Gareth saw it before anyone else. The camp wouldn’t hold. They had lost. His centre gamble had failed. It wouldn’t be long before it was overrun. The ramshackle walls were already being pressed. His red bannered wardens did their best to hold, but they weren’t fighters. Not really. The crafters and non-combatants who had been given weapons were the first to fall. Holes in the lines slowly opening. There weren’t enough bodies. It was only a matter of time. With Camp 5 gone, and Camp 6 gone, a large wedge had formed in their perimeter. It was a wide mouth in the outer ring that they couldn’t close. Beasts poured through broken and splintered planks of wall, rope and canvas. The funnels he had created were now working against him, funnelling beasts directly to them. Every time one beast fell, another was there to take its place.

  That wedge put pressure on every other camp. They were being attacked from a wider angle. Sometimes even from behind. The corridors that had once been ‘paths’ between camps were now choke points packed with injured and terrified people. People without weapons were being funnelled away… but where could they really go? They were surrounded and heading to other encampments would do nothing. Gareth watched as a woman grabbed a boy by the wrist until her grip slipped in blood and he vanished into the masses. Someone shouted for a medic and got no response. There were flashes of fighting everywhere, makeshift spears, swords and daggers all over, thrusting, being held wrong, stabbing through any holes in wall and canvas. His centre was being pushed inward, slowly, but clearly.

  Gareth had hope he could escape into Camp 2. It had consistently reported all clears and no issues. In waves 1 and 2, no help requests had come from there. They had been told that no major damage had been caused. Wave 3 started and the reports proved worthless. There was no slow failure. No real struggle. An Ironbark Rhino hit the wall, and it simply fell apart. Bodies were dragged down in the first moment as defenders weren’t even properly ready to defend. Monsters flowed through and Camp 2 folded. The screams carried across the camp. Bones crunched. The Rhino kept moving, flanked by monkeys and wasps, and it headed for the centre, slowly gaining ground.

  Gareth had already started moving the moment he heard the screams from Camp 2. He picked a few of his wardens and Mira. Made them follow him toward Camp 4 where things seemed only slightly better. He had to get out of the centre. Away from the future killing fields. He ordered the wardens to remove their red banners, then they pushed through the crowd. They thought Gareth had a plan, was getting reinforcements. Even now, these people followed him blindly. Mira stumbled once and Gareth caught her elbow, hauling her forward, and kept moving. Gareth cut away, headed to the wedge between Camp 1 and 4. This was the only safe gap left, space to move around. He guided his small group through with quick gestures and quiet urgency, stepping over debris without stopping, ignoring the bodies in the mud behind him. The centre fell behind them, the screaming rising. “We have to find an escape route,” Gareth said, turning grimly toward the others for the first time.

  ***

  Dalen knew his camp would fall even before the wave had started. He spent the four hours of downtime getting ready for it and this was the result. Camp 3 was still standing, only because the people inside it refused to accept defeat. The wall had already been torn open in multiple places. He had ensured it was patched, only with canvas, in the fighting. No one had time to move planks. Every hit continued adding pressure. Every time the line surged forward to stab through a gap, it came back thinner. Corpses were then piled against the walls. They weren’t winning space, just buying seconds before total collapse. Dalen moved to the inner edge with blood on his hands and mud up to his knees, dragging people out of the press with severe injuries. He shoved makeshift weapons into the hands of anyone who could still hold something. As long as it was considered a System item, it could do damage, no matter how shit it was. He kept his voice steady to stop panic from spreading. “Hold the corner. Keep the point. Don’t chase.” His words were sharp and controlled. It was almost working but… it wasn’t enough.

  He had planned a fallback route with Elira before the wave. He knew there was no point going to the centre. With the outer camps falling, what could the centre even do? He watched as they lost ground inside the camp. He watched as more corpses were made, critical injuries. His one and only person with healing skills couldn’t keep up. After having to use the pill in the previous wave, the healer was kept in utmost safety. Lose her, and it would fall apart faster. Through the fighting, he was certain he’d killed hundreds but it wasn’t enough. Someone screamed when a beast’s claw hooked through a gap and dragged them against the wall from the inside. Someone else tried to climb some crates but an arrow with blue streaks took her out. Dalen saw the line start to bow, people slowly taking steps back. He tried to take more and more of the wall solo, but it wouldn’t last much longer. A flood was coming.

