The tunnel reeked of ozone and burnt earth, its narrow walls throwing every sound back twice as loud. Clashing, screaming, the wet crack of something breaking that Hannah chose not to identify.
"This is madness," she muttered, pressing her back against a nearby wall. "We weren’t prepared for this."
This wasn’t a First-grade Rift at all.
She and Ethan had been sent as escorts, nothing more. Hold the perimeter, wait for C-Dust to neutralize the rift, then move on to the second site.
The kind of assignment you give capable people when you don’t actually need them.
Except C-Dust had walked into something nobody briefed anyone about, and three of their people were already dead.
"Commander!" someone shouted from inside.
"Don’t fall back, Stacy." The C-Dust commander’s voice cut through the noise with the particular flatness of someone spending composure they couldn’t afford. "Move forward. Keep supporting the strike team."
Stacy, the healer, pushed forward.
Hannah watched her do it and felt something cold move through her chest.
The strike team Stacy was supporting had started this engagement at seven. It was currently at four.
They were capable men. She didn’t doubt that. But capable men thrown into something they hadn’t prepared for were just capable men dying in an organized fashion.
Thirty majins already swarmed the team while the rift behind them kept pulsing, kept producing more with a patience that felt almost as if they were programmed to annihilate everyone.
And they weren’t moving aimlessly.
That was the part that made Hannah’s hands tighten at her sides.
Every time the swarm shifted, every time an opening appeared, the majins angled toward Stacy. Toward the one thread keeping the remaining four alive.
It was not their instincts. They were being directed.
Her eyes moved to the far end of the tunnel and found it standing there, exactly as she feared.
The ghoul.
Skeletal and tall, too tall for the space it occupied without seeming to care, it stood at the edge of the rift’s violet light with such stillness as if it knew the battle was already over.
Its dark eyes swept the chaos with inhumane pace.
The look of an intelligence watching a plan execute.
Hannah pulled back from the tunnel mouth and found Ethan.
One look at his face told her he had already seen the ghoul as well. That fury...she knew what was going on inside it.
"Tell me you’ve been watching that thing at the back."
"I do, Hannah." His voice was quiet, controlling his anger.
Hannah warned him, "Ethan...we have been told to just watch and provide backup."
"I know that too...But I would rather be punished than keep watching this."
She opened her mouth.
He was already moving.
The jacket hit the ground.
Flames gathered at his shoulders and ran down his arms.
"Ethan."
He didn’t look back.
The streak of fire that left him entered the tunnel the way a wave enters a narrow channel, filling the space with heat and light and the immediate, overwhelming suggestion that something had fundamentally changed.
The darkness the ghoul had been using, that heavy tunnel shadow that made the majins feel endless and sourceless, burned away in an instant.
Every majin stopped.
The C-Dust commander stood frozen, eyes wide, watching the swarm go still with an expression that couldn’t decide between relief and alarm.
Then Hannah saw the ghoul move.
A single step back.
It was a minimal movement, but it reacted. And the cause was evident.
Ethan wasn’t throwing flames from a safe distance and holding a line.
He was charging straight through its swarm toward it specifically, and the message in that was not subtle.
The ghoul had spent this entire engagement as the one doing the directing.
Now something was coming for it, and it understood exactly what that meant.
The majins recovered first.
The ghoul pushed the command back through the swarm, and they threw themselves at Ethan in a wave designed to bury him under sheer numbers.
It didn’t work.
The first wave hit the fire around his arms and stopped existing as a problem.
He didn’t slow down.
His left arm swung in a short arc, and the flame off it caught four majins mid-lunge and sent them skidding into the tunnel wall as smoking, twitching things that wouldn’t be getting up.
A fifth came at his legs, and the heat alone was enough to make it recoil, and in that half second, he was already past it.
The narrow tunnel should have been a disadvantage.
Not for him.
Narrow meant they could only reach him in numbers the fire could handle, and the fire could handle these numbers without effort because he wasn’t thinking about the majins at all.
He raised his arm without looking, and a sheet of flame swept a cluster of them back like a hand clearing a table.
"*KHRIAAAK!* They cried in pure agony. The pain was unbearable and inhumane to even human eyes.
The ghoul pushed another pulse through the swarm.
It was growing desperate.
Ethan walked through the response it produced.
His feet skidded, palms gathered together, and a big projectile of flames was shot straight at the rift.
The Ghoul panicked and rearranged the formation to tank the attack.
The ghoul and Ethan knew what would happen.
And the result was exactly the same.
Total annihilation.
"Holy..." Stacy muttered, eyes widened.
When the last majin fell, and there was nothing left between them, he stopped for exactly one second and looked at it.
The battle was not over until the Ghoul stood.
Ethan wasted no more time and attacked.
The Ghoul wasn’t passive anymore either.
It moved with a speed that didn’t match its frame, dark energy concentrating at its hands and launching toward him in a focused burst.
Ethan burned every single one.
His flames knew no bounds. He didn’t need flesh to use his flames; even the energy itself was kneeling before his rage.
Each strike dissolved before it reached him, and with every failed attempt, the ghoul stepped back, its cold composure coming apart in real time.
The intelligence behind its eyes, the same intelligence that had orchestrated all of this from a safe distance, was encountering something it hadn’t calculated for.
There was no answer for someone who was simply angrier than it was.
The fight was short.
Fury, when it belongs to someone who knows exactly what to do with it, doesn’t leave room for a prolonged exchange.
The ghoul’s last defense burned away like everything else it had tried.
Ethan stood above it, the trembling ghoul before stomping over its skeletal head, and ending the battle.
The tunnel went quiet.
Behind Ethan, lay a fading graveyard of Knull Residents..
The C-Dust strike team, all four of them, stood in the sudden silence looking like men who hadn’t yet processed the fact that they were still alive.
Stacy lowered her hands slowly.
Hannah exhaled.
At the far end of the tunnel, the rift’s violet light flickered once and began, at last, to thin.
"Cadet Ethan."
The first one to speak was the Commander.
His rigid posture and furrowed brows suggested he was about to reprimand Ethan.
The young man had prepared himself for exactly that.
However, what the Commander did next surprised everyone.
Bowing his head, he said, "I thank you for saving our lives. Truly, without your help, we might have lost more people today."
Ethan sheepishly smiled.
"Don’t lower your head, sir. This was my duty as a Nightwalker."
The man slowly lifted his head.
"When they said they were sending two of the best officers, I doubted you two would be of any help, considering how young you were. However, now... my opinion has changed."
Resting a hand on Ethan’s shoulder, the Commander smiled faintly.
"You deserve recognition for your efforts, son. And I’ll make sure you get it."
He patted his shoulder before moving away to check on his team.
Ethan’s lips slowly stretched in a malicious grin.
’Nice...I needed people who could take my side and I am slowly gaining them.’
Ethan never desired recognition or fame. But what he was about to do soon, he would need all kinds of support he could get.