I headed toward the region I called home the moment the Mornaks pointed.
If they ever came to me like that, it meant they'd made their move—and it wasn't something I could afford to take lightly.
It meant I needed to move. Fast.
Shadow Step carried me across major distances in a violent burst of speed, wind twisting around me as the world blurred and snapped back into focus. But I couldn't spam it like a spoiled god. The evolution had dulled the worst of the backlash, yet I still felt the edge of a limit—like a muscle that would tear if I demanded too much. So I used it in bursts, syncing it with my own ridiculous speed between uses, stride and step flowing together in a rhythm that ate distance fast.
Two days.
That was all it took to cross what had once been a journey measured in distance and time. Fewer days than it had taken me to reach the region when I'd first left home.
As the sun sank again, the familiar breeze swept past me, and night swallowed the earth like it had been waiting with its mouth open. White eyes appeared at the edges of my path—Mornaks watching from the dark, tracking every movement I made like I was a report they couldn't afford to miss.
I didn't acknowledge them. I let my senses map them anyway, their shuffles, their stillness, the way they never fully relaxed.
When I crossed into the region proper, I headed straight for the entrance I remembered from last time—where the Mornaks' home connected to mine like a doorway that was never meant to exist. The air cooled as I got closer, like I'd stepped into shade that didn't belong to the forest.
The wall was there.
Cold stone. Unbroken. Ordinary.
No cave mouth. No crack. No doorway. It looked like the entrance had never existed at all.
Then a Mornak approached from my right, and the thing that bothered me most wasn't its presence—it was that it didn't react to me. It walked straight past as if I weren't there, lifted its hand, and pressed its palm against the rock.
The stone reacted—like something had just clicked into place.
Cracks spidered outward. Black substance seeped through them, spreading across the surface in slow, pulsing waves. The rock didn't break.
It was devoured.
Then reshaped.
A doorway formed—its outline traced by that pulsing black slick, the darkness within turning thin enough that I could sense space on the other side, even if I couldn't call it clear.
Cold pushed outward from it.
The Mornak stepped back. Then it stared into me, eyes fixed and patient, like it had been waiting for me to arrive.
I moved forward without hesitation.
The moment I crossed the threshold, that familiar coolness wrapped around me—not just on my skin but deeper, like the air itself had weight. The place hadn't changed. The temperature hadn't changed. But my vision had.
Last time, the darkness had been a thick curtain I stumbled through, and I'd hated every step of it. Now it was… readable. I could see edges and lines and the faint textures of old stone without straining.
I walked into what looked like an old human castle—ruined and repurposed. And this time, hanging thinly from the edges of the walls, I noticed banners.
Old cloth. Faded symbols.
Human.
I didn't notice that before.
As I continued, the same Mornaks lined the passage. The ones who'd stepped forward last time, eager to eat me like I'd been delivered as fresh food, weren't as eager now. They watched instead. They kept their distance. Their hunger was still there—I could feel it in the tension of their stillness—but something had changed.
Either Verren had ordered restraint, or my evolution had made me too dangerous to test.
I approached the same building I'd entered before, where the council met. I passed Verren's room without stopping. I didn't sense any vibrations inside. But from the council room, I felt five presences waiting—subtle shuffles, tiny adjustments, anticipation.
The guards moved away from the doors without being ordered.
Like they knew who I was now.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
The room looked the same in structure—five pillars rising like stone bones from the floor, each one topped by the silhouette of an elite Mornak. But the silhouettes felt… clearer to me now, not because they'd changed, but because I had.
Verren sat in the center, and he seemed stiffer than before, posture rigid like he was holding himself in place. My gaze drifted to the one with intense intrigue—Jonah, the one who had looked more interested in dissecting me than killing me. That curiosity was still there, precise as ever.
Then my attention snagged on the one to my left.
Marrow.
Something was off about him. Not just his usual aggression. Something in the way he sat, the way his energy pressed forward like a blade. My memory said he'd been the one most disgusted by me.
The other two remained nameless in my mind, but the weight of them wasn't simple. Their presences had edges.
The atmosphere in the room was intense, and I felt the air thin as if the space itself didn't want to carry sound. The old me would've sat here imagining death in a hundred different shapes, thoughts racing, stomach turning, trying to anticipate the angle the knife would take.
But now?
Now I stood before them relaxed and sharper, and the calm in me wasn't confidence so much as exhaustion with being afraid.
I expected Verren to speak first. But he let the silence stretch instead.
Something felt off about him. He looked like a thing that had been forced to sit still.
Finally, he broke the silence.
"It seems you have changed," he said calmly.
I didn't take the bait. I didn't let him set the conversation.
"I assume something has happened?" I asked sharply.
To my left, Marrow scoffed—not at the question itself, but at my tone. Like being direct with Verren was an insult all on its own.
