Ayla was bored.

The fight wasn’t interesting anymore. She stood behind the line, watching the humans taking a formation.

They were slow and careful, trying their best to protect themselves.

Kael blocked. Kenji cut. Elara darted in and out.

Sora held the threads of light together. Jaxon threw fire when he could.

It worked. But it was inefficient.

Each movement carried hesitation. Each strike needed space. Each decision took time.

Time was wasteful.

Ayla’s gaze drifted across them one by one. There was nothing to learn from them. Nothing new or worth storing.

They weren’t like Kenji. They were simply replaceable.

With or without them, the outcome would not change.

Her eyes returned to the front.

The Hobgoblin Warrior stepped forward, its massive frame cutting through the stalled horde.

Its greatsword dragged for a moment, then lifted, heavy and deliberate.

With a guttural roar, it rushed towards them. Kael shifted his stance, waiting for it to come. His shield was angled forwards as Kenji moved beside him, waiting for an opening.

Ayla tilted her head slightly.

They were preparing to receive the impact.

Too slow. She didn’t want to waste any more time; she was already hungry.

So Ayla decided to end the fight.

The Warrior was mid-charge when she moved. Its greatsword had risen above its head. Its eyes were locked on Kael and Kenji at the front of the platform. The blade was about to come down.

Ayla stepped into its shadow.

The world went dark and quiet for a single heartbeat. Shadow Stride did not feel like walking through a doorway.

It felt like being unmade and remade in a different place, and that place was inside the cold space directly behind the Warrior’s heels.

She emerged a pace behind it.

The pulse of darkness rolled outward at her exit. Sound dimmed. Light bent. The Warrior’s senses all muted at once.

For one full second, the Warrior heard nothing, saw nothing, and felt nothing except a vague wrongness behind it.

By the time the second ended, Ayla had already reached up and placed her hand against the back of its skull.

The streams of blood inside its brain burned, steaming its brain. The Warrior’s brain stopped.

The greatsword fell out of its hands. The body followed a beat later, going down to its knees first, then forward onto its face.

The chamber floor caught the impact with a heavy thud.

The horde did not understand what had happened. The Warrior had been shouting one moment and silent the next.

The goblins closest to it slowed in their charge, their instincts churning out a confused alarm signal.

Ayla did not give them time to process.

She stepped into the shadow under the Warrior’s body. She emerged in the shadow of a stone outcrop on the chamber wall.

A goblin nearby froze, looked toward the place she had appeared, and managed half a step backward before her thread reached its heart.

She stepped again.

She emerged in the shadow of another goblin’s raised cleaver. The cleaver’s owner had no time to register the new presence at its elbow.

Its head separated from its shoulders before the cleaver finished its arc.

She stepped again.

Three goblins this time. Clustered together at the base of the platform. Her exit pulse muffled their dying screams.

It was a strange sight. Shadows flashed across the chamber and silence spread wherever she moved.

Kael turned to face Kenji. "Is she a human?"

Kenji froze.

"There is no damn way a human is this powerful!" Kael muttered. "Wait, isn’t her trait Pyromancy? Don’t tell me she has dual traits!"

Kael lowered his shield slowly, his Iron Will running on momentum and confused habit. Elara stopped mid-dart and turned her head.

Sora, still pouring Life Link into the line, blinked at the chamber and forgot for a moment to keep her hand raised. Jaxon’s mouth opened and stayed open.

The goblins began to break.

Lesser bloodlines ran on a single instinct, but even lesser bloodlines understood the smell of a chamber where their kin were dying without explanation.

The goblins at the rear of the horde turned first. They scrambled toward the tunnel mouth, climbing over one another to escape the chamber that had become wrong.

They did not make it.

Ayla emerged from the shadow at the tunnel’s threshold, blocking the retreat. The pulse of darkness rolled into the goblins at the front of the rout, muffling their cries.

Her threads slipped between them like thin rain. The runners died first. The ones behind them tried to reverse course and ran into the bodies of the ones still pressing forward.

The chamber turned into a slaughterhouse with no one to hear the cattle.

When Ayla finally let the last goblin fall, her shoulders barely lifted. Her breathing was even. The hem of her shirt was clean.

She had not so much as touched the floor with anything other than her feet.

She turned her head toward the tunnel. A figure had arrived.

The Hobgoblin Mage stepped into the chamber. Tattered silken robes hung across its bony frame.

The bone staff in its right hand pulsed with a sickly green glow at the tip.

Its eyes, set deep in a hairless skull, swept the chamber and registered, in order: the dead Warrior, the dead Assassin, the dead horde, and finally the silver-haired girl standing among the corpses.

The Mage’s mouth opened to chant. Ayla did not give it the line.

She stepped into its shadow.

The exit pulse, this time, was fuller. A wave of dark air punched outward like a soft fist. The Mage’s casting hand jerked.

The green light at the staff’s tip flickered and lost its shape.

The Mage tried to turn its head to track the disturbance, found that it could not hear its own thoughts clearly, and managed one strangled syllable before Ayla’s hand closed around the back of its neck.

She broke the neck cleanly with a single twist. The Mage dropped. The bone staff clattered to the stone. The chamber went quiet.

Countless notifications flashed inside her head.

[Level up]

[Level up]

.

.

[Level 8 (0/80)]

Ayla stood among the bodies, then glanced once toward the team on the platform. Five faces stared back at her. None of them spoke.

She turned away, and hundreds of tendrils began to bloom from her body. They poured out of her sleeves, her collar, the hem of her shirt, every place where cloth met skin. The tendrils were thin and pale blue.

They reached the corpses around her in a wave, attached to skulls, slipped through ear canals and eye sockets and the soft junctures of jaw and bone, and began to feed.

The chamber filled with the soft, methodical sound of a thousand mouths drinking.

[Biomass consumed: Hobgoblin Warrior.]

[Trait Acquired: Bone Density (D).]

[Biomass consumed: Hobgoblin Mage.]

[Trait Acquired: Acid Synthesis (D).]

[Multiple Lesser Goblin biomasses consumed. Reserves expanded.]

The notifications stacked across her vision in clean rows. She read them once, dismissed them, and let her tendrils continue their work.

The harvest would take another minute or two. She did not rush it.

On the platform, Kael was the first to find his voice.

"Kenji," his voice shook.

"Yes."

"What is she?"

Kenji watched the silver-haired girl stand among the corpses of a horde, surrounded by hundreds of feeding tendrils, the chamber so quiet that her breathing was audible across the pool.

He did not answer for a long moment. When he answered, his voice was very level.

"She is on our side. That is the part that matters."