Eric tasted lightning before he heard it.

  The air carried that sharp, metallic bite—ozone and burned dust—threaded through the thicker stink of smoke and ruptured fuel. Heat rolled off the broken street in shimmering waves, but the power in the air made it feel wrong, like the desert itself had been forced to hold its breath.

  The Naga Brute surged through the haze, wounded but furious, its coils grinding over crushed cars and buckled asphalt. Where Eric’s void had bitten earlier, the Brute’s scales were blackened in jagged patches, as if rot had been painted onto living armor. It should have slowed.

  It didn’t.

  It hit like a moving wall.

  Eric raised his blades—two short void edges, black and too clean against the ruin—and braced for impact.

  The Brute’s upper body snapped forward in a brutal hammering motion, not elegant, not technical—pure dominance. The strike caught Eric across the forearms with enough force to rattle his bones. His feet skidded backward, boots scraping sparks off broken glass embedded in the street.

  Pain flared through his wrists.

  Empty.

  The thought came sharp and cold. Not panic. Assessment.

  He could feel it, that hollow ache behind his sternum—his tank scraped thin, the void inside him hungry and impatient.

  I need fuel. Now.

  A second strike came low—coil whipping like a cable.

  Eric leapt, barely clearing it, and felt the tail pass under him with a violent rush of displaced air. He landed on the hood of a wrecked sedan and kicked off, trying to keep the Brute’s attention pinned on him and away from the civilians still stumbling out of broken doorways.

  “MOVE!” he shouted, voice tearing raw. “GET OUT—GO!”

  A few heads turned. A few people ran harder.

  Most just ran blind.

  Lightning snapped down from above.

  Eric felt it a fraction of a second before it hit—one of the Angaria spellcasters had repositioned, clinging to the side of a damaged structure with too many limbs and too much patience. The bolt came aimed not to kill, but to herd—forcing Eric into the Brute’s range.

  Eric twisted and threw a void tether—thin as wire, black as absence—anchoring it into a streetlight pole. He yanked himself sideways, the bolt carving past his shoulder and detonating into the street. Asphalt erupted, a crater blasting dust into the air.

  The Brute lunged through the dust immediately.

  Eric met it with his blades—two rapid slashes that left dark trails through the haze. The cuts didn’t spill blood the way steel would. They left absence behind, edges of reality chewed raw.

  The Brute hissed anyway.

  It slammed its coil down on him.

  Eric got an arm up. The impact drove him to a knee, void buzzing against scale as his constructs held—barely. His shoulders screamed. His ribs protested with a sharp, hot protest that told him something had cracked.

  He gritted his teeth.

  Joy sparked in him like a match struck against bone.

  He hated it.

  He hated that his body recognized this rhythm. Hated that the terror in the street didn’t drown out the ancient, predatory thrill of being tested—of being pushed to the edge and not falling.

  People are dying, he told himself. You don’t get to enjoy this.

  The Brute pressed harder, trying to crush him into the pavement.

  Eric snarled and twisted his wrists, turning the blades not to cut deeper, but to slide along the Brute’s scale pattern. He was looking for the give—for the place the armor didn’t match the muscle beneath.

  A second Angaria dropped into view, skittering from a rooftop edge to a billboard support with unnatural speed. Its limbs glowed faintly as it gathered power.

  Eric saw the pattern forming—two casters, alternating pressure, forcing him to dodge into the Brute’s crush zone.

  Smart.

  He needed smarter.

  The Brute whipped him sideways.

  Eric’s body snapped through the air and he slammed into the side of a building hard enough to cave drywall and shatter interior framing. Dust exploded around him. He dropped to the floor among toppled chairs and a broken vending machine.

  For half a beat, the world narrowed to ringing ears and the taste of blood.

  He pushed up fast.

  Fuel. I need fuel. I need a kill or I’m done.

  The wall behind him vanished as the Brute punched through it—stone and steel giving way like wet paper beneath its mass. Eric rolled under the first strike and came up running, void forming in brief anchors to propel him—stab into concrete, pull, release—like a grappling line made of hunger.

  Lightning flashed again.

  He let it graze him.

  Just enough.

  Pain lanced through his shoulder as void snapped reflexively to meet it, devouring a thin ribbon of the spell. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t comfortable. It burned like swallowing molten wire.

  But it was something.

  His lungs drew fuller.

  His muscles steadied.

  He turned that stolen power into motion and vaulted back into the open street, forcing the Brute to pivot after him. The Brute’s wounded patches smoked faintly where void residue still clung.

  Eric locked eyes with it.

  Not fear.

  Not defiance.

  A hunter’s attention.

  The Brute struck again—high this time—trying to fold him in half.

  Eric ducked and drove both blades upward into the Brute’s underside.

