Moto watched Aemon fall and felt his blood go cold.
He was moving before the thought finished forming. "Handle the big one!" he shouted back at Snake and Tanaka, already at a full sprint toward the cliff. "Go — I've got him!"
Snake understood without asking. He nodded, the green light in his tattoos guttering but still present.
Moto reached the edge and leapt.
He ripped his obsidian blade free mid-fall and drove it into the sandstone face. Sparks flew. The friction dragged against his descent, slowing it — not enough, but enough. He twisted, aimed for the water below, and hit it.
Cold swallowed him. The current had opinions. He fought them, eyes scanning the murk until he found Aemon — a faint shape tumbling slowly in the dark water — and drove toward him, got an arm around his chest, and pulled.
He hauled them both onto the rocky shore and shook him.
Aemon coughed. Rolled. His eyes opened with the bewildered terror of someone who is alive and hasn't processed it yet. "Grillet," he whispered, trembling so hard Moto could feel it through his grip. "He was just — gone, and then he was there, and he—"
"I know," Moto said. He'd seen the expression on Grillet's face from across the clearing. He knew exactly what had happened, and the fury it had produced in him was something he was setting aside for now. "Then we go in and drag him out."
He pulled the herb pouch from Aemon's soaked pocket. Wet through. He held it anyway and looked at Aemon steadily.
"Burn it. Go in. As soon as he shows himself — I'll be right here. Same as last time."
Aemon stared at the pouch. The same words, the same place. The last time Moto had said those exact words, Aemon had sent Grillet to follow Snake, had believed him harmless, had trusted without understanding what he was trusting. He looked at Moto's face — the mud, the cut palms, the complete, uncomplicated certainty — and nodded slowly.
His hands shook too badly. Moto helped him with the lighter. The flame caught. Smoke curled upward and the world softened at its edges, and Aemon's eyes closed, and he went under.
In the clearing, the battle had found its own desperate rhythm.
Snake drove the wolf-Terror skull-first into the mud with the last of his stolen energy, the impact cracking the ground in a radius. Kazuchi went still.
Najo stumbled back into the clearing, bleeding from one shoulder, barely upright. "Is it dead?"
Snake's green glow had shrunk to almost nothing. "I think so."
The clouds shifted. Moonlight fell into the clearing like something that had been waiting.
It struck Kazuchi's prone body.
The twitching started slowly — a leg, a paw, then the spine, arching with sickening pops as the bones reshaping themselves worked through the skeleton from the inside out. The crusty hide split open and thick black-and-crimson fur tore through. The eyes snapped open — blinding, feral, something beyond hunger in them.
Kazuchi rose. Larger. The ground fractured under its paws.
Snake stared at it. "You've got to be kidding me."
It charged.
The three of them scattered. Tanaka moved at the edges, reading the patterns — velocity, footfall, weight distribution, head tracking. Najo's stone fists hammered at the creature's flanks and shattered against the new hide like thrown glass. Snake's serpents reached for energy to drain and were swatted apart before they could bite.
"Snake," Sixtus hissed, panicked, somewhere near his ear. "Stop. Your heart can't—"
Snake spit blood. "If Blake dies because I stopped," he said, "then what was any of it for."
His dreadlocks blazed green. Every tattoo on his body turned white-hot.
Tanaka's eyes locked on the cliff edge. The angles. The weight. The distance.
"Najo!" she screamed over the roar. "Pillar — horizontal — NOW!"
He didn't question her. He drove both fists into the earth and ripped a dense stone cylinder from it, flat to the ground, aimed like a cannon.
Kazuchi lunged.
"PUSH!"
Najo put his weight into the stone, Snake and Tanaka driving from behind, and the battering ram drove into Kazuchi's chest. The creature's claws gouged furrows deep into the earth as it was walked backward, inch by inch, its roar shaking the trees. They hit the edge. The cliff face crumbled. With a sound that came from somewhere deeper than noise, Kazuchi went over, the stone pillar tumbling with it, and the gorge received them both.
Silence fell over the clearing like something settling after a long time.
Snake's green light went out.
He hit the ground and his body convulsed once, hard, and then went horribly still.
