Hiding on this rocky spine was a terrible idea. Wet moss. Dead dirt. Granite that felt like teeth. Leonardo shoved his ribs against the boulder and tried not to move. He didn't care about the cold or the fact that sharp stone edges were currently chewing through his wool tunic to get at his skin. You need pain out here. Pain keeps your brain from snapping in half when the Elinor Woods start messing with your head. Let it bleed a little. Let it freeze. It beats the alternative.
He had to babysit his own breathing. Every single breath was a math problem. Suck in a tiny bit of air. Hold it. Push it out through your teeth so it doesn't puff up into a big white cloud. Normal kids would lose their minds, gasping and crying, blowing warm fog into the night air that any tracker beast would spot from miles away. He gave his brain the bare minimum of oxygen required to stay awake. The freezing wind scraped down his throat. He swallowed the cough.
Being quiet is for amateurs. Ecatrice beat that lesson into him back in the courtyard. You can't just stand behind a rock and hope the monster is blind. You have to yank your whole existence out of the equation. He shoved every drop of sweat, every stupid terrified thought, every erratic heartbeat straight down into the Vazio. Delete the footprint. Become a glitch in the mud. The Elinor Woods are already deafening, packed with chaotic magic roaring through the trees. So he made himself zero. A blank space between the roots.
Then the noise started.
Skritch. Skritch-clack. Getting closer.
Paws don't sound like that. Wild dogs know how to walk. This was dead bone scraping on dead bone. No cartilage. Just a gross, dry, clicking rhythm that made his stomach turn. Whatever was making it had too many legs and probably lacked skin altogether. Just a broken biological machine.
Leonardo moved his neck maybe a millimeter. His muscles screamed. Move too fast and the air shifts. Shift the air and you die. He found a crack in the granite barely wide enough to fit a copper coin and put his eye right against it.
The thing spilling over the ridge's edge was a Void-Stalked Scavenger.
Big as a timber wolf, built like a two-hundred-pound centipede shoved into a dog's skeleton. The armor was the worst part. It wasn't solid. It was like looking through dirty, frosted glass. You could see the inside of the beast. Sick purple mud pumped through its veins instead of blood, twitching and spasming, lighting up the ribcage. Zero eyes. Just a sloped dome of armor on the head. The snout was lined with these disgusting, wet holes that kept opening and snapping shut. They made a wet smacking sound, tasting the night air for magic and sweat.
Level 1, Leonardo thought, desperately trying to stick a textbook label on the nightmare to keep his head straight.
His left eye started burning. A deep, sick heat right behind the pupil. The Soul-Seed inside his ribs was waking up, reacting to the corrupted monster outside. It's infected, he realized, staring at the purple sludge. The Black King's rot is in there. It's too heavy. Too fast. The Spire's books are garbage.
The beast slammed on the brakes. Every single leg locked up at once, stopping ten feet from the boulder.
The snout drifted his way. The holes glowed purple. It couldn't see him since it had no eyeballs, but it definitely felt the missing space where Leonardo was hiding. If the whole forest is screaming with magic, a perfectly quiet hole is going to stick out. It was a neon sign.
Leonardo squeezed the Sting. The cheap leather handle dug right into his popped blisters. The Earth-Tier knife was freezing, biting into his calluses like dry ice.
Waiting means dying. He didn't yell or jump. He just dropped the Void State and uncoiled. One frame he was a rock, the next he was a blur tearing through the fog.
Forget the head. Stabbing that dome would snap his wrist in half. Take the legs, pin them to the dirt, then finish it, Arthur had told him.
He swung the Sting. Silent blade cutting the wind. He went low and hacked straight through the back joint where the leg connected to the chest. Earth-Tier metal sheared the armor like wet cardboard.
No screaming. It didn't have lungs. No red blood either. Purple liquid blasted out of the stump under high pressure and hit the rock with a loud hiss. Acid. It boiled on contact with the cold air. The toxic smoke smelled like rotting peaches and electrical fires.
The monster lost a leg but still spun around like a top. The remaining claws scraped wildly over the wet granite. Then came the vibration. It buzzed right in Leonardo's teeth and rattled his ribs. Sonar tracking.
The beast launched itself. Two massive jaws unfolded from its chest and snapped forward to crush his ribs. You don't block two hundred pounds of flying monster with a dagger unless you want your arms ripped off.
He just ducked out of reality.
He sidestepped. Bypassed the panic entirely by sinking back into the Vazio. The jaws clapped shut on nothing, missing his face by an inch and spitting rotten wind into his eyes.
The dagger was doing its job. His left eye watched the purple veins die off near the cut. Earth-Tier metal doesn't just slice; it eats mana. The bleeding stump turned into dead, white chalk. The magic was sucking out the energy the beast needed to regenerate. It tried to stand on the bad leg and collapsed. The nerves were fried.
"You're fast," Leonardo muttered into the fog. "But you weigh a ton. Keep twitching. You're bleeding out energy."
The monster's blind instincts kicked in. It sensed the gap. It knew where Leonardo wasn't standing. It threw itself up on its hind legs to get tall, flashing its soft underbelly. Glowing ribs lit up purple. The core was redlining. A wet sucking sound came from its chest, and it hawked a massive glob of acid right at his head.
Leonardo stood his ground. Moving meant losing the angle. He dug his boots in, twisted his wrist, and swung the Sting up fast.
The metal hit the acid and drank it whole. Tiny silver carvings on the blade flashed white. It swallowed the raw essence before it could melt his face off. The recoil from eating that much heavy mana sent a freezing shock straight down his arm. Fingers went totally numb. Ice in his elbow. He gripped the leather harder and leaned into the cold.
"My turn."
He didn't even run. Distance is a joke when you drift. He slipped right under the monster's guard. The Academy called him a Level 1 Inept. Garbage. No spells, no glowing shields. But standing here in the absolute zero of the Vazio, he was the top of the food chain.
He shoved the Sting straight up. Put all his weight into it. Legs driving the force up his back and out his shoulder. He aimed for the soft, glowing gap right under the heavy skull.
The knife went in easy. No bone to stop it. He buried it to the hilt, burying his fist in the chest cavity. It didn't feel like stabbing meat or practice dummies. It felt like punching a sandbag full of electricity.
The hilt shook so violently his shoulder almost dislocated. The runes flashed bright and ripped the essence straight out of the beast.
It didn't thrash. Didn't bite. It just froze up like dead wood. The purple mud in its veins got sucked upward into the metal. Leonardo locked his grip. The energy transfer was so strong it actually pushed him backward, boots dragging through the mud. He could feel the life force moving through the dagger. Hungry, jagged energy bleeding into his wrists and up his arms.
A weird popping sound hit the air. Like glass breaking underwater.
The creature completely collapsed. The shell didn't crack; it just turned to gray ash all at once. Two hundred pounds of monster gone, blowing away in the wind. Just a small, bruised purple orb left behind, hovering over his bloody knife.
He dropped his arm and gasped. Lungs burning like he inhaled pine needles. He doubled over and coughed. The word 'Inept' crossed his mind, but the cold System text wiped it out.