  Elira had watched as the flood of beasts around her wall slowly thinned toward Dalen’s camp. The beasts had found an opening. She couldn’t send bodies to other places, her camp didn’t have enough people for that. Every person was needed, useful. She had treated the tailor and blacksmith like valuable resources and they had responded in kind. Her fighters had good weapons, leather armour made of beast hide. Shields had been crafted from wood planks, swords and spears of bone and metal. Gaining some height, she could tell things weren’t looking good. The beasts were far stronger now. Monsters out of nightmare were starting to appear. A wendigo here. Hell, what the fuck was that thing with green pulsing bulbs all over it. She felt lucky it hadn’t joined the fray yet. Hearing the screams from Camp 2, she knew Camp 3 was done for. It wouldn’t hold now. She gave two short orders and a pre-planned seam in her wall opened, just wide enough for a single person to enter. It would need fierce guarding.

  Dalen knew the moment his camp was gone. He’d watched one of his stronger fighters fall to stacking poison from the wasps. He’d watched his mages use their remaining essence. He used them as a last resort, setting the walls on fire. It was a gamble, it could set the entire encampment ablaze, but he needed the time. He ordered the retreat. “One by one. No running. Keep your weapon up.” They moved in a line, battered and bleeding, using the last functioning, burning barricade as cover while the rear guard stabbed and held. The first few reached Elira and were caught by her people, pulled into place, immediately put to use on the walls. Dalen’s people were disciplined enough to follow the orders of a surviving camp. They knew they wouldn’t be in charge and didn’t even try to fight it. They assimilated.

  The beasts began funnelling. Dalen stayed back without thinking about it. He planted himself at the gap’s mouth, sword in one hand, torch in the other. He became the wall for the last few seconds Camp 3 had left. A beast lunged at him, too fast for him to react to. Dalen drove his sword into its shoulder, twisting to keep it from pushing through. A boar charged and its tusks drove through his thigh. Grunting, he ran it through. A pack of dire wolves took advantage and savaged his chest, arms, anything they could get their teeth around. He barely felt it, running on pure adrenaline. Something tore and he went down, face hitting the dirt, warmth running down his side. His vision flashed as he was dragged through the mud. He felt bone crack.

  Elira was there in a flash. Her staff flashing with essence. Fire, lightning and earth hit all at once. Beasts fell one by one. “Sarah! Get here now, close that gap!” she shouted. She dragged Dalen through the hole and watched as the gap was seamlessly packed with mud which hardened through Sarah’s magic. Canvas dropped and planks slammed into place, reinforcing the gap. The screams throughout the encampment could be heard everywhere. It was done, now… how long could this camp hold?

  Dalen lay on his back inside Elira’s perimeter, eyes wide, one hand pressed to his hip where bone pushed out of his flesh, blood running freely. He attempted to sit up, to thank Elira, but he was shoved down with a single palm to the chest.

  “Breathe,” Elira said. “You’re alive right now, don’t make yourself dead.”

  Orders were passed through the camp, healers working overtime. Camp 3 finished collapsing, the fire licking Elira’s walls. A water mage working overtime to ensure they wouldn’t catch fire. Elira looked towards Gareth’s camp and sighed. “We’re probably going to be the last ones left,” she muttered, before taking her place on the wall.

  ***

  Kaizer forced himself to stop chasing the Centaur’s lanes. The frustration was still there, hot behind his teeth, but he packed it down and turned it into something usable. He cut left into thicker brush, dropped low, and triggered Silent Stalker in a short burst. The world tightened. Sound dulled. His body went light in the wrong way, as though the air stopped grabbing at him. He used it for three steps, not more, then let it fade before it could cost him control. He moved again. Another burst. Another three steps. He didn’t disappear. Not fully. But his presence smeared in the forest’s noise, and that was enough to break the Centaur’s perfect cadence for a heartbeat. Kaizer didn’t waste the heartbeat on hope. He spent it on ground.