  The contact felt different than scale—softer. Vulnerable.

  The Brute shuddered and pulled back, and Eric felt something else beneath the creature’s rage: a pulse of power, dense and rhythmic, like a drumbeat hidden under muscle and venom.

  There you are.

  He wasn’t surprised. He’d known it was there. He’d just been too empty, too pressured, to tune himself precisely enough to lock on.

  His void didn’t just cut. It listened.

  Eric adjusted his grip, angled the blades minutely, and pushed his will through them like threading a needle. Not brute force—precision. Matching the Brute’s internal mana cadence, riding it, slipping into the gaps in its defenses.

  The Brute’s eyes widened a fraction.

  It felt it.

  It didn’t know what it was, but it felt weakness creeping in where strength should have been absolute.

  The Brute surged in panic, trying to overwhelm him before the drain could take hold.

  Eric’s feet left the ground again as he was smashed backward—another hit, harder—his spine slamming into a car door. Metal folded around him. His vision sparked white.

  He coughed blood and laughed once—sharp, involuntary.

  Disgust followed instantly.

  Shut up, he told himself. Focus.

  He ripped free of the mangled door and rolled as lightning slammed into the street where he’d been. Heat and dust washed over him. The Angaria were still trying to pen him.

  Eric raised one blade toward the nearer caster—tempted, so tempted to go carve out an easy meal.

  But the Brute was the real fuel.

  A goblin—small, shrieking—rushed him from the side with a crude blade.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Eric didn’t even look.

  He backhanded with the flat of his void edge.

  The goblin simply ceased to be in that slice of space—ash and nothing. The void swallowed the mana like a starving animal tasting a crumb.

  Not enough.

  Not even close.

  The Brute reared back for another crushing swing.

  Eric stepped into it.

  A risky move. A suicidal one if he mistimed.

  The coil slammed down and Eric let it clip him—shoulder and side—enough to spin him, enough to make it look like he’d been thrown off-balance. Pain ripped through him.

  And as the Brute followed through, Eric drove both blades deep again, exactly where the mana rhythm was loudest.

  He felt the frequency lock.

  The void responded eagerly.

  Black tendrils crawled outward under the Brute’s scales, not visible as vines, but as a spreading deadening—strength collapsing, internal power unraveling.

  The Brute’s next motion stuttered.

  Just a fraction.

  But Eric felt it like a door cracking open.

  He bared his teeth.

  Not a grin—yet.

  A promise.

  Soon.

  He yanked free, pivoted, and sprinted along the street, forcing the Brute to chase him farther southwest—away from the thickest civilian clusters, toward thinning buildings and open desert margins where collateral would matter less.

  The Angaria followed, skittering across vertical surfaces, preparing new spells.

  Eric’s chest tightened again.

  Panic rose.

  Joy rose with it.

  He swallowed both.

  Hold it together. Get fuel. Get control. Then you can save who’s left.

  And somewhere beyond the torn skyline, the gate continued to pulse—spilling bodies, spilling magic, spilling war.

  On the far side of the tear, the air was colder.

  Not because the desert wasn’t hot, but because the space around the gate didn’t obey desert rules. It smelled of ozone and blood and foreign earth—Nytheris’ breath bleeding into the human world.

  A tall Angaria stood at the threshold, its body draped in chitinous armor that looked grown rather than forged. Its limbs moved with arrogant patience. Its eyes—too many, too focused—watched the chaos beyond like a theater performance curated for its amusement.

  “Look at them scatter,” it said, voice translated in the minds of those near enough on its side, not as words but as meaning. “Soft flesh, soft structures. A world built for collapse.”

  Below it, goblins surged toward the opening in chaotic waves. They weren’t all true goblins—some looked wrong, thinner, paler, their movements jerky, as if animated by poor craftsmanship.

  Husks.

  Disposable.

  The Angaria tilted its head as one such husk tripped over a fallen companion and was trampled into the dirt without anyone slowing.

  It clicked its mandibles in something like disdain.

  “Will these disposable husks hold?” it asked another Angaria beside it, tone mocking. “They break like dry reeds. Even your real goblins had more bite than this.”

  The other Angaria didn’t answer immediately, watching the human skyline, watching the two bright threads of power moving through it—wind and void.

  Then it spoke, careful. “They aren’t meant to hold. They are meant to clog. To flood streets. To force panic.”

  The prideful Angaria’s posture lifted, savoring. “And in the flood, glory is taken.”

  It stepped closer to the threshold.

  On the other side, lightning flashed again.

  The Angaria’s eyes gleamed.

  “Good,” it murmured. “Let the husks soften the prey.”

  It leaned forward, tasting the air.

  “And then we feast on the ones who think themselves predators.”

  Eric felt the Brute’s pursuit like thunder behind him.