"Snake—" Tanaka was already kneeling beside him. She pressed her fingers to his neck. Nothing. His chest wasn't moving. The adrenaline had finally called in the debt.
She pressed her lips together and looked toward the shed. Gasoline smell, thick and wrong. "Drag him away from it," she said, already moving. "I need whatever's inside."
She worked fast in the dark, scavenging by feel — old generator tubing, copper wire, a battery with something left in it, tools that had been broken long enough to rust. She was back outside in minutes, hands moving without stopping, building something crude and specific and functional. She attached the wires to his chest.
Zap.
His body lifted and dropped.
She connected a small salvaged bulb to the circuit as a monitor and watched it. Nothing. Then — faint. Again. Faint, irregular, but present.
She exhaled.
"Stay with me," she said quietly. "Just stay."
Inside Aemon's mind, the darkness was familiar.
The Plain stretched white and still, the restrained figure at its centre — glowing, chained, thrashing in the chair. Grillet leaned against it with practiced ease, watching Aemon materialise.
"Hey buddy," he said, smiling. "Sorry I've been MIA. This one's been a handful." He gestured at the figure. The chains rattled. "Hard to keep a lid on it."
Aemon looked at him. The betrayal had had time to settle, and what was underneath it was hotter and more focused than he'd expected from himself.
"Did you push me," he said.
"What?" Grillet tilted his head. "Come on. That's Moto talking. He's been trying to turn you against me since day one. You're really taking his word over mine?"
The familiar voice. The familiar certainty. Aemon felt it working on him the way it always had — the subtle gravity of it, pulling toward the easier explanation.
"I think I saw—"
"So you hate me now too." The smile warped at the edges, becoming something jagged. "That's rich, Aemon. I was born from you. When you had nothing — no parents, no clan, just a cold room in Zen — you made me. I transcended the boundary between thought and reality just to sit beside you. And now you want to replace me with them?"
"I'm not replacing—"
"Our friends," Grillet said, his voice dripping. "Listen to yourself."
In the real world, on the rocky shore, tears ran down Aemon's still face. Moto gripped his shoulder tighter. He couldn't hear anything, couldn't reach in, could only watch the grief working across his friend's features and let the fury in his chest become something useful.
Come on, Aemon, he thought fiercely. Don't let him do this.
Inside, Grillet stepped closer. "You know what Moto really thinks of me. You've seen the look. He says all the right things but there's something in him that will never accept me. Which means he'll never fully accept you."
"They just don't know you like I do," Aemon said, and heard how thin it sounded.
"Oh, drop it." Grillet's face broke into something ugly. "You don't actually care about any of them. You just want someone to look at you. I warned you — your rage destroys everything, and you still chased their fake love because you're weak."
"It's not fake."
The shout surprised them both.
The Plain vibrated.
Grillet paused. Then he smiled slowly and cracked his knuckles. "Oh. Finally. Let's see it then."
He lunged.
Aemon fought back — the techniques he'd learned, the footwork Moto had drilled into his body over weeks — but here, in the terrain that Grillet had spent years learning before Aemon had, none of it was enough. Grillet hit him like he'd been waiting for this. Each blow carried the weight of everything that had been suppressed and redirected and weaponised, and Aemon went down hard, and scrambled back, and hit the cold metal leg of the chair.
Grillet stood over him, massive now, his shadow filling the Plain.
"You couldn't make friends in Zen," he said. "Even your parents were too busy with their prophecies to really look at you. So you made me — in the image of Gilbert. The boy everyone loved. The golden child you could never be."
He kicked Aemon onto his back.
"Even in your own mind — I'm better than you."
SNAP.
One of the chains holding the restrained figure broke clean. The figure lurched against the remaining ones, a guttural sound building behind its mask. The mask itself began to tremble at the seams.
Aemon lay on the floor, looking up at Grillet — the being he had called his friend, his protector, his only constant — and then looked past him at the masked figure.
The thing Grillet had always told him would destroy everything.
He reached up. His hand found the zipper.
Grillet's composure cracked. "Don't. You'll destroy everything. You'll lose all of them. It will—"
"The only monster I see here, Grillet," Aemon said quietly, "is you."
He pulled.
RIIIIIP.