Stepping through a World Gate did not feel like walking through a door. It felt like being disassembled into a million freezing particles and violently stitched back together a heartbeat later.
Kairo Ashford hit the ground on his hands and knees, emptying the contents of his stomach onto alien soil. His head spun dizzily, his inner ear screaming in protest against the sudden shift in atmospheric pressure. He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the intense wave of spatial nausea.
"Breathe through your nose," Zeke Morrison instructed, his voice tight. The pale Vampire Slayer trainee was leaning heavily against a jagged pillar of black rock, looking remarkably green. "Don't lock your jaw. The pressure takes a minute to equalize."
"Fuck me," Kairo groaned, spitting the bitter taste from his mouth, and forced himself to look up.
They were no longer in the Mortal Realm of their birth. They had arrived on Morvath.
The planet was a nightmare cast in perpetual dusk. The sky above them was a bruised, airless shade of dark purple, choked with thick, swirling clouds of volcanic ash. There was no sun, only a strange, ambient twilight that cast long, deceptive shadows across the terrain. The ground beneath Kairo's boots was not dirt; it was a sea of razor-sharp, glassy obsidian that crunched like broken bones underfoot.
"Form up!" Torren Ash barked. The Gravity Slayer had already recovered, his war hammer resting on his broad shoulder. He pointed the haft of his weapon toward the glowing, purple spatial tear humming quietly behind them. "The World Gate anchor is set to a three-hour cycle. We have exactly one hundred and eighty minutes to secure the Abyssal-Crystals and fall back to this exact coordinate. If you miss the extraction window, you are marooned."
Renna Kade drew her twin crescent swords, the teal currents of her Storm Demon Slayer Art already crackling along the metal. She didn't look cocky. The oppressive, heavy atmosphere of Morvath seemed to bleed the arrogance right out of her.
"Keep your eyes moving," Renna warned, stepping to the vanguard. "Demons here aren't feral. They've adapted to the terrain. They hunt in packs."
Malik Frost rubbed her arms, her breath pluming in the freezing, sulfur-scented air. She stayed close to Kairo, her blue eyes scanning the jagged obsidian ridges. Ruben Veil had already dropped low to the ground, his sharp brown eyes tracking the deep, dragging shadows between the rocks.
Kairo stood up, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He reached down to his hip out of pure instinct, his fingers grasping for the familiar hilt of his longsword.
He gripped empty air.
Master Draven had taken his weapon. Kairo was standing on an alien planet, surrounded by adapted demons, unarmed. The whispering, hungry pull of the demonic essence inside his core urged him to manifest the void, to summon his Cosmic Demon Slayer Art and rip the twilight apart.
Build the vessel, Draven's booming voice echoed in his memory.
Kairo gritted his teeth and locked the Abyssal energy down. He wasn't going to cheat. If he relied on magic now, his body would shatter.
"Hey," Zeke murmured, stepping past him. The tall, red-eyed boy reached into his tactical harness and tossed something through the air.
Kairo caught it seamlessly. It was a foot-long cylinder of dense, polished ironwood, capped at the end with a lethal, sharpened wedge of pure silver. One of Zeke's spare vampire stakes.
"It doesn't have the reach of a sword," Zeke noted dryly, drawing his own weapons. "But if you jam it into a demon's eye socket, it usually stops them from complaining."
Kairo gripped the stake, testing its weight. It was light, balanced for thrusting rather than slashing. "I owe you one."
"Save it," Ruben snapped from the front of the formation. The Ghost Art trainee pointed a trembling finger toward a high ridge of volcanic glass fifty yards to their left. "We have company."
The shadows on the ridge peeled themselves away from the stone.
They were Scythe-Fiends. Lean, multi-jointed horrors with skin the color of dried blood and elongated forelimbs that ended in long, curved blades of organic bone. There were six of them. They didn't roar. They didn't charge blindly. They communicated with a series of high-pitched, clicking chirps, spreading out rapidly to encircle the squad.
