Phase Two arrived the way a blade arrives—clean, sudden, and making everything after it different from everything before.
The Sovereign Venom Serpent surged, and the lane bent to its will. Shutters burst into splinters; signboards snapped from iron hooks; dust rose and instantly turned to pearl‑gray haze as venom aerosolized the air. Frostwing ripped a seam of winter down the street, not a wall but a laminar curtain of cold that told particles to slow. Brandon rode the narrow dry vein down the center like a thought that couldn't afford doubt. The koi hugged the rim of his travel bowl until water lapped over his back and slicked his gills, then launched on command for that precise hinge he and Brandon had taught each other to disrespect with teeth and timing.
Mark. Strike. Numb.
Mark. Strike. Numb.
They carved latency into the serpent's reflexes one micro‑delay at a time. Predators don't negotiate with clumsiness; it enraged the thing.
"Window," Brandon said, and sketched it with two fingers—there, a fraction left of the jaw. The koi slid through that geometry as if it were visible and left pain‑that‑numbs: Blood Scales flared, grazed the slick gum, smeared a red edge that wasn't just blood anymore. Frostwing scissored glare across its eyes; the serpent blinked too slow. Brandon's boots skated where Frostwing had painted ice thin as glass; his blade put another fine line at the hinge.
[Numb stacks: 5 → 6]
[Behavioral latency ↑↑]
[Survivor extraction: 100%]
Good. The street behind them was empty of breathers. In front of them lay one enormous problem.
"Keep it here," Brandon said. "No tunnels. Make it fight where the sky can see."
Frostwing screamed agreement and smoothed the cold until it behaved like obedient fog. The serpent's tail bulldozed a market stall into memory. It arched, muscles rippling, as if it could shiver off the seconds they'd strapped to its instincts.
"Brace," Brandon warned.
The shed began.
Scales lifted with a susurrus like a thousand people inhaling. Edges pried up, then peeled not as one skin but as a storm of plates. It shook, and armor tore free in an outward blast. Not defense; projectile. Each plate spun like a saw‑coin dusted in venom crystals, a cloud of green‑rimmed shrapnel.
"Down!" Brandon snapped.
Frostwing folded a wing around them and whispered cold that made the spinning plates heavier. Many sank; many didn't. Three ricocheted off Brandon's bracer; one kissed his cheek with a stinging line. Two curved for the bowl; the koi flared Blood Scales and slammed them with his own edges. Pain lit him. Numbness leaked outward. The plates fluttered and fell harmless.
No time to count luck. The serpent stood revealed—sleeker, meaner, its body slick with chemistry rather than water. Venom steamed from it like winter breath. The slow was gone.
[Status: Sovereign Venom Serpent — SHED STATE]
[Armor profile: reset]
[Venom output: ↑↑]
[Apex ability: concealed]
"Ultimate incoming," the koi sent.
It came.
The head reared and opened into an engine. Not spit, not spray—a beam. A pressurized lance of translucent green scored a line through the lane, turning wood to smoke and stone to sagging paste. The laminar sheet bowed like sticky water under falling iron.
Frostwing cut across the beam to deflect it and paid. The lance grazed her primary; icy vanes sputtered to steam; a ragged edge drooled blue fire. She cranked a secondary to keep from tumbling, screamed a note that emptied the sky of birds, then slammed to the street and stayed there, breath heaving, wing wrong.
"Wing!" Brandon barked—just the one word, heavy enough to break a heart. He interposed his body between serpent and phoenix without measuring. The serpent obliged his heroics with a short beam. It grazed his forearm. The skin smoked; the muscle tightened in protest.
He did not fall. He set his feet harder.
[Alert: Brandon — Venom exposure: confirmed]
[Onset: subacute][Neuromuscular integrity: degrading]
[Frostwing — Wing integrity: 41%][Flight: disabled]
Despair found teeth.
"System," the koi thought, voice like a stone skipping too low. "We lose here?"
[Outcome projection: Failure risk ↑↑]
[Advisory: Retreat recommended]
Retreat to where? Back through bodies and alleyways? Retreat meant the serpent turning right and undoing everything luck had redeemed.
Not this time.
He told Brandon first. Not this time.
Brandon nodded once, a soldier's amen.
"Give me a mark," the koi said. "One—best we'll see before it learns us."
Brandon's pupils were slow but his discipline wasn't. He watched the serpent watch Frostwing. It had recast the equation: broken bird = sure meal; man = annoyance; fish = rounding error. It committed to a weight shift it couldn't take back.
"Taste reflex," he said, drawing a string in the air from hinge to palate. "When the tongue flicks—root."
The koi coiled, Harden bracing under Blood Scales like rebar under poured stone.
"Frostwing," Brandon rasped, voice fraying, "give him cold."
The phoenix didn't stand. She lifted her head and exhaled a thread—not a cone, not a dome, a seam of winter—across the bowl. Cold kissed the koi's plates. He felt it take not atop his armor but into it, patterning the latticework of pain‑hardened scale.
Something soft and unarguable crossed the bond—affection without speech. The System's tone changed timbre, as if discovering an instrument it owned.
[Affinity threshold reached]
[Cross‑signature resonance detected]
[Self‑learned Hybrid pathway: OPEN]
Not yet more; just the door cracked. The serpent struck, tongue a blurring column of wet.
Brandon's fingers twitched in the cue they'd rehearsed.
The koi moved—
—and the chapter did not give him a miracle to finish with. Not yet. The serpent's mouth slammed shut on air. Its head hammered a support beam and snapped it into matchsticks. The beam collapsed across Frostwing; Brandon lunged, caught the weight, roared as venomed muscle protested, and heaved it sideways by will alone. The phoenix dragged her body clear, scraped the cobbles, and forced a thin breath that turned venom haze to sugar‑slow strands.
The beam came again. Brandon couldn't pull the same miracle twice. He shoved the bowl aside with his knee and took half the line across his cuirass. The leather smoked; the buckle popped. He didn't yell. He just splayed his feet wider and held.
"Koi," he said, voice steady because it wanted to shake, "we're at the edge."
The koi knew. You hear the edge without ears. It sings like wire.
[Battle state: Critical]
[Legendary Task Clause: If Host dies before first attempt on Bonus Objective (Emerald Dragon), task = failed][Penalty: immediate upon revival]
He could not die. He could not retreat. He could not let Brandon collapse, could not let Frostwing be consumed on stone she used to own as sky.
The serpent coiled for a finishing lunge, SHED STATE toxins hissing off its skin. The air tightened; the world leaned.
"On me," Brandon ordered, and for the first time it sounded like a prayer.
The koi's answer wasn't a word. He loaded Bounce until reality thinned to a line.
The serpent's shadow bent over them, jaws opening into a cathedral of knives. The koi's bowl rocked—just enough water to read the ripple like script. Angle. Timing. Now.
He launched straight up, a red flash rising into a green engine.