The Void Wraith didn't come.
Its signature flickered at the edge of his Sense range for approximately ten seconds, present, absent, present and then simply stopped appearing. Either it had retreated or it had moved into a spatial fold that his Sense couldn't resolve, which was a problem with a long timeline on it and not the immediate one.
The immediate one arrived from above.
Yuan heard them before his Sense caught them, the dungeon's upper ventilation shafts, which he'd noted as architectural features during the descent and filed as irrelevant, turned out to be exactly the kind of open vertical access that something with wings and no respect for corridor geometry would use. The shriek from Chapter 19 hadn't been the Void Wraith at all.
He had approximately two seconds to arrive at this conclusion before the first Harpy came through the shaft opening and the corridor became significantly more complicated.
There were seven of them.
C-rank, roughly human-sized, the biological architecture of something that had evolved specifically to make enclosures feel unsafe, wingspan wide enough to brush both walls simultaneously in a standard corridor, which they immediately demonstrated. Their colouration was the flat grey-brown of deep dungeon stone, camouflage that would have been effective in any environment with less mana saturation. In the current environment his Sense painted them clearly, but his eyes had a half-second lag behind the data.
The first shriek hit before he'd fully processed the count.
It was frequency, a targeted sonic output that interacted with the ambient mana in the corridor and amplified on contact with anything biological. Yuan felt it as a physical pressure behind his eyes and a sudden wrongness in his spatial awareness, his inner ear and his Battle Instinct feeding him contradictory information for two disorienting seconds.
Zhang Wei had both hands over his ears and was already backing up.
Yuan grabbed his arm and pulled him into motion.
The retreat was controlled, barely.
Shadow Step twice in quick succession, purely to reposition, pulling Zhang Wei with him on the second activation by the collar of his jacket in a move that was technically outside the skill's design parameters and worked anyway, the intangibility apparently not caring whether he was carrying extra weight as long as the intention was clear.
They came out in the wider passage junction forty meters back, the one Yuan had identified earlier as defensible and Yuan put his back to the left wall immediately and started reading the situation.
Seven signatures. Three had followed them to the junction entrance. Four were still in the upper corridor, which suggested the flock was operating with some degree of coordinated behavior rather than pure pack instinct a portion had held position rather than all committing to pursuit. Either there was a lead individual directing traffic or the species had distributed tactical intelligence.
Neither option was simpler than the alternative.
Zhang Wei straightened up beside him, hands dropping from his ears. "Flying," he said, with the flat tone of someone registering a tactical category. "You don't have anything for flying."
"I have Ember Shot. Ranged."
"Thirty meters, five second cooldown, fifteen MP per use." Zhang Wei had apparently been paying close attention to Yuan's ability usage throughout the evening. "Against seven targets with Aerial Agility passive."
"Yes."
"That's suboptimal."
"Yes," Yuan agreed.
[Ding!]
[Monster Detected: Shrieking Harpy]
[Rank: C]
[Abilities: Sonic Shriek (Active) | Aerial Agility (Passive) | Talons (Active)]
[Weakness: Focused ranged attacks. Anti-air capabilities.]
He read the weakness notification and felt the gap in his current toolkit with a clarity that was almost architectural. Anti-air capabilities. The system was describing an entire category of ability he didn't have. Every extraction so far had been ground-based, terrestrial monsters, floor-bound combat, all of it operating in the horizontal plane. He'd been building a toolkit that was comprehensive for dungeon corridors and useless the moment something removed itself from ground level.
He filed that as a lesson for later and worked with what he had.
Three Harpies at the junction entrance. They weren't pressing in, the junction's geometry limited their wingspan advantage, which they apparently recognized, because they were hovering at the entrance rather than committing to the tighter space. Smart. Or instinctually calibrated to their own limitations, which amounted to the same thing in practice.
The four in the upper corridor were moving, repositioning, he thought, using the ventilation shaft system to circle around. His Sense tracked them at the edge of its range, the Sense-fourteen resolution letting him maintain contact through two layers of stone.
Flanking. Maybe two minutes before they found an entry point into the junction from a different direction.
He needed to thin the numbers before that happened.
"The three at the entrance," he said. "One of them is different."
Zhang Wei looked. "They look the same to me."
"Mana signature. Center one." Yuan kept his eyes on the junction entrance. "The other two are running standard C-rank output, elevated, combat-ready, but consistent. The center one is cycling differently. More complex pattern." He paused. "Lead individual. The four repositioning are responding to its movement, not the other way around."
"Kill the leader, break the coordination."
"Extract the leader. The ability it has for directing the others, that's what I want." He glanced at Zhang Wei. "Which means I need to get hands on it while it's alive enough for extraction, which means the approach can't be purely destructive."
Zhang Wei was quiet for a moment. "You need me to get their attention."
"All of them. Including the four flanking, when they appear, I need them focused on you and not on me. Long enough for one approach vector."
"That's a lot of C-rank sonic attacks for one person to weather."
"You have E-rank reinforcement."
"Shenzi, I want to be very clear that 'E-rank reinforcement against seven C-rank flying monsters' is not a sentence that inspires confidence."
"Ten seconds," Yuan said. "I need ten seconds of their attention. Then Shadow Step puts me on the lead Harpy and the engagement is over."
Zhang Wei looked at the three hovering Harpies at the entrance. Looked at Yuan. Looked back at the Harpies.
"When this is over," he said, "and we are topside, and everyone is alive, I am going to sleep for approximately three days."
"That's fair."
"Ready when you are."
Yuan checked his MP. Forty-one, the Intelligence boost having widened the pool ceiling and accelerated the recovery. Enough for multiple Shadow Steps and an extraction if he didn't need additional fire abilities first.
"Now," he said.
Zhang Wei walked into the junction entrance with his reinforcement at full output and his arms spread wide, which was either very brave or very insane and Yuan had stopped distinguishing between those categories an hour ago.
The three Harpies reacted immediately, the lead one's mana signature spiked, coordinating the other two, and all three descended on Zhang Wei with the focused aggression of something that had just been given an obvious target. The sonic shrieks came in sequence, overlapping, the frequencies reinforcing each other in the enclosed junction space.
Zhang Wei held. His reinforcement was taking damage, Yuan could see the shimmer of it flickering at the edges under the sonic input, but he was upright and moving, keeping lateral motion to make the Talon attacks harder to land.
The four flanking Harpies appeared on cue, dropping from a ventilation access point in the junction's ceiling. All four immediately oriented on Zhang Wei, the lead individual's coordination pulling them into the existing engagement pattern.
All seven focused. All seven committed.
Yuan activated Shadow Step.
The three seconds of intangibility carried him up and across, the targeting instinct his talent had been developing treating the lead Harpy's mana signature as a fixed point to arrive at. He came out of the skill with both arms extended, hands reaching for the creature's core position--
--Harpy turned.
The Aerial Agility passive wasn't just movement speed, it was reaction speed, and the lead Harpy's combat sensitivity had apparently registered the mana displacement of Shadow Step's arrival even through its own sonic output.
It pivoted mid-air with a wing adjustment that covered ninety degrees in under a second.
And at a range of approximately forty centimeters, with no barrier between them, it opened its mouth.
The shriek came out at point-blank.
Yuan's inner ear, his Battle Instinct, his Mana Sense, his Tremor Sense, and his spatial awareness all delivered contradictory information simultaneously at maximum intensity. He felt his footing concept disappear, not physical footing, he was mid-air, but the cognitive sense of where he was relative to everything else simply stopped being available for the half-second the shriek was at full output.