Chief walked to the edge of the ink-formed platform and spat a curse.
"Damn – this thing is too big."
The beast below answered with the slow, wet churn of a thing that could breathe both land and water. One of the subordinates' voice cracked: "We are in its attack range."
Kiaria stepped forward, calm as a knife. "Elder Mu Li, tell me if you need help."
Mu Li's reply was softer than the chaos warranted. "Little Patron, you have done enough for us. Think of yourself this time."
But before Kiaria could argue, Chief cut in, voice low and hard: "Patron – let him do what he wants. If you look with that vision of yours, you'll see what I mean."
Kiaria closed his eyes for a breath and let the monochrome veil unfurl.
Under that sight the truth was a cold, simple schematic: eighteen Marshal beast cores throbbed below them – the platform's heartbeat. There was no matching Yin source. He looked up. The platform's pale light dimmed at its edges. A slow, terrible realization settled in his chest: the Yin that held their refuge was bleeding out of Mu Li himself.
Kiaria's fist curled until his knuckles whitened.
Diala, watching him, reached for his wrist. "Ghost – are you alright?" she asked, voice small.
He answered without looking away. "Mu Li is feeding the formation with his own Yin."
The Princess, sensing what that meant, threw her small arms around both of them. "It's alright. Life is what hunters barter. Don't be sad." Her words were braver than her age.
The experienced hunters gathered close, eyes hard. One of them – Mu Long– a hulking man with an axe and a face like hammered metal – pointed the blunt of his weapon at a trembling newbie. "Lucky rats," he rasped. "Show us your treasures. Can't you see we're trying to defend you?"
The young man swallowed. Blood trickled from the axe-man's mouth as he spoke – the mark of his own forced speech, tongue bitten and bleeding. He grinned without humor. "I won't dump you. My axe just rests on his neck. If I let go, I'm afraid this rat might lose something." The threat was casual, cruel, effective.
Kiaria watched the tactic more than the cruelty: fear was shaping the mob into discipline. Diala and the Princess whispered that the old man was heartless; Kiaria only noted its usefulness.
Below, the swamp was impatient.
The octopus rose and wrapped twenty-four-foot mature Blood Worms into thick bundles, then hurled them skyward toward the formation.
No one was watching closely enough.
The first cluster struck the defensive shield. Treasure weapons – lances, blades, elemental relics – auto-activated and sliced. The hunters marveled at the coordination between beast and worm: it was not mindless; it was synergy. But the worms had answers: each severed segment did not die. It split, and the attack bred two hungry worms where one had been.
The swarm pressed. Flames licked at worm flanks; icy shards tried to stiffen and shatter them. But the red segments only multiplied. Yang was being drained faster than the defensive circle could mend; gaps opened like rents in cloth.
Kiaria, Diala and the Princess did not throw themselves into the chaos. Kiaria kept the Princess safe. He barked commands instead.
"Ice Units– coat the gaps with glossy, slippery layers.
Water Units – douse the slimed skin.
Fire units – combine and focus; send coordinated fireballs at clusters."
The coordination worked. Attacks layered and closed breaches. For a breath, the swarm's assault stalled.
But Mu Li's face had gone pale.
The elder's left little finger had eroded – a dying frost that ate flesh and bone. He steadied his brush, jaw clenched, and kept pouring Yin into the pattern. Nobody noticed at first; everyone was busy with the worms. Then the numbness left some throats and voices returned – panic and blame followed like dogs.
"Old man – focus on the formation!" one yelled."You brought us here!" another spat.
Mu Li moved without a word. He rebuilt the gapped regions stitch by weary stitch, exchanging his life-force like ink on paper. Each correction cost him. The left hand went first – the palm slipped away from his wrist, pale and quiet as a fallen leaf. The veterans cried out.
"Mu Li…" old friends called.
One hour – the numb hour – had passed. Now the noise returned and with it the cruel tongues of fear.
"Du Bai, it's nothing. I'm old. I lived long." Mu Li murmured with a small smile that did not reach his eyes.
"Mu Li, you don't have to do this!" Mu Long roared.Mu Li's voice flicked with mischief and sorrow. "Then will you take my place, Mu Long?"
There was no answer. Words were wasted. The swamp struck again.
A shower of carcasses and writhing infants fell at once – the octopus and worms used feints. The formation's outer layer swallowed the rain; everyone scurried to remove putrid bodies and stamp out wriggling larvae. While bodies were cleared, worms crawled over the formation's underside and found the elder's exposed Yin like honey.