  The Centaur’s first response was a ricochet shot that came in sideways, deep blue essence trailing behind it in a hard line. It struck a trunk beside Kaizer and split into a cluster of needles that hissed through leaves and dirt. Kaizer ducked. One needle grazed his cheek and cut shallow, the sting sharp and immediate. He tasted blood. He pushed forward anyway, another Silent Stalker burst to close the last few metres, and this time the Centaur didn’t fire at his body. It fired at the earth. The arrow hit in front of Kaizer’s feet, and blue ropes erupted from the shaft, thick strands of condensed essence that snapped out in a fan and wrapped for his ankles, his calves, his knees. Kaizer felt the grab and the pull in the same instant. He swore, loud and raw, and drove his weight forward. The ropes held. They did not stop him. They stole his balance, stole his stride, and that was the point. Kaizer dropped a hand to the ground to stop his face from smashing into rock, then tore the ropes apart with his claws, shredding the strands in violent, jagged cuts that sent blue sparks fizzing into the undergrowth.

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  “Stop running!” he barked, voice ripping out of him. “Fight me properly!”

  The Centaur answered with calm laughter that carried through the trunks. It kept retreating, hooves striking stone and root without slipping, bow lifting again. Kaizer burst forward through brush, and another rope-arrow hit, this one angled, ropes snapping around his spear haft and yanking it sideways. The pull nearly wrenched it from his grip. Kaizer roared and drove essence through his hands, not as a spell, not as a technique he could name, just raw control forcing his grip to become unbreakable for a second. He ripped the spear free, felt his forearms light up with strain, and kept pushing, breath hard, eyes burning with the need to land one real hit.

  A third arrow fired past him, too high, too wide. Kaizer saw it as a deep blue streak cutting through branches. It didn’t arc back. It didn’t shatter beside him. It kept going, clean and indifferent, vanishing between trunks toward the clearing. A moment later, a scream carried back on the wind, thin and high, followed by shouting that turned to chaos again. Kaizer’s stomach tightened, not from surprise, from confirmation. The Centaur wasn’t missing. It was firing through him. It was firing through everything, bleeding the camp while it bled him. Kaizer’s jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.

  “You’re pathetic!” he shouted, and the words were half insult and half plea. “You think this makes you smart?”

  The Centaur didn’t answer. It didn’t need to. It just kept him moving.

  Kaizer cut into a lower lane, using Silent Stalker again, longer this time. He felt the edge of it slip, his presence flattening, his footfalls dying into the forest floor. The Centaur’s next arrow came late. Not late enough to be harmless, late enough to be wrong. Kaizer slid behind a fallen log and the arrow struck the wood, ropes snapping out and wrapping empty air. Kaizer launched over the log and finally saw the Centaur properly through the trees, close enough that he could see the draw of its bowstring, the tension in its forearm, the calm in its eyes. Kaizer surged, spear low, claws out, fangs aching under his gums.

  The Centaur’s ears flicked. Its gaze shifted. It stepped back, but not cleanly. Kaizer was inside the distance now. Not close enough to stab, close enough to force a choice.

  “Better,” the Centaur called. “You can learn.”

  Kaizer didn’t respond with words. He responded with Triple Thrust. The spear snapped forward in three fast, brutal lines, each thrust aimed at a different angle, each one designed to catch the body mid-adjustment. The first scraped armour. The second clipped the Centaur’s flank, opening a shallow cut that bled dark and quick. The third would have punched into the gap beneath the ribs if the Centaur hadn’t twisted, and it still took the edge of the strike, the point dragging across metal and flesh hard enough to leave a groove. Kaizer’s heart hammered. He had touched it. He had finally touched it.

  Then the world tried to take the moment away.

  A shadow stepped into the lane, tall and gaunt, antlers catching on branches. A wendigo. Its mouth opened in that hollow call that had once locked Kaizer’s body in place. It was close. Too close. Kaizer smelled it, rot and cold and something older. The Centaur used it like a door slamming shut.

  Kaizer snarled, furious, and drove forward without hesitation. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t stall. He took a half-step to the side and rammed his spear up under the wendigo’s jaw, point punching into the skull. The creature convulsed. Kaizer ripped the spear free and tore its throat open with his claws in two savage rakes that sprayed blood across bark. The sound died. The body fell. Kaizer didn’t look at it again. He ran straight through the collapsing corpse, boots slipping on gore, and he felt Essence Siphon tug faintly at the leaking power without him even trying. He took a controlled inhale and the pull steadied him, a small bite of fuel taken from a kill he didn’t have time to admire.

