The conference room was silent, a long rectangular table at its center surrounded by senior Association officials. At the far end, one of the Association’s higher-ranking officers reviewed the mission records scrolling across a mana-projection screen.
Aria Frost stood before him.
The Black Fang Syndicate operation had been completed successfuhim, but completion didn’t mean the mission was finished.
Any operation that took place inside the human world, especially one involving awakened criminals, civilian casualties, hostages, or the use of lethal force, triggered a full operational review.
Every member involved had to account for what they’d done: where they’d been, what they’d seen, which enemies they’d engaged, why they’d made the calls they made, and how those calls had shaped the outcome.
Aria gave the team’s overall account first, the initial infiltration, the division of the team once the underground structure forced them apart, the rescue of the kidnapped children, the capture of the syndicate’s leadership.
She reported that formation had held until the tunnels made it impossible to maintain, and she walked the officer through Felix’s actions: his movement through the facility, the number of injured teammates and civilians he’d treated, how fast he’d moved between combat and healing, and his confrontation with the syndicate leader.
The officer listened without interrupting.
When Aria finished, the rest of the team gave their own accounts. Darius reported his engagements with the syndicate’s heavy combatants and the structural damage sustained underground.
Kael covered his role clearing the western corridor, his use of fire magic in a space probably too confined for it, and his part in securing the prisoners. Lena detailed the eastern corridor and the civilians pulled from one of the storage sections.
Ryan, Mira, Orion, and the rest filled in the remainder.
The Association cross-checked every account against the mission recordings.
Nothing significant failed to line up, the operation had gone almost exactly the way the team described it.
The officer finally closed the records. The syndicate was dismantled, the children were alive, the evidence was secured, the leadership was in custody. Officially, the mission was a success.
The team was dismissed.
Monday
The rift shimmered ahead of Monday, a pale blue distortion hanging in the middle of the forest, twisting the space around its edges.
Aria studied the readings one last time. "S-rank."
Darius nodded. "Mana density’s high."
Felix adjusted the strap of his equipment. "Sounds fun."
Kael sighed. "You say that about everything."
"Because everything is fun."
Lena glanced at him. "One day you’re going to say that right before something eats you."
"I’d heal myself."
"That’s not how being eaten works."
Felix considered that. "Fair point."
Aria sighed. "Enough. We’re going in."
The team crossed the gate, and space broke.
There was no warning, one moment fifteen heroes were moving through the entrance together, and the next there was nothing.
Felix felt the ground vanish beneath his feet, his vision twisting as mana surged violently around him, and then the world snapped sideways and slammed him into the ground.
He rolled with the impact on instinct, came up in a crouch, and looked around.
"Well." He got to his feet slowly. "That’s inconvenient."
The spatial disturbance had scattered the entire team, each of them thrown into a different section of the rift.
It wasn’t unheard of, spatial disturbances inside rifts were rare but documented, and teams trained for exactly this.
The priorities were simple, in order: survive, clear the area, regroup. Felix activated his mana perception and found the surroundings full of monsters, mostly B-rank with a scattering of A-ranks. Nothing that worried him yet.
The team fought their way through it separately.
Aria cleared her section first, Darius not far behind her. Kael and Lena found each other early and started working toward the center together. The rest moved through their own zones at their own pace, clearing what they found.
The rift itself was stable, they had two days of slack before the ten-day limit became a real concern, so there was no reason to panic.
One by one, the team started finding their way back to the convergence point. By the end of the first day, several had already made it. By the second morning, almost the entire team had gathered.
Almost. Felix was still missing.
Felix moved through a narrow valley, blood soaking into the sleeve of his uniform. He glanced down at it. "Annoying."
The A-rank beast lying behind him wouldn’t normally have been worth a second thought.
He kept walking.
Nearly two full days clearing his section alone and now he was expecting to run into his teammates any time now.
His mana perception picked something up, and he stopped cold. Something powerful was nearby. Very powerful. He turned his head slowly, and two golden eyes stared back at him from between the trees.
