Cain advanced, blade hanging low, eyes lit with something far colder than rage.

"No," he said, voice dragging like steel through wet earth. "But I can erase what should never have drawn breath in my city."

The phantom shifted. Its limbs unfolded like jagged lances, stabbing into the cobblestones, cracking them like brittle bone. The ground shivered beneath its weight.

Then it lunged.

Stone screamed as talons raked across the alley floor, each step tearing furrows into the earth. The phantom moved without sound from its maw—only the grinding shriek of its limbs as they split and reformed, clawing for Cain's throat.

Cain didn't backpedal. He surged forward.

Steel carved arcs of silver against the dark, the edge of his blade colliding with an alien limb. Sparks hissed and scattered. The impact sent a pulse through his bones, the phantom's strength like a collapsing tower smashing into his arms.

He pivoted with the momentum, letting the strike glance past as he slid under its reach. His breath was a blade in his throat, sharp and controlled. A slash to the joint—quick, merciless. The cut landed. Ichor sprayed in a black arc, sizzling where it touched stone.

The phantom didn't flinch. It never did.

Another limb unfurled, barbed and glistening. It came down like a hammer, and Cain threw himself aside as the cobblestone erupted where he'd been. Shards of stone peppered his arm, cutting shallow grooves across his skin. Pain flickered. He ignored it.

Above them, dawn split the sky—a pale wound bleeding light across a city that would never wake the same.

The hunt was done.

What followed now was war.

---

A whisper of cloth. A gleam of steel. Susan moved like a serpent through the ruin, her blade sliding free with a hiss. The phantom barely registered her until her strike kissed its flank, a perfect horizontal arc aimed to sever muscle from bone—if it had either.

Her blade bit deep, but not enough. The phantom's flesh was like tempered stone beneath its glossy hide. It screeched—not a sound, but a vibration, thrumming through the alley, cracking glass, turning marrow to frost.

Cain staggered back two steps, vision juddering. He tasted iron in his mouth, clenched his jaw, and forced his lungs to move.

"Hunter!" he barked.

A shadow peeled from the rooftops. Hunter dropped soundlessly behind the phantom, crossbow drawn. The quarrel sang through the air, tipped with runes that pulsed like veins of fire. It buried itself in the phantom's shoulder.

The thing convulsed, limbs snapping inward like a broken insect. Then it reformed, wrenching the bolt free in a spray of ichor. Its body rippled—new arms tearing from its sides, each longer than the last, each tipped with talons that hooked like butcher's steel.

"Adaptive bastard," Hunter muttered, already reloading. His fingers were quick, mechanical in their precision.

Cain spat blood, eyes narrowing. "Susan—keep its eyes on you. Roselle—"

He didn't need to finish. Roselle was already moving. She was the knife in the wind, her presence a whisper even the phantom couldn't track until the first blade struck. One moment empty space, the next—a blur of motion, twin sabers carving crescents of death.

Metal screeched against bone-hard flesh. Sparks rained. Roselle vanished again before the phantom could retaliate, reappearing in the blind pocket of its reach, slicing tendon—or what passed for tendon—before dissolving back into shadow.

It was enough to make the creature falter, to slow its rhythm by a fraction. And a fraction was all Cain needed.

He closed the gap in a storm of broken breath and fury, every strike calculated, merciless. His blade carved sigils into its hide—not for beauty, but for function. Runes bled across steel, igniting in brief bursts as he chained slash into thrust into cleave.

The phantom recoiled, body warping in spasms, its silhouette no longer remotely human. It was a tower of flesh and angles, limbs multiplying, tearing at walls to brace itself. Buildings groaned as its weight drove cracks through their spines.

Cain ducked under a scything limb, rolled across rubble, and came up slashing. The blade tore through a joint. Ichor drenched him, stinking of copper and rot.

Then came the blow.

A limb like a battering ram struck his ribs, and the world spun. He crashed through a wall, wood splintering like bones, and landed in a shower of dust and pain. The air left his lungs in a single brutal gasp.

"Cain!" Susan's voice snapped through the chaos, raw and cutting.

He forced himself upright, ribs screaming. Blood filled his mouth, hot and slick. His blade was still in his grip—that was enough.

Through the hole in the wall, he saw it—the phantom tearing free from the alley, vaulting upward like a nightmare learning to fly. Its limbs dug into stone facades, hauling its bulk toward the rooftops.

"It's running," Hunter called, voice low and grim.

Cain stepped back into the street, staggering only once. His eyes burned—not with pain, but with a clarity that hollowed him from the inside out.

"No," he rasped. "It's not running."

He looked past the creature—past its writhing silhouette against the pallid dawn—toward the horizon. And then he saw it.

Another shape.

No—many.

Far beyond the rooftops, where the city bled into the wastes, the air rippled. Figures stood in the mirage, tall and wrong, their forms bending light like heat off iron. Watching. Waiting.

The phantom wasn't fleeing. It was buying time.

---

They cornered it on the eastern wall, where the city broke like a wound into the sprawl of blackened marsh. It hung there for a moment—arms like banners of bone and sinew unfurling against the sky, its body silhouetted against the bleeding dawn.

Cain climbed after it, boots grinding against stone, muscles screaming mutiny. His blade dripped black fire now, runes scalded into its edge from the heat of his strikes.

Susan flanked him, breath ragged but blade steady. Hunter crouched higher up, one last rune-bolt slotted, the glow crawling across his gauntlet like lightning. Roselle was smoke at Cain's side, twin sabers ready to gut whatever gods had cursed this night.

The phantom turned its head. For the first time, it moved slow—as if acknowledging them. Its face, if it could be called that, peeled open like a wound, rows of teeth flowering in silence.

Cain raised his blade.

Hunter's finger tightened on the trigger.

Susan whispered a prayer to no one.

Then the sky tore.