"They're flanking," Torren observed coldly. He slammed the head of his war hammer into the obsidian ground. "I'll anchor the center. Renna, break their speed. Malik, control the terrain. Do not let them isolate you!"
The Scythe-Fiends dropped from the ridge, moving with an ugly, arachnid-like agility.
Renna moved first. "Gale Fang!" She swung both crescent swords, launching two compressed blades of wind that tore through the ashen air.
The wind strikes clipped the lead demon, sending it skidding across the glass, but the others adapted in a heartbeat. They scattered, zigzagging erratically. One of them banked hard, using its scythe-arms to vault over a rock formation, dropping directly toward Malik.
Malik's hands flashed with Abyssal energy. "Glacial Spike!"
A jagged pillar of black ice erupted from the obsidian, impaling the descending demon through the shoulder. It shrieked, thrashing wildly, but its momentum carried it forward. Its scythe-arm swung down, aiming to decapitate the young Ice trainee.
Kairo didn't think. He moved.
He didn't channel a single drop of his Cosmic Art. He relied on the brutal physical conditioning Draven had subjected him to. His muscles, sore from hauling granite, fired with explosive kinetic force. Kairo tackled Malik around the waist, driving them both into the sharp glass dirt as the bone-scythe cleaved the air where her neck had been a second prior.
The demon ripped itself off the ice pillar, shrieking in fury, and lunged at Kairo on the ground.
Kairo rolled onto his back. He didn't have a sword to block. He didn't have the reach to parry. As the demon's jaws snapped downward, Kairo drove both of his boots upward, planting his soles squarely into its chest. Using the demon's own downward momentum against it, Kairo kicked out, launching the demon over his head.
It crashed onto the jagged rocks. Before it could scramble to its feet, Kairo was already moving. He vaulted off the ground, closing the distance in three rapid strides. He leaped, bringing his entire body weight down on the demon's back, and drove Zeke's silver-capped stake directly into the base of the demon's skull.
The silver burned through the Abyssal nerve cluster with a sharp sizzle. The Scythe-Fiend spasmed once, then dissolved into foul-smelling ash.
Kairo ripped the stake free, his chest heaving, his muscles burning with pure lactic acid. He had killed it with physics, leverage, and a piece of wood. No magic. No cosmic backlash.
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A deep, bone-shaking boom echoed across the battlefield.
Torren Ash had activated his Gravity Art. "Crushing Orbit!" the big second-year roared.
A localized field of intensified gravity locked down a twenty-yard radius around Torren. Three Scythe-Fiends were caught in the invisible net, their bodies slamming into the obsidian ground as their weight suddenly quadrupled. Torren didn't hesitate. He stepped into the field, untouched by his own power, and swung his war hammer in a devastating, horizontal arc, shattering the demons' bone plating in a shower of black gore.
"Clear!" Zeke yelled, withdrawing his bloody stakes from the final demon's chest.
The squad stood in the twilight, panting heavily. The skirmish had been brutally fast.
"Harvest the cores," Renna ordered, wiping thick black blood from her cheek. "We don't have time to—"
The ground suddenly lurched beneath their boots.
It wasn't a minor tremor. The entire volcanic shelf groaned, the jagged obsidian cracking and splintering outward. The ambient twilight seemed to darken, the air growing thick enough to choke on. The Abyssal pressure radiating from the smog was so intense that Kairo felt the breath leave his lungs.
Ruben Veil fell backward, his sharp brown eyes wide with naked terror. He pointed a shaking hand toward the thickest veil of volcanic fog.
"Torren," Ruben whispered, his voice cracking. "That's not a Scythe-Fiend."
A massive silhouette stepped out of the ash.
It stood fifteen feet tall, walking upright on two digitigrade legs. Its armor was not made of bone, but of a dark, metallic substance that absorbed the ambient light. Molten, dark-purple Abyssal energy dripped from the huge, glowing crystal embedded directly into the center of its chest.
