Sakura sank into the comforting depths of the armchair filling one corner of her underground lair, enjoying a moment of stillness and solitude before beginning another lengthy scrying session.

  Yussuf the Red was in the ground, and the undead horde had been defeated, but she knew this was only the eye of the storm. Something had raised those bears from the dead and sent them stampeding for Puppet Town.

  The mysterious entity was still out there, and the gods only knew what it was planning next. Regardless of the details, Sakura and Lore-Weaver were the only ones who could put the pieces together before this precious moment of calm blew past and their next ordeal began.

  She took a deep breath and opened her eyes, scooting her chair up to the table holding the pile of claws the harvesters had retrieved from the stage-three bear bringing up the rear of the Reanimated horde. She needed them to use her ultimate ability Analyze, which she hoped would unmask the entity that was responsible for creating the undead and unleashing them upon the Ivory Plains.

  Lore-Weaver was skittering along the periphery of its web. When it returned, she could ask the spider for its take on the situation, but not until she uncovered the details herself. The spinner of truth and lies loved to speculate, but it never revealed secrets that hadn’t been unraveled by her own efforts.

  Dialla had given Sakura a fresh pile of mana seeds in case she was able to follow the traces of magic clinging to the claws to their source and investigate the area with Remote Viewing. She’d eaten dinner and taken a long shower to soak the stress out of her muscles, which meant she was ready to begin.

  She sipped from her glass of water, ignited her core, and willed her ultimate to activate. Analyze. She felt the web stretching across her inner world vibrate as her reactor flared to life, enhancing her senses as its infinite strands merged with her awareness.

  A flood of information surged into her brain—far too much data to unpack all at once. All magic, particularly powerful workings, left lingering traces that lasted from hours to days depending on the circumstances. Most were too faint for even mana-sensitive individuals to detect, but Analyze could read them like the words on a page.

  Combined with the complex interference patterns of high-rank skills formed in the flows of magicytes banding the globe, she could learn a great deal about the nature of a spell by studying objects that were in the area it was cast in, or better still, that had been the direct recipient of the skill in question.

  With an effort of will, Sakura shut out the scintillating colors emanating from her magitech devices, reactor, and the background noise that was always present in a settlement with hundreds of core-wielders. She narrowed Analyze’s focus until it only encompassed the spell lingering around the bear’s claws—the skill that had restored the beast’s body to an unnatural state of being and directed its actions after.

  When she understood what she was looking at, she let out a groan of dismay. It’s rank seven after all. Whatever did this is far more powerful than the creatures comprising that stampede.

  This was one of the most powerful skills she had ever Analyzed. It strained her mind to the limit to tease apart the intricate weaves and deduce their functions, including the magical fingerprint that was unique to each core-wielder.

  The amount of mana required to cast Reanimation on hundreds of creatures at once was staggering, especially when considering that it had been maintained for over a week and across what must have been a considerable distance, since no sign of its caster had been detected thus far.

  She broke into a cold sweat as she followed her train of thought to its logical conclusion. This must be the work of a stage-four entity—somewhere between early and middle. It was insanely dangerous to spy on anything two stages above your own, even by magical means. But since Sakura had a feeling this clue was critical to her ongoing survival, she was willing to take the risk.

  Now that she had memorized the energetic signature of the Reanimation skill, the next step was to concentrate on it while activating Remote Viewing. With any luck, she would be able to follow the magic back to its source, but at the least, she should be able to find the area where the horde had been raised and start searching for additional clues.

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  After ordering her Compounding Pharmacy implant to produce a stimulant to counteract the fatigue from the difficult working, she ignited her core and activated Remote Viewing. This time, she appeared beside her own body, which was slumped over the table while her consciousness was traveling on its own.

  Sakura shook her head at the stark reminder of just how strange her life had become, then turned her attention to the claws resting on the tabletop—or more accurately, the magical residue coating them and lingering in the space they’d passed through.

