000

The sand exploded beneath my feet.

I crossed the desert as a golden blur, keeping my speed low enough that I didn"t create a continuous sonic boom. Dunes disappeared beneath me. Stone ridges became dark streaks at the edges of my vision. Several nocturnal monsters sensed my approach and buried themselves so deeply that only terrified vibrations remained beneath the ground.

Sasuke"s path was easy to retrace.

He had flown east on his summoned hawk, but the creature"s feathers carried his scent. Every wingbeat left a faint wake through the air, settling across the landscape in a trail only enhanced senses could follow hours later.

The terrain grew increasingly broken.

Sand gave way to black stone, then towering formations split by narrow canyons. Static prickled across my fur before I saw the battlefield.

The cavern"s ceiling had partially collapsed.

I slowed near the entrance and walked inside.

The air reeked of ozone.

Lightning had fused sections of stone into glass. Deep cuts crossed the walls where Susanoo blades had struck. Burn marks from Sasuke"s fire techniques overlapped craters blasted into the ground by Rey Dau"s attacks.

I crouched beside one of the larger depressions and placed my fingers against the stone.

Sasuke had fought hard.

I could reconstruct much of the battle from the damage alone. Rey Dau had controlled the sky and forced Sasuke into the cavern. Sasuke had tried lightning first, discovered that the monster absorbed it, and changed tactics. Several collapsed stone arches suggested he had weaponized the terrain. Black residue along one wall carried the unmistakable spiritual distortion of Amaterasu.

A large stain darkened the ground near the center.

Rey Dau"s blood.

Several broken scales lay scattered around it, but there was no corpse.

I walked around the stain.

Something had landed directly on top of the dead monster.

The impact marks were shallow despite the creature"s apparent size. Its weight had been distributed with extraordinary control. Four sets of claw impressions appeared around the corpse, each barely penetrating the stone.

Wings had displaced dust toward the cavern walls.

Whatever stole Sasuke"s kill could fly.

That explained how it escaped so quickly. Sasuke had been nearly out of chakra, his summoned hawk was injured, and his new devil wings were unlikely to match a native aerial predator over long distances.

Still, stealing an apex monster from Sasuke Uchiha required confidence. Or intelligence. Probably both.

I found a pale scale lodged in a crack near the bloodstain.

It was almost white beneath the moonlight filtering through the broken ceiling, but faint rainbow colors moved across its surface when I turned it between my fingers. The material was far stronger than it looked. Even applying enough force to crush enchanted steel didn"t bend it.

White. Flying. Strong enough to carry an entire Rey Dau corpse. Sneaky enough to approach Sasuke without him noticing until it was already taking his prey.

"Well," I murmured, "I think I found my wraith."

I brought the scale closer to my nose. The scent was faint. Cold stone. Old bone. Something metallic and predatory. Beneath it lingered the almost clean smell of high-altitude air.

Rey Dau"s blood provided the easier trail.

The white wraith had wrapped or dragged the corpse when taking off, causing droplets to scatter across the cavern floor and up the broken wall. Outside, the trail continued northeast.

I slipped the scale into storage and launched myself forward again.

The blood trail crossed the remaining desert before turning toward the distant forest.

I reached the first trees within minutes.

This ecosystem felt completely different from the dunes. Moist earth replaced dry sand. Enormous roots twisted through the ground, some thicker than buildings. Plants glowed softly beneath the canopy, their leaves pulsing with stored energy.

Several large creatures moved through the darkness.

One stopped chewing long enough to look up as I passed overhead, then immediately flattened itself against the ground in the universal posture of an animal hoping a greater predator hadn"t noticed it.

Halfway through the forest, I sensed Thor.

He was standing waist-deep in a river and scrubbing himself with such determination that he was removing a concerning amount of the riverbank along with whatever had gotten on him. Mjolnir rested on a nearby boulder, and pieces of discarded armor had been arranged along the shore to air out.

Even from several miles away, the wind carried a faint odor.

My nose wrinkled. It smelled like rotten eggs, spoiled onions, swamp gas, fermented giant sweat, and the concept of humiliation.

