Rize’s foot sank into the sand and refused to come free.

  The moment she tried to pull back, the desert answered by sliding away under her weight, swallowing her ankle deeper like a dry bog that didn’t need water to drown you. The grit poured into her boot in a steady, hateful stream, scraping skin raw and turning every tiny movement into punishment. Sweat stung her eyes, blurring the world into bright smears of gold and white, and when she blinked hard the heat only seemed sharper.

  Her throat burned as if scorched from the inside out. Every breath dragged furnace air into her lungs, hot enough that it felt like it singed all the way down, and she could taste dust on the back of her tongue. I… can’t move…! The thought came with a sickening clarity, the kind you get right before impact.

  The shadow closed over her. The creature’s jagged mandibles opened wide, and it was so close that she saw her own reflection trembling in its many glinting eyes—small, bright, already doomed. That reflection looked wrong, like a person viewed through warped glass, but the fear in it was unmistakable. She tried to raise her sword, but her arm felt like iron, heavy and slow, as if the heat had melted strength out of her muscles.

  Her legs were trapped. She couldn’t jump. She couldn’t run. The sand held her like a fist. Only one voice surfaced through the panic—distant, faint, yet sharp enough to pierce her chest.Wait for me. I’ll come back. I promise. Yu’s promise flared inside her like a match in the dark. For a heartbeat she almost caught it—almost turned it into strength—but the jaws were already upon her, descending with the blunt inevitability of a guillotine. The world narrowed to the serrated edges, the hot stink of disturbed sand, the rush of air pushed aside by the monster’s weight.

  “…Yu…” The name slipped out of her lips, barely a breath. Light cut the desert in half.

  SLASH. A horizontal, slicing white flash struck the monster from the side, so clean and fast it looked like the world had been edited. A violent shockwave rippled across the dunes, blasting sand into the air in a curtain that stung like thrown needles. The creature’s head didn’t just split—it shattered, collapsing in a spray of black fluid and broken chitin before it could even shriek.

  “—!” The blast knocked Rize sideways, wrenching her trapped leg free by force rather than mercy. She hit the sand hard, coughing immediately, choking on heat and grit that flooded her mouth. Her lungs burned as if she’d inhaled embers, her ears rang, and her vision turned to a storm of white and gold as the shockwave rolled through her body. For a moment she didn’t know if she was alive.

  Then, through the swirling haze, a streak of silver cut forward like a blade finding a line through chaos. A figure stepped out of the sandstorm with wind at her back and not a single trace of hesitation in her stride. The silhouette was sharp against the sun, too bright and too calm for a place that wanted her dead.

  “You worry so much about your footing that you almost got eaten.” The voice carried a sharp edge, but there was a thread of amusement woven through it like a hook.

  ?

  “An adventurer basics, Rize. You can’t even handle soft ground?” Claval’s words came first, crisp and unapologetic, and only then did Rize’s eyes fully focus on her.

  Claval stood half-turned, silver hair whipping in the scorching wind as if the desert itself had failed to ruffle her composure. Under the brutal sun she looked almost unreal—too bright, too sharp, too alive—like a hero torn out of a different story and dropped here by mistake. Her cloak was splattered with dark fluid, and her sword still shimmered with a pale residual glow, as if the flash that killed the magical beast hadn’t finished fading from the steel.

  Claval flicked her blade once, casual, and sand sprayed away in a thin arc. The motion was effortless, practiced, insulting in its calm. Rize forced herself upright, muscles trembling with leftover shock, and the sand tugged at her boots as if it resented letting her stand.

  “Claval! Why are you here!?” The shout came out rough, cracked by heat and fear, but the anger was real and hot enough to burn through the dizziness.

  Rize hated the rush of relief that had come with recognizing her. She hated it because it mixed with everything else—rivalry, jealousy, resentment—and made her feel ugly inside. Claval saving her life was undeniable. Accepting that fact without choking on it felt impossible.

