The beak got within a hair of the scout’s eye before something tore it off course. A blow caught the bird square in the side and flung the whole mass of it clear across the clearing.

It smashed through two trees before it hit the ground, screeching, its feathers smoking where the strike had landed.

The scout was still frozen with his hands half-raised, far too slow to have done anything about it himself. Loccy stood right in front of him, one arm still extended from the swing that had sent the bird flying.

Two wings of pale gold light had unfolded behind her back but it was what she now held in her other hand that pulled every eye in the clearing toward her.

A massive hammer hung easily from her grip, its head a single block bigger than her whole torso. The metal of it was threaded through with the same pale gold that burned in her wings.

Her insignia glowed across the flat of the head, marking the weapon as something her evolution had forged, not a thing anyone had handed her. She swung the hammer up onto her shoulder like it weighed nothing at all, then glanced back at the scout with a bright, unbothered smile.

"You okay?" she asked, her ears twitching, like she hadn’t just launched a five-shard monster across the clearing with one arm.

The scout couldn’t get a single word out, just stared up at the small bunny girl and the slab of metal resting against her shoulder. Behind him, Cassie’s mouth had fallen open, and Jonas looked like his brain had quietly given up.

Hajin pulled up a few steps short, the chain still loose in his hand, since there was nothing left for him to actually do. Juna landed beside him and folded her claws away, looking faintly annoyed that Loccy had beaten her to it.

’So that’s what hers looks like,’ he thought, his eyes moving over the hammer and the wings. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

He’d known Loccy carried a second wing ever since the Beast King gate, but she had never once needed to bring it out until now.

Juna’s evolution had remade her from the inside, the white hair and silver eyes proof enough of that. Loccy’s hadn’t bothered changing a single thing about the way she looked.

It had simply handed her a way to put all that monstrous strength somewhere. Right now that somewhere was a hammer the size of a grown man.

Across the clearing, the bird was already dragging itself upright, its torn feathers knitting back together while the purple corruption pulsed through them. A hit like that hadn’t come close to putting it down for good.

Loccy’s ears flicked toward it, and her easy smile sharpened into something hungrier. She slid the hammer off her shoulder and let its head drop to the ground, cratering the earth at her feet.

She glanced back over her shoulder at Hajin, the hungry look on her face softening into something more like a question.

"Master, can I take this one?" she asked, bouncing slightly on her heels despite the hammer planted at her side.

Looking at the bird dragging itself back together, then at Loccy all but vibrating with the urge to hit something, Hajin let himself smile a little.

"Go for it," he said.

From everything he understood about the wings, they worked as a flat multiplier on a summon’s base stats and nothing more. The number of wings set how big that multiplier got, but the base stats underneath kept climbing the whole time, fight after fight.

That gap was exactly why Juna still sat so far above Loccy, even now. She had three wings to Loccy’s two, along with far more time spent bleeding through real fights to grow what those wings multiplied.

Loccy had the raw strength to close some of that distance, but not the fights to sharpen it yet. A mutated five-shard would drag that growth out of her one painful hit at a time.

She didn’t need to be told twice, as she ripped the hammer up out of the crater before the word had fully left his mouth. She shot across the clearing straight at the bird, the ground cracking under every step she took.

The bird shrieked and threw itself off the ground before she reached it, wings beating hard as it climbed out of her reach. It came back down a heartbeat later, talons first, dropping through the air with enough speed to leave a purple streak in its wake.

Loccy didn’t try to meet the dive head-on, instead pivoting on one foot and swinging the hammer up in a tight arc. The head caught the bird at the worst possible angle and knocked it skidding sideways through the air.

She followed without a pause, the hammer flowing from one swing into the next without the slightest drag. The bird tried to climb again, but she met it with a backswing that cracked across its wing and dropped it toward the ground.

Hajin watched the whole exchange with a slight frown, since this was not what he had expected at all. He’d sent her in figuring she would struggle, lean on raw strength, eat a few bad hits and learn something from them.

Instead she fought like she’d been doing it for years, every swing landing exactly where she meant it to. The hammer moved like an extension of her arm, not a weapon she had held for less than a minute.

’Where the hell did she learn to move like that,’ he thought, his frown deepening as she spun the hammer through another clean combination.

It wasn’t the first time that exact question had nagged at the back of his mind. Loccy had been an ordinary rabbit before the system pulled her out of the Veil and rebuilt her, so she’d had no hands to hold a weapon and no reason to ever learn how to fight.

And yet there she was, reading the bird’s dives and answering each one with technique nobody had ever taught her. He filed it away with the growing pile of things about his own summons that he still couldn’t explain.

Across the clearing, Loccy laughed, light and delighted, as she chased the staggering bird down for another swing.

Hajin watched the genuinely unhinged joy painted across her face as she closed in on her prey.

He glanced over at Juna, who was watching the one-sided execution with a faint smirk of genuine approval. A slow realization finally dawned on him that none of the girls bound to his system were even remotely sane.

’Haha, I probably need to start being a lot more careful around this bunch,’ he thought to himself with a quiet sigh.