  Each time the Naga moved, the street trembled. Each time it hit something—a car, a wall, a streetlight—ruin spread outward. Eric stayed just ahead of it, forcing it to commit, forcing it to keep burning strength while his void continued to nibble at its mana cadence in brief, precise cuts.

  It was working.

  Slowly.

  Dangerously.

  He couldn’t afford slow.

  Two more lightning bolts cracked down in rapid sequence—Angaria coordinating now, trying to time strikes with the Brute’s lunges.

  Eric dove, rolled, and snapped a void hook into the street, pulling himself forward like a shot. The first bolt exploded behind him. The second clipped his thigh.

  Agony bloomed.

  The void ate it reflexively.

  Fuel trickled in.

  Not enough.

  His body was starting to show it—fine black lines rising under his skin, faint purple shading where regeneration was being forced to choose what to repair first. His breath came harsh. His hands trembled slightly on his blades.

  He heard screams behind him again—closer than he wanted.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw a cluster of civilians near a broken storefront, frozen in indecision.

  “RUN!” he shouted again, voice cracking. “MOVE!”

  They moved.

  Good.

  He refocused.

  The Brute surged, wounded pride turning into rage, and Eric could feel its internal rhythm growing jagged as the void interference spread. The Brute was strong, but it was no longer stable.

  Eric tightened his grip.

  One more good lock, he told himself. One real drain and I can finish you.

  The Brute struck.

  Eric stepped in.

  And the street exploded into another exchange of crushing force, lightning pressure, and hungry black edges—Eric balancing on the razor line between saving strangers and feeding the monster inside him that wanted, desperately, to be alive again.

  The Brute learned.

  Not quickly—not cleverly—but viscerally.

  Eric felt the shift before he saw it. The Naga’s internal rhythm, once steady and overconfident, had begun to fracture under sustained interference. Its mana surged in uneven pulses now, flaring hot and erratic where void tendrils had gnawed too deep.

  That made it dangerous.

  The Brute stopped chasing blindly.

  It coiled low, anchoring its massive body against the street, and struck with intent—less sweeping power, more controlled violence. One coil lashed outward, not at Eric, but at the streetlight he was using as cover, ripping it free and hurling it end-over-end like a thrown spear.

  Eric barely twisted aside in time. The streetlight smashed through a storefront behind him, glass and signage detonating outward.

  The Brute surged forward again, jaws parting wide as venom hissed across the pavement.

  Eric’s boots hit the ground hard. He felt the tremor in his knees, felt how close he was skating to the edge of what his body could take.

  Still not enough, he thought grimly. I need more fuel. Bad.

  Lightning cracked again.

  This time it wasn’t a bolt—it was a net.

  Arcing strands of power lashed across the street from opposite angles as the Angaria coordinated their casts, weaving a lattice meant to constrain movement rather than obliterate it. Eric felt the air tighten, resistance snapping around him like invisible wire.

  He cut through one strand instinctively.

  Pain slammed into him as void met structured spellwork head-on. The void devoured it—but not cleanly. The backlash tore through his arm, muscles spasming as he staggered.

  The Brute didn’t miss the opening.

  It hit him like a freight train.

  Eric was lifted off his feet and smashed bodily through the remains of a parked bus, metal folding inward with a shriek. His body punched out the far side and skidded across the street in a spray of sparks and debris.

  He rolled to a stop on his side, coughing, vision flashing white and black.

  Get up.

  The command came from habit, not hope.

  He pushed to one knee just as the Brute reared back again, coils bunching, mana spiking wildly as it prepared a crushing downward blow.

  Eric raised his blades.

  Not defensively.

  Deliberately.

  He reached inward—not blindly, not panicked—but with the practiced hunger of something that had done this before. He let his awareness slide along the Brute’s broken cadence, feeling for the dominant thread beneath the chaos.

  There.

  A deeper pulse. Older. Anchoring the rest.

  Eric centered on it.

  That’s you, he thought. That’s what I eat.

  He lunged forward instead of back, driving both void blades deep into the Brute’s torso at once.

  The reaction was immediate.

  The Brute screamed—not audibly, but through the violent collapse of its internal structure. Mana surged, then faltered, then began to drain catastrophically as the void latched on like a predator finding the throat.

  The Brute’s coils spasmed, smashing into the street, cracking asphalt and sending shockwaves rippling outward. Its strikes lost precision, lost force, becoming wild thrashes instead of killing blows.

  Eric felt it all.

  The drain burned—but it also fed.

  Power flooded into him in uneven waves as the void tore the Brute apart from the inside. His skin flared with dark veins again, but this time they receded almost as quickly as they appeared. The purple hue beneath his flesh softened, regeneration roaring back as fresh mana reinforced battered systems.

