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To get out of this hellhole, we needed two Beast Characteristics.

After some arguing, we finally settled on who would be with whom and what role each half of the team would play.

Eliza was going to be with Theo, while Houseplant, Mary, and I were going to be on the other team. Eliza and Theo’s team would be called Team A. Ours would be called Team B.

Team A’s job was to do the main fighting. Our job was to formulate a plan, provide support, and scout the area.

The reason was obvious. Theodore had the highest Talent Rank among us, which meant he had the most spiritual power of anyone still fighting. He was also ranked first in Draeus’s class. Eliza, meanwhile, was already Awakened, so without question she was the strongest among all of us.

My spiritual power was low, and my Affinity was Ice. With that Affinity, all I could currently do was produce a cold mist from parts of my own body. Houseplant was, to be blunt, not much use in a straight fight, while Mary was a brilliant swordswoman who had originally been chosen to stand with Eliza — until Theodore’s pride would not allow him to be left behind.

Our plan was to move toward the black spire, since it was the most probable place to find Unorthodox creatures. We were, all of us, quietly terrified of finding something capable of turning us into dust before we had the chance to run.

Theodore and Eliza walked ahead of me as the foul stench of black moss crept into my nose.

’Ugh.’

I concentrated very hard on not being sick in front of everyone.

"We are stuck with a new problem now," Theodore snapped.

As if the smell were not enough, our path was blocked by a distorted crimson-black shape that looked, at a glance, like a large, thick tree branch.

I looked toward Arthur, only to find his usual scared face, now layered with disgust as well.

Eliza sighed and took both her axes in hand, spinning them like they were dancing for her.

’How cool.’

I could not help but think it. We are, after all, all fond of flashy things.

The cutting edges of the axes sparked with lightning as she raised them. She swung, and the distorted shape turned to ash the instant the blades touched it.

We kept our distance from anything like that on principle. First, we did not know whether it was safe to touch — it could have been poisoned, and we would not have known until it was too late. Second, if an Unorthodox creature was standing close by, closing the distance to check would hand it a free attack. Staying back at least gave us time to react.

A few minutes later, we reached our destination.

We crouched a few meters from the black spire, on a knoll of crimson mud that reached waist-height in places, thick enough to act as a wall between us and whatever was out there. It let us watch the spire while staying mostly hidden.

The spire itself was darker than shadow. Looking directly at it felt like staring into something beneath the concept of darkness rather than an example of it. It was larger than anything I had ever seen in my life, its tip vanishing into the clouds as though the clouds were simply its hair. It was not only tall — it was wide enough that I found myself wondering, absurdly, whether there was a door somewhere.

"Bloody hell," Arthur breathed.

I looked at Eliza and could think of two explanations for her expression. Either she was thinking hard, or she was as frightened as the rest of us and hiding it slightly better.

Arthur looked at his sister. "Is there no other choice?"

She clicked her tongue before finally meeting his eyes.

"No."

His face made it clear he had expected that answer and hated it anyway.

Just as we finished taking in the spire, Eliza’s hand rose, palm out. She had sensed something.

I followed her line of sight and saw it.

It had a humanoid body with four arms, each ending in a pincer instead of a hand. Dark carapace covered its back, and two devilish horns crowned its forehead.

[You Are Looking At A Beast Fiend: Yangereu]

Looking closer, I saw that Yangereu was not alone.

Dog-shaped creatures moved with it, low to the ground and quick, weaving between its legs the way real dogs might weave between the legs of someone they trusted. There were five of them, maybe six — it was hard to count when they kept folding in and out of each other’s shadows. Their bodies were wrong in the specific way everything in this Realm was wrong, joints bending a fraction too far, spines a fraction too long, as though something had built them from a memory of dogs rather than an actual dog.

[You Are Looking At Feral Fiends: Suap]

’Even its pets are Fiends.’

I felt the blood leave my face. I had already known Yangereu was dangerous. Seeing it surrounded by creatures that were themselves Fiends was a different order of dangerous entirely, the kind that made the word feel too small for what we were looking at.

"So, what is the plan," Theodore said, looking at me.

I looked at him, then at Yangereu, then back at him, and felt the full weight of having absolutely nothing to offer.

"Let me think," I said, which meant I had no idea yet.

His expression did not change. "That is reassuring."

"I said let me think."

"I know."

"Then let me think."

He clicked his tongue and turned back toward Yangereu, and I let the silence between us do the work of an apology I was not in the mood to give out loud.

Down below, Yangereu dragged itself toward the black spire, unhurried, four arms swaying loosely at its sides. The Suap trailed behind it in a loose formation, close but never too close, the way a pack learns exactly how much distance keeps it safe. There was something almost deliberate in how carefully they kept that distance, and I found myself narrowing my eyes at it, trying to work out what it meant before I had context enough to know.

Just as they reached the base of the spire, Yangereu raised one arm. I tensed without meaning to. The pincer swept sideways, caught one of the Suap mid-stride, and cut it clean in half.

The motion was almost lazy. That was the part that unsettled me the most — there was no anger in it, no hunger, nothing that looked like a reason. It was the kind of violence a person commits when they are bored, or when they simply do not consider the thing in front of them worth the effort of caring about.

Yellow blood, thick as pus, sprayed across the mud in a wide arc, and the smell that followed a half-second later was worse than the black moss had been by an order of magnitude.

Arthur clapped a hand over his mouth, his face gone the color of old paper.

"You alright," I asked him.

He nodded too quickly. "Yeah. I am fine."

He clearly was not, but I let it go, because I did not have that particular problem myself. I had built up a strange kind of immunity to disgust in my old life, from a childhood spent looking at pictures of infected gums crawling with fly larvae for reasons I no longer remembered and did not much care to reconstruct — a genuinely useless memory to have carried across worlds, and yet here it was, finally earning its keep.

Eliza, being Awakened, had an easier excuse than either of us. Her spiritual power was more than strong enough to suppress a reaction like that on its own, and she watched the whole thing with the flat, professional attention of someone cataloguing a threat rather than witnessing a death.

Theodore only clicked his tongue, arms crossed, jaw tight.

Mary’s expression did not move at all, which by now I understood was not the same as her feeling nothing.

"Does it always do that," Arthur asked once he had lowered his hand.

"I do not know," I said.

"Could have fooled me."

"I said I do not know."

He looked back toward Yangereu without another word, and I decided that counted as him accepting the answer.

The remaining Suap did not scatter. They did not so much as flinch. They simply waited, heads low, while Yangereu finished what it was doing, and something about that obedience frightened me more than the kill itself had. Yangereu watched, patient, until the last of the dead Suap’s blood had drained fully into the mud, not one drop wasted on haste. Then it seized the small corpse by the head, hauled back with all four arms, and threw it against the spire.

The black surface did not so much catch the body as accept it. There was no sound, no impact, none of the wet finality I had braced myself for. The Suap simply sank into the spire the way a stone sinks into still water, ripples closing neatly over the place it had been, and then it was gone, as if it had never existed at all.

For a moment, nobody said anything. Even the wind seemed to be waiting for permission to start again.

"...What," Arthur finally managed.

"I do not think that was normal," Theodore said, eyes still fixed on the spire.

"No," I agreed. "It definitely was not."

"So we need to be fast," Arthur said, "and we need a plan, and currently we have neither."

"We have half of one," I said. "Give me a minute."

I sat back against the mud wall, out of Yangereu’s sightline, and let the ache in my legs remind me that crouching in a defensive position for this long was its own kind of exhausting. Then I opened the Shop in my head.

[Shop Opened]

═══════[ SHOP ]═══════

Chapter 25: Trojan Horse of Five Emboidments