"Lady?" Daniel spat the word, jealousy thick in his throat. "What is this, a medieval play?"

He had already noted the difference in how the girl’s gaze rested on each group. The warmth she aimed at the Outers stung his pride.

He could only conclude that she belonged to them somehow. An Outer girl, then. A slum-dweller.

His eyes traced the shape of her, and his tongue ran across his lower lip. When his gaze drifted to Kenji, his expression cooled.

Everyone at Atlantis Academy knew Kenji: the top fighter of the entire senior class. Daniel had no intention of crossing him, Outer girl or not.

Ayla paid no attention to the noisy boy. Her gaze remained fixed on Jaxon. He had been her first meal, after all. She liked him the most.

When the silence stretched, Jaxon tried again.

"Have we met somewhere?"

The question sounded foolish even to him. How could he forget such a beautiful girl? If he had seen her, he would’ve remembered her.

Such a beauty was rare even among the Inners, even with her clothes a little ragged and her hair shorter than was fashionable.

"I have eaten you once."

His thought process froze in his head. For a beat, everyone present hung their mouths open.

"Eh?"

"Ehhh?"

Kael’s playful expression turned to admiration. Elara covered her mouth to keep from screaming. Sora placed a hand on her chest, as if it were going to burst.

Meanwhile, the expressions on Daniel and Haiz shifted from envy to anger.

Kenji pressed his palm against his face. "Let us finish it already." His voice contained killing intent. Everyone sensed it instantly.

"Finish what?" Daniel’s hand moved toward his weapon, the air around him shifting.

"Annoying," Ayla muttered.

To the wide, terrified eyes of every teenager in the chamber, her head split open. The blue mass beneath bloomed outward, tendrils unfurling from where her face had been.

Kenji moved at the same instant, sword drawn from the sheath in a single clean motion. Neither of them gave the group a heartbeat to react.

A blade flickered. A thread snapped. A scream cut short before it found its full voice. Within seconds, six teenagers lay across the cavern floor, limbs severed neatly at the joints, chests still rising and falling.

Their cries braided together in a chorus that filled the small chamber and bounced off the walls in messy harmonies.

Kael’s hand grasped at a leg that was no longer attached to him. Elara was making sounds that were not quite words. Sora had passed out from shock, which Kenji privately considered a mercy.

Daniel was begging in a high, fast voice that did not sound like the one he had used a moment ago. Haiz had bitten through his own lip and was bleeding onto the stone.

Jaxon stared at the ceiling with tears running sideways into his hair, and his lips moved around a single name.

Mia.

"Can you finish it quickly?" Kenji turned, his breath coming uneven, though his hand on the sword stayed steady.

Pale blue tendrils unfurled from Ayla’s split skull and stretched in six different directions across the chamber. Each one found its target with the precision of long practice.

They drilled inward, soft and patient, and the screaming ended one voice at a time.

[Trait Acquired: Iron Will (C)]

[Trait Acquired: Wind Walker (C)]

[Trait Acquired: Life Link (B)]

[Trait Acquired: Earth Bind (D)]

[Trait Acquired: Shadow Pulse (D)]

The notifications stacked across her vision in clean rows. Six new lines added to her catalogue—five new traits, since Jaxon’s contribution was already inside her.

The tendrils retracted. Her skull sealed. Her face returned to the perfect arrangement Kenji had grown almost used to.

She wiped a smear of red from her chin with the back of her hand and considered the small massacre at her feet.

"They aren’t as tasty as you," she murmured.

Kenji puffed his chest in pride, then froze. That didn’t sound like praise.

He suspiciously glanced at her innocent face. Thinking about her age, he sighed. Monsters were monsters after all; their only instinct was to kill and devour.

"Now," she said, looking up at him with a bright smile, "we go back."

Kenji stared at the bodies a moment longer than he needed to. Jaxon’s open eyes still pointed at the ceiling.

The boy’s mouth had stilled in the shape of his sister’s name. He drew a slow breath and turned away.

"Yes," he said. "We go back."

Ayla’s tendril found his ear before he had finished the sentence.

[You have been killed.]

[Do you want to regress together with Kenji? Y/N]

*

* *

"Yes," she said into the dark.

"Who expected this fucking tunnel to mutate at the last moment? I just wanted to be a Crusader, damn it." Daniel kicked a stone across the passage. It cracked against the far wall and skittered into the dark.

"Quiet, idiot. You want every monster in the layer crawling up our ass?" Haiz hissed, his eyes darting to the shadows pressing in from every angle.

Their fate had been sealed the moment they awakened with D-grade traits. Fighting for resources inside the Crusade was a game played by stronger hands than theirs.

All they had wanted was registration—a name on the Crusader rolls. The badge that opened doors in the waking world, where ordinary citizens treated Crusaders as something close to gods regardless of how thin their actual talent ran.

That was why they had chosen a red-difficulty tunnel: the lowest rung. A formality. A line item to check off before the rest of their lives began.

No one ever expected a red to mutate into Apocalypse.

"Do you think it is because of Kenji?" Daniel asked, a chill threading through his voice.

Kenji’s awakening had been a phenomenon. The awakening stone had shattered the instant his palm touched it, which meant a trait above ordinary S-grade.

An S-plus, perhaps; possibly something rarer.

And yet, for reasons no one could explain, the boy had chosen a red-ranked tunnel for his first run.

The decision had made headlines across the city for a full week. Those who didn’t know him branded him with a name: "Coward."

If not, why hadn’t he chosen high-ranked tunnels? Higher-ranked tunnels carried steeper risks, certainly, but the rewards scaled with them.

Anyone with a top-tier trait chose top-tier tunnels. That was simply how it worked. Kenji had walked into a beginner’s run with the talent of a generational prodigy. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

That was simply a waste of his talent.

"I do not think humans can affect a tunnel," Haiz muttered, though his tone carried no conviction. "And there is no rule against a strong Runner picking a weaker tunnel. He can do what he wants."

They stepped into the chamber together. Both of them froze in the same heartbeat.

"Kenji?" Daniel’s voice climbed half an octave.

Then his gaze drifted past Kenji to the figure beside him, and his next breath caught in his chest. Long silver hair fell in soft layers below her shoulders.

A pair of golden eyes blinked at them with an innocence that did not belong this deep in a tunnel.

When her lips curved upward, two dimples appeared, one in each cheek, and the chamber felt several degrees warmer.

"Beautiful" was an understatement for her.