The ash didn't settle.
It moved instead, crawling slowly across the cracked pavement in thin, searching lines, gathering itself the way water finds the lowest point in a room. Jin watched it happen without reaching for the staff yet, some part of him already expecting this after everything else tonight had taught them about how these things worked.
The ash pooled together and began to smoke, a thin, acrid haze rising off it as it compressed into something denser, something with weight and shape. Where it touched bare concrete, the surface hissed and pitted, tiny craters opening up like the ground itself was being eaten alive from underneath. The smell reached them a moment later, sharp and chemical, nothing like the rot they'd braced themselves for after the last two fights.
Joon covered his nose with the back of his wrist. "That smell is somehow worse than the last one."
