I was already moving. Wave Motion lit up in my feet and the kama filled my right hand and Sensory Hijack slid into the alpha’s nervous system like a thread through a needle, the same way it had threaded into Addison twelve hours ago except this time I wasn’t trying to make anyone feel good.

the ability latched onto the creature’s pain receptors and I dialed them past ten. Every injury the alpha had taken, every cut from fire and blade and death mana, suddenly screamed at volumes the creature’s natural tolerance couldn’t begin to process.

The alpha howled. The sound cracked stone somewhere upstream. The water around its legs started boiling from Blair’s residual heat, and the creature thrashed in the shallows with enough violence to send water in arcs that nearly dragged me under just from proximity.

Blair hit it again. A focused beam this time, narrow and surgical, aimed straight at the wound my kama had carved open. Her fire poured into the gap where death corruption had already eaten through the tissue, and the combined effect turned into something awful.

The flesh around the wound didn’t just burn. It rotted and ignited at the same time, death and heat feeding each other in ways neither element could have managed separately.

The alpha screamed at a pitch that made my bones hum wrong and turned my hearing into static.

I crossed the distance and drove the kama into the base of its skull. The blade sank six inches into dense bone and muscle, and the Death Mark erupted outward from the point of contact in branching patterns that looked like frost forming on glass if frost were made of entropy and malice.

The corruption raced along the creature’s spine, and everywhere it touched, the fur turned black and the flesh withered and the massive body began consuming itself from the inside.

The alpha convulsed once. Twice. On the third spasm its front legs collapsed and its enormous head crashed into the shallow water, creating a wave that soaked me to the waist.

I kept the kama buried and fed more death mana through the blade, feeling my reserves drain with each second of sustained output. The corruption spread faster, reaching the hindquarters, the tail, the organs beneath the ribcage.

Blair stood on the shore with fire wreathing both arms, watching, ready to blast the thing into carbon if it moved again.

It didn’t move again.

The alpha died slowly and horribly and I felt every second of it through the Sensory Hijack connection that I maintained until the creature’s nervous system finally ceased transmitting.

The gold eyes went dark. The enormous body went slack in the shallow water, already beginning to decompose at an accelerated rate from the death mana saturating its tissues.

A core materialized above the corpse. Silver tier. Glowing with concentrated mana from a lifetime of hunting in a Void Gate’s enriched atmosphere.

I pulled the kama free and let it dissolve into black smoke that evaporated before it hit the water. My hands shook. My ribs screamed. My mana sat at twelve percent, so low that the System displayed the number in red with a warning about ability failure thresholds.

Blair lowered her arms. The flames died to nothing, and without the blue-white light her face was illuminated only by the dying forest fire above the canyon rim. Her ice-blue eyes found mine across fifteen feet of steam and blood and river water, and the look she gave me was not hatred or contempt or the practiced disgust she wore like makeup at the academy.

"You used death mana." Her voice was raw from screaming and rough from smoke inhalation. "You used it to amplify my fire. You knew the corruption would weaken the tissue enough that my Hellflame could burn through the alpha’s natural resistance."

"Yeah."

"That’s impossible. Nobody combines death and fire aspects. The mana types are fundamentally opposed. They cancel each other out in every documented case."

"Apparently they don’t."

Blair stared at me with an expression I had never seen on her face. Not anger. Not calculation. Not the cold appraisal she used on people she considered beneath her notice. This was something raw and unfinished and dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with combat.

"Who are you, Monroe?"

The question sat between us like a live wire in standing water. The alpha’s corpse decomposed in the shallows. The river roared past. The fire above the canyon walls threw dancing shadows across Blair’s face and the ruined remains of her seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-credit tactical suit and the burns that covered her left side and the curve of her waist where the suit had torn and her skin showed through in patches that my brain kept cataloging against my explicit instructions.

I picked up the Silver core and pocketed it. Twelve percent mana. Three bottles of essence. God knows how far to the gate core. Two teams scattered through a burning forest. And Blair Davenport staring at me like I’d just rewritten the laws of physics in front of her, which was maybe the most attractive thing anyone had ever done in her general direction given that her love language appeared to be competence.

My Treasure Sense pinged at the extreme edge of its range.

Not the core this time.

Something else. Something moving toward us from upstream at a speed that didn’t match anything in the bestiary of creatures we’d encountered so far. The signature was massive and complex and registered on my detection ability as simultaneously valuable beyond comprehension and dangerous beyond description.

I grabbed Blair’s wrist. Her skin was furnace-hot from sustained flame use and the contact sent a jolt up my arm that was one-third pain and two-thirds something else entirely. Blair looked down at where my hand wrapped around her wrist and then looked up at me and the gold light from the dying alpha’s Silver core reflected in both her eyes and made them look less like ice and more like something that could melt.

"Run," I said.

The canyon wall behind us exploded.