The courtyard burned with red light.
Where moments ago there had been triumph, now there was only destruction.
The scorngul hadn't come here to cause chaos. It had come here to escape it.
The new snake type beast towered above the shattered barracks, its crystal-lined hide gleaming like molten glass. Its roar wasn't just sound—it was pressure. Vibration. It struck the bones like a hammer on steel, making Reva's ears ring and Ajax's vision blur. Dust churned around its form as it pulled its serpent body free from the earth, muscles coiled and ridged with unnatural density.
"Screaming Death," Ajax whispered hoarsely, forcing himself upright. "A Scorngul's only predator… and not a regular one. It's using crystalline augmentation. A titan variant."
The Spiral Core inside him pulsed wildly, as if it, too, recognized the threat.
The Screaming Death moved unnaturally fast for its size. In a blur, it crossed the distance and swung its tail. Ajax barely raised a mana-forged shield in time—only for it to shatter under the impact. The blow sent him skidding backward, trenching the stone beneath his boots.
Elyr scrambled to his feet, clutching his bow, but Reva was already moving.
"Get to cover!" she screamed at him. "Now!"
He obeyed, diving behind a half-buried weapons rack just as a spire of stone erupted where he'd been standing.
"How can that thing conjure?!" Reva shouted to Ajax.
The monster bellowed again.
Ajax conjured new weapons—twin swords, reinforced, etched with deeper glyphs, allowing him to condense more mana into his weapons. His arms shook with the strain.
Reva darted in low from the left, her daggers glowing blue with barely-contained energy. She feinted low, then slashed across the top of it's body. Sparks flew—but no blood. Just the high-pitched scrape of steel against glass.
Ajax joined her, blades flashing. He landed a blow along its underbelly—but it was shallow. Not enough. Not even close.
It twisted, head snapping toward him, and released a torrent of compressed earth magic from its throat—raw force, directed like a beam.
Ajax rolled left, barely escaping the blast. The ground exploded behind him in a wave of dirt and fire. He came up gasping, cuts along his side, one blade already flickering.
"I can't cut deep enough," he muttered.
Reva looked back at him from her crouched position behind a shattered wall. Her breathing was fast. Ragged.
"We're not strong enough."
Ajax stared at the beast, panting.
His Spiral burned.
But not in pain.
In growth.
The pressure inside him, coiled and dense for days, finally broke.
His spiral ignited.
Then his vision went white.
Pure, infinite white.
Only Ajax in a void of light.
And in that stillness, a figure appeared.
A girl.
She stood in a ruined garden, surrounded by ash-covered petals that drifted like snow. Her hair was dark, just like he remembered. Her eyes—gods, those eyes—soft, knowing, endless. The wind stirred her cloak as if it had waited for her alone.
Ajax staggered forward in the vision, a boy again and not a boy. He reached out. "You…"
She smiled. It wasn't sad. It wasn't joyous.
It was final.
"You're not done saving people," she whispered, her voice a warm wind that cut through the ash, "And you're not ready to save me yet."
Then she turned, just slightly, and vanished in a quiet blaze of white flame.
Ajax gasped.
His sight returned to him.
The Spiral ignited.
And the second ring awakened.
His heartbeat paused—just once—before returning faster. Harder. His chest flared with green-gold light, and the Spiral roared to life, spinning not with strain but precision.
Perfectly smooth.
His ability to absorb mana from the atmosphere exploded.
So he did.
Ajax gasped as the power surged. He struggled to contain it at first.
He needed to expel the mana in his body now or it would completely overwhelm his mana spiral.
So he sent the mana everywhere.
His eyes ignited with a luminous-green and his scout coat came to life with growing glyphs.
New weapons formed in his hands.
Cleaner. Sharper. The energy within them no longer struggled to stay stable. It thrived—condensed so tightly it hummed like vibrating steel. Each blade gleamed like polished emerald, layered in luminous glyphs that stabilized the density.
Reva stared from across the yard. "Ajax…?"
He didn't answer.
He charged.
Faster now. Lighter.
He shot multiple blast of air from his feet when he moved, propelling him faster than he had ever gone before.
He dashed beneath the Screaming Death's guard, slashed deep across its body—this time, drawing blood. The creature howled, a brilliant spray of molten red spilling onto the stone.
It turned, enraged—but Reva was already there.
Something had changed in her, too.
Her Pulse Gate burned visibly through her skin, and behind her eyes, the edge of a third Gate shimmered faintly. A cyan lightning aura emanated from her body.
She screamed, daggers flaring an azure flame, and struck high.
Ajax dove low to its side, carving into a joint just beneath the ribcage, and Reva caught the tail mid-swing, dragging it off-course with a desperate grunt.
Together, they moved like they had trained for this very moment.
Slash. Feint. Cut. Dodge.
Their breath synchronized.
Their strikes landed.
The Screaming Death shrieked in frustration, flailing and bucking, its massive frame breaking stone and wall alike.
But the Spiral wasn't slowing.
Ajax dashed up its back in a single bound. He summoned a spear the size of a sandcrawler mid-motion, leaped into the sky, threw it towards the beasts crown while exploding a fireball behind it to propel it downward, and drove it into the crystalline ridge at the base of the skull.
The creature screamed once more.
And collapsed.
Hard.
The sound echoed through the canyon beyond, like a drumbeat of finality.
Reva fell to one knee, panting, one hand pressed to her ribs. Blood matted her cloak, but she was grinning.
Ajax stood atop the monsters head, chest heaving, eyes glowing faintly.
It was dead.
Really dead this time.
And still… the silence felt almost wrong.
Elyr emerged slowly from his hiding place, eyes wide. He looked not at the corpse, but at Ajax—at the twin rings of spiraling mana still glowing faintly in his chest.
"You… you got stronger," he said softly.
Ajax dropped to the ground beside the beast's head.
"Yeah," he replied. "I think I did."
Reva limped over, glancing between him and the boy.
"Come on," she said. "Let's search the outpost for supplies and loot what we can from the beasts corpses. Then we're heading home."
Neither Ajax nor Elyr argued.
But far above them, on a jagged ridge of black stone, someone had been watching.
A lone figure stood at the edge of the canyon, unmoving. His cloak shimmered faintly in the last light of dusk—not black, not red, but gold. Woven from a material that seemed too smooth for silk and too heavy for metal, it rippled without wind.
In his gloved hand, he held a long spyglass etched with glyphs. He lowered it slowly.
His face remained hidden beneath a shadowed hood, but on the back of the cloak, subtle embroidery glinted—three letters:
V.O.N.
He watched Ajax for a moment longer, gaze unreadable.
Then the gold-cloaked man turned and walked away from the ridge—no sound, no trace—until even his presence faded like a heat mirage into the dusk.