Yuto slowly pushed himself to his feet, wincing slightly as loose stones shifted beneath his boots.

The first thing he noticed was the silence.

Not the ordinary silence of an empty room or a quiet forest. This was something deeper. Heavier.

The kind of silence that made him feel as though he were the only living thing in existence.

His gaze swept across the landscape.

Rock.

Endless rock.

Jagged cliffs, uneven ground, and towering stone formations stretched as far as the eye could see. The terrain was barren and lifeless, devoid of vegetation or any signs of civilization. Massive cracks carved through the earth while enormous boulders rested like forgotten monuments scattered across the desolate wasteland.

There was no movement.

No wind.

No sound.

Only an endless rocky expanse disappearing into the distance.

Yuto slowly looked upward.

His eyes narrowed.

The sky was purple.

Not the purple of dusk or dawn, but a deep, unnatural shade that covered the entire heavens.

There was no sun.

No moon.

No stars.

Just an endless violet canopy hanging above the realm.

The sight sent an uncomfortable feeling crawling down his spine.

This place felt wrong.

Alien.

As though it had been separated from the rest of existence.

Remembering Lyla’s warning, Yuto immediately became alert.

Assume everything is trying to kill you until proven otherwise.

Right.

He adjusted his grip on his sword and took a careful step forward.

A scraping sound came from his left.

He stopped.

It came again — low, deliberate, something heavy dragging itself across stone. From beyond a cluster of tilted rock spires, something moved. A shadow first. Then a shape. Then the shape resolved into something specific, and Yuto had the distinct experience of his threat assessment revising itself upward very quickly.

The creature stepped into view.

Wolf-like, in the way that a storm is rain-like. The basic architecture was there — four legs, a head with teeth, fur — but everything about it had been taken several steps further than was reasonable. It was easily the size of a horse in full charge, its frame dense with muscle that moved visibly beneath its hide. The fur was sparse in places, replaced by overlapping plates of gray, shell-like armor that ran along its shoulders and flanks in a pattern that looked almost reptilian. Along its spine ran a line of jagged, feather-like protrusions that shifted slightly as it moved, not quite connected, not quite free.

Its head was lupine. Its jaw was not.

There was a second hinge near the back of it, revealing a second row of grinding teeth tucked behind the first, like whoever had designed this animal had looked at a wolf’s mouth and thought: *insufficient.*

From its shoulders extended two membrane remnants — vestigial, too small to be wings, twitching with faint instinctive motion like they hadn’t received the message yet that they no longer served a purpose.

Its eyes were dull amber.

They were fixed entirely on Yuto.

A name surfaced in his mind

*Blackmaw.*

He turned this information over briefly.

Wha made this beast so formidable wasn’t just its strength, it was the fact that it was a paragon and a dreadlord. Which meant it had three souls. This made it stronger than even Shiny!

Yuto had exactly enough time to process this before the creature exploded forward, stone cracking under its weight like the ground itself was objecting.

He moved.

Claws slammed into the rock where he had been standing, detonating shards in every direction. Yuto rolled beneath the follow-through and came up already swinging, his blade cutting across the creature’s foreleg in what he considered a solid strike.

The armored fur barely registered it.

The Blackmaw twisted mid-motion with a speed that had no right to exist in something that large, and its jaws came down toward him. Yuto threw his sword up. The impact transferred through the blade into his arms like a bell being struck, forcing him back several steps, joints screaming.

The second bite came immediately after, no pause, no recovery period offered.

He pivoted away. The teeth clamped shut beside his ear with a sound like two boulders meeting.

He made a quick decision.

Shiny appeared in a flash of light, landing lightly on the stone despite the circumstances, and took in the scene with a single sweep of his sharp eyes. He unsheathed his sword in one clean motion.

"Don’t worry, Master!," he announced,"I will protect you from this evil beast!"

He did not hesitate. He rushed the Blackmaw head-on.

Steel met beast.

Shiny’s sword connected with the creature’s shoulder plate with enough force to make it recoil half a step — the first time it had moved in any direction it hadn’t chosen. The Blackmaw snarled and shifted its full weight toward this new, more interesting problem.

That gave Yuto his opening.

He darted in low, blade angled to slip beneath one of the armor gaps along its ribcage. The Blackmaw jerked violently, wrenching its body sideways before he could go deeper, and he withdrew before the gap closed on his sword arm.

The retaliation came sideways — the creature sweeping its entire body in a single motion.

Shiny braced his sword against it. The impact dragged him backward across the stone, his boots carving two parallel lines into the ground, but he held. He always held.

Yuto stepped in again.

He changed his approach. Not trying to cut through the armor now, not wasting effort on its bulk — instead targeting the joints, the gaps between plates, the places where the shell-like covering ended and something softer continued. Striking fast. Precise. Chipping away at mobility rather than mass.

The Blackmaw adapted quickly, because of course it did. It began moving in sudden, unpredictable lurches, snapping its body in directions that didn’t follow cleanly from its previous position. One strike caught Yuto across the shoulder, the edge of a claw rather than the center of it, but enough to send him stumbling back with his vision briefly narrowed.

Before it could press the advantage, Shiny drove his sword deep into a softened patch beneath its neck plating.

The Blackmaw roared.

The sound shook the surrounding stone formations. Literally. Loose rocks skittered off ledges and several of the smaller spires trembled. The creature reared back, thrashing with the energy of something that had not previously been required to acknowledge pain.

Yuto forced himself forward through the ache in his shoulder.

They moved together now — not with any kind of choreographed precision, nothing that elegant — but aligned by shared necessity, reading each other through the rhythm of the fight. Yuto high. Shiny low. The Blackmaw staggered, caught between two angles it could not fully address at the same time.

Another strike.

Then another.

The beast’s movements lost their earlier certainty, aggression breaking into uneven, unstable bursts. It was still dangerous — a cornered animal with three souls and armor plating remained dangerous — but something in it had begun to unravel.

A last desperate lunge.

Yuto drove his blade into the gap behind its foreleg at the same moment Shiny struck the opposite side. The timing was not planned. It happened the way things happen when two people have been fighting the same enemy long enough.

The Blackmaw collapsed.

Its full weight hit the stone with a crash that traveled through the ground into Yuto’s boots. Then stillness. Then the silence came back, settling over the wasteland like it had never left.

[Blackmaw Slain.]

[+1 soul core]

[Paragon Slain.]

[+15 soul cores]

[Dreadlord Slain.]

[+10 soul cores]

Yuto exhaled slowly. He lowered his sword. The tension in his arms and shoulders began the long, reluctant process of releasing.

Shiny remained where he was, energy still flickering at the edge of his posture, sword still half-raised. Waiting. Not quite willing to trust that it was over.

Yuto looked down at the Blackmaw.

*Stronger than Shiny*, he thought. *And we just killed it.*

He was not sure whether that was encouraging or alarming. Probably both.

The wasteland did not stay quiet for long.

A low growl rolled through the rocks.

Then another answered it.

"Fuck."