The philosophy of Kaira "The Smasher" Vane was elegantly simple: If it is in your way, punch it. If it doesn't break, punch it harder. If it still doesn't break, you clearly weren't using enough explosive decompression.
Ren was learning this lesson the hard way.
They were moving through the Canal District, a section of Veridia that had once been the jewel of the capital. In the days before the Aether flooded the world, this district was a place of romance. Gondolas drifted down crystal-clear waterways, musicians played lutes on the limestone bridges, and nobles in silk laughed under the soft glow of lantern-light.
Now, the canals were choked with debris. The water was a murky, stagnant black, slick with oil and things Ren desperately tried not to identify. The lanterns were shattered. The silence was heavy, broken only by the distant, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of a wyvern beating its wings against the thermal currents high above the cloud layer.
Ren walked two steps behind Kaira, clutching the strap of his satchel. He felt naked without a weapon, though he supposed his own body was the shield now.
"So," Ren started, his voice hushed to a whisper that barely cut the fog. "Do we have an actual plan? Or are we just walking toward the biggest, scariest light in the sky?"
Kaira didn't look back. She was busy inspecting a silver locket she had swiped from a ruined dresser in the last alleyway. She popped it open, frowned at the picture inside, and pocketed it.
"The plan is simple, Scribe," she said, her voice scratching the air like sandpaper. "We cross the bridge. We cut through the Royal Park. We break down the front door of the Sanctum. We fix the prism. We get rich. Or famous. I haven't decided which one I want more yet."
Ren hurried to catch up to her stride. "The Royal Park? Kaira, that's the 'Green Zone' now. The Aether accelerated the plant growth by a thousand years in a week. It's a jungle. And the rumors say the inner circle is held by the Lions."
Kaira stopped. She turned, her sea-green eyes boring into him.
"Lions are just big cats, Ren. Big cats have chins. I hit chins."
"You can't just punch a lion," Ren argued, his hands waving frantically. "They have claws the size of daggers. They have pack tactics. And the Aether makes them faster than anything natural."
"I'm faster," Kaira said flatly. She held up her right hand. The skin rippled, flashing with that iridescent, oily sheen of the Mantis chitin. "Besides, I have you."
Ren frowned. "Right. The 'Sponge'."
"Tactical Sponge," she corrected, tapping his chest. "It sounds more professional. Like a rank. Be proud of it."
She spun on her heel and continued walking. Ren sighed, looking down at his healed hand. He flexed the fingers. The memory of the pain from the fall was fading, replaced by a strange, humming energy that lived in his marrow. It was a cold sensation, like ice water running through his veins where the blood used to be.
They turned a sharp corner past a collapsed bakery, and the path opened up.
Ahead lay the Bridge of Saints, a massive limestone arch connecting the lower districts to the wealthy mid-city. It was a marvel of engineering, wide enough for four carriages to pass abreast, lined with statues of the ancient kings of Veridia.
Now, it was a chokepoint.
"Hold up," Kaira whispered, throwing an arm out to stop Ren. She pulled him into the shadow of a gargoyle.
In the center of the bridge, a makeshift barricade had been erected. Piles of expensive mahogany furniture, crates of stolen wine, and the shattered remains of a royal carriage blocked the path completely. It was a fortress of garbage.
Perched on top of the barricade were three figures.
They were hunched over, their spines curved in jagged, unnatural arcs. They wore scraps of scavenged leather armor—pauldrons made from pot lids, greaves made from drainpipes—but their skin was their real armor. It was matted with coarse, spotted fur. Their ears were large, rounded, and twitched independently at the sound of the wind.
Hyenas.
But like the Silverback, these weren't just animals. They were Wild-Blooded. They stood on two legs, nearly seven feet tall, with arms that hung down past their knees. Their hands ended in black claws that clicked against the stone.
They were gnawing on something. The sound of wet tearing and crunching bone drifted across the bridge.
"Scavengers," Kaira spat, her voice filled with disdain. "Hyenas hunt in packs, but the Wilding makes them sadistic. They don't just kill; they play."
One of the beasts on the barricade stopped eating. It lifted its head, sniffing the air. The muzzle was long and wet, twitching. It turned, revealing a face that was a horrific fusion of man and beast, frozen in a permanent, drooling grin where the lips had receded from the gums.
"Fresh meat," the beast rasped. The voice sounded like grinding gravel in a rock tumbler. It was a mockery of human speech.
Ren's stomach did a backflip. "They can talk?"
