The golden shield is gone.

  It doesn’t even flicker—it’s just—absent. Gone. One moment a buffer between him and everything, the next an open wound.

  The cold of the world outside welcomes him instantly, dragging claws of immediacy across his nerves. Mist doesn’t slide past him anymore; it swirls slow and greedy, pressing in like a train pervert trying to smell his hair.

  He is exposed. He is seen.

  The absence of his field is like driving without a windshield, as suddenly everything starts pressing in, making him painfully aware that nothing stands between him and the world’s teeth anymore.

  And the world notices.

  Everything shifts. The colours of the street no longer flicker harmlessly against the bubble—they lunge.

  Things that have ignored him entirely now turn, angle, perk. Their bodies pulse in the colour of hunger, and Aster jerks forward with the kind of run that doesn’t need coordination—just raw, unpolished terror.

  Six blocks to 7 Heart Lane. Six.

  The first scream isn’t his—though it could come from something wearing his face. It is layered, deep, wet, like a drainpipe vomiting shadows. Something skitters overhead. He doesn’t look. He fucking runs.

  Every exposed inch of street is now hostile terrain. Mists coil. Vines reach. Surfaces crawl like time is melting at the edges, and every object has suddenly remembered it used to be alive and is bitter about it.

  The howling returns—distant, but too close to be safe. The Bloodhounds aren’t in view, but they are still breathing, still siren-ing, somewhere behind the curtain of golden light where Matter carves his own law into existence.

  Block five.

  He tears past a shattered storefront where moth-sized swamp gnats the colour of embalmed regret flutter hungrily, their translucent wings catching the shadow-rot air with microscopic teeth. As they see him, they whir and hinge toward him. Aster doesn’t give them a chance; he is already running full force past them, barely avoiding their ranting wing buzzes as he speeds by.

  Block four.

  His lungs burn. His ribs shout mutiny. Sweat stings his eyes. He turns into a side street—a severe tactical blunder because he doesn’t immediately see the large somethings dangling on a street-facing fire escape.

  He would have kept going if the sound hadn’t hit him first: a vibration in the air like the buzzing of a hive, the low thrumming heartbeat of something too alive for comfort. The thing isn’t a nest—it’s a swollen sac, pulsing with a sticky amber sheen, strands of something viscous stretching across the iron bars like the world’s most malicious spiderweb.

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  An entire colony of giant honey-pot ants crawls over it, bodies bulbous and translucent, each a different colour, bloated with luminescent fluid. They pulse in near-synchronous rhythm like a hive of beating hearts. The pulsing syncs with his breath.

  He stops. A bad call. The ants don’t.

  Three swarm down the fire escape like they’ve been waiting specifically for him. Their mandibles aren’t sharp—they are wet. They drip with yellow resin, some hybrid of saliva and weaponized nectar. One leaps. Aster throws himself backward, instincts dictating every move.

  He stumbles against a light post. Something glimmers nearby.

  A pole. Around one point eight meters, glowing softly in the broken sunlight.

  It isn’t exactly Excalibur. Not Excalibur. More like an abandoned street sign that’s having a mystical phase. Glowing softly, half covered in unknown nightmare goo. But he doesn’t care. He grabs it in both hands. His brain doesn’t have time to question the practicality of wielding non-approved glowing steel infrastucture against Astral wildlife.

  The pole hums—a low, unsettling charge runs through it, as though it wants to be used. It doesn’t feel safe. But nothing else does either.

  The first ant launches. Aster swings.

  Crack.

  It doesn’t hit with a splatter—more like a pop. A cranial explosion of amber goo sprays across the pavement. The rest of the ants react violently.

  A screech ripples through the colony. The sack shakes. Dozens of glowing heads turn in unison. Aster realizes what he’s just broadcast.

  The colony knows he’s fresh meat.

  They come down the building like a pissed-off waterfall made of sentient molasses—fast, precise, horrifyingly focused. Each one hits the ground already accelerating towards him.

  He swings again.

  Crack—Splurt.

  Another goes down. The smell is unmistakably sweet. Sickly. Like someone spilled sugar over a corpse and let it ferment.

  They swarm.

  He feels one on his leg—hot and sticky, wasting no time to burrow. He screams, booting it off. He swings the pole in a wide arc, spinning in an ungainly, improvised drunken-monk style of pole combat. The glowing rod screeches against metal. A satisfying squish.

  He is laughing now—of course he is.

  Is this how it ends? Beaten to death by glow-in-the-dark ant blobs? For the love of whatever god creates anthologies of cosmic hilarity, just why??

  Every step feels like running through static. His heart is shredding itself. But the pole—some part of him registers it vibrating with every impact. Thrumming. Feeding something back into him. His muscles burn, then don’t. His vision sharpens instead of narrowing.

  Either the weapon is doing something very illegal to his nervous system—

  —or this is just adrenaline discovering new career prospects.

  A particularly large ant leaps onto the pole. He flings it away, gagging. It has eyes. Too many eyes. They squirm across its head, blinking in sequence like a child’s toy eating itself.

  They latch back on.

  Aster roars—rage, panic, survival mess all blending into one animal noise as he slams the ant against a rusted mailbox, splattering amber ichor across its surface. The creature peels apart like a syrup-filled taco.

  He doesn’t pause. Doesn’t think. He runs.

  He runs until the hum quiets, until the swarm slows, until the pole is the only warm thing in his hand. His chest thrums. His awareness jitters with the bleeding auditory chaos of the world folding in on itself behind him.