Pinned face-down against the damp earth, swallowed whole by the absolute darkness of the island forest, Lucas felt the biting cold seep straight through his shredded clothes.
His mind, still reeling from the horrific violence he had just committed, spun in relentless loops.
The motionless weight pressing down on his chest was an enigma.
It could just as easily be a nightmare dredged up from the depths of Gregory Island as another recruit driven to feral frenzy by starvation and terror.
The ice-cold edge of a blade bit into his carotid artery.
It left no margin for error.
Despite the visceral panic choking him, Lucas forced his body to freeze, hiding the tremors wracking his frame.
He swallowed his terror, gathered what little breath remained in his exhausted lungs, and tried to break the suffocating silence.
“Who… nghhh… who are you?” he croaked, his voice raw and raspy from near-asphyxiation.
The knife’s razor edge sank a millimeter deeper into his skin—just enough to let him taste the immediate threat of a fatal bleed.
Then, a harsh, distrustful female voice cut through the dark above him.
“You… you’re not an Infected, are you?”
An Infected?
Lucas understood instantly.
She was referring to the grotesque mutation that had taken Ben—that puppeted husk writhing with venomous, skull-patterned serpents.
This person had crossed paths with other recruits who shared the same macabre fate.
After a split-second pause to order his clouded thoughts, Lucas answered as best he could.
“No… I’m… I’m not infected…”
The grip did not loosen.
If anything, the pressure against his throat intensified.
“Oh yeah?
Prove it.”
Lucas knew with cold certainty that the slightest hesitation—the smallest suspicious twitch—and this shadow would slit his throat without a second thought before vanishing into the canopy.
On this island, mercy was a currency that no longer existed.
Playing his final card, he searched his memory, matching the voice to a face he had glimpsed during the initial assembly.
“You’re… you’re Narissa Varaïn… aren’t you?”
For a fraction of a second, time seemed to freeze.
The crushing bite of metal against his throat eased, and then the blade was snapped back entirely.
The shadow pulled away.
Instantly freed from the chokehold, Lucas slammed a hand over his bruised throat and dragged in a ragged gulp of night air.
It burned his lungs like fire as he rolled painfully onto his back.
Under the faint, sickly moonlight filtering through the dense canopy, he caught the azure gleam of scales tracing her face and neck.
It was Narissa.
The Neïd seemed to have regained some of her strength; the dull, desiccated complexion she had sported hours earlier was gone, replaced by a sharp, predatory vigor fueled by the night’s damp chill and the lunar glow.
With a fluid, near-invisible motion, she sheathed her weapon beneath her coat.
Lucas recognized it immediately: it was one of the trench knives handed out by the Syndicate during the dormitory massacre.
Of course, he thought bitterly.
A former thief guild leader isn’t about to let herself be disarmed of a blade like that.
Narissa wasted no breath on pleasantries.
Her piercing gaze locked onto Lucas, her tone dropping into a dry, clipped demand:
“Besides you… where are the other recruits?”
Lucas, battered by the brutal backlash of his Daken mark and crushed under the psychological weight of the murder he had just committed, struggled to sit up.
He leaned heavily against the mossy trunk of a nearby tree, his voice stammering and weak.
“I… I don’t know… I haven’t… seen anyone else yet…”
The child-like pitch of Lucas’s voice, fractured by sheer exhaustion, did not escape the Neïd.
Without a word, her eyes narrowed.
She began to inspect him with methodical, ice-cold scrutiny, taking in every inch of his condition.
Breathing unstable… depleted of energy, she analyzed silently.
But this level of fatigue goes deeper than mere physical strain.
Look at his eyes… that’s the face of a kid who just walked out of a fresh trauma.
Given the black blood staining his hands and clothes, he put down his first kill only minutes ago.
He’s also carrying a severe burn across his back… yet he isn’t flinching from the pain.
Interesting.
“Can you walk?”
Lucas tried to drive power into his legs, but his knees buckled instantly.
Paralyzed by a leaden lethargy, he couldn’t take a single step.
He shook his head in bitter resignation.
Narissa didn’t sigh.
She showed neither irritation nor pity.
She simply seized Lucas by the arm, draped the young recruit’s limb over her shoulder, and hauled him halfway off the ground to support his weight.
Bound together by a fragile alliance and the most basic instincts of survival, they resumed their slow trek through the pitch-black forest.
Meanwhile, several miles away, Chogo and the band of survivors he was leading ground to a sudden halt at the edge of a colossal chasm.
The earth dropped off into a vast, pitch-black abyss whose bottom remained entirely hidden in shadows.
On the far side, at a daunting distance, a rocky trail resumed its path in the dark.
A ugly smirk twisted the face of the massive Grod.
Well now, big guy… Commander Mélo must be a real demon to have cleared a drop like this without even blinking, he thought to himself.
Behind him, whispers of panic quickly spread among the recruits.
The gulf appeared entirely impassable, and the dreadful prospect of turning back into a jungle crawling with the walking dead and winged abominations sent a chill through the group.
A battle-scarred man in his thirties, who had elected to fall in behind Chogo, stepped up to the giant.
He asked in a hushed, anxious tone, his eyes scanning the drop:
“So… kid?
You got any bright ideas on how we’re supposed to cross this?”
Chogo, half his face submerged in the heavy shadows of the overhanging trees, let out a low, muffled chuckle.
He turned slowly toward the veteran, his perpetual, mockingly unhinged grin plastered across his face.
“We jump.”
The man went dead silent.
He stared at the red-skinned brute, praying it was just a sick joke, but Chogo’s eyes were completely devoid of hesitation.
