"How do we even kill a Kharis?" Riko whispered. She gripped the staff she picked up from Sohrab's home, her eyes darting through the frozen timber. The bitter wind thrashed the dead pines, stripping bark from the trunks with a hollow shriek. "I've never seen one."
Eila didn't turn. He stared straight into the treeline, his boots sinking into the crust of the forest.
Without mana circuits, taking down a beast. His survival instincts flared, begging him to run.
Lucio crouched, his boots scraping the frozen dirt. "They nest above ground," he whispered, his breath pluming in the cold. "We need a trap. We can't survive a direct hit."
Kian drew his daggers, the steel rasping in the quiet. "Agreed."
They pushed deeper into the timber. The dense canopy swallowed the remaining daylight, plunging the woods into a suffocating grey. Shattered boulders and snapped pine trunks marked the perimeter of a hunting ground.
A sudden gale thrashed the branches. Lucio dropped to his knees behind an uprooted trunk, dragging Kian down by the shoulder. He pointed a trembling finger through the dead roots.
"There."
Past a jagged mound of stones, the Kharis slept. It possessed the massive bulk of a stag, but the blunt and malformed jaw of a crocodile. Heavy scales armored its hide like granite, shifting with the slow, rhythmic heave of its lungs.
"Traps will snap," Eila muttered, his eyes tracking the rise and fall of the beast's mossy scales. "Too much mass. And if it tastes mana in the air, it will frenzy."
Lucio swallowed hard, clutching his notebook. "We need a decoy. Someone to draw it out into the open, then we hit the blind spots. Who..."
He trailed off. The Cinders all turned to Riko. She gripped her staff, her knuckles turning bone-white.
___***____
The beast's eyelids parted. A slit of molten orange pierced the gloom, locking onto the human shivering in the clearing.
Riko couldn't speak. The air in her lungs turned to ice. She forced herself to take a single step forward, dragging her boot through the gravel to make a sound. Crunch.
The forest erupted.
The Kharis vanished in a violent blur of torn earth, appearing inches from Riko, its jaws unhinging to reveal rows of jagged, yellow bone.
Pure panic hijacked her mind. She forgot Eila's warning. She thrust her hand forward.
"LOGIC: SCHISMA!"
The kinetic line struck the beast's snout and shattered against the thick scales like fragile glass. The Kharis didn't even flinch. It raised a massive paw the size of tree-trunk. Aiming to snap Riko's neck in one wild motion.
"NOW!"
Kaito dropped from the canopy. His boots slammed into the side of the Kharis's skull with the weight of an anvil, driving the beast's snout into the frozen dirt. He hit the ground rolling, twin steel flashing in the dark as he leveled his blades.
The Kharis roared, righting its massive frame. It vanished, the displaced air tearing through the clearing as it appeared behind Kaito.
In just enough time, Kaito crossed his twinblades. The descending paw struck the steel with a shriek of tortured metal. Kaito's knees buckled, his boots gouging the frozen mud. He dropped his center, driving a thrust toward the beast's exposed gut.
"THE TAIL!" Lucio screamed.
A slab of scaled muscle thick as a battering ram swept the dirt. It caught Kaito in the ribs with the horrific crack of shattering bone. The brawler slammed into a pine trunk and crumpled into the snow.
His twinblades spun through the freezing air.
Eila blurred into motion. Ignoring the blinding agony in his fractured collarbone, he snatched both leather grips before they hit the ground. Using his momentum, he lunged forward and drove the right-hand blade deep into the Kharis's glowing orange eye.
The beast unleashed a wet roar, thrashing backward as black blood geysered from the ruined socket.
Eila retreated, his boots sliding across the frost. 'One eye gone. It's range is restricted.' His eyes moved on instinct, tracking the sweeping tail and the massive claws. 'Stones offer zero cover. Pines possess no low branches.'
He bolted into the dense shadows of the timber. The Kharis snapped its jaws, tracking his movement with its remaining eye.
'I need an opening...' He scanned the surroundings, tracking the beast.
Eila wrenched his arm back and hurled the left-hand blade into the dark.
