The canyon floor smelled like wet copper and burned vegetation, and Blair Davenport was limping faster than any reasonable person with second-degree burns should have been capable of moving.

I kept pace three feet behind her because that seemed like the distance least likely to get me set on fire or pushed into the river. Blair had opinions about personal space, and those opinions carried the thermal output of a small industrial furnace when violated. I’d learned this during the past hour of navigating upstream through a gorge that the Void Gate had apparently designed to be as uncomfortable as possible for two people who couldn’t stand each other.

"You’re breathing too loud."

"I got clawed by a leopard the size of a Honda Civic. You’ll have to forgive my respiratory system for having opinions about that."

Blair didn’t turn around. Her red hair hung in damp tangles down her back, plastered to the ruins of her tactical suit, and the burns along her left side caught the dim firelight from above the canyon walls in a way that made my stomach tighten for reasons entirely unrelated to attraction. She was hurt. Badly. The kind of hurt where movement should have been impossible and rest should have been mandatory and the fact that she kept walking anyway told me everything about the species of stubborn that the Davenport family bred into their children.

Her legs were something else entirely.

The tactical suit had torn from mid-thigh down on her right side during the fall into the river, and the remaining fabric clung to her skin with the kind of devotion that usually required dinner and a conversation about feelings first. Every step she took made muscles move in her calves and thighs that personal trainers and ballet lessons had sculpted into the specific shape of a problem I did not need right now. The burned skin along her hip glowed faintly in the ambient light, angry and blistered, and I kept noticing it because I was checking the wound progression rather than because the curve of her waist where it met her hip created a ratio that my brain wanted to calculate and my System wanted to categorize as Platinum tier.

Stop it.

"There’s a ledge system about forty meters ahead," Blair said. "The rock formations change from volcanic basalt to something with more quartz content. Should give us better footing."

"How do you know the geological composition of a dimension that shouldn’t exist?"

"I have eyes and a brain, Monroe. Some of us use both."

God, she was insufferable. Also possibly the smartest person in this canyon, which annoyed me more than the wounds did.

My Treasure Sense pinged at the edge of its range. The core signature had grown stronger over the past thirty minutes, a deep pulse that resonated through the Bronze-tier ability like sonar bouncing off something massive and valuable and very much alive. The signal pointed upstream, deeper into the burned forest where the leopards had coordinated their attack and the canopy still glowed with dying embers. Every step in that direction brought us closer to whatever controlled this nightmare ecosystem, and every step also brought us closer to the creatures that had already demonstrated they could kill professional-grade hunters through sheer tactical cooperation.

I checked the System.

Lifespan: 13D 21H

Points: 8,480

Health: RECOVERING

Mana: 47%

Active Abilities: Wave Motion (Bronze), Sensory Hijack (Bronze), Treasure Sense (Bronze)

Stored: Reaper’s Edge (Copper)

Essence Vault: 3/6 Cups (Silver)

Three bottles of Belle’s Silver essence pressed against my ribs inside the dimensional storage. Emergency fuel. One cup powered an Overclock that elevated a single ability by two full ranks for four minutes. Three cups meant three Overclocks if I spaced them around the six-hour cooldown, or one Overclock and two raw consumption events that would push my health from RECOVERING toward something more useful. The math was simple and the math was also a lie because Void Gates didn’t care about math. Void Gates cared about killing you in ways that statistics couldn’t predict.

"Monroe."

I looked up. Blair had stopped walking and turned halfway toward me, and the firelight caught the angles of her face in a way that turned her from beautiful into something older and more complicated. Her ice-blue eyes held mine with the kind of intensity that usually preceded either violence or extremely expensive damage to property.

"Something’s following us."

I froze and listened. The river’s roar filled the canyon with white noise that masked everything beyond a twenty-foot radius. But beneath the water sound, below the ambient hum of a mana-saturated atmosphere pressing against my eardrums, something scraped against stone. Claws on rock. Rhythmic and patient and getting closer with the unhurried confidence of something that knew its prey couldn’t escape.

"How many?"

"I can’t tell." Blair’s flames ignited across her right hand, blue-white and controlled, the temperature rising enough that I felt it from three feet away. "But whatever it is weighs enough to displace the gravel on the upper shelf. I can feel the temperature shift when it moves."

Temperature shift. She could read thermal signatures through her flame connection to the environment. That was insane. That was S-rank sensory capability hidden inside what most people assumed was a purely offensive ability. Blair had been downplaying her detection range for her entire academy career.

"You can do thermal sensing?"

"Not the time, Monroe."

Fair point. I swapped Treasure Sense back to Reaper’s Edge. The transition took five seconds during which my mana channels reorganized and the cold hunger of death mana flooded through where the warm detection sense had been. The kama manifested in my right hand without conscious effort, eighteen inches of crystallized darkness that absorbed the firelight and refused to give it back.

Blair’s eyes locked onto the weapon. Her mouth opened and closed once.

"What the hell is that?"

"Extremely classified."

"That’s death mana. You’re holding a weapon made of death mana. First-year lottery students do not have access to death-aspected abilities."

"And yet here we are."