His smile disappeared.
A massive black panther stepped into the open, its body dark and heavy with muscle, two enormous black horns curving back from its skull, lightning crawling visibly across its fur. The air itself seemed to bend around it.
Felix’s pupils contracted. "...Peak S-rank."
The panther held his gaze without moving.
He’d fought peak S-rank monsters before, plenty of times, but never alone. Usually Aria and Darius were there. And, fifteen people surrounded the boss and he could focus entirely on keeping them alive while the rest of the team carved out openings.
This time there was no team, no backup, no formation. Just him. And the monster.
The panther vanished.
*BOOM.*
Felix barely got clear in time, lightning exploding where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.
*CRACK.*
He twisted, raising an arm just as the panther’s claw slammed into him, the impact sending him skidding across the dirt and loose stone.
*SKRRR.*
Pain tore through his ribs. He released healing mana on instinct, feeling the fractures knit back together with a faint, sizzling hum. He got to his feet just in time to realize the panther was already gone.
"Fast," he managed.
*CRASH.*
It was on him again: a flash of black, an impact that drove him into the cliff face hard enough to splinter the rock behind him.
Stone fragments rattled down in a shower of sharp clicks. He dropped to one knee, healed himself again, and felt his breathing turn ragged.
The panther didn’t give him time to recover.
It came again. And again. And again.
*SLASH.*
Felix dodged when he could, blocked when he couldn’t, and healed every wound the instant it opened, but the math wasn’t in his favor.
The beast was simply faster than his body could track.
*ZZZT-CRACKLE.*
Lightning scored across his shoulder, his flesh hissing as mana stitched the burn closed.
SNAP.
A heavy kick shattered his thigh. A split-second later, a blunt strike tore his shoulder from its socket with a sickening pop.
Each time, he forced raw mana through the torn muscle and broken bone, dragging himself back into stance.
But healing wasn’t free. His reserves were draining fast, his pulse hammering a violent, uneven rhythm against his temples.
Drip. Drip.
Blood ran down into his eyes, pooling along his jaw before spattering against the dirt. He wiped it away.
Silence rushed back into the clearing, thick and suffocating.
The panther watched him. He watched it back.
For the first time in his life, Felix understood what real death felt like, the plain fact that one mistake here would kill him. There was no one to catch him if it did.
He started laughing, quietly at first, then louder, his shoulders shaking with it.
The panther crouched low.
His eyes sharpened. "You’re really going to kill me."
*KRA-KOOM.*
Lightning exploded around the beast as it charged, and this time Felix didn’t retreat.
He stepped into it.
*THUD-CRUNCH.*
The collision was brutal. A claw tore across his chest at the same instant his fist slammed into the panther’s ribs, mana-coated knuckles punching clean through fur and muscle.
*ROOAAR—WHAM.*
The panther’s paw drove into his abdomen hard enough that something inside him gave way.
Felix coughed blood —
SPLAT
then smiled.
He’d stopped defending. The healer had disappeared; only the fighter was left.
His instincts took over completely, and he stopped watching the panther’s body and started watching its movement instead: the set of its shoulders, the angle of its hips, the way its claws swung, the way its weight shifted a fraction of a second before it accelerated, the way lightning gathered along its limbs right before it moved.
It was faster than him, but speed wasn’t the same thing as unpredictability, and Felix had spent his whole life reading things that wanted to kill him.
He started reading it.
SWOOSH.
The panther attacked; he twisted, let a claw pass a hair from his cheek, and—
*CRACK.*
—drove his elbow into its throat. It retaliated and he took the hit—
SNAP.
—felt a rib crack—and answered with a fist under its jaw hard enough to stagger it.
*BAM.* BAM.* BAM.*
He followed immediately, one punch, two, three, each blow dense with mana, not aimed to overpower the creature but to find something underneath the muscle worth hitting: lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, joints, anything that would slow it down.
RRRIIIP.
