Ronan stood at the ridge’s edge, surveying the aftermath of their bombardment. Below, the lit city was now just a sprawl of shattered buildings, crushed vehicles, and the faint haze of dust still settling across streets.

Sarael pressed against his side, her shadows curling around both of them like a cloak.

"How many did we kill?" she asked.

"Dozens, maybe more. I lost count..."

"And your level?"

"Still fifteen, they aren’t worth much EXP despite their intelligence."

Sarael nodded, her violet eyes fixed on the darkened city below. Her expression had shifted during the bombardment. The eager, approval-seeking goddess was still there, but something colder and protective surfaced beneath it.

She was in her element now. This was her domain, darkness, shadows, the quiet moments before violence. Ronan realized he was seeing a slightly different side of her, the side that had survived centuries of isolation without going completely mad.

Or maybe she had already gone mad, and this was just what functional insanity looked like.

***

The city streets were a graveyard.

Ronan moved through the shadows with Lover’s Protection active, his body dissolving into near-perfect invisibility. Sarael didn’t need the skill; she was shadow itself, flowing alongside him like a second silhouette, her presence betrayed only by the faint scent of her signature flowers.

Up close, the damage was even more extensive than it had looked from the ridge. Buildings had collapsed inward, their structure torn open by the barrage. Streetlights lay bent and shattered across the pavement.

The warm orange glow was gone, replaced by the cold violet of the moon and the absolute black of Sarael’s influence.

"Movement."

Sarael whispered, her voice directly in his ear despite her form being somewhere to his left.

"Ahead, at the intersection. There are two of them."

Ronan pressed himself against a collapsed wall and peered around the corner.

The creatures at the intersection were humanoid. That was the first surprise. He’d expected more beasts, flesh golems, skitters, stalkers, the usual nightmare fauna of this world. But these things walked on two legs, wore the remnants of clothing, and carried weapons.

And some were even familiar.

The clothes on those figures, he swore he’d seen them before.

A jacket with a guild patch half-ripped from the shoulder. A porter’s harness still buckled across a sunken chest. The remnants of people he’d watched die over forty-seven days.

But it was the faces that made his stomach turn.

Distorted, stretched, like a mirror image that had melted. But still recognizable. Still wearing the ghosts of expressions he remembered from the expedition.

"The hell...?"

He kept his voice low, barely a breath.

Two possibilities, neither of them good. Mimics, creatures that wore stolen shapes like costumes. Or remnants of the expedition itself, corrupted into something worse than dead.

Either way, it explained the patrol patterns and the organization. If these things had once been hunters themselves, or had absorbed enough of them to mimic their behavior...

They’d be smarter than anything else in this world.

Ronan’s jaw tightened, a brief glimpse of sadness showing in his face, but it didn’t last long.

"Doesn’t matter. They’re already dead."

Sarael tilted her head, her violet eyes tracking the nearest figure as it shambled past.

"Should we kill them...? Well, again, I suppose?"

"No." He shook his head, barely a motion. "We’re both still invisible. We kill them now, we announce exactly where we are to every other patrol in the city."

He watched the figures move past, close enough that he could smell something faint and wrong beneath the general rot of the dead city.

"Let’s just wait for them to pass."

Ronan held his breath as the two figures shambled past the intersection, their distorted faces swiveling. One of them, the one wearing the porter’s harness, stopped mid-step.

Its head turned toward the collapsed wall where Ronan crouched.

But he didn’t panic, not yet. Lover’s Protection was active, and the shadows around him were thick enough to hide an army. But the creature’s melted features twitched, its nostrils flaring as if testing the air.

"Ronan," Sarael whispered, her voice a thread of sound directly in his ear. "It senses something."

"I know."

The creature took a step toward them. Then another. Its companion had stopped too, head swiveling with that same eerie synchronization.

Then Sarael’s shadows moved.

Nothing that would register as an attack. Just a subtle shift in the darkness at the far end of the street, a whisper of movement that drew the creature’s attention away from the collapsed wall.

The porter-thing’s head snapped toward the disturbance, and a low, wet growl escaped its throat. The two figures exchanged a look that was almost human, then continued their patrol down the intersecting street.

Ronan waited until their footsteps faded before exhaling.

"Good thinking."

He pushed himself off the wall and kept moving, his boots silent on the rubble-strewn pavement. Sarael flowed alongside him, her shadows pressing close.

They passed more patrols as they pushed deeper into the city. Groups of two and three, sometimes a cluster of five, huddled together in the ruins of a bombed-out building.

All of them wore remnants of the expedition. All of them had faces that made Ronan’s jaw clench.

But not all of them were humanoid.

Some were skitters with guild patches embedded in their chitin. A bone-face with a tattered cloak still wrapped around its sinewy shoulders.

Creatures that had absorbed the dead, or been absorbed by them, or something in between that Ronan didn’t have the vocabulary to describe.

"They’re getting thicker the more we reach the center," Sarael murmured.

"As long as we don’t make too much noise, we should be fine."

***

It took an hour of careful navigation to reach the city center. The narrow streets opened into a wide plaza, and there, ringed by collapsed barricades and the remains of tents, was the forward camp.

Ronan stopped at the edge of the ruins.

He recognized this place. The mess tent where he’d eaten his last real meal. The medical station where a healer had died trying to save a hunter on day twelve. The spot near the latrine where he’d hidden for three hours while a rogue flesh golem tore through the camp.

Now it was a graveyard. Equipment scattered, bloodstains dried black on torn canvas. And in the center of it all, humming with faint blue light, stood the exit gate.

Between Ronan and the gate, dozens of distorted hunters stood motionless, their melted faces fixed on the portal like worshippers before an altar.

Ronan murmured.

"They’re just... waiting."

"Making sure no one exits, perhaps?"

Ronan scanned the congregation. No gaps, and no clear path. The moment he stepped into the open, Lover’s Protection would fail, and every single one of those things would be on him.

Even uninterruptible invisibility won’t work when the gap between the distorted hunters was barely as wide as an inch.

He’d have to be as thin as a stick to avoid being detected after accidentally brushing their shoulder.

"Can you distract them? Draw them away?"

Sarael nodded, but her expression had a mix of worry in it.

"I can try. But once I move, the others we passed will swarm here. You’ll only have seconds."

"I can do that."

Sarael nodded and stepped forward, and her shadows uncoiled from her body like serpents. They spread across the rubble in a silent wave, cold and weightless, reaching toward the far end of the camp.

Then they slammed against a collapsed barricade with a sound like thunder.

Every head in the congregation snapped toward the noise. The distorted hunters let out a collective hiss, and then they moved, shambling toward the source of the disturbance.

The path to the gate opened.

"Go!"

Ronan activated Shadow Merge. Darkness swallowed him whole, cold and absolute, and when it spat him back out, he was fifty meters closer, boots hitting the ground at a dead sprint.

The gate loomed ahead, blue light washing over him. Behind him, some of the creatures had already turned back, realizing the deception. He heard their footsteps, wet and dragging, closing in.

But they were too slow.

Ronan launched himself through the gate, and the world dissolved into light.

[Tartarus-B Escaped]

[+1 Skill Evolution Point Obtained]

[Usable only through intimacy with (Bonded)]