Dry Scar opened wider with every step.

From the rise where the truck had left them, the hunting grounds had looked empty. Once Neo and Alice walked into it, the place changed shape. Distance stopped feeling clean. Dunes rose where the land had looked flat. Half-buried stone broke the sand at odd angles, like old bones pushing up through skin. The trees were worse up close. Their trunks climbed high into the pale sky, stripped bare, dark in some places, white in others, each one standing alone with enough space around it to feel deliberate.

Wind moved through the ground in long dry breaths.

Sand scratched over stone. Nothing else.

Neo walked a few paces ahead at first, then slowed so Alice could come level with him. He had one hand in his pocket, shoulders loose, face as unreadable as always.

"This place looks like a bad memory," he said.

Alice kept her attention on the dunes ahead. "It’s wide."

"That’s what bothers you?"

"Yes."

Neo glanced sideways at her. "I thought you’d say the dead trees, the buried ruins, the part where the driver implied a murderer might be walking around."

Alice’s expression barely changed. "Wide is worse. More room for things to hide."

Neo let out a quiet breath through his nose, almost a laugh. "So you’re the paranoid one today."

Alice answered without missing a step. "I listened."

"That sounded personal."

The sand underfoot shifted with a dry hiss every time they moved. In some places it sat shallow over hard stone. In others, their steps sank farther than they should have, the surface collapsing slightly before holding. Neo kept his pace easy and his senses open. Dry Scar had that old, unpleasant feeling some places carried, the sort that made the back of the neck stay aware without needing a reason.

A broken wall emerged from one dune on their left, worn smooth by years of wind. Farther ahead, something like a stairway jutted from the sand and ended in open air.

Alice turned her head toward it for half a second. "Do people really come here just to wander around and look?"

"People do a lot of stupid things if the reward sounds good enough."

"And if they hear the word ruin."

"That too."

They walked another minute in silence before Neo stopped and crouched. He pressed two fingers to the ground, not because the sand held some magical answer, but because the shape of it said more when seen from up close. There were disturbances there. A trail. Fresh enough not to have been eaten completely by the wind.

Alice halted beside him. "Soul Beast?"

"Yeah." Neo rose.

Alice gave a short nod.

Neo pulled Soul Essence through himself and the Vagabond’s Rag formed over his clothes in a low shimmer, rough fabric settling around him like a familiar lie pretending to be protection. After that, black metal flowed from his relic into both hands and split into the paired blades.

The Twin Fangs of the Mourning Executioner had lost the raw shape they once carried. After being devoured and remade, they had come back finer, crueler, cleaner in design without looking decorative. One curved slightly inward, eager and narrow. The other held a heavier line near the spine, built for damage that stayed with a target after the strike had ended.

Alice’s attention dropped to the blades. She looked at them for a moment before asking, "Is that what the boss from the tower gave you?"

Neo rolled one wrist, testing the balance of the twin blades before the black metal caught the light and thinned along the edge.

"Yeah," he said. "That’s exactly it."

Alice kept her gaze on them another second. "They look nice."

"They are." Neo glanced at her. "That all?"

Alice answered by summoning her axe and looked ahead again. "If they cut well, that’s enough."

It appeared in her hand with a brief flash of Soul Essence, heavy and broad-bladed, built with the sort of straightforward violence that matched her well. She rested it against one shoulder and looked ahead again.

Neo gestured with one blade toward the trail. "Let’s see what’s digging under us."

The warning came less than a minute later.

A tremor.

Small. Quick. Easy to miss if a person was busy admiring the scenery or imagining profit.

Neo’s head turned sharply. "Right."

Alice moved the instant he spoke.

The sand ahead of them exploded upward.

A giant scorpion burst from beneath the dune in a shower of grit and broken crust, black-brown shell covered in pale dust, eight legs finding purchase in an instant. Its body was as long as a small car. The tail rose behind it in a smooth arch, stinger gleaming with a dirty green sheen.

The thing snapped forward fast.

Neo met it faster.

