The range beca a warzone in seconds.
Association officers who had frozen at the Claimant’s ergence found their training again. Veterans who had been grinding these mountains for weeks drew weapons and fell into formation. The evacuation horns resud, but evacuation was no longer possible. The creatures were everywhere, pouring down from the sky and up from the valleys, cutting off every route.
A Glasswing Darter dove toward a cluster of retreating rookies and an Association officer intercepted it mid-flight, her blade carving through its crystalline wing. The thing screeched and tumbled, but two more replaced it before she could recover her stance.
Sowhere below the ridge, a Mirecrawler’s acid caught an A-tier fighter across the chest. His scream cut off.
"Kaiden!"
Brittany and Trisha had reached the ridge from behind, ard and pale. "We need to leave," Brittany said. Her eyes swept the descending swarm. "We can help coordinate the retreat. Get you and the girls to..."
An Embermaw dropped toward them trailing fire from wings that shouldn’t exist.
An arrow of condensed arcane energy punched through its skull before it got within thirty ters.
Tessa Verain landed on the ridge with her bow already nocking another shot, her Eclipse badge catching the bruised light. Behind her, more of the guild’s veteran track fighters were erging, forming a periter, their movents sharp despite the chaos.
"Retreat where?" Tessa called. She loosed another arrow. Another creature dropped. "The whole range is crawling with them. Since they can fly at high speeds, using vehicles is a death sentence."
She was right. The swarm extended in every direction, a living ceiling of wings and claws descending on every human across the mountains. The rhythms the fighters had learned over weeks of grinding ant nothing now. Creatures that had attacked in predictable sequences were diving in coordinated waves. Beasts that had never shown pack tactics were flanking, herding, boxing in.
A veteran two ridges over died because he dodged left when the old rule said left was safe. The new rule said left was where the second Darter was waiting.
Another died because she expected the Cragweaver’s web to anchor before it struck; it struck mid-leap instead.
His girls had already moved. They’d fallen into the formation that had carried them through weeks of grinding this range, weapons drawn, powers humming, facing the incoming cluster with the grim focus of won who had no intention of dying here.
Luna’s Stormblade crackled. "What are these, pokemons? How can they just evolve?"
Not caring to get an answer right away, her blade angled toward the incoming swarm.
Vespera stepped past her.
Blood still dripped from her nose, staining her collar, but her eyes were clear and cold. From the eastern approach, a cluster of the evolved monsters had broken from the main swarm and were driving straight for their position. Three Shellback Gorgers with wingspans that blocked the sky led the push, a pack of Mirecrawlers scuttling beneath them and a hulking spine-studded brute bringing up the rear.
The shadows answered her call.
They rose from the stone around her like a tide, pooling at her feet, climbing her body, wrapping her arms in tendrils that pulsed with a darkness deeper than absence of light. The air temperature dropped. The sky dimd wherever her gaze touched.
"[Shadow Mandate]."
The shadows at her feet erupted outward in a wave that crossed the distance to the incoming monsters in the span of a heartbeat, and where it touched them, it held.
The Shellback Gorgers froze mid-flight, their wings pinned by darkness that had wrapped them like chains. The Mirecrawlers thrashed against bonds they couldn’t dodge. The spine-studded giant at the rear managed one step before shadow tendrils found its legs and anchored it to stone.
Vespera closed her fist.
The shadows constricted, snapping inward with a violence that turned monsters into components. Wings separated from bodies. Limbs tore free at joints. The spine-studded giant split down its center as if unzipped from crown to tail, its insides spilling across the stone in a wet avalanche.
The Mirecrawlers died in pieces, acid blood spraying from stumps where legs had been, mandibles still clicking as the shadows dragged what remained of their bodies in separate directions.
Then the corpses flickered.
The Shellback Gorger nearest to him, the one Vespera had bisected through the torso, shimred at the edges like a heat mirage. Its flesh lost solidity. Its blood stopped spreading.
And then it was gone.
The body faded from existence in the space of two seconds. Despawned, leaving behind only a faint wisp of light where the creature had fallen.
And then, the wisp began to drift. Slowly at first, then faster, pulled toward the horizon by an invisible current. Toward the direction the mountain sized creature had gone.
The other corpses followed. The Mirecrawlers. The spine-studded giant. Every piece of every monster Vespera had killed shimred and faded and left behind those sa pale wisps, and every wisp traveled the sa direction.
"That’s not possible," Nyx said quietly.
She was right. It wasn’t.
Monsters inside their dungeons despawned on death because the dungeon core reclaid them. Given ti, they would respawn, pulled back into existence by the sa force that had created them. It was why dungeon grinding was sustainable. It was why the sa monsters could be fard again and again.
But monsters that left their dungeons didn’t despawn. Their corpses remained on Earth, solid and harvestable. It was what allowed Kaiden’s cooking streams to exist. It was how Runewoven sourced the materials for their crafting. It was how the entire awakened economy functioned. You killed sothing outside a dungeon, its body was yours to harvest for all its worth.
These monsters had been outside. They had been on the range. They had been in open air under Earth’s sky.
And they had despawned anyway.
However, nobody had ti to process its implications. The swarm was still descending. More monsters were breaking toward their position. Tessa was already loosing arrows. The veteran fighters were engaging.
But Vespera’s eyes had gone distant. She was staring at the wisps as they faded into the horizon, and when she spoke, then her focus shifted, red eyes aid solely on her son as her voice cut through the chaos. "Kaiden. What’s going on?"
The fighting continued around them. Arrows flew. Monsters screeched. Sowhere nearby, a human voice cried out and went silent. The sky pressed down on the range like a bruise.
Kaiden looked at his mother for a long mont, longer than the situation should have allowed.
"That thing," he said finally, "wants to usurp ."
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