An Alpha-class Morvath.
Torren tightened his grip on his war hammer, his broad shoulders tensing. "Hold the line," he ordered, though his voice lacked its usual certainty.
Kairo stared at the glowing crystal in the demon's chest. It was the exact material he needed to forge his new weapon. And to get it, he had to kill a nightmare using nothing but a wooden stake.
"Oh, shit," he breathed.
Aethelgard was a world forged of light and razor blades.
Cassian Ashford stepped out of the World Gate, raising his left hand to shield his eyes from the blinding glare. The sky above was a brilliant, crystalline blue, without a single cloud. But it was the terrain that defied description.
There were no trees, no soil, no grass. The entire landscape was composed of towering, hexagonal pillars of shimmering white-gold crystal. They jutted from the ground at aggressive angles, forming a lethal, glittering forest that reflected the intense sunlight in a million blinding directions. The air tasted sharply of copper and pure ozone.
"Keep your eyes averted from direct reflections," Lysan Vex ordered. The third-year squad leader stepped past Cassian, holding a long, masterfully crafted golden spear. Lysan moved with an effortless grace that spoke of previous off-world deployments. "The ambient light here will burn your retinas if you stare into a crystal facet too long."
Cassian blinked rapidly, allowing his eyes to adjust. The gravity here was noticeably heavier than on the Mortal Realm. Every step required a conscious exertion of muscle. He could feel the strain in his atrophied right arm, which hung in its support wrap like dead weight.
He drew his weighted wooden practice sword with his left hand. The weapon felt absurdly fragile in this environment.
"Form a diamond perimeter," Lysan commanded, scanning the jagged, glittering terrain. "Aethel-Crystals don't just sit on the ground waiting to be picked up. They grow inside the apex predators of this planet. We are tracking a Gargoyle. It relies on camouflage."
Marcus Cole unhooked his paired short blades. The red-haired trainee moved stiffly, the heavier gravity pulling mercilessly at his broken ribs. "Frank, watch our rear. Jack, find a shadow, if there are any on this blinding rock."
"Watch the reflections," Frank murmured, his blue eyes scanning the crystalline canopy. "They'll lie about where it is." He kept his hands near the hilts of his water-blue blades.
Jack Shadow didn't reply. The silent trainee merely slipped behind a leaning pillar of opaque quartz, using the dense structure to obscure his presence.
Cassian took the left flank. He focused on his breathing, adjusting his stance to compensate for the heavier gravity. Fighting left-handed required him to rethink his entire spatial awareness. His dominant side was now his shield, his weak side his sword.
"Movement," Jack's voice echoed softly, bouncing off the crystalline walls, impossible to pinpoint. "Above."
Cassian snapped his head up.
High on the side of a ninety-foot crystal spire, something shifted. It wasn't a shadow. It was a distortion in the light.
An Aethel-Gargoyle detached itself from the spire. It was the size of a warhorse, its body plated in thick, overlapping scales of white-gold crystal that perfectly mimicked its environment. It had heavy, bat-like wings that didn't flap, but rather glided on the thermals of the planet's magnetic field.
It dropped toward them like a falling star.
"Scatter!" Lysan yelled.
The Gargoyle smashed into the ground exactly where Cassian had been standing a second before. The impact shattered the crystal floor, sending a spray of razor-sharp shrapnel flying in all directions. Cassian threw his left arm up, his wooden sword deflecting a shard of flying crystal that would have taken his eye out.
"Thunder Art: Boltstride!" Lysan chanted.
The third-year leader vanished in a blinding flash of golden electricity, reappearing on the beast's right flank. Lysan thrust the golden spear forward. The tip sparked, striking the Gargoyle's thick shoulder plating.
