The Ganshka tribe was deep in its daily rhythm, a tableau of mundane savagery.
Crude huts of lashed wood and dry grass circled the clearing like rotten teeth.
Adults sat in patches of thin sun, sharpening bone tools on river stones and skinning the small, furry remains of a recent hunt.
The air hung thick with the metallic scent of blood and the greasy smell of curing hides.
Their young darted between the structures in a chaotic, shrieking game, their shrill voices cutting through the humid morning air like glass.
"Open fire," Ashan said, the words quiet, flat, and final.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
Three arrows struck home.
A hunter slumped over his work.
A woman reaching for a waterskin gasped, looking down at the fletching suddenly blooming from her chest.
A sentry by the tree line crumpled silently.
At the same instant, Damara, Imla, and the two support members—a Rat-faction boy and a Wolf-faction girl—raised their palms.
The guttural words were almost lost beneath the sudden chaos.
Four streaks of dark-blue energy tore through the clearing, slamming into the tribesmen at the perimeter.
One bolt took a Ganshka in the throat, silencing its startled cry.
Another punched through a raised arm and into the heart behind it.
Chaos erupted, raw and shrieking.
Ashan's hand dropped.
Dris and Roderic surged forward from the undergrowth, swords drawn, while Helma and Ballio continued their deadly rain from the rear.
Dris flooded his limbs with prana, a dark-bluish sheen flickering over his skin, and swung his sword in a brutal, whistling horizontal arc.
A Ganshka's head left its shoulders, tumbling into the dirt like a discarded melon, its expression still fixed in confusion.
Gnash! Gnash! Gnash!
The sound was less language and more the fury of a ruptured hive.
Shrill cries of alarm and rage filled the clearing as the tribe scrambled, snatching up crude daggers and bone-tipped spears.
Dris and Roderic moved not as brawlers, but as practitioners.
Their footwork was the kiriyas they'd drilled until their muscles screamed—efficient, angular, deadly.
Blades carved through gaps in frantic defenses, aiming for the arteries and joints Ashan had silently marked during three days of hidden observation.
Ashan's eyes swirled grayish-white. [Viksana: Analyze].
The world sharpened, clarified, and reduced to vectors and vulnerabilities.
Weak points bloomed across his vision like poisonous flowers—a pulsing green dot over a tendon here, a flickering red crosshair over an unprotected kidney there.
"Left, Dris! Knee!" His voice was a calm scalpel in the tumult.
Dris obeyed without thought, his following thrust slipping past a clumsy parry and into a throat.
Imla and Damara fought back-to-back, a spinning engine of precision.
Their spears were not for brute force but for surgical strikes—a flash of steel to pierce a hamstring, a quick reversal to jab into a screaming mouth.
From the tree line, Helma and the other archers neutralized the Ganshka bowmen with ruthless, mechanical efficiency.
For every arrow loosed from a crude Ganshka bow, two hissed back in reply.
Women screamed, dragging children toward the dubious safety of the huts.
The game was over.
Then, a new threat.
Five Ganshka at the far edge of the clearing, older, their skin marked with ritual scars, pushed through the panic and began chanting in unison.
The guttural syllables were wrong, a perversion of Ashurain.
Greenish, sickly light coalesced into crackling orbs between their claws.
"Casters!" Roderic barked, deflecting a bone spear.
The orbs launched, screaming across the clearing like damned souls.
Roderic didn't dodge.
He parried a wild swing and yanked the attacker into the orb's path.
It exploded against living flesh with a wet thump, and the Ganshka convulsed, its fur smoldering.
Dris twisted aside at the last second, a claw of residual energy grazing his chin, drawing a thin line of blood.
"Bastard!"
Imla and Damara rolled clear as another orb cratered the earth where they'd stood.
Ashan was already gone.
[Viksana: Conceal]
His presence vanished.
Not just sight, but the subtle pressure of a living being, the sound of his breath, and the heat of his body—all erased.
He was a ghost, a negative space moving through the positive chaos.
Dris, bleeding and furious, snarled the incantation through gritted teeth.
Garu ektbor narwath ferath!
Tiger-striped fur rippled across his body, his face elongating into a snarl, claws erupting from his fingertips.
The transformation stole a heartbeat, a moment of vulnerability.
Gnash!
A Ganshka lunged, seeing the opening.
Dris caught the bone dagger on his newly hardened forearm, the shock jolting up his limb, then tore forward with his own claws.
They met resistance—skull—and then didn't.
The sensation of crushing bone and wet brain matter was profound and savage.
"Where's Ashan?" Roderic shouted, cutting down another attacker, his eyes scanning the fray.
No answer.
The clearing was a slick, red poem of violence.
But the five casters, regrouping, began another chant, their voices rising in desperate harmony.
Ashan reappeared behind them.
Not from the shadows, but from the empty air itself.
Steel flashed, a practical, unadorned movement.
One head fell, the chanting cutting off into a gurgle.
The others spun, their pebble eyes wide with shock.
