Inside the gloomy inn room, time itself seemed to slow under the weight of exhaustion. Kurumi and Hu had long since lost their fight against their heavy eyelids. Their heads leaned against each other as they surrendered to deep sleep, their breathing steady and calm.

  Sae watched them silently for a while, a dagger resting in his hand. The expression in his eyes wavered somewhere between pure disappointment and the unspoken thought, Are these really the people I chose as my companions? Such carelessness was unacceptable for a warrior as disciplined as he was. Letting out a faint sigh, he cracked the window open. He needed to find the Void creature slithering through the darkness outside. Allowing the cold night air to flood the room, he slipped out with a swift motion and closed the window behind him without a sound.

  At that moment, Kurumi had drifted far beyond the borders of reality, sinking into the depths of a dream her mind had prepared for her.

  Kurumi opened her eyes to a vast plain where long, lush grass swayed endlessly. The sky was painted in the melancholic yellow of sunset. A gentle wind swept her black hair across her face, carrying with it the scent of fresh soil and an ancient tree. Standing before her was a massive plane tree, on the verge of shedding the last few leaves clinging to its branches.

  Leaning against the trunk was a woman. Dressed in black, wearing hard-edged boots, with hair as dark as the night itself, she was both strangely familiar and utterly foreign. Deep within her soul, Kurumi felt an inexplicable closeness to this woman.

  The woman lifted her head slightly and met Kurumi’s gaze. A mocking yet sorrowful smile curved her lips.

  “How strange… You’re really alive, huh? No matter what he does, fate somehow keeps bringing you together. Or perhaps this serves his dark plans even more. Hah! How ridiculous… Why would a being with such power wish for its own end?”

  Kurumi froze. Who are you? What are you talking about? Who do you mean by ‘we’? The questions hovered on the tip of her tongue—but before she could speak, the world began to tremble.

  Tick… tick… tick…

  The rhythmic sound rising from the ground seemed to tear through the fabric of the dream itself.

  The woman smiled again, this time with a warning in her eyes. “You have more pressing problems right now,” she said, then dispersed like a cloud of mist and vanished.

  The shaking intensified, and Kurumi snapped awake with the sensation of falling into endless darkness. The room was still shrouded in night. Beside her, Hu slept on, completely unaware, tossing restlessly in his sleep. His murmurs broke the silence of the room.

  “Kurumi… look at the door… Kurumi, the door…”

  Kurumi let out a deep sigh. “Look at this cult soldier… and Sae too… we really are in trouble,” she muttered. But the ticking sound from her dream hadn’t stopped—in fact, it was continuing, now clearly coming from the window.

  Driven by curiosity and a creeping dread, she got out of bed. She walked toward the window with slow steps. Her hand trembled as she grabbed the curtain and yanked it aside.

  In that instant, she felt the blood drain from her veins.

  Pressed flat against the glass was a massive, bloodshot eye, staring directly into Kurumi’s own. The pupil constricted the moment it noticed her. There was nowhere to run; that enormous gaze flooded the small room with pure terror.

  Kurumi was frozen in place. Her legs trembled uncontrollably, her knees threatening to give out, yet she couldn’t tear her eyes away from that horror. Her pupils shrank to pinpoints in fear. Survival instinct took over—without breaking eye contact for even a second, she began to shuffle backward, inch by inch.

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  Right beside her lay Hu, sprawled on the floor. Keeping her eyes fixed on the thing, Kurumi kicked Hu sharply with her foot.

  “Wake up already… idiot,” she whispered hoarsely.

  Hu kept mumbling nonsense, still lost in his dreams. Kurumi’s patience snapped; her final kick landed hard against his ribs. With a groan of pain and confusion, Hu’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Oof, Kurumi… wha—”

  He never finished the sentence. The moment Hu lifted his head, he met that horrifying eye. The gaze that seemed to pin a person’s soul in place now locked onto him. His drowsiness evaporated instantly, replaced by raw terror. He swallowed and whispered in a shaking voice:

  “On three… run.”