  The Centaur gained distance again, but not as much as before. Kaizer had learned the trick. He had stopped paying the full cost.

  He broke into another burst of Silent Stalker, and the forest seemed to blink around him. The Centaur fired, ropes snapping out, but Kaizer was already shifting lanes, already cutting behind a boulder, already forcing the ropes to latch onto dirt and stone instead of him. He came out of cover and saw something new. Five figures ahead, spread across the lane, cloaks and crude staves, eyes wide, hands shaking. Humans. Low-level mages. Their essence was thin and frantic, their spells half-formed.

  The Centaur had stopped relying on fog and distance for one beat and put bodies in front of him instead.

  A bolt of fire shot out, small and sputtering, aimed at Kaizer’s chest. A shard of ice followed, not sharp enough to pierce, sharp enough to distract. A gust of wind kicked dirt into his eyes. Kaizer staggered one step, blinked hard, and rage flared up his throat.

  “Move,” he growled, and it came out like a threat.

  They didn’t move. They tried to cast again.

  Kaizer hit them like a storm that didn’t care what they were. He drove his spear through the first mage’s stomach and ripped it free, the point coming out wet. The mage folded, hands still trying to shape a spell as blood poured through their fingers. Kaizer didn’t stop. He turned, claws sweeping across the second mage’s face, tearing skin and eye in one brutal rake. The mage screamed and dropped. Kaizer kicked them aside, stepped into the third, and slammed his spear butt into their throat hard enough to crush cartilage. The fourth raised a staff and tried to scream a word. Kaizer bit down on the staff and snapped it, then drove his fangs into the mage’s shoulder and triggered Fangs of Verdana. The poison went in hot. The mage convulsed almost immediately, legs buckling, hands clawing at their own arm as paralysis crawled through muscle. Kaizer tore the bite free and threw the body aside like garbage.

  The fifth mage ran.

  Kaizer chased for three steps, then launched a throwing dagger with a short pulse of Essence Coating. The blade hit the back of the skull and dropped the mage mid-stride. Kaizer didn’t slow to confirm the kill. He already knew.

  He lifted his head, breath coming hard, blood dripping from his claws and chin, and saw the Centaur again through the trees. It had retreated, but it had spent something real to do it. Kaizer could feel it now. The rhythm of the arrows had changed. The ropes weren’t as thick. The follow-up shots were less constant. The Centaur was still in control, but the control had edges.

  Kaizer wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his wrist and spat red into the dirt. “Yeah,” he said, voice shaking with the effort of keeping himself from sprinting blindly again. “That’s right. Run.”

  He pushed forward again, deliberately this time. He triggered Silent Stalker in a burst, slipped behind a line of trees, then dropped it and sprinted, forcing the Centaur to guess which lane he was taking. The Centaur fired a rope-arrow anyway. It hit the ground where Kaizer would have been if he kept chasing straight. The blue ropes snapped out and caught nothing.

  Kaizer came from the side and finally got his break.

  The Centaur’s retreat lane narrowed between two boulders. For half a second it had nowhere clean to step without slowing. Kaizer saw it and lunged, spear driving forward. The Centaur twisted, deflected the spear with a hard knock of its bow, and Kaizer’s thrust missed the kill. But the twist brought the Centaur’s flank close enough for Kaizer’s other weapons.

  Kaizer dropped the spear and jumped.

  He hit the Centaur’s side like a body check, claws digging into armour and flesh, and he clamped his jaws down on the nearest exposed gap, just above the hip where the armour didn’t fully cover the junction. His fangs punched in. He tasted blood. He tasted the Centaur’s essence, dense and sharp. He triggered Fangs of Verdana and forced the poison deep.

  The Centaur jolted, not in panic, in shock. It drove an elbow back and slammed Kaizer in the ribs hard enough to knock air out of him. Kaizer didn’t let go. He held the bite for one more heartbeat, one more hard push, then tore free and dropped, rolling as the Centaur lashed out again. Pain flared in his side. Something bruised deep. His vision pulsed for a second.

  Kaizer laughed, short and ugly, more breath than sound. “Got you.”

  The Centaur didn’t stop to trade words. It snapped back and whistled a short command, sharp enough that Kaizer felt it in the way the forest shifted. Beasts moved. Not stumbling into the lane by chance. A line of bodies stepped in, shoulder to shoulder, claws low, jaws open, turning the space between them into a moving wall. The Centaur used them to buy distance, hooves already sliding into the next retreat lane.