Any aggressive action breaks concealment, Ashan noted coldly, the analytical part of his mind already moving to the next step.
A dark-brown bolt of compacted earth and stone, smelling of grave soil, lanced from his palm.
It didn't pierce; it crushed.
One caster was driven into the ground, a ruin of broken greenish limbs.
Ashan followed the spell's release with a physical lunge, the three-part sequence of [Traya Vetra], a deadly dance: a forward thrust (piercing a lung), an upward slash (severing a chanting jaw), and a downward chop (finding the collarbone and deep into the chest).
Two remained. Their panic was pure fuel.
Green orbs formed, larger, wobbling with unstable power—
Ashan was already moving.
Not on instinct, but on a map of the immediate future.
[Viksana: Foresee]
A five-second phantom reel played behind his eyes: the orbs launching, curving, missing.
He saw where he needed to be.
He stepped into the empty space they would avoid, used a fallen Ganshka's chest as a springboard, and ended the second-to-last with a downward slash that split it from shoulder to hip.
The final caster turned to run.
An arrow from the tree line took it in the back. It stumbled.
Ashan's sword took it in the neck.
Huff.
He stood amidst the carnage of the spellcasters, his breath a controlled rhythm in the sudden, ringing quiet.
"Yo, leader!" Dris called, wiping a smear of blood from his furred muzzle, his grin feral and bright. "Need help?"
Ashan surveyed the clearing.
The fight was over.
The kinetic fury had bled out, leaving only aftermath.
Silence, broken by the low moans of the dying and the muffled, terrified whimpers from the huts.
Only bodies remained.
Two Ganshka survivors—non-combatants, an elder and an adolescent—had been dragged from a hut and now knelt near the entrance, shaking violently.
One, the elder, looked up, its pebble eyes swimming with a terrible understanding.
It tried to form words around its malformed mouth.
"Gnash—spare—gnash—"
An arrow pinned its skull to the doorframe.
The adolescent fell an instant later, Ballio's shot clean through the eye.
Ballio lowered his bow, his hands trembling not from exertion, but from something else.
His breathing was hard and ragged. "Did we… get them all?"
"All fighters," Dris said, reverting to his human form with a series of sickening cracks.
He prodded a body with his foot.
Roderic pointed his bloodied sword at the huts. "Not all of them."
From within, the wailing of children rose—a high, desolate sound that had nothing to do with battle and everything to do with loss.
"Tch. Annoying," Damara muttered, leaning on her spear, her face a mask of weary disgust.
"We succeeded," Imla said calmly, clinically wiping her blade on a patch of grass.
"No losses. Minimal injury. Orders?"
Ashan studied his team.
Bloody. Shaken. Breathing the same iron-tang air. Alive.
"Gather vestiges," he said, his voice hollowed out by the stillness.
"Check the huts for supplies. We leave in five minutes."
Ballio hesitated, staring at the hut from which the cries emanated. "Can't we… just leave them?"
Dris scoffed, kicking over a basket of roots. "Why waste mercy on them? They're just gremlins."
"They're not Sadhakas," Ballio argued, his voice strained. "They're children. They're no threat."
"No threat now," Imla snapped, her usual composure cracking into icy impatience. "Can you promise they won't remember? Won't grow? Won't hunt us later with our faces etched in their hate?"
"But that'll take years!" Ballio's protest was almost a plea.
"Will it?" Damara asked flatly, her dark eyes holding his. "How long did it take us to learn to kill?"
Silence descended, heavier than before.
The childlike wails continued, a stark counterpoint.
Ashan closed his eyes briefly.
When he opened them, they were on Ballio.
"Ballio," he said, and his name in Ashan's mouth sounded like a verdict.
"We are weak."
Ballio stiffened as if struck.
"The weak cannot afford morality. It is a currency for the safe and the powerful. Principles require strength to defend them—strength we do not have."
Ashan's gaze was relentless, a mirror reflecting back a truth Ballio wanted to shatter. "And never forget who your allies are. Hesitation gets them killed. Your uncertainty is a weapon you point at Dris's back, at Helma's throat."
Something settled inside Ballio then.
Not acceptance, not peace, but a kind of cold, heavy understanding.
The weight of the island, of the Law, of the simple, brutal arithmetic of survival, pressed down until his principles cracked.
"…Then why lead us?" he asked, the fight gone from his voice, replaced by hollow curiosity.
"If survival is all that matters… why bother saving anyone? Why form the pact?"
Ashan didn't answer. He turned and began methodically retrieving a dark-green vestige from the chest of a fallen caster.
Dris chuckled softly, a dry, rustling sound.
He slung his sword over his shoulder, his eyes lingering on the silent huts.
"Because nothing's pure, kid. Not good. Not evil." His grin widened, but it never reached his eyes. "Just gray. Endless, fucking gray."
The clearing smelled of blood, voided bowels, and crushed greenery.
No one argued.
They simply set to work, the children's cries the only eulogy for the dead and for the parts of themselves they left beside them in the dirt.