a car.
"Formation," Aria called. Her wheelchair hummed as she positioned herself at the rear, eyes already seeing patterns the rest of them couldn't. "Marcus and Chen Wei front. Lyric and David middle. Yuna with me. Asha, watch our backs."
No one questioned her. Aria's RIFT Attunement made her see combat three steps ahead. If she said formation, you followed.
They approached the breach.
The wall had been torn apart from outside. Stone scattered across the courtyard like broken teeth. Dark liquid seeped from the edges of the hole, hissing where it touched the ground.
And beyond the breach, in the shadows of the dying day, something moved.
The void-hound emerged from darkness like nightmare given flesh.
Yuna had seen corpses in the Reach. Had faced the echoes in the ash-storm. But nothing prepared her for this.
The creature was wrong. Fundamentally, viscerally wrong. Its body shifted as she watched, never settling into a fixed shape. Four legs became six became eight. Its head was a mass of angles that shouldn't exist, features rearranging every time she blinked.
And its eyes.
Dozens of them. Scattered across its shifting form like stars in a collapsing sky. Each one fixed on the seven summons with hunger that transcended physical need.
"Spread out," Aria commanded. "Don't let it corner anyone. Marcus, draw its attention. Chen Wei, flank left. Everyone else, stay mobile."
Marcus stepped forward. His hands had stopped trembling. In the face of actual danger, the fear of hurting someone had transformed into something else.
Purpose.
"Hey!" he shouted at the creature. "Over here!"
The void-hound's heads, all of them, swiveled toward him.
It charged.
The creature moved faster than anything that size should move.
One moment it was thirty feet away. The next it was on Marcus, jaws, so many jaws, snapping for his throat.
Marcus caught it.
His hands wrapped around the closest thing the creature had to a neck. Muscles bulged. Veins stood out on his forearms. The void-hound's momentum stopped dead, like it had hit a wall.
"Now!" Marcus roared.
Chen Wei came from the left. Her fist connected with the creature's flank, enhanced by BEDROCK strength. The impact sent a shockwave through the courtyard. Cobblestones cracked.
The void-hound screamed.
Not a sound. An anti-sound. A hole in the air where noise should be, making Yuna's ears ring and her vision swim.
It threw Marcus. The massive boy flew twenty feet, hit the wall hard enough to crack stone, slumped to the ground.
"Marcus!" Yuna started toward him.
"Stay in formation!" Aria's voice cut through. "He's alive. Focus on the threat."
The void-hound turned. Its dozens of eyes swept across the remaining six, calculating, choosing.
They settled on Yuna.
It knew.
Somehow, impossibly, the creature knew she was the weakest. The one with 2.1 Resonance. The one whose wings barely flickered for seconds at a time.
Insufficient.
The void-hound charged.
Yuna's body locked. Fight or flight, and her muscles chose freeze. The creature's jaws opened, revealing teeth that bent light wrong, and time slowed to a crawl.
I'm going to die.
The thought was calm. Clear. Almost peaceful.
Then something else surfaced. Deeper than fear. Hotter than panic.
Rage.
She'd survived the portal. Survived the Reach. Survived her mother dying in a hospital bed while the world told her she wasn't enough. She'd walked through graveyards of five hundred thousand corpses and kept walking.
She hadn't come this far to die in a courtyard to a creature that was nothing but teeth and hunger and wrong.
HEAT.
The warmth exploded from her spine. Not the flicker she'd managed in training. Not the desperate burst that lasted seconds.
This was more.
Silver light erupted from her back. Wings, real wings, manifesting fully for the first time. Translucent and blazing and solid enough to feel the air catch beneath them.
Yuna moved.
Not running. Flying.
The void-hound's jaws snapped closed on empty air. Yuna was above it, wings beating, silver light trailing behind her like a comet's tail.
She could feel the wings now. Not just heat, but connection. Like they'd always been there, waiting for her to believe enough to use them.
The creature snarled. Leaped. Its shifting form launched upward, reaching for her with claws that materialized from nothing.
Yuna dove.
The world became simple.
Move. Dodge. Survive.
The void-hound was fast, but Yuna was faster in the air. Her wings responded to thought, banking and rolling, keeping her just out of reach. Each pass, she drew the creature further from her teammates.
But she couldn't keep this up forever. Already the wings were flickering. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Her longest manifestation yet, but fading.
"Yuna!" Aria's voice from below. "Lead it toward Marcus! He's up!"