Thor plunged his entire head beneath the water, surfaced, sniffed one arm, grimaced, and started scrubbing again.

I considered stopping. I desperately wanted to know what had happened. But the blood trail was already fading, and questioning Thor could wait until later. Whatever story produced that smell would only improve with his attempts to hide it.

I continued past him without making my presence known.

The forest eventually thinned.

Mountains rose ahead, their jagged peaks cutting across the stars. Pale stone towers reached thousands of feet into the sky, linked by narrow natural bridges and broken shelves of rock. Cold air descended through the valleys, carrying the scent of snow despite none being visible at lower elevations.

The trail grew stronger.

Drops of Rey Dau"s blood stained stone ledges and cliff faces. The white wraith had flown higher as it approached the mountains, occasionally striking the dangling corpse against the terrain.

It had been carrying the body somewhere specific.

I slowed as I entered the first ravine.

Here, the world became strangely quiet. No insects chirped. No small animals moved through the rocks. Even the wind seemed reluctant to enter.

Long scratches marked the cliff walls. Some were fresh, others old enough for erosion to soften their edges. Bones littered several narrow shelves above me-remains of large monsters, picked clean and arranged in deliberate piles rather than scattered randomly.

Territory markers. This was the domain of an apex predator. I followed the blood deeper into the mountains until the ravine opened into a vast stone basin surrounded by vertical cliffs.

At the far end, hundreds of feet above the ground, a cavern entrance split the mountain like a black wound.

Rey Dau"s blood marked the rocks below it.

Something moved in the darkness.

My tails rose behind me. Blue foxfire flickered along their tips, then faded as I deliberately suppressed it. I smiled up at the cave.

"Found you..."

The cavern entrance was smaller than I expected.

That stopped being true once I stepped through it.

Beyond the narrow opening, the passage expanded into an enormous chamber buried inside the mountain. The ceiling rose hundreds of feet above me, supported by black pillars that looked grown rather than carved. Pale blue crystals embedded in the walls still emitted a faint, flickering light despite the age of the structure.

I stopped walking. "What the hell?"

This wasn"t a nest. It was a laboratory.

Massive vertical pods covered the chamber.

Some stood upright along the walls in orderly rows. Others hung from the ceiling in clusters, linked to the stone by black conduits resembling roots or veins. The smallest pods were twice my height. The largest could have held creatures the size of dragons.

Clouded glass covered their fronts.

Something floated inside one of them.

I approached carefully.

The pod contained a pure-white monster curled into a fetal position. It had four limbs, folded wings, and a broad armored skull. Pale organic chains wrapped around its forearms, trailing through thick liquid like the tendrils of some deep-sea creature.

It wasn"t the same monster I had tracked.

This one was smaller. Younger, perhaps?

I examined it. The creature possessed characteristics from multiple unrelated species. Its armor resembled reptilian scales but contained mineral fibers more commonly found in the shells of desert monsters. Its muscles were layered like those of an aerial predator, while its bones had the flexible internal structure necessary to withstand violent high-speed impacts.

The organs controlling its chains were stranger still.

They had been deliberately integrated into the creature"s nervous system.

It was a chimera. Someone had designed this thing piece by piece.

I moved to the next pod.

Another white monster floated inside. This one had a longer snout and heavier forelimbs. Its chains ended in sharpened hooks rather than blunt segments.

The third pod was empty.

Cracks spread across its glass from a large hole punched outward.

I looked around more carefully.

Dozens of pods had broken from the inside.

Some had shattered so long ago that dust coated the broken glass. Others showed newer damage, with scratches in the surrounding floor suggesting their occupants had crawled or dragged themselves away.

There had been more than one white wraith. Potentially many more.

"How interesting," I murmured. The entire place looked abandoned. Dust lay thick across the machinery, and mineral deposits had formed over several conduits. Tree roots had invaded cracks in the walls. Whatever civilization constructed this facility had disappeared centuries ago.

Maybe thousands of years ago. Yet portions of the laboratory remained active.