Beast Strength surged through his limbs, not as some noble blaze, but as a brutal answer written straight into muscle and bone. He shot in from the side just as the first claw crashed down where he had been standing half a heartbeat earlier. One blade carved across the joint. The second followed low under it, metal kissing shell with a hard scraping cry.

The scorpion hissed and twisted at once.

Alice came in from the front.

Her axe fell with both hands behind it, slamming into the creature’s carapace with enough force to jolt sand loose from its back. The scorpion reeled and lashed its tail toward her head.

Neo cut across its path.

One fang bit into the base of the tail. The other opened a second line across the same section before the first strike had even finished.

Mourning Venom entered with the cuts.

Grave Wound followed.

The beast jerked as if the pain had arrived inside the shell rather than on it. Its movement hitched for the smallest instant.

Execution Mark.

Alice saw the opening and stepped through it like she had been waiting there already. Her foot sank into the sand, grounded, and she drove the axe down again into the front of the body where shell plates overlapped.

The impact rang out through the dead quiet around them.

The scorpion staggered back, one claw dragging wrong now.

Neo kept moving.

He did not give it space to recover. Beast Strength was still alive in him, pushing his body with that feral edge that made everything feel one step lighter, one beat quicker. He slipped past the weakened claw, cut once across the side, ducked the tail, and drove both blades into the same wounded line with a savage cross motion.

The scorpion convulsed.

Its tail crashed sideways into the sand. One leg folded under it. The poison inside its flesh had begun ruining whatever flow kept its body coordinated, and every movement it made only worsened the damage opened by Grave Wound.

Alice’s voice came flat from his left. "Finish it."

"You giving orders now?"

"Yes."

Neo almost snorted.

The beast lunged one final time, more anger than sense, and Alice raised her free hand as pale Soul Essence rushed around her forearm and spilled outward in a clean surge.

Valkyries’ Call.

The force of it washed over Neo like a tightening current, his body drawing one sharp extra breath without meaning to. Strength rose. The next step bit deeper.

He blurred forward.

The first fang opened the underside of the throat. The second went through softer flesh just above it. He ripped both free and Alice’s axe came down an instant later, cleaving deep enough to end whatever fight the creature imagined it still had left.

The giant scorpion collapsed into the sand with a dry, ugly shudder.

Silence returned at once.

Neo breathed out and rolled his shoulder once, bleeding off the last of Beast Strength’s push. Alice lowered the axe and gave the corpse a brief glance to make sure it wasn’t about to surprise them.

"It moved well," she said.

Neo flicked venom-dark blood from one blade. "For a bug."

Alice’s mouth shifted a fraction. "That was not a bug."

"Big bug, then."

He stepped toward the corpse and the notification appeared.

[Soul-Window]

[You have slain Sandgrave Scorpion - Ember Core.]

A dull orb began forming above the broken remains.

Neo picked it up without ceremony. The Soul Core fit cold in his palm for one breath before he consumed it.

[Soul-Window]

[You have consumed Sandgrave Scorpion - Ember Core.]

[+2 Souls]

[202/2500 Vein]

The light vanished into him before Alice could ask anything, and from the outside all that remained was the dead scorpion at their feet, its shell split open and sinking slowly into the sand.

Neo exhaled through his nose.

’202.’

Alice rested the axe against one shoulder and watched him for a brief moment. "Well?"

Neo flicked the last trace of blood from one blade. "Not bad."

That was all she got, and she seemed fine with it.

He was about to turn away when something farther up the dune caught his attention.

Wind dragged thin sheets of sand across the rise, but not enough to hide what waited on the other side.

Another scorpion.

Dead.

Its shell had been split through the middle in a way cleaner than what he and Alice had just done. A little farther beyond it lay a second one, half-buried already, with one claw severed and the body carved open near the throat. And beyond that, near the roots of one of the dead giant trees, rested a third.

Neo stopped.

Alice came up beside him and took in the sight without speaking.

Three bodies.

Fresh enough that the wind had not claimed them yet.

Not killed by other beasts. Killed by an awakened.

Neo’s face stayed blank, but the thought came fast.

’So we’re not alone.’