  “Later. Focus on what’s in front of you.” Claval shrugged as if the question was trivial, as if appearing in the middle of a desert was less interesting than correcting someone’s stance.

  The dismissal hit Rize like a slap, and irritation tightened her chest until breathing hurt. She wanted to grab Claval by the collar and shake an answer out of her. She wanted to demand how and why and where the rest of the party had gone. She wanted to scream that none of this made sense, that the ruins were gone, that she’d been swallowed by light—But the desert didn’t give her time to argue.

  “…Right now, we fight.” The decision came out of her mouth as a statement, not a question, and she stepped closer to Claval’s side because standing alone felt like begging the sand to take her again.

  Rize tightened her grip on her sword, forcing her fingers to stop shaking. Heat pulsed off the metal like it had absorbed sunlight, and the hilt was slick with sweat. She planted her feet the best she could, bending her knees to lower her center of gravity, remembering the way Naz had once said footing was half the battle.

  “That’s better.” Claval’s grin widened, sharp with approval that felt dangerously close to praise.

  For a brief moment, rivalry and jealousy blurred under survival instinct. They were simply two fighters under an unforgiving sky, sharing the same threat and the same thin margin between standing and dying. Rize swallowed, mouth painfully dry, and tasted grit between her teeth.

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  Rumble. The sound wasn’t loud at first, more felt than heard—a tremor that crawled up through the soles of her boots. The sand ahead bulged as if something underneath had taken a breath.

  “…Incoming,” Claval muttered, and her tone finally lost its laziness. The dune exploded.

  BOOM. Two massive creatures burst forth, each larger than the one Claval had just erased. Armored bodies rose out of the sand in ugly, efficient arcs, jagged spines catching sunlight like serrated knives. Dozens of legs tore through the surface as they surged forward, skittering across dunes with a speed that made their bulk feel obscene. Their mandibles clacked open and shut as if tasting the air, and black-red eyes locked onto the two women with hunger that didn’t bother to hide itself.

  “Rize, you take the right one.” Claval pointed lazily as if assigning chores, and the casualness made Rize’s stomach drop. The right creature turned slightly, angling toward her, and the ground under it rippled as its legs churned sand into waves. It was close enough now that she could hear the rasp of chitin on chitin and the dry hiss of sand sliding off its plates.

  “Wh—!? No way!!” Rize snapped, and panic sharpened the protest into something almost shrill. She was exhausted. Her lungs were already burning. Her arms still trembled from the shockwave. The desert had turned every step into labor, and this thing was bigger, harder, faster than the first. The idea of facing it alone felt like stepping under a falling boulder.

  “You can handle it. Just don’t turn your back.” Claval didn’t even look over her shoulder as she launched herself toward the left monster. She moved like a blade of light, carving through sand with a speed that made the ground look slow. Her sword traced a pale arc, and heat shimmered behind it like the air was being sliced open. The left creature reared, and Claval met it head-on, unshaken, as if this was the only place she had ever belonged.

  Rize was left facing the second monster alone. Her legs trembled. Her breath faltered. The heat pressed against her ribs from the outside, and fear pressed from the inside until she felt squeezed between them. She tried to set her stance, tried to remember that sand stole momentum and punished lunges. She lifted her blade and forced her gaze to stay on the creature’s head, its mandibles, the way its legs positioned for the next strike.

  Don’t turn your back, Claval had said. The monster lunged. Rize barely managed to lift her sword in time. Her strike met the chitinous shell with a brutal clang that rang through her arms and into her teeth. The impact jolted her wrists, and the blade skidded off the armor as if she’d hit a wall of stone. CLANG.

  No cut. No crack. Not even a scratch. The creature didn’t slow. It surged forward, legs beating the sand in a rapid, ugly rhythm that sent ripples under her feet. The dunes shifted, trying to slide her balance out from under her, and she stumbled one half-step as the ground betrayed her.

