The world was a blur of wet shale and the copper-stink of my own blood.
My right arm was a dead weight. Not just numb—calcified. A heavy, vibrating slab of salt and granite fused to my shoulder. Every time my heart thudded, the arm hummed back, a low-frequency rattle that made my molars ache.
If the Alchemia finished setting, I was done. I'd be a one-armed freak with a decorative statue where my sword hand used to be.
I slammed my back against a salt-crusted cedar, the bark biting into my spine. I shoved a strip of grimy leather between my teeth and bit down until my jaw popped.
No spells left. Just pure, desperate spite.
I shoved my mana into the rigid lattice of my own cells. I didn't flow; I hammered.
The thaw was fucking agony.
The arm didn't soften. It shattered. I actually heard the wet crunch as the glass-state bone splintered back into marrow and meat. My vision went white. I gagged, vomiting a thin stream of yellow bile over my knees, my lungs hitching in a silent scream.
Then, a twitch.
My fingers felt like they'd been dipped in boiling oil, purple and bloated, screaming at the mere brush of the wind. But they moved.
I didn't get a second to celebrate.
The wind died, then curdled. A cacophony of voices—wet, dry, and metallic—stitched together into a single, dissonant howl.
Fifty feet ahead, the shadows didn't just move. They unfolded.
A mountain of gray, slick muscle hit the dirt. It was the size of a bull but moved like a landslide. Three heads lolled from a single, thick neck: one a charred skull with embers for eyes, one a translucent ghost-flicker, and the last a jagged mess of slate.
I didn't wait for a greeting. I threw a gravity spike.
It punched through the thing's chest with a wet thwack, opening a hole wide enough to see the trees on the other side. No blood. Just a gray, gelatinous slurry that flowed back into place before the mana even dissipated.
The charred head swiveled. Its jaw unhinged with a sound like a wet boot pulling out of deep mud.
"Soft… marrow," it hissed. The voices grated against each other, three frequencies of wrong.
Fire erupted.
I lunged to the side, the heat screaming past and singeing the hair off the back of my neck. I smelled my own burning skin before I even felt the sting. I tried to anchor its legs—
The bastard split.
The wind-head and fire-head tore themselves out of the main torso, their bodies stretching like taffy before snapping into separate, jagged shapes.
I lashed the wind-beast with a Gravity Cord, slamming it into the dirt. I stepped in and buried my fist in its ribs.
My knuckles hit something hard. A core.
The damn thing slid away under my skin, slick as a greased eel. My fist just sank into cold, regenerating sludge.
The ground exploded.
The earth-head had hammered the soil, sending a pillar of stone straight into my gut. I went airborne, the wind knocked out of me in a pathetic wheeze. Before I could even orient the sky from the dirt, the wind-beast was on me.
Its limbs lengthened into translucent razors.
Rip. Tear. Crunch.
My leather armor was tissue paper. My chest—already a map of scars from the Apex—blasted open in three fresh, hot rifts. I hit the dirt, the impact jarring my teeth. The Aurelian Heart tumbled from my satchel, glowing a mocking, steady gold in the muck.
I scrambled for it. A wet, heavy hand clamped around my throat, cutting off my air.
The three faces hovered over me, cycling through the central torso like some sick carnival game. I could see them now—the cores. Oily, pulsing spheres the size of a man's heart, darting beneath the ribs every time I tried to lock onto them.
I tried to flare my gravity. Tried to crush the whole zip code.
My mana flickered. Empty.
The fire-head leaned in, its breath a mix of woodsmoke and rotting meat. A burning palm pressed into my collarbone.
The sizzle of my own meat was the only sound in the woods.
"Stop," I croaked.
I wasn't "fighting" this thing. I was a cornered rat getting played with before the neck-snap.
The earth-beast raised a fist made of jagged flint.
Think. Think or die.
I reached out—not with my hands, but with my mind, searching for the Gravity Cord I'd left a half-mile back, still tethered to the ton of stone I'd dropped on the Apex.
I didn't pull the stone to me. I used the cord as a winch.
I yanked.
The mana-line went taut and launched me backward. It nearly tore my hip out of the socket. I was dragged through briars and dirt at a suicidal clip, trees becoming a lethal blur.
Behind me, the thing let out a roar of pure, cheated hunger.
I didn't slow down. I couldn't.
Blood was everywhere—down my shirt, in my eyes, mixing with the dirt. My collarbone was a blackened ruin. My mana was so tapped out that my very organs felt hollow, aching from the vacuum.
I hit a dry creek bed and rolled, shoving myself under a pile of rotted logs and stinking, anaerobic mud. I clutched the Aurelian Heart to my chest like a prayer and stopped breathing.
Silence.
Then—squelch.
Heavy. Wet.
The forest went dead silent. The wind-head drifted inches above my hiding spot, its presence a cold pressure on my skin. The mud masked my scent, but my heart was drumming so hard against my ribs I was sure the vibration would give me away.
I wasn't a hero. I wasn't the Apex.
I was just a dying man face-down in the rot.
Somewhere above me, the thing took a long, wet breath, searching.