Its claw tore through his shoulder. He ignored it, drove his knee into its abdomen—
OOF.
—and felt its body fold. He grabbed one of its horns, hauled its head down, and buried a mana-coated fist directly into its chest.
SKREEE-SHREK.
The panther screamed.
ZZZZZT-BZZZZT!
Lightning erupted from its body and Felix’s entire frame convulsed with it, muscles burning, vision blurring, but his fist stayed buried where it was. He could feel it under his knuckles.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The heart. Still beating.
He grinned through the blood in his mouth.
"Got you."
*VWRRRR.*
He gathered everything he had left, the last of his healing mana, the last of his combat reserves, every scrap of strength still in his body and compressed it into his fist.
CHOMP.
The panther lunged one final time, jaws snapping toward him, teeth sinking deep into his shoulder as Felix stepped straight into the maw.
*CRACK.*
The panther went still. Its eyes went wide. Felix’s fist had punched clean through its chest and stopped its heart.
Fizzle... sputter...
It staggered backward, lightning flickering weakly across its body before winking out entirely.
*THUD.*
The enormous creature collapsed, kicking up a plume of gray dust.
Felix stayed on his feet for exactly three seconds before his legs gave out.
FLUMP.
He dropped beside the corpse.
His body was corpse, several ribs broken, his shoulder torn open, his left leg badly damaged, internal bleeding he couldn’t quite stop no matter how much mana he threw at it.
What little mana he had left was nearly gone.
He stared up at the sky and felt his vision start to darken at the edges.
"...Aria..."
He tried to move. Nothing happened.
"...Darius..."
His eyes closed. The last thought that crossed his mind, oddly, was almost mundane:
I’m going to miss Thursday.
Then everything went black.
"Felix!"
Aria’s voice cut through the valley. The team had finally reached the area, having regrouped less than an hour earlier and gone straight into searching for their missing member.
Darius stopped short, his expression changing. "There."
Everyone followed his gaze to the enormous corpse of the black horn panther lying in the middle of the clearing and beside it, Felix.
Aria’s face went pale. "Move!"
They rushed toward him. He didn’t respond.
Darius pressed two fingers to his throat and found a pulse, weak, far too weak. "He’s alive."
Aria was already contacting the Association. "Emergency extraction. Peak S-rank boss confirmed dead. One critically injured hero, we need a medical team immediately."
The response came almost instantly. Within minutes, emergency personnel came through a temporary extraction gate and Felix was transferred straight to an emergency medical facility, where the healers worked for hours, setting bones, stopping the internal bleeding, stabilizing the organs that had started to fail, restoring torn muscle, treating mana pathways that had been pushed past what they were built for. Slowly, his body pulled back from the edge.
But Felix didn’t wake up.
The physical damage could be repaired. The exhaustion would fade in time, and the mana would eventually return.
But the fight had taken something else from him, his body had been pushed beyond every limit it had, and his mind had gone through a real death crisis for the first time in his life.
Now it simply refused to surface. There was nothing left for the doctors to do except wait and watch.
Felix Valerius stayed unconscious.
Thursday came.
At Acheron Deep, the reinforced door opened, and Seraphina looked up immediately.
For weeks now, Thursday had become something she found herself waiting for, not because of the therapy, but because Felix came. Her eyes went to the doorway and stayed there.
No familiar voice followed. No footsteps. No playful greeting.
She kept watching the empty entrance anyway, her fingers resting against the book beside her, the one she’d already finished, the one she’d spent the week wondering what would replace.
A mystery, maybe. Something historical.
Something with more philosophy in it than plot, the kind of thing that would give her something to argue with him about. She’d even worked out a question to ask him.
She’d been looking forward to something.
She had no way of knowing that, somewhere far away, Felix was lying unconscious in a medical facility, further from her than he had ever been.
Seraphina lowered her eyes to the closed book, then lifted them to the door again.
She waited.
Thursday had finally come.
Felix hadn’t.