The octopus struck the cores. A hard, crushing blow smashed through the formation's heart.
There was a single thin instant – then the anchor pattern folded into a final, fragile sheath and spat the platform and all on it a hundred meters clear of immediate danger. The shelter held them like a thrown net.
Kiaria did not stand on chance or miracle. He moved.
He stepped to Diala. No whispered prophecy, no stranger's voice from the void – only memory and training. He whispered, "Twin Polarity Stasis. We can freeze them – but we must do it together." He had seen the method once, a shard of technique pulled from their last inheritance; it lived in muscle and blood now.
Diala's eyes shone. "I remember. I'll do it." She rose, steady as blade.
They stepped from the platform and descended, blessed by the faint remnants of Goddess wards that blurred them from swamp-sense. They stood face to face above the muck.
Hands joined – not a clutch, but a weaving.
Kiaria poured his left Yin into Diala's right Yang. Diala sent her left Yin into Kiaria's right Yang. The circuit mirrored. The world between them tightened.
A small, four-colored crystal winked into being at their palms: white and black graded like dawn and dusk, edged with fiery orange on the white half and deep azure on the black. It pulsed like a heart.
Repel and attract collided in a brittle lattice. The swamp's murmur stuttered. Smell thinned as if a hand pressed the air flat.
For fifteen minutes the world froze to their will.
Tentacles stilled and retracted; the octopus's mind fogged. Blood Worms, mid-crawl, turned to stone-pause – bodies rigid, breathing held. The swamp became an aquarium of halted motion.
Kiaria shouted, voice raw: "Run – now! Petrification won't last. Don't wait!"A chorus of hoarse shouts rose: Run… run… run…
The survivors poured through the safe corridor. Diala shortened her velvet nimbus into a sling and Kiaria moved like a carved shadow, catching and flinging people into the gap Mu Li's platform had carved. They were mercilessly efficient: no one left behind if they could help it.
At the same time Mu Li – pale, fingers like bleached twigs – did what he could not refuse. He took what remained of his Yin and inked the brush with it. The last of his strength drew new leaves – a narrow path – and the brush, hovering, pointed the survivors forward.
His body did not turn entirely to ash.
The elder's breath thinned to a whisper. He fell, collapsed on the platform's edge, ink-slick and trembling. His left leg twitched once and lay still; the wound smoked faintly where Yin had been spent. Blood and ink mixed on his sleeve. He stared at the brush in his hand as if seeing an old friend, then closed his eyes.
"Mu Li!" Azriel and the veterans rushed to him. They wanted to bow, to curse, to weep – but weeping would not stitch fingers back. They pressed hands to his chest and found a faint beat. Not gone. Alive – but gravely spent.
Mu Long's voice shredded the air. "You old man – you left us!" He slammed a stone in anger, his face a ruin of grief and fury. Others muttered blame; some lifted the calloused body as if it were a relic and not a man.
"Don't touch him yet," Chief ordered. "He bought us a path. We move while there is breath." His voice steadied the frenzy.
They used Mu Li's last ink-path. The platform took the survivors and the wounded and carried them onward. Smoke and vomit and the taste of iron trailed behind, but a path existed where none had been.
When the counting came, a trembling hand was raised. "Chief – only five of us left." The voice was smaller than the speaker.
A hush fell. Mu Long's cry split the air again, but Azriel put a steadying palm on his shoulder.
"It's all right." Chief's voice was iron wrapped in velvet. He tapped the twin on the back and added quietly, for the group: "Do not forget how Ghost Shade has twisted fate for us. Trust him." The name – Patron – passed from mouth to mouth, a knot of belief.
They looked toward the swamp. The leaves hung empty now; the octopus's limbs were a gallery of frozen strikes. The platform bore their wounded and the old calligrapher, breathing faintly but not gone.
Patron and Shade had not returned yet. They were out there, below the immediate safety, hands still joined, the echo of their crystal humming faint like a bell.
So the survivors waited – bleeding, terrified, grateful – watching the black water with hungry, fearful eyes. They tended the wounded, refilled Marshal cores that had burned low, and kept a watch on the path Mu Li had drawn.
Chief kept his gaze on Lainsa. She would not move willingly; he had to, earlier, force her little body into the safety net. Now he sat, jaw set, and scanned the horizon.
Injured and uninjured alike huddled at the swamp's edge. All of them – from the scarred axe-man to the trembling newbie – faced the black throat of the Swarm and waited for Ghost Shade's shadow to return.