"Some of them," Kaira whispered, cracking her knuckles. "The smarter ones retain speech. Usually just the hungry ones."
The leader of the pack hopped down from the barricade. He was massive, his chest scarred with old claw marks. He held a rusted, spiked mace in one hand—a weapon clearly stolen from a dead city guard.
"Toll," the Hyena giggled. It was a high, chirping sound—a psychotic laugh that made Ren's skin crawl. "Pay the toll."
Ren stepped forward from the shadow, hands raised in a universal gesture of surrender. "We don't have any gold. We're just passing through. We don't want trouble."
The Hyena leader tilted his head. His yellow eyes narrowed, the pupils contracting to pinpricks.
"Not gold," the beast hissed. He pointed a claw at Ren. "Meat. An arm. A leg. Sweet meat. Pay the toll."
Ren froze. He looked at Kaira. "They want a leg."
"Tell them no," Kaira said, her voice bored.
"I think they're insisting, Kaira. He has a mace."
"Ren," she sighed, looking at him with the kind of annoyance usually reserved for a slow child. "This is a teaching moment. Go tell them no."
Ren blinked. "Me? You're the one with the cannon-arms! I'm the scribe!"
"Go. Draw aggro. I need a clear shot. Their hearing is too good; if I charge up the impact dial now, they'll scatter."
"Draw aggro?" Ren whispered furiously. "You mean get killed!"
"You can't die," Kaira reminded him. "Probably."
Before Ren could argue the semantics of 'probably', Kaira placed a heavy combat boot squarely on his backside and shoved. Hard.
Ren stumbled forward, flailing to keep his balance. He tripped over a loose cobblestone and nearly fell face-first onto the bridge. He scrambled to a halt ten feet from the Hyena leader.
The beast towered over him. Up close, the smell was atrocious—a mix of wet dog, rotten meat, and old blood. The Hyena loomed over Ren, drool dripping from its jaws onto the pristine white stone of the bridge.
"Hi," Ren squeaked.
The Hyena's grin widened, revealing rows of bone-crushing teeth. "No toll? Then we take the whole thing. Soft boy. Crunchy boy."
The beast swung the mace.
It wasn't a clumsy, animalistic swing. It was fast, powered by the unnatural strength of the Aether. Ren tried to dodge. He saw it coming. His eyes, sharper now thanks to the Axolotl DNA, tracked the arc of the rusted iron.
But his body was still human. His muscles were still the muscles of a boy who sat at a desk for twelve hours a day. He wasn't fast enough.
CRUNCH.
The spiked iron head of the mace slammed into Ren's left side.
The sound was wet and sickening. Ren felt his ribs pulverize. The force of the blow lifted him off his feet and sent him careening through the air. He smashed into the stone railing of the bridge, his spine colliding with the balustrade.
He hit the ground, coughing. Bright red blood splattered onto the white stone.
The pain was absolute. It was a white-hot spike that drove itself through his chest, paralyzing his lungs. He couldn't breathe. His vision grayed out.
"Tasty," the Hyena laughed, walking slowly toward him. The beast raised the mace high above its head for a finishing blow to the skull. "Crack the shell. Eat the jelly."
Ren lay there, gasping, staring up at the mace. I'm dead. Again.
But then, the Wild Soul woke up.
It didn't ask for permission. It just took over.
A cold, viscous sensation flooded his torso. It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water into his chest cavity. The pulverized ribs didn't just heal; they snapped back into place with aggressive, audible force. Click. Snap. Pop.
The internal bleeding stopped instantly, the vessels cauterizing and reweaving themselves. The pain didn't fade; it was deleted. It vanished, replaced by a sudden, violent surge of adrenaline.
Ren's eyes snapped open. The gray fog in his vision cleared into high-definition clarity. He saw the rust flakes on the mace. He saw the fleas on the Hyena's chest.
The mace was coming down.
Move.
Ren didn't think. His body reacted with a fluidity he had never possessed before. He rolled to the left, his body moving like water.
The mace smashed into the cobblestones where his head had been a fraction of a second ago. Sparks flew as stone shattered.
"Hey!" Kaira's voice rang out, cutting through the air.
The Hyena looked up, confused.
Kaira was airborne.
She had used the distraction to sprint up the side of the overturned royal carriage. She launched herself off the top of the barricade, silhouetted against the dying orange sun. She was falling toward the Hyena leader, her right arm pulled back.
