Two blocks from the canal, the subtle pressure of an active hunt locked onto Leo’s trail like a sudden drop in barometric pressure.
On the surface, the evening street moved with ordinary rhythm, with crowded food stalls and rumbling trams carrying workers home from their shifts.
Yet beneath his skin, an icy pressure lingered at the back of his neck, warning him that experienced predators were reading his ether wake.
Kage agreed through their sensory link, sending a wordless warning of two figures pacing their movement across the high rooftops.
The phantom greaves around his calves tightened with predatory tension as the shadow beast shared its heightened hunting senses.
’Two trackers,’ he thought, turning down an alley to lead the pursuit away from the crowded tenement blocks.
’They’re patient professionals, which means Flint spared no expense after losing his most profitable colosseum.’
Remembering Cole’s warning about the freight workers, he plotted a course toward a deserted industrial depot at the edge of the district.
He gave the pursuers an obvious trail to follow, leaping across gables and allowing his umbral ether to flare like a struck match.
He wanted them confident, eager, and far away from any innocent laborers who might get caught in the crossfire.
The night air washed over his face as he sprinted across the twilight rooftops, feeling the steady thrum of F-Rank power in his veins.
The abandoned locomotive depot had stood empty for a decade, consisting of cavernous sheds, rusted turntables, and shattered skylights that let in the rain.
He walked to the center of the largest maintenance hall, resting his satchel on a weathered rail buffer while drawing the Null Razor.
The umbral blade hummed in his grip, its violet circuits drinking the dim ambient light of the stormy evening with hushed hunger.
The reinforced double doors at the far end of the depot suddenly blew inward, torn off their hinges in a cloud of dust and debris.
A looming figure stepped through the wreckage, wearing an apron over dense fabric as thick bone plates erupted across his chest and shoulders.
Jagged bone spurs pushed out through his forearms like armor plating, while a five-foot notched cleaver rested casually across his broad shoulder.
[ Bounty Hunter Identified: Grave-Hound Grimm | Rank: F+ ]
[ Class: Osteo-Brutalist | Threat: Lethal In Close Quarters ]
"Hah, Ghost!" Grimm bellowed with feral delight, his voice echoing across the rafters like a barking hound.
"I caught your scent from three miles out, all that juicy pit money burning on your shoulders!"
"You brought a partner with you," he replied, circling the corroded locomotive with his blade held low in a ready guard.
"Where’s he hiding?"
"You’ll meet him when the sound dies!" Grimm roared, slamming his cleaver against his own chest plates with a loud clang.
’When the sound dies,’ he noted mentally, filing the warning away as his battle instincts flared into high gear.
’That means the sensory assassin is setting up an ambush from the shadows while this brute keeps me occupied.’
Grimm charged forward like a runaway freight train, swinging the bone cleaver in a furious downward arc.
The strike split the floor where he had been standing a fraction of a second before, sending chunks of stone showering across the hall.
The follow-up swing came whistling toward his ribs, and he met the jagged edge with the flat of the Null Razor.
The black blade drank seventy percent of the crushing force, channeling the impact into his phantom greaves.
He shot backward across the floor on a ribbon of shadow ether, absorbing the momentum with effortless grace.
"Fast!" Grimm crowed, stomping across the rubble with joyful fury in his glowing yellow eyes.
"Grave hounds love chasing fast prey across the ground!"
Three jagged bone spikes broke free from Grimm’s forearms, hurtling through the air like thrown spears without any telegraphing motion.
He swayed his torso to let the first two spikes whistle past his ears, then caught the third projectile out of mid-air by its shaft.
"Keep throwing them," he taunted, snapping the bone spear in half before tossing the shards to the floor.
"Every hit just buys me more fuel to burn in this fight."
"A fighter with an appetite!" Grimm laughed, closing the distance with wild, sweeping cleaver strikes that tore through weathered gantries.
The depot groaned around them as support pillars buckled under the stray blows, showering debris down from the ruined ceiling.
He stopped retreating once he decoded the rhythm of Grimm’s wind-up, noticing the slight pause whenever the big man committed to an overhead swing.
As the next overhead blow descended, he stepped inside the attack with fluid Viper-Weave footwork.
He trapped Grimm’s wrist with one hand, redirected the cleaver’s momentum downward, and drove his heel into the side of the tracker’s knee joint.
The joint gave way with a resonant crack that echoed loudly across the empty maintenance hall.
Grimm let out a pained roar, dropping to one knee as the bone plates around his leg shattered under the precise strike.
"Stay down," he warned, resting the tip of the Null Razor against the tracker’s exposed collar.
"The bounty is on my head, so walk away before you lose more than a leg."
"I don’t walk away from half a million credits!" Grimm snarled, surging back to his feet on raw fury as fresh bone plates rapidly knitted over the fractured knee.
Thick calcified armor spread over the joint in seconds, reforming the shattered bone into a thicker, jagged shell.
’His skeleton regenerates instantly,’ he realized, parrying another swing with a clear ring of void energy.
’Blunt trauma won’t stop him, so I have to cut through the core armor.’
Channeling his shadow ether into the blade, he delivered a two-handed diagonal slash that sheared through the thick bone plating on Grimm’s chest.
Crimson blood sprayed across the floorboards as the tracker collapsed onto both knees, panting while clutching his sliced armor.
"Good," Grimm wheezed through bloody teeth, his eyes still gleaming with feral madness.
"You’re strong enough to earn every single credit on that board."
The air in the maintenance hall turned freezing, with cold condensation frosting the weathered gantry frames as their weapons clashed.
Leo kept his feet centered, drawing deep, even breaths of the humid ozone to maintain his absolute stillness.
Before he could deliver the finishing strike, the sound in the depot vanished in an instant.
There was no explosion, no flash of light, and no sudden warning, yet every sound in the world ceased to exist between two heartbeats.
Grimm’s panting mouth moved soundlessly, the rain outside made no noise against the roof, and his own feet made zero sound against the floor.
A suffocating pressure clamped down on his eardrums, filling his skull with an unnatural, absolute silence.
The Null Razor trembled in his grip, but its familiar hum was fully smothered by the localized field.
’The second tracker,’ he thought, spinning on his heel as the hairs on his neck stood on end.
’The sensory assassin has deployed his silence dome to blind my hearing.’
High in the rafters above, a stealthy shadow detached from a support beam and descended through the blackness without disturbing a single speck of dust.
Two thermal-plasma daggers ignited soundlessly in the gloom, plunging toward the back of his neck in a lethal ambush.
He couldn’t hear the descent, but Kage’s predatory instincts screamed through their bond a split second before the daggers could strike home.