"Our first target is him."

Kig tapped the hologram.

"Battlebeast."

The projection rotated slowly — a broad figure, heavy built, the kind of frame that suggested it had been in a lot of fights and come out of all of them.

"He’s a high god, same rank as Nibbleskin. But his danger isn’t just raw strength. He’s a martial artist — his entire fighting style is built around something called energy splicing. He reads a fight as it’s happening and adjusts. Fast."

Kig was bald, built solid, and spoke the way someone speaks when they’ve given a thousand briefings and stopped wasting words somewhere around the five hundredth. He was one of Victoria’s generals. A high god of the Wereboar race.

He had seen worse than Battlebeast.

He still wasn’t taking this lightly.

"His corruption is the part that complicates things. It doesn’t weaken you — it makes you want to fight. Anyone exposed long enough starts losing the ability to think clearly and starts swinging instead. Your own teammates become a problem. The longer the fight runs, the messier it gets for everyone involved."

He moved to the next display.

"Trump cards. First — Battle Frenzy. A state he can enter that pushes his output up and spreads the corruption effect faster. Second — a weapon called the Chainsaw of Flesh." He paused just briefly. "And a pet. Gore."

He left Gore at that.

"Now. Lady Victoria is our biggest asset which means she stays here. We also can’t leave this position open with the corruption army pushing from the north. So the team going out will be small."

His eyes moved across the room.

"Five."

Nobody spoke.

"Yuno Al’K, Firedemon, Gravitas — you’re in. For support, Nibbleskin and Lady Gaia."

Yuno Al’K was the natural first pick. A divine-ranked assassin sitting right at the edge of high god — precise, efficient, the kind of fighter who ended things before they became extended problems.

Nibbleskin and Gaia made sense alongside him.

Firedemon and Gravitas were not Kig’s original selection. He had a different formation in mind when he first built the plan. But Lady Victoria had weighed in and that had been the end of the discussion.

"Our scouts have his general location. Mountains west of here." Kig looked around one last time. "Get moving."

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

The staging ground shifted back into motion the moment the briefing ended.

Technicians returned to their work. The defensive modifications on the castle resumed. People who had tasks went to do them without needing to be redirected.

Enzo and the rest moved quietly off to the side.

They didn’t announce anything. Just separated from the main group and made their way toward the back of the castle where a small shuttle sat hovering a few feet off the ground, humming low and steady.

Gaia was already there.

She was standing a little apart, looking at the shuttle with a practical expression. Not unfriendly. Just not particularly open either.

Nibbleskin, perched on Enzo’s shoulder, looked at her through his third eye.

"Be nice," he said, keeping his voice low. "She’s the only human here. Well —" he glanced around, "— technically I’m the only beast here. But still. I’m assuming you’ve made friends with humans before. Try to remember how."

Only Nibbleskin had seen up close what Gaia looked like when she was backed into a corner. The cold exterior was real but it wasn’t the whole picture.

"I think we know more about her than even you do," Enzo said.

They had reached the shuttle now.

Nibbleskin looked at him sideways.

"Ehnn?"

Between living alongside Raven and everything that came with that, Enzo’s group had built up a reasonable picture of who Gaia actually was.

High God of the Ice World — a super world she had named after herself, which said something about her. Egotistical. Arrogant. Tyrannical in the way she ran things. None of that was a secret or a surprise to anyone who had heard her name.

But there was the other side of it too.

One of seven high gods of humanity in this era. Not a ceremonial title — a real one. She had been part of the generation that fought to carve out the position humanity held in the universe right now. That hadn’t happened quietly or easily.

Currently ranked the fourth most powerful human in the universe.

That number meant something real, especially given that high gods almost never fought each other directly. The ranking came from a long record of everything else.

That was her future self, this cold detached woman standing to the side with a severed arm.

"Well," Nibbleskin said after a moment. "That’s a good sign."

He didn’t push further. Just settled back on Enzo’s shoulder, tail curling once, and let it go.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

They boarded and the shuttle pulled out from the back of the castle, picking up speed as it wound through the dark forest. The trees were dense enough that it required some navigation but the shuttle moved through the gaps cleanly, responsive, well built.

Then it went quiet. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Not the engine — that kept running. But the hull shimmered once and the shuttle disappeared from view entirely, stealth mode kicking in and rendering it invisible.

"Nice right?" Nibbleskin grinned. "Hand built by Li Wu. He’s the Hunter’s Association head — took over as God of Machinery after you killed Raz." He leaned back with a satisfied look. "What do you think?"

Enzo looked around the interior of the shuttle for a moment his mind buzzed before finally landing on the thought.

"Hunter’s Association?"

He said it before he fully thought about whether to say it.

"You have one of those too?"

The question came out a little more careful on the second pass,

He was thinking about Snowfall City. The Association he had encountered there , how it operated, how the legends around it didn’t suit something born from human, what it was connected to, how far its reach actually extended.

’They can’t be the same one.’

He turned the thought over quietly, not saying it aloud.

Could they?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​