  Kaizer’s ribs throbbed where the elbow had caught him, but his mouth still tasted the Centaur’s blood. The poison sat in that bite now, crawling forward, slow and patient. He spat red into the dirt and lifted his spear.

  “Cute,” he snapped. “Hide behind them.”

  A boar-like beast lunged first, tusks ripping through brush. A second beast followed, lean and fast, trying to hit Kaizer’s flank while the first pinned his front. Kaizer stepped into the boar’s charge, drove his spear through its throat, and ripped sideways. Blood sprayed. The second beast leapt anyway.

  Kaizer didn’t meet it with the spear.

  His hand dropped to his belt and he pulled a throwing dagger. He pushed a thin line of essence into the metal. Deep blue light crawled along the edge, tight and steady. He threw it at the lunging beast, the blade cutting toward its face.

  The beast turned instinctively, jaws opening, eyes locked on the dagger.

  Kaizer twisted his wrist and pushed a controlled pulse through the dagger’s path.

  The dagger curved.

  It slipped past the beast’s muzzle by a finger’s width, skimmed through the gap between two bodies, and shot into the retreat lane behind them.

  The Centaur had already begun its next step.

  The dagger hit low, driving into the back of its leg where tendon and muscle worked hardest. The Centaur jolted, hoof scraping stone. The retreat stuttered. It didn’t fall, but the next step came heavier, slower, and the rhythm broke for the first time in a way that wasn’t deliberate.

  The Centaur’s head snapped back, eyes wide for a heartbeat. Surprise, clean and honest.

  Kaizer bared his teeth. “Yeah,” he said, breath ragged. “Take your own medicine.”

  He felt it as he said it. Not the satisfaction, the shape of the control. The same kind of bend the Centaur had been using against him, forced into a blade instead of an arrow. He didn’t have the words for it yet. He just knew it wasn’t luck.

  The beasts hesitated, confused by the break in command. Kaizer used the hesitation. He tore through them with spear and claw, cutting the lane open again, forcing the Centaur to keep backing away even as its leg refused to cooperate properly.

  The Centaur didn’t panic. It didn’t break. It just retreated with a fraction less certainty, bow lifting again, eyes locked on Kaizer like the fight had become something new.

  It fired again, not ropes this time. A heavy arrow struck the ground and burst into a cloud of blue mist that stung Kaizer’s eyes and made his lungs seize when he inhaled. Kaizer coughed once, hard, and forced himself to breathe through his nose. He grabbed a cloth from his belt, wrapped it over his mouth in a fast motion, and pushed forward through the sting, eyes watering, throat burning.

  Out of the fog, something massive moved.

  A Gravebloom Devourer, smaller than the one in the den but still wrong, vines and bulbous growths pulsing as it pushed through the lane. The Centaur used it the same way it had used the wendigo. A wall made of meat and teeth. A few seconds bought with a monster’s body.

  Kaizer’s frustration surged again, but it didn’t take his hands. He stepped into the Devourer’s reach, spear back in his grip, and drove Essence Coating into the point in a short, brutal pulse. He stabbed into the pulsing bulbs and ripped sideways. The growths burst wet and hot, spraying foul fluid. The Devourer shrieked and lashed out with a vine that wrapped Kaizer’s arm and yanked. Kaizer let it pull, stepped into the force, and used the motion to close, claws tearing through vine and flesh. He rammed his spear into the creature’s core mass and twisted until the resistance gave. The Devourer collapsed, still twitching, still trying to bite with a mouth that no longer mattered.

  Kaizer took one hard inhale and felt Essence Siphon catch the spill. The pull steadied him again, small, controlled, enough to keep him moving.

  He looked up through the thinning mist and saw the Centaur retreating again, but its cadence had changed. It was still fast. Still clean. Just not perfect.

  Kaizer lifted his spear, blood dripping from the point, and his voice carried through the trees, raw and furious and satisfied all at once.

  “Run,” he shouted. “Run and feel it.”

  He pushed after it, step by step, closing ground that had been impossible to close earlier, and for the first time in the fight, the Centaur’s distance stopped feeling endless. It started feeling breakable.