CHAPTER 1049: THE CRAFTING PROCESS (1).

The smoke still lingered in the alleys of City Z, dragging the stench of ash and burned iron into every breath. Cain walked at the front, boots sinking into soot-stained cobbles. Behind him, Susan and Hunter moved in silence, their figures sharp against the fractured light of dawn. Steve trailed with his pack of devices humming low, tiny sparks dancing across his fingertips as he checked the grid’s response from a wristband screen.

The city was stirring awake. Shutters slammed open. Vendors began clearing their stalls of ash. The cries of hawkers mixed with the barking of stray dogs, and beneath it all was the low hum of suspicion. Everyone had felt the tremor of last night’s clash. The walls might have muffled it, but City Z had a way of knowing when its blood ran hotter than usual.

"Too many eyes," Susan muttered, adjusting her cloak. Her gaze flicked toward a cluster of street urchins crouched on a stairwell, whispering while pointing toward them. "They’ll report."

"Let them," Cain said, voice flat. "Better whispers than silence. Silence hides worse things."

Hunter gave him a brief glance but didn’t press. He knew Cain rarely spoke without calculation. Every word was a tool, a placement, a cut.

They turned into a narrower lane, where laundry lines sagged between broken windows. The smell here was stronger—rot mixing with the copper tang of blood. Cain slowed. His eyes scanned the walls, the grooves in the stones, the flecks of dried ichor that no one in the city dared to clean. Signs of passage. Signs of things the city pretended not to see.

Steve crouched near a streak of blackened residue. He tapped the scanner embedded in his glove, and the device whined in protest before flashing red. "Residuals match the phantom’s bleed. It cut through here."

"Not long ago," Cain murmured. He pressed two fingers against the wall, feeling the faint pulse of heat still trapped in the stone. "It’s close."

Hunter unslung his crossbow, cocking it with slow precision. "Scouting, not engaging?"

"Scouting," Cain confirmed. His blade stayed sheathed, but his eyes burned with readiness. "If it wanted a fight, it wouldn’t leave trails this loud. Something else is moving it."

The group slipped deeper into the lane. Every corner tightened, every shadow stretched long. The noise of the waking city faded behind them until all that remained was the drip of water from broken pipes and the scratch of rats scattering at their approach.

Susan stopped first. Her hand lifted, palm flat, signaling silence. Ahead, at the dead end of the lane, a figure stood. Cloaked, tall, head slightly bowed. Its presence was wrong—not in its form, which mimicked a man well enough, but in the way the air seemed to buckle around it.

Cain studied the figure. It didn’t move. It didn’t breathe. But it was waiting.

"Bait," Steve whispered, voice almost lost to the stillness.

Cain didn’t answer. He stepped forward, closing the distance with measured steps. The cloaked figure raised its head slowly, revealing nothing beneath the hood but a swirl of white mist that pulsed like a heartbeat.

"Not phantom," Hunter said quietly. His eyes narrowed, fingers tightening on his weapon.

"No," Cain agreed. "Something older."

The mist surged outward. A dozen voices whispered at once, words layered atop one another until they became meaningless sound. Susan winced, pressing her palms to her ears. Even Hunter grimaced, his focus wavering for a heartbeat.

Cain stood unmoving. His gaze locked on the mist, cutting through its shifting shapes. He spoke low, calm, deliberate. "Who pulls you through?"

The figure convulsed. The whispers rose in pitch, bending into a single, jagged voice. "The city... watches... through us."

Steve cursed under his breath. "Not good. Not good at all." He yanked a device from his pack, slamming it onto the ground. A dome of faint static hissed outward, dulling the whispers to a background hum.

Cain advanced another step. "Then tell your city this—" his hand rested on his blade, "—I see it watching back."

The mist twisted violently, arms bursting from the cloak like tendrils of smoke hardened into blades. It lunged.

Hunter fired first, bolt piercing one limb, scattering it into vapor. Susan moved next, her blade flashing silver as she cut another tendril clean through. The figure shrieked, though the sound was more a tearing of air than a cry of pain.

Cain struck last, his blade drawing a single line across the thing’s center. The cut didn’t sever flesh—it carved through presence. The mist collapsed, imploding into itself until only the empty cloak remained.

Silence followed. The air slowly calmed.

Susan exhaled, steadying herself. "That wasn’t phantom. That was... something else."

Steve retrieved the cloak cautiously, folding it with tools instead of bare hands. "Signal residue’s all over this. If I had to guess, it was a relay. Something, or someone, watching from a distance."

Hunter frowned. "Then we weren’t hunting. We were being tested."

Cain sheathed his blade. His gaze lingered on the empty alley, as though the walls themselves were hiding answers. "Not tested," he said quietly. "Measured."

The word hung heavy.

Behind them, the city roared with the start of a new day. Caravans rolled in, guards barked orders, the market’s chaos swelled louder than ever. Life surged forward as if nothing in the alleys had shifted. But Cain felt the weight in the silence between breaths, in the way shadows seemed to lengthen just slightly faster than they should.

"We move," he said. "Back to the towers. There’s more to cut from this web before it closes around us."

And so they slipped once more into City Z’s veins, unseen hunters in a place that had begun to watch back.

Cain’s stride never faltered as they left the alley behind. Yet beneath his calm, a cold certainty gnawed deeper: this was no longer a hunt between man and shadow. The city itself had bared teeth. And if City Z had chosen to measure him, then it already feared him.