  The Brute sagged.

  Eric ripped free and staggered back, chest heaving.

  The Angaria shrieked in fury and unleashed everything they had—lightning, fire, compressed force—but Eric moved through it like a man wading through rain instead of a storm. Not untouched. Never untouched.

  Just… standing.

  The Brute collapsed fully a heartbeat later, its massive form crumbling into ash and dead scale as the void finished devouring what remained.

  Eric stood over the remains, shaking, breath ragged.

  Fuel surged.

  Control followed.

  He didn’t linger.

  He turned and sprinted back toward the shattered Primm Valley Resort, following instinct and rising screams.

  Mike slid the van sideways without thinking.

  The tires screamed in protest as he yanked the wheel, bringing the vehicle to a hard stop amid dust and scattered debris. The engine stalled. Someone shouted behind him.

  Mike was already out the door.

  “Hey—HEY!” Michelle called after him. “Mike—wait!”

  He didn’t.

  He’d seen the figure under the rubble—half-buried near a collapsed overhang where concrete had pancaked inward. A woman, pinned from the waist down, one arm twisted unnaturally beneath her.

  Training overrode everything else.

  He dropped to his knees beside her, hands moving automatically. “Ma’am, can you hear me? Hey—hey—stay with me.”

  Her eyes were open.

  Unseeing.

  Blood pooled beneath the rubble, dark and still.

  Mike’s breath hitched.

  No pulse.

  No breathing.

  His mind didn’t accept it.

  “RTO!” he shouted reflexively, voice raw. “RTO, we need a medevac—LZ’s compromised, I need—”

  He grabbed at the rubble, fingers scrabbling uselessly against broken concrete. “Hold on—hold on—we’ll get you out—”

  Michelle was there suddenly, kneeling beside him, her face drained of color.

  “Mike,” she said softly. “Mike—stop.”

  He didn’t hear her.

  He was back somewhere else entirely.

  Sand. Heat. The smell of blood and diesel. A voice screaming in his ear that help was coming when it wasn’t.

  He tore at the debris harder, hands bleeding, breath coming in short, panicked gasps. “Stay with me—don’t you quit on me—”

  “Mike!” Michelle grabbed his shoulders and shook him. “Look at me!”

  His eyes snapped to hers.

  She swallowed, tears streaking down her face. “She’s gone,” she whispered. “Mike… she’s already gone.”

  The words landed like a physical blow.

  The world rushed back in all at once.

  The screams. The smoke. The thunder of distant impacts.

  Mike sagged back onto his heels, hands shaking violently.

  “I—” His voice broke. “I thought—”

  “I know,” Michelle said, pulling him into a tight embrace despite the chaos. “I know.”

  Nearby, Inaria watched.

  She stood half-hidden behind a fractured wall, her lean frame tense, translator humming softly against her collarbone as it parsed the exchange into meaning she understood far too well.

  She didn’t know their words.

  But she knew the sound of grief.

  She’d heard it before—on battlefields, in slave pens, in the quiet aftermath where survival was counted and worth was measured in who remained standing.

  Her gaze lingered on Mike.

  Not with contempt.

  With something cautious.

  Curious.

  Eric felt it through Hunger’s Passing.

  The spike of panic. The sudden hollow grief.

  He faltered mid-stride, teeth clenching hard enough to ache.

  Mike—

  Celeste felt it too.

  Her worry cut sharp through the link, a flicker of alarm that nearly made her lose altitude as she redirected a gust beneath her feet.

  Eric swallowed hard.

  The anger that followed wasn’t clean.

  It was messy and hot and furious at the unfairness of it all—at the bodies piling up while he fought monsters and fed on power like some damned predator.

  He leaned into it.

  The void answered.

  He burst through the casino entrance just as more rubble gave way overhead.

  “GET OUT!” he shouted. “MOVE—NOW!”

  A man crawled free from beneath a blackjack table, eyes wild. The ceiling groaned again, concrete cracking loose.

  Eric didn’t hesitate.

  He dove, throwing both arms up as void flared outward into a broad, curved shield. The rubble hit and vanished, devoured piece by piece as Eric took the rest of the impact on his back.

  They hit the floor together.

  The man stared at him, shaking. “What—what are you?”

  Eric sucked in a breath and pushed himself up. “Club bouncer,” he said hoarsely. “You’re over capacity.”

  The man laughed hysterically.

  Eric was already gone, vanishing in a plume of dust and manic laughter.

  He sprinted back toward the street, toward the second zone marked by instinct and pressure.

  And above it all, the gate shuddered again.

  Not from strain.

  From arrival.

  Something vast pressed against the threshold.

  Everyone bound by Hunger’s Passing felt it at once.

  Something big.

  Something powerful.

  And it was stepping through.