The floor burned.
But the fire didn't consume wood.
It revealed it.
Ash peeled back like old skin, revealing something older beneath the chapel's foundation. Stone etched with runes — pulsing. Breathing. As if something below the village had waited for this very moment.
Callen raised his arms. The barbed-wire staff scraped his skin, drawing blood that he flung toward the flames. The masked priest beside him knelt, still chanting.
Rui's powers flickered in her palms, responding to the strange vibrations. Her breathing quickened.
"There's something under us," she said. "It's alive."
Li Wei was already scanning the walls. "Find another way out."
Chen Yu grinned. "You kidding? I'm just getting warmed up."
From outside the chapel, the Ember Saints pounded on the doors, rhythmic and patient. As if they didn't need to rush. As if they knew their god would do the work for them.
The flames in the runes dimmed — then sank.
A hole cracked open in the altar floor.
A gust of hot wind surged out, carrying the smell of rot and sulfur… and something metallic.
And then they heard it.
Click… click… click…
Claws, maybe.
Or talons.
Something with mass.
Heavy. Wet.
Emerging from the pit was a long, malformed limb — dark red, layered with calcified scales. The fingers were too long, almost delicate. Almost… human.
Rui staggered backward. "That's not a zombie."
"It's not," Li Wei said, eyes narrowing. "It's something they've been feeding."
Callen dropped to his knees, sobbing with joy.
"Behold the Hollow Flame!" he cried. "The first of the Burnt Angels!"
Chen Yu spat. "More like the first barbecue.
The creature fully emerged.
Its face was a mosaic of stitched flesh, metal clamps, and veiny orbs that may have once been eyes. Its body rippled with tumors that throbbed in sync with the chapel's chanting. Wings — or what remained of them — jutted from its back like broken antennae.
And yet it stood upright, arms spread like a prophet.
The room's temperature dropped.
Then — fire exploded from the creature's chest.
Rui screamed and shielded her face, but something else kicked in — a dome of force rippled around her, absorbing the flame. Her power had evolved again.
Chen Yu laughed like a maniac, running straight into the flames. The heat wrapped around him — but it didn't burn.
It fed him.
His veins glowed crimson.
Li Wei threw two fungal darts at the priest — one missed, but the other struck true. The masked man collapsed, foaming, spores blooming from his robes.
"Rui! Seal the hole!" Li Wei shouted.
"I'm trying—!"
She raised her hands, but the creature screeched — a psychic howl that dropped her to her knees.
It wasn't just noise.
It was memory. Her memory.
Images of her childhood experiments, wires in her spine, her blood being tested, weapons training at age seven. Screams from other Ghost Batch children.
"Get out of her head!" Chen Yu shouted, slamming a flaming fist into the creature's side.
The blow stunned it — just long enough for Li Wei to grab Rui and pull her behind the altar.
"Don't listen to it," he said. "It feeds on guilt."
She blinked hard. Focused.
"Okay."
She reached deep — into whatever was awakening inside her — and pushed.
The flames shifted.
The altar cracked.
A shockwave burst from her chest, throwing the creature back into the hole.
Chen Yu dove to avoid falling in with it.
The ground began to quake.
"Time to go," he said.
Li Wei spotted a ladder near the back wall — half-hidden behind a curtain. It led down into a tunnel.
"Move!"
Rui slid in first, then Chen. Li Wei followed last, just as the creature screeched again from the pit — grabbing at the altar's edge, half-melted but alive.
As Li Wei dropped into the tunnel, a final burst of fire engulfed the chapel above.
The screams of the Ember Saints turned to echoes.
Then silence.
The tunnel was long. Claustrophobic. Lit only by the dying light on Chen Yu's skin and the faint glow of the runes still humming beneath Rui's fingertips.
No one spoke for a while.
They just walked.
Eventually, the tunnel opened into a mossy cave mouth overlooking a valley thick with mist.
The morning sun broke over the horizon, pale and cold.
Li Wei stood at the edge, watching the smoke rise from Hollowpath far behind them.
Rui leaned on the wall, exhausted. Her voice was hoarse.
"They believed that thing was a god."
Chen Yu sat on a rock, panting. "You'd be surprised how often madness and miracles look the same."
Li Wei said nothing.
But in his mind, a thought echoed:
If this was just one village… what else was awakened by the rain?