Pluto—"
He didn't answer.
He was already moving.
The first attacker hadn't fully raised his weapon before Pluto closed distance. The regained energy in his body translated cleanly into motion — efficient, brutal.
He drove his weapon upward beneath the barrier user's ribs before the shield could reform.
The man gasped as Pluto ripped the blade free.
The others reacted fast — faster than predators — but Pluto's presence had changed the field entirely.
He moved through them like accumulated restraint finally released.
No wasted speech.
No hesitation.
One fell.
Then another.
Khalifa dragged herself backward, staring in disbelief.
This was not the exhausted Pluto she remembered.
This was concentrated.
Focused.
Alive.
An arrow grazed his shoulder. He ignored it.
A blade slashed across his side. He absorbed the momentum and countered.
Three attackers remained standing.
They regrouped quickly — trained enough to understand formation.
Pluto stopped advancing.
Measured.
The same calculation that once unsettled him now steadied him.
He could take them.
But noise would grow.
Predators were never far.
He sensed heat signatures shifting at the perimeter already.
"Leave," he said quietly.
The three hesitated.
Then one noticed movement deeper in the swamp.
Low growls.
Multiple.
They cursed and retreated — not in panic, but in prioritization.
Within seconds, they were gone.
The forest inhaled again.
Pluto stood still until their signatures faded.
Then he turned.
***
Khalifa was the first to speak.
"Why?"
Her voice wasn't grateful. It wasn't hostile either. Just confused.
Pluto looked at both of them once before answering.
"I need temporary help... Also I just happened to stumble upon you."
Ronan's brow tightened.
"You saved us for convenience?"
"I saved you because you're the people I distrust the least," Pluto said evenly. "And you're the only ones in sight."
There was no apology in it. No softness.
Only urgency.
Haste sharpened his eyes. He kept glancing past them, measuring distance.
Something bigger was moving.
Ronan noticed.
"Why do you think we'd help you?" he asked calmly.
Pluto met his gaze directly.
"Because if you don't, what's coming will finish you off. You're better off with me."
A beat.
"The gang will regroup. The predators are already moving. Pick one."
Ronan opened his mouth to counter—
Khalifa cut in first.
"He's right."
Ronan glanced at her sharply.
She held his stare.
"We're already exhausted. And something is coming."
Silence stretched thin.
Then Ronan nodded once.
Temporary alignment. Fragile but existent.
Pluto didn't waste another second. He reached into his pouch and brought out three cores — two intact, one dimmer.
He handed one each to Ronan and Khalifa.
They absorbed them quickly.
Energy surged faintly in both — not transformative, but stabilizing. Enough to sharpen response time. Enough to stand straighter.
Pluto held the last core in his palm.
The strain of the battle master ability was already setting in. A pressure behind his eyes. A tremor in his fingers. He had named it himself after the first time he'd matched Saul's precision — Battle Master. A state of perfect combat intuition. Perfect trajectory reading.
It was not free.
He crushed the core.
Power flowed again — hotter this time, rougher. It filled the cracks but widened them too.
He inhaled sharply.
This had to end quickly.
Or it would end him.
Ronan flexed his fingers once.
"By the way…" he began carefully. "What are we fighting?"
The words barely left him when the forest exploded.
Trees splintered.
Mud detonated upward.
The rhino predator barreled through the swamp like a moving fortress.
"THAT!" Pluto barked, already rolling aside.
The beast's horn ripped through the space he'd occupied.
It pivoted mid-charge and angled directly for Ronan.
Leaving a blind spot.
Battle Master ignited.
Pluto didn't think.
He flowed.
Each step landed where it needed to. Each shift was pre-calculated before impact occurred. He circled toward the creature's exposed flank, inwardly stunned at how natural his body felt.
It wasn't stronger muscle.
It was perfect timing.
'When did I become this?.' he wondered briefly.
Khalifa lifted both hands.
Distortion surged outward, thickening the air around the rhino's charge. The force that would have shattered Ronan's hastily formed ink staff slowed — not stopped — but enough.
Ronan braced, absorbing impact with reinforced ink layers.
The rhino's horn cracked the staff in two, but the delay shifted momentum by inches.
That was enough.
Pluto struck.
All power committed.
He drove his blade toward the seam between chitin and vine fiber.
The impact jarred his entire arm.
Minimal damage.
The plating held.
He had the skill.
Not the firepower.
The rhino's head snapped toward him.
It moved faster than mass should allow.
Pluto barely lifted his guard before its side slammed into him, hurling him across wet ground.
Mud swallowed his back.
Pain ripped through his ribs.
He forced himself up as the beast reoriented.
Then something shifted.
For a split second, his strength surged unnaturally — the mark blazing white-hot beneath his skin.
He caught the horn mid-charge.
Not stopping it—
Redirecting it.
He twisted with it, using its momentum to fling the massive body sideways into a cluster of trees.
Wood shattered.
The swamp trembled.
The feat lasted half a breath.
Then the drain doubled.
It felt like something ripping pieces out of him internally.
Vision flickered.
Time was narrowing.
Ronan noticed immediately.
"Your output's unstable," he shouted.
Pluto didn't respond.
He couldn't spare breath.
The rhino rose again — irritated now.
Behind it, heat signatures shifted.
The other predators had returned.
Shapes moving in peripheral vision.
They were no longer chasing randomly.
They were coordinating around the largest threat.
Pluto.
***
Far away — and nowhere at all —
The corridor trembled.
Mira stood frozen.
The ground before her dissolved, bark peeling back like skin revealing something buried beneath.
She expected Saul.
She expected Pluto.
Instead—
A younger version of herself stood there.
Not a forest entrant.
Not weapon-bearing.
Standing in a hospital corridor flooded with sterile light.
Memory.
Her grandmother mother seated on a narrow bench, hands clasped tightly together.
Waiting.
Mira remembered that day.
The doctor had walked out slowly.
Too slowly.
Delivering news in controlled words.
It's progressing faster than anticipated.
Her grandmother's silence.
Her own stillness.
Waiting had felt like control then.
Like endurance.
Like strength.
But it had been helplessness disguised as patience.
The Owl appeared beside her in the corridor, quieter than before. A sinister wrongness, barely there, enveloped it.
"This is what binds you," it said softly.
Mira didn't look at it.
"You confuse stillness with resilience."
The memory-self turned toward her — eyes hollow, young, afraid.
"You stay where you are even when movement is required."
The ground beneath the memory fractured, the weight didn't.
The hospital lights flickered.
In the distance, something cracked — not in the forest, but in causality itself.
Mira felt it.
Pluto had shifted something.
And the corridor could no longer contain her by reflections alone.
***
Back in the swamp, the rhino charged again.
Pluto's breath came ragged now.
Drain spreading.
Predators circling.
Ronan launched ink tendrils to entangle one of the flanking beasts.
Khalifa distorted a second long enough for Pluto to cut it down.
But the rhino was the axis.
The deciding weight.
It lowered its head once more.
Pluto steadied himself despite the tremor in his arms.
He had minutes.
Maybe less.
End this.
Or die trying.
And somewhere beyond sight—
The forest watched.
Not randomly.
Not blindly.
But carefully measuring which causality would hold.