The world contracted to the sound of a scream and the sharp, final hiss of superheated glass. One moment, Leo was there, a nervous flicker of Aethel energy. The next, he was a silhouette slammed against the ancient wall, his cry choked off as a lattice of razor-sharp, crystalline threads bloomed from the stone, pinning him by the arm and shoulder. The strands, still glowing with residual heat, hummed with a malevolent energy, thin as wire and hard as diamond.
The thing on the ceiling shifted, a skittering sound of hooked claws on stone. A Glass Weaver. The name, a footnote in some dusty bestiary, did no justice to the reality of it. It was a nightmare of obsidian and rage, its eight multi-jointed legs splayed out in a perfect, geometric mockery of a spider. Its carapace drank the dim light of the outpost, but a sickly orange glow pulsed from within, illuminating the complex machinery of its gut through a semi-translucent abdomen. It wasn't a beast. It was a furnace. A mobile glassworks from hell.
"Leo!" Zane's roar was pure, unadulterated fury. He didn't hesitate. He didn't think. He was a hammer, and the world was full of things to smash. He charged, his Stonetusk Boar Echo flaring to life, coating him in an aura of dense, earthy power. He didn't aim for the Weaver; he launched himself at the wall beneath it, intending to bring the whole ceiling down.
His shoulder connected with the Ancient masonry in a deafening boom. Dust and rubble rained down, but the smooth, dark stone barely trembled. It was like punching a mountain.
A sound, like a thousand slivers of glass grinding together, echoed from the ceiling. A chittering, alien sound that might have been laughter. The Weaver moved, not by crawling, but by simply unfolding and refolding its legs with impossible speed. It flowed across the ceiling, repositioning itself directly over Zane. Its spinnerets glowed white-hot.
"Zane, move!" Kael yelled, his voice raw.
Too late. Another stream of molten glass shot downwards. Zane, with a bellow of rage, brought his kinetic spear up to block. The glass struck the carbon-fiber shaft and hardened instantly, encasing the top half of his weapon in a heavy, useless lump of jagged crystal. The force of the impact drove him to one knee. He was disarmed, bogged down, and utterly furious.
The squad was broken. Leo was pinned. Zane was neutralized. They were four days out from the enclave, trapped in a forgotten tomb with a Tier-2 predator that was, quite literally, running circles around them on the ceiling. This wasn't a fight. It was an execution.
Panic was a cold tide, rising in Kael's throat. The Hound inside him snarled, a useless surge of aggression. Attack. Lunge. Tear. But the technician, the part of him that saw circuits and stress points, screamed a different truth: Flawed approach. Incompatible hardware. System failure imminent.
He forced the beast down, letting the technician take over. He let his senses expand, filtering the world through the Hound's predatory lens. The chaos of the moment—Zane's grunts of effort as he tried to break his spear free, Leo's pained whimpers, Maya's terrified silence—faded into background noise. He saw the energy. He saw the Weaver's Aethel Frame, a complex and beautiful web of fiery orange light. He saw the flow.
And he saw the pattern.
It wasn't just random attacks. It was a cycle. The internal furnace would build pressure, a gathering of Aethel energy in its core. The spinnerets would glow, drawing that power. It would fire. And then, for a fraction of a second after the shot, the system would vent. The armor plates around the spinnerets would retract almost imperceptibly, releasing a faint puff of superheated gas. A thermal regulation cycle. A weak point. A design flaw.
"Zane!" Kael's voice cut through the room, sharp and clear with a certainty that surprised even him. "On your feet! I need you to draw it down!"
Zane looked over his shoulder, his face a mask of disbelief and rage. "Draw it—? It'll kill me, you idiot!"
"It'll kill us all if it stays up there!" Kael shot back, pointing with his own, un-glassed spear. "Its legs are too strong to break, its carapace is too thick. We can't hurt it on the ceiling. Get its attention. Make it drop!"
"And then what, Scuttler? You gonna run at it?"
"Maya!" Kael ignored him, turning his gaze to the girl who stood frozen near the entrance. "When it lands, I need a flash. A focused one. Right in its face. Can you do it?"
Maya looked from Kael's desperate, intense eyes to Leo, who was now struggling to stay conscious. Her own fear was a palpable thing, but beneath it was a flicker of resolve. She gave a single, jerky nod.
The choice hung in the air, thick and heavy. It all came down to Zane. He looked at his useless weapon, at his pinned teammate, and at the monster on the ceiling that was slowly, patiently, deciding which of them to kill next. The logic was undeniable. The hammer wasn't working. It was time to try the scalpel.
A guttural curse ripped from Zane's throat. It was the sound of a lifetime of pride being swallowed. He threw the ruined spear aside. "Fine!" he roared, not at Kael, but at the Weaver. "Hey, you ugly glass-assed son of a bitch! Come and get me!"
He didn't charge it. He charged the opposite wall, putting his back to the creature in a blatant act of insult.
It worked. The Weaver let out an infuriated shriek. A predator's pride had been wounded. It dropped from the ceiling, its eight legs absorbing the impact with a ground-shaking THUD that sent cracks spiderwebbing through the concrete floor. It was on their level now, a hulking terror of sharp angles and burning light.
"MAYA, NOW!" Kael screamed.
There was no hesitation this time. Maya thrust her hands forward, and the faint, silvery light of her Glimmer Moth Echo exploded outwards. It wasn't the diffuse shimmer from the training yard. This was a concentrated, blinding lance of pure, chaotic light. A flashbang made of soul.
It struck the Weaver's multifaceted eyes, and the creature reeled back with a sound of pure, systemic agony. It reared up on its hind legs, its massive abdomen—the location of its internal furnace and its vulnerable spinnerets—fully exposed.
Kael was already moving.
He wasn't running. He was flowing. The rhythm of the Hound, the predatory pounce he had practiced until his muscles screamed, took over. He wasn't a technician anymore. He wasn't a boy. He was a weapon aimed at a weak point. The world narrowed to a single target: a small, pulsating patch of softer, glowing flesh on the Weaver's underside.
He surged forward, his body low to the ground. He didn't shout. He didn't roar. All his energy, all his will, all his fear was focused into the tip of the kinetic spear in his hands.
He drove it upward.
There was no screech of metal on crystal. Just a sickening, wet crunch followed by a sharp, resonant CRACK. It was the sound of a crucible breaking.
The Weaver went rigid. The orange light in its core flickered violently, then went out. A tremor ran through its crystalline body, and it collapsed, its massive weight shaking the very foundations of the ancient outpost. For a heartbeat, it lay still. Then, with a soft, final chime like a thousand tiny bells falling silent, its body dissolved. It didn't fall to dust. It sublimated into a swirling cloud of shimmering, obsidian-black particles, leaving nothing behind but the acrid smell of ozone and a profound, terrifying silence.