The impact rang out like a struck bell. The spear did not pierce the armor. It merely glanced off, leaving a shallow scratch in the crystalline scale.
The Gargoyle shrieked—a high, vibrating frequency that made Cassian's teeth ache—and swiped a clawed wing at Lysan. The squad leader ducked under the blow, spinning backward to maintain distance.
"Its armor is too fucking dense!" Marcus shouted over the ringing noise. "Standard thrusts won't penetrate!"
"Then we break its footing!" Frank River stepped forward, his Water God Slayer energy flaring. He didn't aim for the beast. He slammed his palms against the ground beneath the Gargoyle's heavy, clawed feet. "Tidewall: Submerge!"
A rush of pressurized water coated the smooth, crystalline ground. In the heavy gravity, the water spread into a slick, low-friction film over the polished glass.
The Gargoyle attempted to lunge at Frank, but its claws found no purchase. It slipped, its legs sprawling outward, sending the beast crashing onto its stomach.
"Marcus!" Lysan yelled. "Crack the sternum!"
"Lightning Art!" Marcus roared, fighting through the agonizing pain in his ribs. He closed the distance in a blur of erratic speed, sliding across the wet crystal on his knees. As he slid under the struggling beast's chest, Marcus crossed his twin short blades and channeled maximum electrical voltage into the steel. He drove both blades directly into the center of the Gargoyle's glowing chest plate.
The lightning discharged with a deafening crack. The armor didn't break, but a deep, spiderwebbing fracture appeared in the center of the white-gold crystal.
The Gargoyle roared, thrashing wildly to shake Marcus off.
"Cassian! Now!" Marcus screamed, rolling desperately out of the way of a hammering wing-strike.
Cassian moved.
He didn't have a steel blade. He didn't have his right arm. But he had a fracture in the armor, and he had Kane's lessons. He sprinted forward, his boots finding traction where the water had pooled into the deeper grooves.
The Gargoyle raised its head, its glowing, solid-gold eyes locking onto the twelve-year-old boy charging it with a piece of wood. It opened its maw, a sphere of highly condensed celestial energy building in the back of its throat.
Cassian didn't slow down. He couldn't parry a plasma blast. He had to hit the target first.
He planted his right boot into the slippery crystal, using the heavier gravity of Aethelgard to anchor his momentum. He rotated his hips, transferring the entirety of his body weight into his left shoulder. He gripped the wooden sword tightly, aiming the blunt, dense tip directly at the spiderweb fracture Marcus had created.
Cassian thrust the wooden blade forward with everything he had.
The dense ironwood struck the fractured sternum. The kinetic force, amplified by the heavy gravity, shattered the weakened crystal plating. The wooden blade punched through the armor, sinking deep into the unprotected, glowing core of the beast.
The celestial energy building in the Gargoyle's throat misfired, venting harmlessly into the sky as the beast seized, its internal matrix shattered. The glowing light in its eyes dimmed, and the creature collapsed onto the crystalline floor, dead.
Cassian fell backward, his chest heaving, his left arm shaking from the force of the impact. The wooden sword was lodged deep in the beast's chest, the wood already beginning to char and smoke from the intense heat of the celestial core.
Lysan walked over, looking down at the dead Gargoyle, then at Cassian. The third-year leader didn't say a word, simply extending a hand and pulling the exhausted first-year to his feet.
"Harvest it before the core destabilizes," Lysan instructed quietly.
Cassian approached the carcass. He reached into the shattered cavity with his left hand, his fingers closing around a piece of solid, jagged crystal the size of a fist. It was searing hot, pulsing with chaotic, unfiltered divine energy.
As he pulled it free, the Aethel-Crystal reacted to his touch.
Deep inside Cassian's chest, the dormant, suppressed power of his Universe God Slayer Art recognized the celestial material. The crystal flared with a blinding, golden-white light, resonating perfectly with his soul.
He had his forging material. Now, he just had to survive long enough to get it back to Highmere.