The elders' chamber stank of ash, iron, and flesh.

  “They’re ready,” Thassun muttered, finger tracing the cracks along the shrine wall. “The gods stir again. They whisper in Kael’s dreams. The seal Harun carved weakens.”

  “But the boy resists,” Numa rasped, her mouth slick with a ceremonial bde’s bite. “Still clings to thought. To feeling.”

  “Then we’ll tear it out of him,” Elder Vorth growled. “Rip away the runes. Break him open like marrowbone. Let the gods drink.”

  One by one, the elders murmured in agreement. Around them, sacrificial fires hissed in their bone urns. The chamber pulsed like a living thing.

  None of them noticed the faint rumble beneath their feet.

  Outside, the cold night air shattered with the cng of metal.

  They came without warning.

  Shadows climbed the ridge, silent and practiced—cloaked in dull steel and obsidian leather, bearing no guns, only cold weapons forged for killing monsters.

  They didn’t shout.

  They didn’t chant.

  They knew what they faced.

  And they came to kill.

  Harun heard the first horn break.

  He was sharpening Kael’s food knife, watching the boy sleep in fitful silence, when the tremor hit. Not from the earth—but from the blood.

  He knew that kind of movement.

  It wasn’t natural.

  It was a hunt.

  The Yagami roared in answer.

  From huts, caves, altars—they poured out like hornets.

  No armor. No formation.

  Just skin, blood, and madness.

  Their flesh already twisted by Strength Miyaki—arms thick as tree trunks, feet like cracked stone. Some bore sharpened bones for fingers. Others ripped nails out of their hands and drove them into their own skulls to awaken deeper yers of Spiritual Miyaki.

  “Cut your fear and eat it!” one screamed, tearing into his own face before charging the ridge.

  “They come with bdes? Then we’ll bleed with them!”

  They met the attackers in a frenzy of ripping muscle and screaming steel.

  Harun grabbed Kael and ran.

  He didn’t expin.

  He didn’t need to.

  The boy already smelled the blood in the wind.

  The csh was brutal.

  Swords met flesh that refused to yield. Axes cnged against rib cages reinforced with Defense Miyaki. Spears found gaps only to be snapped by the jaws of grinning madmen.

  But the attackers didn’t break.

  They moved in coordinated pairs—one to distract, the other to kill. Their bdes gleamed with silver runes designed to crack through Miyaki-reinforced flesh.

  And when they killed?

  They burned the bodies.

  They’d done this before.

  They knew what the Yagami were.

  Even if they didn’t know why.

  From a crawlspace beneath the ruins of an old altar, Harun and Kael watched it unfold.

  A Yagami berserker charged—his chest fyed open, entrails dragging, still ughing.

  One attacker sidestepped, parried with a hooked give, and then another plunged a dagger into the Yagami’s throat, twisting until steam hissed from the body.

  Another came, shrieking a hymn to Rahzun, the god of fury.

  This one had stone pting fused to his back and arms—a walking sb of violence. He knocked two enemies down with one swing of a broken tree trunk.

  But the third attacker leapt onto his back, sliced open the gaps beneath the arms, and then drove a serrated hook into his spine.

  Even the Yagami can die. Just not easily.

  Kael whispered, “They don’t know, do they?”

  Harun stayed quiet.

  “They’re not here for me.”

  “No,” Harun finally said. “Not yet.”

  “Then why?”

  Harun didn’t answer. His eyes were locked on something else.

  A unit of cloaked elites had entered the battlefield—five men and women, their bdes humming with Spiritual dampening.

  They didn’t fight.

  “Third unit down. The enemy stronger than expected,” one said, adjusting a rune-dial strapped to her arm.

  “They’re tougher than the others,” said another. “They are Yagami after all.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Mission’s the same. Full purge.”

  Kael pressed closer to Harun, his fingers trembling.

  “Do they really not know what’s under this mountain?”

  “They don’t,” Harun said, eyes hard. “They’re just here to kill the monsters.”

  He looked down at Kael.

  “Not knowing the worst of them is already watching.”

  The enemy approached the northern pass—the st escape Harun had mapped.

  Two guards moved to check the tunnels.

  Harun tensed.

  Kael grabbed his coat.

  A moment.

  A breath.

  If they look left, they die.

  But they passed.

  Above, one of the cloaked elites turned to another.

  “We’re close. They’re thinning. Give it two more hours.”

  “After that?” she asked.

  “We light the caves. Clean it all.”

  Harun and Kael crouched in the shadows.

  Watching, unseen but surrounded and if they moved now only death awaited them.