"I can’t hold it that long." His voice broke on the middle word. "In this mana density, my fields collapse in under two seconds. There’s too much ambient energy. It’s like trying to drain a pool with a shot glass."

"Then give us two seconds. Two seconds is enough."

Dante stared at her. She watched him process the request, watched the fear fight with something older and more stubborn that lived underneath the panic. The part of Dante Pope that had earned Elite Ten status through something other than matchup luck. The part that refused to believe he was as temporary as everyone said.

"Two seconds," he repeated.

"Two seconds. Can you do that?"

A pause that lasted longer than Naomi would have liked. Then a nod. Small. Reluctant. Genuine.

"I can do two seconds."

Misato’s clone materialized beside Belle, having scouted the first hundred meters of the ravine approach. The clone looked rough, uniform torn and expression carrying the strain of operating at sixteen percent of the original’s capability for hours. Misato herself remained somewhere between the main body and the various copies she’d distributed across a half-mile radius to maintain awareness of their surroundings.

"Approach is narrow." The clone spoke with Misato’s voice but a flatness that came from reduced cognitive capacity. "Twenty feet wide at the entrance, narrowing to twelve about fifty meters in. Root structures create overhead cover but also limit vertical escape. I counted eight hostiles in the first stretch. Smaller than the leopards. Insectoid. Similar to the mosquitoes but ground-based, six legs, mandibles, approximately German Shepherd size."

"Mantis types," Javier said, already writing. "Void Gate evolution of standard D-rank arthropod chassis. Probably territorial guards for the core approach."

"Probably the thing that’ll eat us if we don’t pay attention," Jordan corrected.

Belle stood and slung her crossbow over one shoulder. The Silver buff made her amber-brown eyes glow faintly at the edges, a phenomenon Naomi had noticed starting two hours ago and that Belle refused to acknowledge or discuss. Belle’s lips were cracked from dehydration, her blue hair had escaped its combat braid and hung in damp strands around her face, and her tactical suit bore seven distinct tears from encounters that had nearly ended her participation in the evening’s activities permanently. Despite all of this, Belle Fox looked at the ravine like she was assessing the markup on a commodity she intended to purchase at wholesale.

"Core’s that way. We go that way. Simple."

"You keep saying that word," Jordan muttered. "I don’t think it means what you think it means."

"Shut up and get your shadows ready."

The group moved.

The ravine opened beneath the ridge like a wound in the forest floor, walls draped in the same mana-saturated vegetation that covered everything in this fractured dimension. Roots thick as telephone poles wove overhead to create a canopy that blocked what little ambient light the fracture space provided, reducing visibility to approximately twenty feet. The humidity inside was worse than above. Much worse. The air felt like warm gelatin pressing against exposed skin, and every breath required conscious effort as Naomi’s lungs fought to extract oxygen from atmosphere that seemed more interested in suffocating her than sustaining life. Sweat ran freely down her back and between her breasts, soaking through the inner layer of her tactical suit in places where the outer shell had been compromised.

Belle held up a fist. Everyone stopped.

"Contact. Forty meters. Six signatures moving along the left wall in paired formation."

Hikaru drew the tantō from the sheath at the small of her back, the family blade that represented the only item she’d taken from Japan besides money and forged documents. In the deep green murk of the ravine, Hikaru’s red eyes caught light from sources Naomi couldn’t identify, creating the impression that Hikaru could see in darkness the way a cat could.

The mantis creatures came low and fast.

They emerged from the root network above without warning, dropping like armored rain. Six-legged, plated in chitin that glistened black in the half-light, with mandibles that opened sideways to reveal concentric rings of serrated teeth. Each one measured roughly the size of a large dog but moved with the articulated precision of something that had been killing prey in this ravine for generations.

Naomi swung the staff up, the crystal tip igniting with spiral energy that burned white-hot even through the steam. The blast caught the first mantis three feet from her face and erased it, armor and flesh and internal organs converting to gas that expanded so fast it popped the compound eyes of the next creature behind it.

The Gold buff made it feel easy. Too easy. Like turning a dial past every safety mechanism the System had ever installed.

Two more mantis bodies dropped in perfect halves. Naomi tracked the fall and realized Hikaru had already moved, the invisible blade passing through chitin and muscle tissue in cuts so precise the creatures didn’t understand they were dead for a full second. No sound. No flash. Just geometry asserting itself in ways biology couldn’t argue with.

The bisected halves stood upright like anatomical diagrams before gravity caught up and pulled them sideways across the wet stone.

Belle fired from behind Naomi’s shoulder, crossbow bolt punching through a mantis’s head at point-blank range with the confidence of someone who’d been aiming at compound eyes since Tuesday and had learned the exact distance between the brain cluster and the sensory organs. The creature dropped and skidded across wet stone.

Jordan’s shadows exploded outward from where he stood at the formation’s center, catching the final two mantises in tendrils of compressed darkness that wrapped around legs and mandibles and squeezed until chitin cracked like eggshell. The creatures thrashed and screamed, a high-frequency sound that made Naomi’s sinuses pulse, before Jordan closed the tendrils completely and reduced both creatures to something that no longer qualified as biology.

Silence returned to the ravine.

"Clear," Belle said, her detection sweeping forward. "Next cluster is eighty meters ahead. Eight this time."