Aurelia's hand tightened on her sword hilt, the leather creaking in the dead silence. "A graveyard?" she repeated, her voice sharp enough to cut glass. "Do not mistake your cowardice for foresight, Vance. I will not have this mission undermined by—"
She never finished the sentence.
The air in front of them went wrong. It wasn't a sound or a sight at first, but a feeling. A deep, nauseating hum vibrated up through the soles of their feet. The light seemed to bend, the tall, dark trees at the edge of the clearing warping as if seen through flawed glass. The air, already heavy, soured completely, the rich scent of damp earth replaced by the sharp, metallic tang of ozone and rot.
"Senior… Senior Sister…" Zhang Min stammered, his face the color of old parchment. He pointed a trembling finger. "What is that?"
The space between two ancient, gnarled oaks began to shimmer. It wasn't a grand, fiery portal. It was a wound in the world, a silent, vertical tear in reality that bled a bruised, purple darkness into the forest. It was a nascent demon rift.
Before Aurelia could even process the impossible sight, the wound vomited.
A tide of chittering, red-skinned things poured out, no bigger than large dogs, with too many joints in their limbs and mouths filled with needle-like teeth. Imps. Behind them came the heavier, loping forms of Hellhounds, their coats smoldering with a faint, internal fire. They weren't an army. They were a flood of starving, feral creatures, their multifaceted eyes locking onto the four cultivators with a singular, ravenous hunger.
"Formation! Hold the line!" Aurelia's voice cut through the initial shock, a beacon of cold command. Her sword was out, a flash of silver that trailed a mist of killing frost. She was a prodigy, and her instincts were flawless.
But her team was not.
Li Wei, seeing a chance to prove his valor, let out a war cry and charged forward, his polished blade held high. "For the sect!" he roared. It was a brave, glorious, and suicidally stupid move. Three imps swarmed him instantly, their claws tearing at his limbs, their weight dragging him down before he could even land a proper blow.
On the other side, Zhang Min simply froze. His sword trembled in his hand, his eyes wide with a terror so absolute it had stolen his voice and locked his muscles. A lean Hellhound, drooling molten saliva, lowered its head and charged directly at him. He was going to die.
He moved without thinking, his body acting on instinct honed by forty-seven years of war.
.
He shoved past Aurelia, his left hand grabbing Zhang Min's collar and violently yanking him backward, sending the smaller boy stumbling to the ground. With his right, he retrieved one of the lumpy, cloth-wrapped spheres from his pocket.
"What in the—" Aurelia began, her attention split between the swarmed Li Wei and Irelion's bizarre maneuver.
Irelion didn't answer. He channeled a sliver of Qi into the parcel—just enough to activate the Cinder-Bloom catalyst—and hurled it underhand into the charging Hellhound's path.
The bomb didn't explode with a grand boom. It detonated with a wet, violent CRUMP. A blinding flash of white-hot fire erupted outwards, followed instantly by a spray of razor-sharp Iron-nettle shrapnel that shredded the air with a vicious hum. The Hellhound, caught in the epicenter, was vaporized. The imps flanking it were torn to pieces, their chittering cries cut short. The concussive force of the blast sent a wave of heat and dust washing over them.
In the ringing silence that followed, there was a new, smoldering crater where the demons had been.
Li Wei, momentarily freed from his attackers, scrambled back, his robes torn and bloody, his face a mask of shock. Zhang Min was still on the ground, whimpering.
Aurelia stared at the crater, then at Irelion. Her mind, usually a fortress of cold logic, was reeling. The rift, the demons, the bomb—it was all impossible.
"You knew," she breathed, her voice a mixture of awe and absolute fury. "You didn't just suspect. You knew. That bomb… you prepared it. How?"
"No time," Irelion grunted, pulling another sphere from his pack. "There are more coming."
He was right. The rift pulsed again, and more demons spilled out, their numbers easily double the first wave. They were no longer walking into a graveyard. The graveyard had bloomed around them, and they were the corpses.
Aurelia shoved her disbelief down, her training taking over. "Vance, on me! Li Wei, Zhang Min, guard the flanks! We make our stand here!" Her blade became a whirlwind of ice, every slash of her sword, Frost Severance, freezing the ground and slowing the advance of the nearest demons.
They fought back to back, a desperate island in a sea of snarling demons. Irelion didn't use any fancy swordplay. His movements were brutal, simple, and lethally efficient. A thrust to an eye socket. A slash to a tendon. He fought like a butcher, not a swordsman, conserving every ounce of energy.
They were holding. Barely.
Then, the rift pulsed a third time, a deep, resonant thrum that vibrated in their chests. The chittering horde of imps fell silent, parting with a strange, instinctual fear.
A new figure stepped through the tear in reality. It stood nearly eight feet tall, its skin the color of cooling lava, cracked with veins of green, fel fire. In one hand, it held a massive, jagged axe that dripped with a black ichor. It was a Felguard, a lesser demon commander. It was a beast of the Spirit Realm, a creature so far beyond their ability to fight it was laughable.
The Felguard's burning green eyes swept over the bloodied disciples, dismissing them as insects, until its gaze landed on Aurelia. It saw her power, the purity of her Qi. A low, guttural laugh, like the grinding of tectonic plates, rumbled from its chest. It raised its axe and pointed it directly at her.
It had found its prize.