  Kurumi gave a faint nod in agreement.

  “One… Two… THREE!”

  They bolted at the same time, moving as if they were a single body. At that exact moment, the Void Creature slammed into the inn’s pillars with tremendous force.

  BOOM!

  The wooden beams cracked violently, and the inn began to collapse as if it were a tower of paper. Kurumi and Hu threw themselves toward the stairs, sprinting through falling debris and clouds of dust. By the time they reached the door, the building behind them was collapsing with a thunderous roar.

  They kept running, lungs burning, legs screaming. The streets blurred around them.

  Gasping for breath, Kurumi shouted, “We need to find Sae! Sae!”

  Hu was in no better shape, his chest burning with every breath. “Sae… where could he have gone?”

  Meanwhile, Sae was gliding across the rooftops like a shadow. When the sounds of destruction and splintering wood reached his ears from afar, he halted. The noise was coming from the other side of town. Without hesitation, he changed direction, leaping across the tiles in silence, moving with lethal speed toward the source.

  Soon, he saw the scene. Kurumi and Hu were running in sheer terror. But what caught Sae’s attention was the nightmare chasing them.

  The creature was enormous—nearly ten meters tall, a grotesque monstrosity with purple skin. Despite its massive size, it was strangely gaunt, almost skeletal, as if it were starving. The most nauseating part, however, was its face. Its huge mouth was filled with razor-sharp teeth, and between them were the crushed remains of human heads. The thick red liquid dripping from its mouth wasn’t just saliva—it was the blood of its victims.

  Kurumi and Hu hadn’t dared to look back, and perhaps that ignorance was a mercy.

  Sae calmly drew the dagger at his waist and threw himself off the edge of the roof.

  When Kurumi looked up, she saw that familiar silhouette. Hope surged through her as she screamed, “SAAAAEEE!”

  Sae latched onto the creature’s neck as if defying gravity itself. The creature flailed its long, bony arms, trying to crush the “insect” on its back, but Sae was as fast as the wind. He slipped past the claws and plunged his dagger into the creature’s purple neck.

  A horrifying scream erupted, shattering windows:

  “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAHAAA!”

  As the creature convulsed, Sae sprang into the air. He flipped gracefully, gaining momentum, and hurled his dagger with the precision of a master marksman.

  SPLASH!

  The blade struck straight through the center of the Void Creature’s massive eye. The eyeball burst, spraying blood and pus everywhere. Sae landed on the creature’s shoulder and drove a powerful kick into the embedded dagger, forcing it deeper—straight toward the brain.

  But he wasn’t finished.

  Sae plunged his hand into the creature’s shattered eye socket, into the sticky pool of blood and gore, and whispered the ancient words of ice magic:

  “Karuyuns.”

  The air froze instantly. The freezing spread from the creature’s eye to its brain, then across its entire skull in seconds. Its scream died in its throat. As Sae landed lightly on the ground, the massive creature collapsed to its knees behind him.

  CRACK!

  The frozen head shattered upon hitting the ground, exploding into thousands of crystalline shards.

  Silence fell.

  Kurumi could only stare. It had happened again. Another mission, another danger—and once more, she had done nothing. She had only run. Run without even looking back. Sae had handled everything again. Without him, they would have been nothing more than scraps between that creature’s teeth.

  The feeling of inadequacy struck her stomach like a punch. She wanted to prove that she could accomplish something without Sae—to herself, to the world, and most of all, to Sae.

  Sae let out a deep breath. There was no fear on his face, no triumph—only the calm of someone who had simply done his job.

  “Hu, Kurumi… you can return to cult territory now,” he said, his voice as cold as ever. “Prepare the mission report and deliver it to Rex-sensei. I’ll scout the area a bit more.”

  Without waiting for a response, he picked up his bloodied dagger, wiped it clean, sheathed it, and walked into the darkness.

  Hu exhaled in relief, but Kurumi’s fists were clenched tight. In her eyes burned a dangerous resolve that hadn’t been there before.

  She would go on a mission without Sae.

  No matter the cost—she would succeed.