Her arm had transformed. The skin from her elbow to her fingertips was encased in a bulbous, shifting shell of iridescent chitin—green, purple, and neon orange. The air around her fist was distorting, rippling with heat waves. A high-pitched whine, like a jet engine spinning up, screamed from the vents in her elbow.
"Mantis Style: IMPACT DIAL - TEN PERCENT!"
She didn't punch the Hyena. She punched the empty air three feet in front of its snout.
BOOM.
The physics of the world seemed to break for a microsecond.
The Mantis Shrimp strikes so fast it creates a cavitation bubble in the water—a vacuum that collapses with the force of a bullet and the heat of the sun. Kaira did the same thing with the air.
The shockwave was like a grenade going off. A cone of compressed atmospheric pressure blasted from her fist.
The Hyena didn't even have time to scream. The air blast hit its face with the force of a freight train. Its neck snapped back with a gruesome sound. The massive, seven-foot beast was lifted off its feet and launched backward, flying clear off the side of the bridge.
It plummeted silently into the dark, oily water of the canal far below.
Splash.
Kaira landed in a crouch, her boots skidding on the stone. Steam hissed violently from her elbow vents, venting the excess heat of the strike. She stood up slowly, brushing a speck of dust off her tattered skirt.
The other two Hyenas on the barricade stared at the empty spot where their leader had been. Then they looked at Kaira, whose arm was still glowing with menacing orange heat. Then they looked at Ren, who was currently standing up and wiping blood off his completely healed side.
The survival instinct kicked in. They didn't fight. They dropped their scavenged weapons and scrambled over the debris, their claws scrabbling on the wood as they fled into the darkened alleys of the mid-city, yelping in terror.
Silence returned to the Bridge of Saints.
Kaira turned to Ren. She was grinning, her shark-like teeth glinting. "See? Teamwork. I punch, you bleed. It's a flawless system."
Ren touched his side. His shirt was torn to shreds, revealing the pale, smooth skin beneath. There wasn't even a bruise.
"You used me as bait!" Ren yelled, his voice cracking. "He broke my ribs, Kaira! I heard them crunch!"
"And now they're fixed," she pointed out, walking over to him. She poked his side hard with a finger. "Does it hurt?"
"No," Ren admitted, slapping her hand away. "But that's not the point! It hurt when it happened! It hurt a lot!"
"Pain is just information, Scribe," Kaira said, turning to walk across the bridge toward the setting sun. "It tells you you're not dead yet. If it stops hurting, that means you healed. If it keeps hurting, run faster."
She bent down and picked up something from the ground—a gold tooth the Hyena leader had lost in the impact. She bit it to check the quality, then tossed it to Ren.
"Payment for services rendered. Put it in the fund."
Ren caught the tooth, staring at it. He felt a mix of anger, exhaustion, and awe. She was insane. She was violent. She was absolutely going to get him killed a dozen times over.
But as he looked at his healed hand, he realized something else.
For the first time since the Wilding began, his hands weren't shaking. The paralyzing fear that had defined his life as a Norm was gone. Getting hit, breaking bones, bleeding... the terror of it had evaporated.
The worst thing the world could do to him was kill him. And apparently, the world wasn't trying hard enough.
He clenched his fist around the gold tooth. The faint blue Aether light pulsed beneath his skin, responding to his resolve.
"Tactical Sponge," Ren muttered to himself, shaking his head. "Fine. I can do that."
He ran to catch up with her.
"Hey, Boss," Ren called out, his stride lengthening. "Next time, warn me before you kick me."
Kaira glanced back, the setting sun reflecting off her sea-green eyes. She looked less like a monster and more like a girl trying to survive the end of the world. "No promises, kid. Now hurry up. We have a Kingdom to save, and I'm starving."
They crossed the Bridge of Saints, leaving the lower city behind.
Ahead of them lay the Savage Garden—formerly the Royal Park. It was a towering wall of green. Vines as thick as tree trunks strangled the noble houses bordering the park. The trees themselves were massive, their canopies blocking out the twilight, creating a cavern of shadows.
From the darkness of the trees, a pair of yellow eyes watched them approach. A low, rumbling growl vibrated through the leaves—a sound that you felt in your chest more than you heard with your ears.
It wasn't a Hyena. It was deeper. Heavier.
Something belonging to the Cat family.
Ren shivered, the hair on his arms standing up, but he didn't stop walking. He adjusted his satchel, took a breath of the humid jungle air, and followed the Smasher into the dark.