Verren's voice went colder. "Something has."
Then silence returned.
My focus tightened. The room started to feel less like I'd walked into a council of allies and more like I'd stepped into a place where my presence was being tolerated for now.
"Before we discuss that, I believe there is something you want to tell us."
I frowned. "You may need to be a bit more specific," I replied, keeping my voice flat. I should've been more careful with my words. But I was irritated.
Verren shuffled slightly. His fist curled—just a twitch—then reset, like he'd caught himself.
"Do not play dumb with me, Calder," he said, and the way he spoke my name made it feel like a chain.
"We made an agreement and you broke it."
"Because of a weak, frail, useless monster."
Tension rippled through the room, and my senses caught it immediately—small shifts ran through their bodies, like sitting still was taking effort. But Marrow was the loudest of them. His aggression pressed forward like a blade, obvious and impatient, like he wanted my head separated from my body sitting on his pillar.
I remained composed, because losing control here would be a gift to them.
"Do not speak ill of my friend," I said sharply.
A pause followed, thick and dangerous.
Then I let the next word fall carefully.
"Verren."
"Friend?" Marrow scoffed, disbelief dripping from the sound like spit.
The one to my right spoke, voice rough. "We told you, Verren. He was useless to us."
Marrow inhaled like he was about to launch into something uglier, but Verren stepped in before it could spill.
"I do not care if you make friends with the weak," Verren said. "I care about how you honor our agreement."
"The agreement was simple. You help us obtain mana crystals, and we protect your frail region."
"And what did you do when you found one?" His voice rose with every line, controlled anger climbing toward something sharper. "You betrayed us and spent one of the most powerful things in the world on a monster you'd only just met."
"Betrayed?" I almost laughed, and stepped forward in defiance of the word. "Tell me, Verren."
"You have eyes everywhere," I said. "But you failed to mention something crucial."
"That dungeon wasn't normal. You sent me there to die."
"And what would you know of dungeons?" he scoffed back, like the idea was offensive.
I took another step. The distance between us felt smaller than it should've, and I could feel the other elites shifting on their pillars, their attention tightening.
"Do not play dumb with me, Verren," I said, throwing his own words back at him. "You talk about betrayal when you betrayed me first."
"You sent me into a corrupt dungeon that consumed everything it touched," I said.
"So tell me—why didn't you give me all the information you knew?"
Verren sat up in his chair, focus sharpening like a blade coming out of a sheath.
"Because you wouldn't go if we had told you."
I stared at him.
A quiet sound escaped me, the disbelief tasting bitter in my mouth. I should've been shocked. I wasn't. It fit too well. It was exactly the kind of logic monsters used when they wanted to justify cruelty as a necessity.
"You do not have the right to make decisions for me," I said, and my voice came out colder than I intended.
Verren's anger flared visibly.
"I am the region lord," I snapped. "You may live inside this separate dimension, but your doorway leads from my territory."
All five elites shifted. Not violently. Just enough to make it clear those words had landed badly.
"Therefore you must respect me otherwise—"
I didn't get to finish.
Marrow roared from the top of his lungs, the sound slamming into the room like a thrown stone.
"You disgusting mimic," he shouted. "You think you can stand in this room and rule over us?"
Jonah's voice slid in, calm as ever. "If you're going to do it, Marrow—try to keep the body intact. I'd like to study it."
Marrow paused. His head turned toward Jonah, and a slight smirk tugged at his mouth. "No promises."
Then his eyes snapped back to me. "I wanted you dead the first time we met," he growled. "Verren stopped me. He won't get the chance to save you this time."
He reached down beneath his stone chair atop the pillar, grabbed something, and leaped.
A weapon flashed in his hand as he came at me through the air.
I activated Sovereign's Sight on instinct.
Marrow - Level 26
I almost sighed.
He was strong. Stronger than a lot of things. But he wasn't as strong as he portrayed, and the arrogance in his charge made it obvious he hadn't adjusted to what I'd become.
He brought his axe down in a brutal arc, aiming to cleave through me mid-sentence.
I stepped.
I vanished from their sight. The other elites' heads snapped, eyes cutting through the room, searching.
The axe slammed into the floor where I'd been standing.
Fire erupted from the impact point, flames blooming outward as if the weapon had poured rage into the stone itself.
Marrow wrenched the axe free and snapped his head around, eyes scanning, but it was already too late.
I'd landed on the wall behind his pillar, claws stuck into stone like it was bark.
I used Claw Slash on the pillar.
The arc cut through it entirely.
Marrow turned sharply, and the pillar he'd just leaped from began to tumble, loose chunks shearing away, the larger mass crashing down toward him.
He screamed and swung his axe up, meeting the falling stone.
He sliced it clean in half, like it was hot dough.