Faced with such raw madness, the veteran snapped.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!
JUMP?!
HAVE YOU COMPLETELY LOST YOUR MIND?!”
The shout instantly drew the attention of the surrounding recruits.
As realization dawned on what Chogo was proposing, a wave of outrage and furious protests erupted across the group.
How could anyone suggest throwing themselves into a bottomless, pitch-black pit?
Chogo threw his head back and roared with laughter—a dark, booming sound that echoed ominously off the rocky canyon walls.
“You lot are a fucking riot!” the Grod rasped, spitting onto the dirt.
“I never asked you bastards to follow me!
I don’t even know you pathetic sacks of shit… I don’t give a damn what you do, and I couldn’t care less if you break your necks jumping!”
He stepped closer, his shadow looming over them.
“Get one thing straight: we’re here to join a goddamn criminal syndicate!
So take your crying and your weak-ass feelings somewhere else.
We aren’t friends.
If you drop dead tonight, I’ll sleep like a baby!”
A few recruits boiled with rage at his insolence, but others, more pragmatic, could only manage bitter smiles.
Chogo had just laid down the brutal ground rules of Gregory Island: out here, every man was master of his own fate.
Either follow Mélo’s trail at the risk of your life, or die of fright cowering on the cliff edge.
Hundreds of leagues away from that cursed island—far removed from the blood and monsters—life churned relentlessly through the bustling arteries of Malbour.
At the heart of the Central Market, stalls and canvas tents remained brightly lit long past midnight.
The merchants knew the truth of this place: in the city ironically dubbed “The City of Miracles,” it was under the cover of night that the desperate, the criminal, and the ambitious came to gamble on a new destiny.
In a dim alleyway tucked just beyond the roar of the market, a man leaned against a crumbling brick wall.
His attire was loud and eccentric: a wide-brimmed felt hat that struggled to contain a stubborn streak of hair, and a face so heavily freckled it looked sun-burnt.
A cheap cigar, rolled from low-grade Astra tobacco, burned slowly between his lips.
This was Louis Ponti.
One of the sharpest informers in the underbelly of the city.
A woman dressed in a fine red silk gown, her hair swept up in a strict bun that had been frayed by haste, rushed toward him.
She cast anxious glances over her shoulder before confronting him.
“Are you… the informant?”
Louis drew a long drag from his cigar, exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke, and gave the noblewoman a grand, theatrical smile.
“The very same, my dear lady!
You stand before the incredible Louis Ponti—the absolute cream of the crop when it comes to intelligence across the entire continent of Astra!
How may I be of service to your noble self?”
His exaggerated, utterly fake aristocratic accent made the woman wince, doing little to hide her disgust for this gutter-rat.
“I need to know… if my husband is unfaithful,” she whispered bitterly.
“He is Count Hardwin.”
A noblewoman… Louis thought, his eyes lighting up.
There’s a month’s worth of liquor right there.
He took another slow puff of his cigar, his tone shifting into business mode.
“Standard rate is thirty rivas, my lady.
But seeing as this involves high nobility, there are discretion and hazard fees to consider… That brings your total to forty-five rivas.”
The woman gasped in outrage at the steep price, but her jealousy and spite won out.
“Fine!
Take it… you gutter leech,” she spat, tossing a heavy coin pouch into his hand.
Louis caught the pouch with terrifying speed, counted the rivas with an expert flick of his fingers, and slipped them into his coat.
“Count Hardwin…” he murmured, feigning deep thought.
“Ah, yes.
He was spotted earlier tonight entering a discreet little property over in the Gallé district.
Word is he had very delightful company.
If I were you, that’s where I’d go hunting.”
Without a word of thanks, the woman whipped around and stormed off into the night.
Louis tipped the brim of his hat in a mock salute, blew a final plume of smoke toward the star-littered sky of Malbour, and crushed the cigar butt beneath his boot.
It was time to head inside and get warm.
Back on Gregory Island, the suffocating silence of the night reasserted its dominion over the forest.
Narissa came to a stop at the base of a giant baobab tree, its massive, raised root system forming a natural alcove.
She gently lowered Lucas—who could no longer keep his feet—onto the damp earth before sitting down beside him on the moss.
“Why are we stopping?” Lucas rasped, his voice barely a breath.
“Because wandering blind in this darkness is a guaranteed way to get lost or walk straight into another abomination,” the Neïd replied, her tone cold and pragmatic.
“The only smart move is to recover what strength we can until dawn.”
Lucas nodded faintly, unable to argue with the logic.
But as he closed his eyes, he couldn’t fathom how either of them was supposed to sleep in this living nightmare.
At the edge of the chasm, Chogo was winding up to take a running leap into the abyss when a recruit stepped out from the group.
She was a young hybrid with feline ears and sharp, cat-like features.
“Wait…” she said, placing a cautious hand on the Grod’s massive shoulder.
“I’m not going to stop you from jumping, but you should wait.
At least until daybreak.”
She kept her voice steady.
“We’ll be able to see down there.
We don’t have torches, and we have no idea what’s crawling at the bottom of that pit.
We should all camp here for the night.
You included.”
Chogo froze.
He wasn’t afraid of the island’s monsters, but the hybrid girl’s tone carried a faint, subtle edge of persuasion.
His crooked, cynical grin crept back across his face.
“Well now… since you asked so nicely,” he sneered.
The remaining recruits slouched down onto the cold rock at the edge of the void, settling in for a tense, terrifying night.
Dark shadows enveloped them entirely, leaving a single question haunting the mind of every survivor:
What fresh horrors were Gregory Island and the Eresboros Syndicate preparing for them at sunrise?