  She followed the vivid traces of mana out of her lair, beyond the wall, and to the south of the settlement, which wasn’t surprising, since that was where the battle with the stampede had taken place. She waved to the harvesters who were working through the night to salvage high-grade materials from the beasts’ bodies, even though they couldn’t see her, then returned her attention to the task at hand.

  She could sense Reanimate’s energy saturating the area, and now that she knew what she was looking for, she could follow it back along the path the creatures had taken to assault the settlement.

  Given the prolific tracks the horde had left in its wake, a skilled hunter could have done the same thing with minimal effort. However, Sakura was moving at a speed they could only dream of, flying over tall grass and rough terrain in a flash.

  The traces grew fainter as she followed them toward the border of the Sweltering Green. But by this point, she was certain that she would be able to figure out where the horde had come from and, with any luck, what manner of being was responsible for its creation.

  In the end, finding the source of the stampede didn’t require any specialized techniques or magical sleuthing whatsoever.

  The reason was simple. There weren’t hundreds of undead beasts scouring the jungle this time around—there was well over one thousand. A shambling horde so big it was impossible to miss even from miles away.

  While it was a terrifying sight, it was nothing compared to the primal horror that permeated every fiber of her being when Sakura followed the mana flowing into their Reanimated bodies to its source.

  “Fuck me.” Her eyes went wide as they took in a kaiju the size of a skyscraper towering in the moonlight.

  The writhing behemoth looked like a squid covered in bright-green scales. Its mountainous head featured bottomless black eyes bigger than her house and a serrated yellow beak that could bisect a whale in a single bite.

  Most imposing of all were eight half-rotten tentacles wider than sequoia redwoods. Where the kaiju’s flesh had decayed, she could see the shocking white of bone, revealing that its resemblance to an earthly creature was only skin deep. The bottoms were covered in suction cups with serrated blades along the interior—appendages that were designed not only to restrain the titan’s prey but shred it to ragged tatters of flesh.

  The immense cephaloid was, without a doubt, the most powerful creature Sakura had ever seen—a enemy capable of destroying Puppet Town all by its lonesome, which made its lumbering legion seem kind of redundant.

  Even if her people could figure out a way to kill the titanic squid, the bizarre being was armed with a skill that let it Reanimate hordes of beasts at will. Based on what she had observed thus far, the undead creatures killed all the predators in the area, then the kaiju took its pick from the remains.

  If any of its minions were destroyed in the process, it would just keep raising more, making the squid seem more like a natural disaster than a flesh-and-blood being. Or flesh at any rate. I’m not sure it still has blood.

  She watched with morbid curiosity as the grotesque creature reached out with the tip of one tentacle to touch the body of a fifty-foot serpent, infusing the corpse with Reanimation’s potent magic. The serpentine remains spasmed before rising in a twisted mockery of life. The snake turned to face its creator, then slithered off to join the hunt, searching for more beasts to add to the kaiju’s ever-growing army of undead.

  Bile rose hot in her throat when Sakura realized there were several human corpses milling about with the rest, which must have come from people who had stayed behind in the Gilded Heights when One-Eye left the settlement. Poor bastards.

  Judging by the devastation wrought to the jungle, the kaiju was following the same path the previous stampede had trod—although its pace was far more leisurely as it stripped the jungle of life in passing. The mana emanating from its core is staggering. Even still, there must be a limit to how many creatures the squid can control.

  No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than the kaiju roared. In response to its command, the moldering army fell into formation and began to march, moving far faster than before since it was no longer culling the beasts it passed along the way. She could tell at a glance they were heading straight for the Ivory Plains.

  Judging by their present pace, the cephalopod titan and its host of undead would be knocking on Puppet Town’s door in approximately two weeks.

  Sakura deactivated Remote Viewing and went running for City Hall while asking Dialla to call for an emergency meeting. Every second was a precious resource. They couldn’t afford to waste a single heartbeat if they were going to figure out how to survive an attack from an enemy an order of magnitude more deadly than anything they’d faced thus far.

  Along the way, she sent a message to Edge, explaining everything she’d learned. She ended it with, “Warn your crew and start growing stronger as fast as you can. It’s time to devour your strongest opponent yet.”