Yuna looked. Marcus was on his feet, blood running from a cut on his forehead, but standing. His hands were raised, waiting.
She understood.
One more pass. Draw it close. Give Marcus the opening.
Yuna dove toward the void-hound. Straight at its mass of eyes and teeth and wrongness. Every instinct screamed at her to pull up, to run, to flee.
She didn't.
At the last second, she rolled. Wings tilting, body spinning, passing so close to the creature she could smell it, ozone and copper and decay.
The void-hound lunged after her. Committed. Overextended.
Marcus was there.
His fist connected with the creature's skull, whatever passed for a skull, with every ounce of strength he'd been terrified to use. Not 1%. Not 5%.
Everything.
The impact sounded like thunder. The void-hound's form shattered. Dissolved. Became ash and shadow and nothing, scattered by a wind that existed only for a moment.
Silence.
Then, distantly, cheering from the wall. Reinforcements had arrived. Too late to help, but in time to see.
The void-hound was dead.
Yuna hit the ground hard.
Her wings vanished the moment the threat ended, and she dropped the last ten feet with nothing to slow her fall. Pain flared through her ankle, her shoulder, her everything.
But she was alive.
Marcus reached her first. Dropped to his knees beside her, hands hovering, afraid to touch.
"You're bleeding," he said. His voice was strange. Thick.
Yuna looked down. A gash across her forearm, where one of the creature's manifested claws had caught her during the final pass. Blood ran freely, soaking into the cobblestones.
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing." Marcus's hands, those killer's hands, pressed gently against the wound. Applying pressure. Stopping the bleeding. "You flew. Actually flew. That was Second Mark. Maybe higher."
Yuna blinked. "What?"
Thess's voice came from above. "Twenty-three seconds of sustained manifestation. Full wing formation. Controlled aerial combat." She sounded almost impressed. Almost. "That's Flickering. Second Mark. Congratulations, Yuna. You're now marginally less likely to die immediately."
Twenty-three seconds. Her wings had held for twenty-three seconds.
That was more than double her previous best.
Aria wheeled over. "Analysis: void-hound was a scout. Probably drawn by the concentration of new summons. There will be more."
"There's always more," Thess agreed. "But today, you survived. All seven of you."
Yuna looked around. The other summons were gathering. Chen Wei nursing a bruised arm. Lyric looking shaken but hiding it behind a sharp smile. David pale and trembling but standing. Asha staring at something only she could see, lips moving silently.
Seven summoned. Seven surviving.
First blood, and they'd drawn it from the enemy instead of giving it.
The infirmary was quiet.
Yuna sat on a cot while a healer, an older woman with kind eyes and hands that glowed soft green, stitched her arm. The wound wasn't deep, but it would scar.
First scar of Valdris. Won't be the last.
Marcus sat on the next cot over. The cut on his forehead had been cleaned and sealed. He kept flexing his right hand, the one he'd used to kill the void-hound.
"How do you feel?" Yuna asked.
"Strange." Marcus stared at his fist. "I hit something with everything I had. And it didn't... I didn't..."
"Kill someone you cared about?"
Marcus flinched. Then, slowly, nodded.
"You saved us," Yuna said quietly. "Your strength saved us. That's what it's for. Not destruction. Protection."
Marcus was quiet for a long moment.
"Dylan would have liked you," he said finally. "He always said I needed friends who'd tell me the truth instead of being scared of me."
"I'm not scared of you."
"I know." Marcus's voice was soft. "That's why it matters."
The healer finished Yuna's stitches. Wrapped the wound in clean bandages. "Rest tonight. No training tomorrow. Let it heal."
Yuna nodded. Didn't argue for once.
She was tired. Bone-deep tired. But beneath the exhaustion, something else hummed.
Her wings. Still there, waiting beneath her skin. Stronger now than they'd been this morning.
Second Mark. Flickering.
One hundred seventeen days left.
And for the first time since arriving in Valdris, Yuna allowed herself to believe she might actually survive them.
That night, Yuna dreamed of flying.
Silver wings carrying her above the ash, above the ruins, above the frozen corpses of five hundred thousand dead. Higher and higher until the violet sky became something else, became light, became...
Her mother's voice: "You are enough."
Yuna woke with tears on her cheeks and warmth in her chest.
Second Mark.
Not enough to save the world. Not yet.
But enough to matter.
[END CHAPTER 7]