For a moment, as the two halves of the pillar fell away, we locked eyes. He was mid-swing. I was stuck to the outer wall, watching.
His face twisted with anger.
A slight smirk crossed my face before I could stop it.
That was probably a bad habit to develop. It also felt good.
I stepped again.
He couldn't react in time. His body was still recovering from the swing, and I appeared right below him, on the other side of his axe while it was still moving through the air.
He tried to adjust mid-air, overcompensated, and his balance snapped. He did manage to swing toward me, desperate and fast.
I stepped again.
His axe hit the ground hard as he landed awkwardly, and for a split second—just one—his feet weren't set.
That was enough.
I moved in and used Claw Slash again, this time arcing it through the ground so the cut tore a jagged line across the stone floor before climbing upward like a ripping wave. The arc took his arm clean off, separating it from the axe handle.
The handle fell heavy onto the stone.
Marrow screamed.
The lingering edge of my Claw Slash kept going after it took Marrow's arm—angling left, toward the next pillar. The figure there was slimmer, almost feminine in silhouette.
Something snapped into existence in front of it. A long ribbon—dark and unreal—whipped out through the air, and for a split second I couldn't even tell what it was meant to be. It met my attack and swallowed it whole. No impact. No clash. Just… gone, like the cut had never existed.
I didn't chase the mystery. My focus stayed on Marrow.
His eyes snapped to me, fury wild and raw, and the moment our gazes met, I stepped again.
He spun, off balance, one-armed, trying to track a ghost.
I appeared under him.
He had no time. I formed a fist and uppercut him, driving my knuckles into his chin with enough force to separate his body from the ground beneath him.
He flew.
While he was airborne, I stepped again—this time onto the roof. I pushed off with incredible force, as the ceiling cracked slightly under the pressure like it was complaining about being treated as a launchpad.
I moved through the air, fast enough that the wind tore at my ears, and opened my hand.
I grabbed his face.
Then I slammed him into the ground.
A massive explosion of raw force burst on impact, stone fragments shooting outward, dust erupting like smoke from a bomb. The sound rang through the room and bounced off the pillars.
When the dust began to settle, the only clear shape was me—standing over him, his neck firmly in my grasp, his body limp with unconsciousness.
I lifted him slightly, not because I needed to, but because I wanted the message to land in the eyes of the others.
A soft laugh broke the tension—genuine, almost hysterical. A feminine voice. One of the elites leaned forward on her seat, shoulders shaking as she laughed, sitting up like she couldn't help herself.
"Once again, Marrow proving why he's the weakest."
Verren's head turned. He didn't say a word—just gave her a hard glare.
Her laughter died. She eased back into her seat and slouched, like she hadn't been the one making noise a second ago.
Then I spoke calmly, cold enough that the words didn't shake.
"You will show me respect."
Movement sparked from the closest pillar on the right.
Not a person.
An object.
I felt it before I turned—air vibrating in a fast, thin line as something cut toward my head. I didn't even bother to face it. I just shifted my stance and repositioned Marrow's limp body in front of me.
A spear flashed into view mid-flight, a straight line of intent aimed exactly where my face had been.
The spear stopped.
It halted in mid-air, hovering a finger's width from entering Marrow's head.
Verren's hand was lifted.
"Enough," he stated.
The word hit the room like a command the air itself obeyed. He lowered his hand slowly, and the spear dropped back as if it had never been moving.
He sighed, and for the first time since I'd entered, his posture loosened slightly.
"It seems we both betrayed each other in this predicament," Verren said.
I didn't reply. I stared at him stone cold, fingers still locked around Marrow's neck.
"Would you be able to release Marrow?" Verren asked calmly.
I looked down at Marrow—at the severed arm, the ragged stump, black goop already pooling onto the stone. Pieces of the cut limb twitched and reached, dragging themselves toward what was missing like they were trying to remember how to be whole.
I released him and threw his body toward the right pillar—the one who'd thrown the spear. The elite caught him, landing hard, and I felt vibrations from his teeth grinding, anger held back by effort.
As he jumped down to grab Marrow's unconscious body, I used Sovereign's Sight.
Elias - Level 28
I scoffed—low and sharp—and the sound visibly tightened Elias's face, anger flashing hotter for a moment. But he kept his control.
He jumped back with Marrow's body, and at the same time his spear moved—so fast the air hissed. It shot past my face close enough to shave the space in front of my eyes, then skewered Marrow's severed arm and yanked it off the floor in one clean motion.
The weapon snapped back toward Elias like it was on a leash, whipping past me again with that same razor speed.
I didn't flinch.
I turned my attention back to Verren.
Now the room felt different—like everyone had just been shown what was possible.
"Now," I said coldly, keeping my voice steady. "Tell me what has happened."