The moment the second beast collapsed, Renji dropped flat onto the ground.

He didn’t choose to. His legs simply stopped working, and the earth came up to meet him with a dull, graceless thud. He lay there face-up, staring at the patch of darkening sky visible through the broken canopy, chest heaving, every muscle in his body reminding him simultaneously that it existed and that it was furious about the last hour of his life.

The adrenaline left him all at once, like water draining from a cracked vessel. What replaced it was a bone-deep exhaustion that pressed him into the ground with something close to affection.

"We’re alive," he muttered, mostly to himself.

A grin spread across his face despite everything. He couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried. It was the kind of grin that had nothing to do with finding something funny — equal parts relief and a wild, irrational exhilaration that always came on the other side of something that could have gone very differently.

He raised one arm and pointed lazily toward the two enormous corpses that were now decorating what used to be a functional stretch of forest.

"Girls," he said, in the tone of someone who had absolutely not just been lying in the dirt two seconds ago, "collect the beast crystals before someone forgets."

Aya looked at his outstretched finger. Then at him. Something passed across her expression that might have been disbelief, might have been resignation — with Aya it was often difficult to tell. She turned without a word and moved toward the wolf’s corpse, already producing the short blade she used for extraction work.

Kaede was already moving before he’d finished the sentence,

Lily walked over from the far edge of the battlefield and stood beside him, looking out across the wreckage. Broken trees. Gouged earth. The massive bodies of two creatures that had, not very long ago, been actively attempting to kill all of them. Her expression was composed in the way that meant she was still cataloguing, still processing, still running numbers in her head.

She looked down at him.

"That was quite a fight."

Renji pressed the back of his hand against his eyes for a moment. "Piece of cake," he said. "My girls and I are obviously the greatest hunters alive."

From somewhere behind him, Rei’s mumrmed to herself.

"He really needs to stop saying that."

Lily let the silence sit for a moment, then moved away to walk the field — checking on her scouts the way a commander always did after a fight, whether or not anyone was watching. Renji tracked her progress from the ground without moving his head. Three scouts clustered near the eastern treeline, one of them sitting with his back against a trunk at an angle that suggested bruised ribs at minimum. Two more were helping each other with cloth wrappings around forearms and hands. The scout who’d taken the slam into the tree earlier was upright, which was the important thing, though he was moving with the careful deliberation of someone who’d been told not to make any sudden decisions with his body.

Rei was already there before Lily reached them. She was kneeling beside the worst of the injured — the one with the ribs — her hands moving with the quiet efficiency that came from practice rather than ease. Healing wasn’t effortless for her. It never had been. Renji could see it in the faint tension around her eyes, in the way her breathing had taken on a slightly controlled quality.

He watched for another moment.

Then he sat up.

"Rei. Don’t overdo it."

She looked at him, and he could see the argument forming — the instinct to say she was fine, that they needed the help, that a few more couldn’t hurt. He’d seen that argument before. He’d lost patience with it before too.

"If something worse happens later," he said, and his voice had lost the easy lightness it usually carried, "we’ll need you at full strength. Not half of it."

Rei’s hands stilled. After a moment, she nodded once.

The mood across the group shifted. He hadn’t meant to do it, exactly, but there was no undoing it either. Everyone who’d been letting themselves relax into the aftermath pulled back slightly, some subtle recalibration happening behind tired eyes. The scouts with the smaller wounds began reaching for their own supplies instead of waiting. The comfortable heaviness of victory thinned out just enough to let the awareness back in.

They were still deep inside dangerous territory.

The beasts they’d killed had not been the most dangerous things here. That was simply true, and everyone present knew it

Renji let the quiet sit for a few minutes. He didn’t try to walk it back or lighten it artificially. The mood was correct. Comfortable was a thing you could afford when you were somewhere safe, and they weren’t anywhere safe yet.

He got back to his feet, slowly, working through the various protests his body had organized for the occasion. His shoulder had taken a hit at some point he’d mostly stopped registering. His legs felt like they’d been wrung out and hung up to dry. His back had an opinion about the last few weeks of sleeping on terrain that he was choosing not to engage with right now.

He stretched, working the worst of the stiffness out of his arms, then rolled his neck until something in it produced a deeply satisfying sound.

"Alright," he said, to no one in particular and everyone present. "Time to keep moving."

They reorganized without complaint. That was something — scouts moving with the quiet discipline of people who understood that rest came later, that later was the thing you kept working toward. Packs were consolidated. Wounds were dressed. The beast crystals Aya and Kaede had extracted were secured carefully in the storage cases Lily’s team had brought for exactly this purpose.

Renji fell into step near the front, as the group began moving again through what remained of the forest.

He was quiet for a while. That was unusual enough that Kaede glanced at him once without saying anything.

He was thinking about the count.

One more.

One more giant beast, and he would have what he needed to obtain his appraisal eye. He’d been tracking it in the back of his mind across every fight, every region, every exhausting trek through terrain that seemed personally offended by the idea of people moving through it efficiently. The number had been getting smaller in the way that distances got smaller on a long journey — slowly at first, and then all at once.

One more.

A thought crossed his mind, settling in with the quiet persistence of something that had been circling for a while and finally decided to land.

Could the beast terrorizing the village be the final one he would fight?

He turned it over carefully. It was the kind of thought that wanted to be exciting — the neat convergence of two problems into one solution, the particular satisfaction of a path that resolved itself efficiently. And it was exciting, underneath the layer of caution he was trying to maintain. He couldn’t fully suppress that part.

But the same thought carried weight in the other direction too. A beast that had been described as terrorizing an entire village wasn’t a creature that had made tactical errors. It wasn’t something that had wandered into the wrong territory or failed to learn from bad experiences. Whatever it was, it had learned enough to keep operating, to keep surviving, in proximity to people who had every reason to want it dead.

That was a different kind of problem than what they’d handled today.

The exhilaration and the unease lived side by side in his chest, which was an uncomfortable neighborhood but a familiar one.

He didn’t have answers yet. That was fine. He filed it away for later and kept walking.

The forest began to thin.

It happened gradually, the trees growing further apart, the dense undergrowth giving way to harder, rockier ground. The quality of the light changed — what little remained of the evening was taking on the flat, pale quality that came just before full dark. The wind picked up, and the temperature dropped with it, and then, without quite announcing itself, the treeline simply ended.

The group emerged into open terrain.

Renji stopped.

Before them stretched a landscape of jagged rocky hills and uneven cliffs, the ground broken and irregular, rising and falling without pattern. Nothing grew here in any meaningful sense. The rock was dark, almost black in the failing light, and the cold wind that swept across it carried no warmth and no smell except stone and thin air. In the far distance, a cliff face rose sharply against what little remained of the sky.

It looked like the kind of place that had decided, long ago, that it was not interested in being hospitable.

He stared at it for a long moment.

"This is where we’re supposed to go?"

Lily, at his shoulder, nodded once.

Renji swallowed. He looked at the landscape again, giving it one more chance to look like something other than what it was. It did not take the opportunity.

He forced a smile. It came out weaker than intended.

"No pressure," he muttered. "This place looks incredibly hospitable."

Nobody laughed. But Aya, standing just behind him, exhaled in a way that might have been the closest thing she was willing to offer.

He squared his shoulders against the wind and stepped forward onto the rock.