The scraping sound grew louder. Closer. Multiple points of contact against the canyon wall above us and to the right, where the rock face climbed thirty feet to the rim. I counted impacts. Four sets of claws. One creature moving on four legs. Not a pack this time. One animal, alone, stalking from an elevated position with the patience of something that had learned from watching its packmates die.

I activated Sensory Hijack and reached for the thermal data in the air above us. Bronze rank let me manipulate two senses simultaneously on a single target within fifteen meters.

The creature was outside my range but the ambient warmth from its body created a pattern in the humid air that my ability could read at the edges of capability. Large. Very large. The heat signature suggested something bigger than the pack leopards we’d fought earlier.

I tried to get a clearer picture, focusing on the way the air currents moved around the source of heat, the way the temperature differential mapped out a body mass that shouldn’t have been able to move that quietly.

My mana dropped steadily as I maintained the scan, watching the numbers tick down in the corner of my vision while I tried to piece together what we were dealing with. The information wasn’t precise but it was enough to know we had a serious problem.

"It’s alone," I said. My voice came out quieter than I meant, like saying it too loud would summon the thing down on top of us. "One signature. Above and to our right. Bigger than the ones that chased us."

Blair’s flames intensified, blue-white heat rolling off her shoulders and arms in visible distortions that made the air shimmer. "The alpha."

Of course it was the alpha. Because why would anything about this situation be simple or survivable or remotely fair. We’d been separated from our teams, chased off a cliff, battered by a river, and now the boss of the leopard pack had tracked us through a burning canyon to finish what its subordinates started.

The thermal signature above us shifted, the heat pattern changing in a way that suggested the creature was repositioning itself for a better angle. I watched the numbers flicker in my peripheral vision as Sensory Hijack struggled to maintain a lock on something that was technically outside my effective range.

The information kept cutting in and out, fragmentary data that told me the thing was moving but not where it was moving to. My stomach tightened. We were standing in the open with nowhere to run and a predator smart enough to flank us from high ground where we couldn’t see it coming.

The alpha dropped from the canyon wall.

I barely registered the movement. One second the rock face above us was empty stone and moss. The next second six hundred pounds of supernatural predator hit the gravel between Blair and me, force enough to crack the stone shelf beneath our feet. The impact sent a shockwave through the canyon floor that knocked me sideways and nearly put Blair on her back.

The creature was enormous, bigger than anything we’d faced in the pack. Standing on all fours its shoulder reached my chest. Its head looked the size of a car tire, fangs extended past its lower jaw in curved configurations that belonged on something prehistoric. The coat was solid black—no spots, no markings, just absorbing the light the same way my kama did. Its eyes weren’t yellow like the pack hunters. They were gold. Intelligent and ancient and carrying a weight that told me this thing had lived in the Void Gate for a very long time. It had killed everything that had ever entered its territory.

It looked at me first.

Then it looked at Blair.

Then it chose Blair.

The alpha lunged, speed that shouldn’t exist in something that size, crossing fifteen feet in less than a heartbeat. Blair’s response was instantaneous. Fire erupted from both palms in a concentrated beam that hit the leopard’s face at point-blank range, hot enough to melt stone, hot enough to turn the river spray around us into instant steam.

The attack would have killed anything from a normal gate. The alpha turned its head, took the blast against the armored plate above its skull, and kept coming through the flames like they were nothing more than irritation.

Blair screamed and threw herself sideways. The alpha’s jaws closed on the space where her torso had been, its teeth clashing together with a sound like a bear trap snapping shut. Blair rolled across the gravel, her burned side hitting the stone, and I saw her face contort with pain she refused to vocalize. Blue-white fire erupted from every inch of exposed skin as her ability responded to the terror and the agony in the only language Blair Davenport understood.

Heat. Destruction. Fire that could end anything.

Except it couldn’t end this.

I moved before I finished thinking. Wave Motion gathered in my feet and I launched across the canyon floor like a human missile, the golden energy propelling me in a trajectory that put me between the alpha and Blair in under a second. The kama came around in a horizontal arc aimed at the leopard’s neck, and the death-aspected blade connected with fur and muscle and dense, mana-reinforced bone.

The cut split flesh two inches deep across the alpha’s throat. Black blood sprayed across my face and chest. The Death Mark activated on contact, corruption spreading outward from the wound in visible tendrils that blackened the surrounding fur and started eating through tissue like acid through paper.

The alpha didn’t even slow down.

Its paw caught me across the ribs and sent me flying backward. I hit the canyon wall ten feet up and slid down the rock face, leaving a smear of blood and mana residue on the stone. Something cracked in my chest. Maybe a rib. Maybe several. The pain registered as a distant update somewhere in the back of my awareness, because my System was already busy screaming warnings about internal damage to organs I preferred to keep functional.

Blair was back on her feet. Her tactical suit had been reduced to tatters, and the burns on her side looked even worse than before, and her red hair whipped around her face as she channeled fire into both hands. She slammed her palms together and a compressed blast erupted outward with enough force to make my ears ring even from where I lay crumpled against the wall. The explosion hit the alpha’s flank like a bomb. The creature skidded across the gravel and into the shallow water at the river’s edge, its body kicking up spray. Steam erupted in a column that rose thirty feet into the air.

"Monroe! Get up!"