"One. The ravine is the only approach that doesn’t take us through burning forest or over exposed ridgeline. Whatever designed this ecosystem made sure the core had a single chokepoint for defense."

"Of course it did." Jordan sat against the trunk and rubbed his face with both hands. "Because why would a Void Gate make anything easy."

Hikaru materialized beside Naomi without sound or announcement, which was the only way Hikaru ever arrived anywhere. The compression binding was invisible beneath the tactical suit, the short black hair was plastered to a face that remained composed despite everything, and those red eyes swept the group with an assessment that missed nothing. Hikaru carried two mana cores in one hand, harvested from the mosquito creatures they’d fought through to reach this ridge.

Only Naomi and Jace knew the truth about the person standing six inches away. That the Ice Prince of Obsidian was actually a woman from Osaka who’d cut her hair, stolen her cousin’s identity, and fled across an ocean to escape a family that valued her womb more than her sword. Naomi kept that knowledge locked in the same place she kept her mother’s phone number and the recipe for her father’s fish stew: the part of herself that would break the world before it betrayed someone’s trust.

Hikaru’s gaze found Naomi’s for one second. One full second, which was more sustained eye contact than Hikaru gave most people in an entire day. In that second, Naomi read the question that Hikaru would never ask aloud because Hikaru Tanaka did not ask questions that required vulnerability.

Is he alive?

Naomi held the gaze and nodded once. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. But the Gold buff still hummed through her blood, which meant the System still recognized the bond between her and the person who’d given it to her, and until that warmth died, Naomi would keep believing.

Hikaru nodded back and turned away to examine the ravine approach from the ridge’s edge, her body favoring the left side so subtly that someone without Naomi’s B-rank Perception would have attributed it to uneven terrain rather than a wound sustained eighteen hours prior that had nearly killed her.

"Hey." Javier Mendoza appeared from the undergrowth with his daggers drawn and his notebook somehow still buttoned into his chest pocket despite three hours of running, climbing, fighting, and nearly dying. His dark brown hair stuck out at angles that defied both gravity and personal grooming, and his wide eyes carried the particular brightness of someone who found genuine academic fascination in the process of being hunted by supernatural predators. "I found tracks. Leopard prints, about thirty meters south, heading west. Fresh enough that the mud hasn’t settled back into the impressions. They’re circling us."

"Of course they are," Jordan said.

"But here’s the interesting part." Javier pulled out his notebook, which he had apparently been updating during their retreat through a burning forest while fighting giant insects. Naomi found his dedication both impressive and profoundly annoying. "The print depth suggests individual body mass of approximately four hundred to five hundred kilograms, consistent with the specimens we encountered initially. But the stride length has increased by eleven percent since the first set of tracks I documented near the entry point."

"English, Mendoza."

"They’re getting bigger. Physically growing as the fight continues. The mana density in this fracture space is accelerating their development in real time."

Dante Pope sat on a rock at the group’s periphery, his dark hair a mess and his green eyes fixed on nothing. The exhaustion in his body went deeper than physical. Elite Ten Rank Ten carried a weight that Naomi could see crushing him with every passing hour, because Dante had earned his position through a specific matchup advantage against the previous Rank Ten and now found himself in a situation where his Void Eater ability should have made him the most valuable person in the formation. Should have. In theory, an anti-mage specialist inside a mana-saturated dimension represented a perfect counter to environmental threats.

In practice, Dante Pope was nineteen years old and terrified, and his ability only worked when he could focus long enough to deploy it without his hands shaking so hard that the mana absorption fields destabilized before forming properly.

Jace would have handled Dante differently. Jace would have said something that sounded casual but landed with the force of a truth the other person needed to hear, the way he’d told Naomi she wasn’t crazy for falling fast, the way he’d told Belle that her fear of dying in gates was a reason to get stronger rather than a confession of weakness. Jace understood people the way Belle understood money and Hikaru understood violence, with an instinct that looked effortless and wasn’t.

But Jace was somewhere in a canyon with a woman who wanted him destroyed, and Naomi was here with a team held together by Belle’s directional sense and Misato’s clones and Naomi’s own refusal to let anyone else die before she’d brought everyone home.

She missed him. God, she missed him. The ache lived in a space between her ribs that the Gold buff couldn’t touch because it wasn’t a physical wound. It was the absence of a hand that usually found hers in the dark, a voice that said her name like it was the first word he’d learned in any language, a pair of amber eyes that looked at her like she’d invented gravity and he was grateful for the direction.

Naomi adjusted her staff and faced the group.

"Formation." Her voice carried the calm authority that Misato had been teaching her for weeks, the voice that said I know what I’m doing even when the speaker wasn’t entirely sure that was true. "Belle takes point with detection. Hikaru and I flank. Jordan, I need shadows ready for the chokepoint, wide spread, don’t overcommit to any single target. Charles, you stay with Javier on rear guard. Dante..."

Dante looked up. His face was grey.

"Dante, I need you to hold the center. Your nullification zones are the only thing that can shut down mana-enhanced hostiles at range. You don’t need to fight them. You just need to make them normal for the three seconds it takes everyone else to kill them."