Minutes passed. The air grew colder. Not physically—something deeper, something in the rules binding the world. Frost crawled across the anchor's shoulders despite no temperature drop. The ground patterns twisted beneath them, spiraling inwards toward a point they couldn't yet see.

Cain leaned forward. "That it?"

"Yes."

The anchor's steps slowed automatically. It wasn't fear — it was instinct. Even an unstable creature assembled by a broken thread understood danger.

A shadow rose over the next ridge.

Cain's jaw clenched.

That wasn't a beast.

It was an absence. A hole carved into the world that moved like a predator.

As they crested the ridge, the full horror took shape. The city the Exile had shown him wasn't entirely gone — fragments of it floated in the air, suspended like pieces of shattered glass frozen mid-fall. Streets curled upwards. Buildings bent like paper twisted around a fist. The sky above the center sank inward, forming a vortex of lightless matter.

And the thing causing it all…

It crawled across the warped stone in slow, deliberate motions. Not because it was weak, but because nothing it stepped on could decide what shape to take under its weight.

Cain's breath caught.

That silhouette—like a wolf, but stretched into something too long, too thin, too angular. Limbs jointed in the wrong places. A head shaped like a blade. Empty space made into hunger.

The Exile spoke quietly. "When futures collapse, the world generates replacements. Concepts of threat without detail. Faceless predators. This is one of them."

Cain didn't wait for more.

He leapt off the anchor, landing in a crouch. Dust spiraled outward.

The creature's head snapped toward him with a sound like tearing cloth.

Cain conjured a blade — not a weapon, just raw metal forged from will, extruding from his palm.

The Exile called from behind him, "Careful. It doesn't bleed. It corrects."

Cain didn't respond. He stepped forward.

The creature lunged.

Cain dodged sideways, the ground distorting with the impact. The creature's limbs punched holes into the fabric of the world itself, leaving behind pockets of black instability.

He swung.

The blade met its form—and slid through without resistance. No impact. No cut. No reaction.

Cain grimaced. Not solid.

The creature responded instantly, a limb slicing past his face. The air rippled, leaving a phantom sting across his cheek even though it hadn't touched him.

He grounded himself, spinning the blade in his hand. "Fine. Then I won't cut it."

He swung again, but this time he didn't aim for the body. He struck the distortion surrounding it—the unstable bubble of unformed reality. The impact sent a shockwave through the air, ripping a pulse of clarity through the creature's outline.

It flickered.

The Exile's voice rang out, sharp and precise: "That's it! Don't attack the concept. Attack the contradiction!"

Cain didn't understand the theory, but the instinct clicked.

He aimed his next strike directly at the glitch behind the creature's left shoulder.

The thing reeled, its form fracturing, pieces of its outline glitching in and out.

Cain pressed the attack, pushing the fragmenting distortion harder, faster. Each blow caused the creature to flicker more violently. Its limbs lashed out, cutting spirals into the ground, collapsing stone and air alike. Cain weaved between them, sliding under one, vaulting another, every movement razor-close.

The Exile raised both hands, stabilizing the outer edges of the battlefield. Without her, the city-ruins would have folded into themselves already.

Cain's blade dissolved, reforming into a spear. No flourish. No finesse. Just a simple weapon built to stab at the unstable pocket in the creature's side.

He hurled it.

The spear punched straight into the flickering glitch.

The creature screamed.

It didn't sound like pain. It sounded like a file corrupting.

The Exile shouted, "It's destabilizing! Keep pressure—"

Cain was already moving.

He sprinted, weapons reforming around his arms as extensions of his intent, every strike aimed at the contradicting regions where the creature's existence faltered.

Piece by piece, the hollow form shattered into particles of broken logic—dark fragments dissolving into the air like smoke.

Cain drove a final strike into the creature's throat.

The world snapped back.

The creature vanished.

Only a crater remained.

Cain stood there, panting.

The Exile approached. "One down."

Cain wiped dust off his arms. "Where's the next?"

Her expression tightened.

"Closer than you think."

And from the shadows behind the warped street, another shape stirred.

Kade woke to the sound of something grinding—stone on stone, metal on bone, a noise that didn't belong to anything natural. His lungs dragged in cold air, and for a long moment he lay on his side, the world a stuttering blur of black shapes and pale ash drifting across a broken sky. His heartbeat stuttered once, then found its rhythm again.

He wasn't dead. He wasn't inside the tear. He wasn't dissolved or scattered or whatever the Fallen had tried to do to him.

He was here. Wherever "here" was.

He pushed himself upright, grimacing as his muscles seized with the kind of ache that didn't come from fighting—it came from being unmade and put back together wrong. The ground under him was a sheet of cracked white stone that pulsed faintly, as if it had a heartbeat. Each pulse sent a tingle through his palms.

Above him, the sky was an inverted bowl of stormless clouds, thick and unmoving. No wind. No sun. No sound except the grinding.

He turned.

The grinding came from a tower that shouldn't exist. A spine of pale bone spiraling upward, twisting like something alive, each vertebra the size of a house. At the top, something bright flickered—white-blue, sharp, electric. Every few seconds the tower bent, just slightly, as if stretching against invisible restraints.

"What happened to you…?" Kade muttered under his breath.

The last thing he remembered was stepping into the tear after Lethos wrenched it open with his dying scream—initially a blinding light, the pressure inside it crushing him from every angle, voices whispering things he couldn't hold onto. Then a shove. Hard. As if something had pushed him out before he dissolved completely.