  The mandibles opened wide, and she caught the stench of it—hot dust and something sour, like spoiled meat baked in sun. Her stomach rolled. I can’t… I can’t win…! The thought hit like a cold hand around her throat. Her foot stuck for a heartbeat, heel sinking deeper than she expected, and that tiny delay felt like a death sentence. She tried to force air into her lungs and couldn’t get enough. The shadow of the creature swallowed the bright world, and all she saw was jagged edges closing in.

  “Yu… please—Help me!” The words tore out of her, raw and shameless, and the desert swallowed them immediately. There was no reason a prayer should reach anywhere. No reason a desperate whisper should cross worlds. No reason the sky should care. And yet—

  THE SKY TORE OPEN.

  ZZZZZT—BOOOOM!

  A sound like reality tearing down the middle ripped across the dunes, not from the ground beneath their feet, but from the heavens above. For an instant the flawless blue fractured with a hard-edged line of white, too straight to be natural, like a slit cut through a painted backdrop. Light gathered at that wound, brightening in a way that didn’t feel like magic and didn’t feel like sunlight—more like something cold and precise deciding where to fall.

  A pillar of pure white slammed down. It engulfed the creature in front of Rize in an instant, swallowing armored plates, spines, legs, and hunger in a brilliance so intense she couldn’t look at it. The shockwave rolled outward like thunder made physical, lifting sand in a violent storm that punched her in the chest and ripped breath from her lungs.

  It appeared suddenly out of the sky and didn’t stop there. In the same impossible heartbeat, it struck the left monster as well—Claval’s target—catching it mid-lunge and obliterating it in a torrent of fire, erasing it as if someone had hit a delete key on the world. Chitin shattered into dust. Claws vaporized. The air screamed. The desert flashed white.

  Rize collapsed to her knees, throwing an arm up to shield her eyes as the blast hammered through her. Heat and grit whipped across her skin, and her ears rang with a high, thin whine that made everything feel distant and unreal. Her sword slipped in her grip for a moment, and she forced her fingers to clamp down again, refusing to let it fall. The light faded slowly, like an afterimage clinging stubbornly to the world.

  “…What… was that…?” Her voice shook, small against the vastness, and it came out like she was afraid to disturb whatever had just happened. When she lowered her arm, the dunes were scarred with glass-like craters, the sand fused into smooth, warped bowls that still smoked at the edges. Heat shimmered above them in thick waves, and the air carried the bitter smell of scorched dust. Nothing remained of the monsters—not bodies, not blood, not even fragments large enough to name.

  Through drifting haze, she saw Claval standing frozen a short distance away.

  “…Both of them…?” Claval’s lips moved like the words didn’t belong to her. “In one hit…?” Claval’s sword was still raised mid-strike, as if her body hadn’t received the message that the fight was over. Her eyes were wide, disbelief cracking the usual arrogance clean in half. The wind tugged at her cloak, and for once she didn’t look like she was controlling the scene—she looked like she’d been shoved into someone else’s.

  Silence followed, thick and ringing, broken only by the hiss of cooling glass-sand and the low moan of wind over crater rims. Even Claval—who never lost her composure, who treated danger like entertainment—was shaken to her core by the alien precision of that power.

  Rize swallowed hard, throat scraping, and her breath came out shaky. She looked up at the empty blue sky, at the place where it had torn open, and saw nothing but flawless color again. But she could feel something lingering, thin as spider silk, stretched between her chest and somewhere impossibly far away. Not a rope she could grab—just a sensation, like being seen.

  “…Yu… Was that… you…?” The whisper slipped out, not knowing if it was hope, memory, or miracle. Observation. The word surfaced without her meaning it to, and it made her skin prickle. The knot of fear in her chest loosened, not because the desert was safe, but because she wasn’t alone in the way that mattered most. He was watching. He was fighting with her.

  Rize tightened her grip on her sword until her fingers ached, and she forced herself to stand, legs unsteady on shifting sand. The craters smoked quietly between her and the horizon like warnings carved into the world.

  She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know how to leave. But the sky had answered her once, and that single impossible answer was enough to make her take the next breath without breaking.