Luna ran.
Storm surged through her calves and thighs in electric rivers, each stride covering ten ters of mountain terrain, the wind screaming past her ears and the ground blurring beneath her boots into a sar of grey and black stone.
She was grinning so hard her cheeks hurt.
’He’s insane. He’s actually insane. I’m in love with a complete psychopath and I wouldn’t have it any other way!’
The canyon mouth was ahead, five hundred ters closing fast, and Luna’s mind was racing even faster than her legs.
She replayed it.
Every single beat, from the mont Kaiden had dismissed the overlay after being denied his second target, to the quiet fury in his voice when he said "So we must do sothing else." The girls had seen the shift in his posture. The loosening. The way his jaw unclenched, because the anger wasn’t building anymore. It had found a direction.
"We need sothing bigger. Sothing New Dawn won’t dare fight with a squad like this."
The girls had looked shocked. Luna had felt her stomach drop for half a second before she’d caught it. The tightness at the corners of his eyes. The way his breathing had settled instead of quickened. Kaiden wasn’t spiraling. He was calculating.
She’d kept the concern on her face because the others were keeping theirs, and because sowhere out there a scout with very good ears was watching.
That was the part that made her head spin.
Kaiden hadn’t told them the plan. Hadn’t whispered it, hadn’t pulled them aside for a tactical briefing. He’d kept his mouth shut and trusted his girls to follow him into what looked like a suicide charge against a level eighty monster, knowing that the stalker feeding intel to New Dawn was almost certainly listening to every word they spoke.
Every single thing Kaiden had said out loud was a performance.
"Girls, this will be a brutal battle. We might sustain injuries. But we must push through."
For the scout.
"Found it. Let’s move."
For the scout.
"What? They dare fight a monster at level 80?!"
The grumbled disbelief when Ash and Chinedu’s squad arrived. The fury in his jaw, the cables in his forearms, the way he’d t Ash’s eyes with enough raw anger to make the clown think he was the king of the world. Luna had bought it herself for a mont, and she was his girlfriend.
All for the scout.
Every word sold the sa story: Kaiden Grey was desperate, furious, and making increasingly reckless decisions because New Dawn had backed him into a corner. He’d selected a monster so dangerous that suggested he was cracking under pressure. Lashing out. Making mistakes.
Except the monster selection wasn’t a mistake. It was the entire point.
A level eighty Deepvein Colossus. Five tis the size of the Borer Queen that had nearly wiped them. Mineral-encrusted hide that regenerated from damage. A territorial rage response that chased anything that hurt it for over a kiloter.
Kaiden would never have fought that thing. But that’s the beauty of it. He’d already showcased he was a madman willing to punch way above his weight, so why would New Dawn think he was bluffing when it was them who drove him into such a terrible corner?
Kaiden and co had proven they could punch twenty-eight levels above their weight with the Borer Queen, so a level eighty wasn’t completely out of the question for a man with their track record, but the Colossus’s specific abilities made it a nightmare matchup.
Self-healing hide negated their sustained-pressure strategy. The territorial chase response ant no clean disengage if the fight went wrong. It was the wrong target for their team composition, and Kaiden knew their composition better than anyone alive.
He’d chosen it because New Dawn would fight it.
An S-tier with a ten-man squad and a four-man assist from Ashbound? That was a winnable engagent. Hard, long, resource-intensive, but winnable.
Chinedu was strong enough to crack the mineral hide. His squad was disciplined enough to rotate through a thirty-minute grind. The Colossus was exactly the kind of target a veteran-led group would commit to without hesitation.
And once they committed, they couldn’t leave. The territorial rage response locked them in. Which ant they were stuck, all fourteen of them, in a basin with one exit, fighting a creature that wouldn’t let them walk away.
Five hundred ters from a column of forty Razorfang Slashers.
Luna’s grin widened until it was practically splitting her face in half.
’He picked a monster he’d never fight, next to a horde he knew would chase , and sold the whole thing as a desperate rookie losing his mind. And he did it without saying a single word of the actual plan out loud because the scout was listening the entire ti.’
She wanted to kiss him again.
She wanted to kiss him until neither of them could breathe.
Later. Business first.
The canyon opened up ahead, narrow walls of black stone funneling into a passage where the air tasted like iron and old blood.
Luna’s Storm-enhanced senses picked up the vibrations before her eyes caught the movent. Dozens of chitinous bodies, packed tight, bladed forelimbs clicking against stone in a rhythm that sounded like a thousand knives being sharpened simultaneously.
The Razorfang Slashers.
They filled the canyon floor in a river of segnted bodies and serrated limbs. Level seventy-three at the edges, eighty-five near the center of the column. Big ones, small ones, fast ones that twitched at every sound and slower ones whose carapaces were scarred from lots of killing.
Forty of them. Maybe more.
All migrating north. All following the sa pull that every monster in the deep range had been following for days.
Luna stopped at the canyon’s edge and looked down at the horde.
She took a breath.
’Hunt so monsters there for . If you can’t win, co back.’
His exact words. Said with a straight face, in front of the scout, as casually as a man sending his fastest fighter on a solo grind. Perfectly innocent. Completely reasonable.
If she happened to piss off a column of forty pack hunters and lead them on a rry chase back to a basin where fourteen fighters were already locked in combat with an unkillable mineral fortress, well. That was just bad luck.
Luna raised her hand. Storm crackled between her fingers, violet light dancing across her knuckles.
She aid at the largest Slasher in the column. A level eighty-five specin at the center, its carapace thick and dark, forelimbs the length of greatswords.
The lightning bolt hit it square in the back.
The bolt splashed across the creature’s carapace and dissipated, leaving no wound, no crack, no visible damage whatsoever.
The Slasher’s head swiveled toward her. Six eyes, all of them locking onto the tiny woman standing at the canyon’s edge, crackling with violet light like a neon sign.
One shriek.
Then forty.
The column erupted. Every Slasher in the formation abandoned its migration path and rushed toward her, bladed limbs scrabbling against stone, bodies climbing over each other in their haste to reach the thing that had struck their alpha. The canyon walls funneled them into a wave of chitin and rage.
Luna cupped her hands around her mouth.
"Sorry, Kai! I tried, but this is just impossible for !"
She laughed.
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