The steel bit into a dead trunk with a heavy, echoing thwack. The monster whipped its massive skull toward the noise.
Eila vaulted up a shattered boulder. He launched himself through the freezing air, crashing onto the monster's armored head. He gripped the embedded right-hand blade still lodged in its eye and wrenched it toward the brainpan.
The beast erupted into a death dance. It thrashed through the timber, snapping massive pines like brittle twigs under its immense weight.
'If I pierce the second eye, it thrashes blindly,' Eila calculated, his grip slipping on the blood-slicked hilt. 'I need a killing stroke. The hide is too thick.'
He hooked his good arm under the beast's jaw, wrenching the massive skull back to expose the armored throat.
"KIAN!" Eila roared over the wind. "THE NECK!"
"IGNIS MYTH: CAMINUS BENEVOLA DUPLICI!"
A jagged crimson ring ignited before Kian's outstretched hands. A torrent of blinding light erupted from the circle, slamming directly into Kharis's exposed throat. The kinetic heat scorched the thick scales, cracking the armor down to the raw muscle.
Kian collapsed into the snow, his mana reserves shattered. He gasped for air, clutching his chest. "It's open!"
Eila didn't hesitate. He wrenched the rusted blade free from the ruined eye socket. He drove the steel straight down into the scorched, cracked scales of the throat. The blade sank to the hilt. Eila threw his entire body weight to the side, letting gravity drag the steel horizontally through the jugular.
Hot, black blood painted the frost.
The Kharis unleashed a gargling shriek. It thrashed in a desperate dying frenzy, driving its skull through the timber to scrape the human off its back. Eila clung to the hilt, his fractured collarbone screaming as the beast crushed the surrounding pines into splinters.
After a long time, the massive legs buckled. The beast crashed into the frozen dirt, the earth shuddering beneath the impact.
It let out one final rattling heave. Then, the forest went silent.
Eila dragged his battered body out from under the steaming corpse. He collapsed against a splintered tree root, his chest heaving, his clothes soaked in dark blood.
He drove the blade into the ruined chest cavity, dragging the it downward. A sickening stench erupted as the beast's innards spilled over the frost. Ignoring the blinding pain in his shoulder, Eila wedged his good arm into the cut. He gripped the shattered ribs and wrenched them apart.
The heart pulsed in the bloody hollow. It hummed against his palm, thick muscle threaded with violet and gold. He ripped it free, wrapped the steaming meat in a scrap of burlap, and shoved it into Kian's pack.
"Kaito," Eila rasped, turning to the timber.
Riko knelt in the snow, forcing a bubbling red vial against Kaito's lips. Blood spilled down his chin, staining his collar. Lucio tied a crude splint around the brawler's shattered leg.
Kaito's eyes rolled, fighting to focus. He coughed, spraying crimson across his tunic. "My... blades..."
Eila dropped the twinblades into the snow beside him. Kaito's bloody fingers twitched toward the leather grips before his eyes rolled back.
"H-He...Internal bleeding," Lucio stammered, his hands trembling over the splint. "We have to move him."
They hauled the brawler up. Kian took the heavy side, staggering under the weight as his depleted mana reserves punished his muscles. Eila led the march, his fractured arm hanging dead against his ribs.
They broke the treeline. The biting wind slammed into them, but they didn't stop. They dragged the dying boy across the frozen mud of the dead lake, leaving a dark trail of blood on the ice.
Riko reached the shack first. She slammed her fists against the rotting wood. "OPEN!"
The door swung inward. Sohrab stood on the threshold, his dead eyes sweeping over the battered, bleeding Cinders. He saw the warm blood dripping from Kian's pack, and he saw Kaito's shattered body. His jaw tightened.
"He needs a healer!" Riko choked out, her hands trembling shaking her entire frame.
"There are no Vanguard clerics left in this ruin," Sohrab rasped, his voice cold and practical as he turned to the shadows of his forge. "Run to the slums. Find a local priest. Drag a street cleric here by the throat if you have to, but find someone who knows how to mend torn meat, not just pray over it. Go!"
Riko bolted, vanishing into the freezing fog.