Faint energy moved through the walls. Several pods still regulated their internal temperature. Symbols flickered across a cracked panel near the chamber"s center, too damaged for my translation magic to reconstruct completely.

This world"s ancient inhabitants had created its monsters...

They had possessed biological knowledge sophisticated enough to combine traits from different apex species, technology capable of maintaining life for centuries, and a power source stable enough to continue operating long after their civilization vanished.

Then something had happened. Their creations broke free. I wondered if the white monsters destroyed their makers or merely survived whatever catastrophe had already ended them?

A heavy tearing sound drew my attention deeper into the chamber.

Rey Dau"s corpse lay near the base of a broken pod.

Sasuke hadn"t exaggerated the monster"s size. The lightning wyvern stretched across a significant portion of the floor, its wings folded at unnatural angles and one horn shattered near the base. Black burns from Amaterasu scarred its hide, and a deep wound through its throat showed where Sasuke had delivered the killing blow.

The body was already half eaten.

Large sections of its chest and abdomen had been stripped away. Several lightning-infused organs were missing entirely, and the exposed ribs bore fresh tooth marks. The white wraith had apparently brought Rey Dau here as food.

Sasuke would be furious when he learned that. Which meant I absolutely had to tell him!

I couldn"t see the white wraith itself.

But I could sense it. Its presence clung to the darkness above me. It had hidden itself among the inactive conduits and broken machinery near the ceiling, suppressing its breathing and heartbeat with impressive control.

It was waiting for me to approach the corpse.

Predators rarely appreciated strangers entering their dens and examining their dinner.

I smiled. The faint displacement of air came from behind me. I hopped sideways.

Something enormous crashed into the spot where I had been standing!

The impact shattered the floor and hurled chunks of ancient stone across the chamber. One piece struck a dormant pod, cracking its glass and causing dark preservative fluid to leak down the front.

The white wraith rose from the crater.

It was larger than I had expected.

Standing on all fours, its shoulders reached nearly twenty feet high. White armor covered its body in interlocking plates, with patches of pale grey hide visible around the joints. Its forelimbs were disproportionately powerful, ending in claws capable of gripping stone. Broad wings folded against its back, their edges lined with sharp structures resembling bone.

Its head looked like a combination of several different predators. Draconic jaws. Forward-facing eyes. Armored ridges that swept backward into short horns.

The most distinctive features were the chains. Thick white links emerged directly from organs embedded in the monster"s forearms. The chains curled through the air with independent movement, flexing like muscular tendrils. Each link was covered in small hooked structures that opened and closed as they tasted my energy.

"Hello," I said.

The wraith roared.

The sound shook dust from the ceiling.

Both chains shot toward me. One swept low enough to cut through my legs while the other descended from above. I caught the first with my bare hand and slapped the second aside.

The impact sent a shockwave across the chamber.

Several cracked pods finally shattered.

I expected the chains to recoil.

Instead, the one in my hand tightened. Tiny hooks pressed against my skin-not hard enough to pierce it, but enough to establish contact.

Something pulled at me. It was subtle. A slight pressure beneath the skin, followed by the sensation of energy flowing down my arm.

My eyebrows rose.

The chain was absorbing my life force. Not just my magicules alone. Not just my Youki or stamina either. It drew from everything simultaneously, converting the stolen power into something the creature could use.

I yanked my hand free.

The white wraith staggered.

For one second, I thought I had injured it.

Then its entire body spasmed. The monster stumbled sideways, claws carving furrows through the floor as every muscle contracted at once. Pale light erupted between its scales. It threw its head back and released a tortured roar that climbed in pitch until it became nearly ultrasonic!

Its body began changing.

The white scales along its forelimbs darkened to pale blue. The color spread across its chest and neck in branching patterns like fire traveling through dry grass. Its muscles expanded, stretching the armor plates apart before new layers grew to fill the gaps.

The creature increased in size by several feet.

Its broken scales repaired themselves.

The chains thickened, each link gaining a faint blue glow around the edges.

I stared. "That was barely anything." The amount it had taken from me wouldn"t have powered one of my tails for a second. I could regenerate the loss faster than it drained away.