"I need a different weapon. My dagger isn't going to cut it."
As for how to get a new weapon in the middle of nowhere — Ryan looked at the creature and had an idea.
He started running toward the sparse trees scattered across the open field, using the creature's habit of lunging straight at him on the first charge to let it run itself into a trunk.
Watching it slam headfirst into a tree — coming out unscathed itself while splitting the trunk nearly in half — Ryan let go of his last trace of concern.
No brain whatsoever. Relying on sheer toughness to tank anything that isn't a direct attack.
He began circling the half-split tree with the creature in tow. Since he had no way to sense the creature's position once it vanished, reproducing the old trick of putting a pillar between yourself and a pursuer was out. He had to make do with the clumsy alternative: luring it away, then drawing it back to collide with the tree again.
After several repetitions, Ryan finally had a hard-won club in his hands.
"Not ideal, but it'll do."
He tested the weight while dodging the creature's attacks.
To be fair, it wasn't entirely brainless. Without needing to chase Ryan, it had learned to vanish immediately after each missed lunge, and usually reappeared to strike from his flanks or rear.
Without his danger sense, this thing might have actually pushed him into real trouble.
But now Ryan had the club in one hand and the sun talisman palmed in the other, studying the creature's attack patterns while his mind wandered freely:
Did this thing come from a loss of control? But loss of control from a potion is supposed to be a gradual process — how did the official Extraordinaires not put it down before it went completely feral? Bad timing? Or did an evil god cause this one?
The creature lunged again and again, every lunge missing by inches. Its only realistic chance of landing a hit was to wear Ryan down until he couldn't dodge anymore.
Without the talisman, that might genuinely have been possible. In that case he'd simply risk being detected and lead the creature back to the official Extraordinaires.
"Sun."
After dodging another attack, Ryan spoke the one Ancient Hermes word he knew and deliberately left his back exposed.
He'd practiced this alone many times during quiet hours, so the talisman's faint tremor and the sudden rush of spiritual power flooding through him were familiar. This time, he finally directed that power and channeled it into the disc.
The creature hadn't understood what the word meant. It came at him from behind, same as always.
Ryan was ready. He stepped left to evade, pivoted right, and swung the club upward at a diagonal. The angle and trajectory didn't allow much natural force — but he had Power Strike.
The club accelerated and struck one of the creature's legs exactly as planned. At the same moment, the talisman in his left hand blazed with light, scattering the darkness, warming his body — and cutting off the creature's instinctive attempt to dissolve into shadow and avoid the blow.
Crack.
A clean, sharp sound. The creature lost its balance and tumbled to the ground.
While the talisman's light still held, Ryan stepped forward hard, released the talisman and let it fall, gripped the club with both hands, and brought it down on the creature's nearly-severed leg with everything he had.
Given the creature's earlier sprint back toward escape, he didn't bother raising the club for a proper swing — he just drove it straight down, relying entirely on Power Strike for damage.
The call was right. Club and hands came down on the broken leg before the creature could roll clear, driving into the ground with a dull, heavy crack.
What followed was easier than expected. The creature, apparently feeling no pain, simply wrenched itself free — and tore its own lower leg off, saving Ryan a second blow.
But by then the talisman had spent itself, its material consumed in service to its god, leaving only faint embers on the ground. Ryan, who had been wanting to get in a few more hits to vent his frustration, could only watch the creature vanish back into the darkness.
"At least I'm not entirely on the back foot. Still — I really should have brought a light source."
His danger sense interrupted before he could finish the thought. He threw himself sideways and watched the creature lunge past — limping, lopsided, but still coming for him.
Ryan finally let the frustration out loud:
"Are you serious?! Why won't you run? What do you even have against me?"
The creature, naturally, said nothing. Ryan resigned himself to his luck and ran for Birkoff.
"Well, I'm leading it back anyway. I just hope the Church people are actually doing their jobs."
The creature couldn't keep up with him now, but the lingering sense of having done all that work for nothing wouldn't leave him.
He made a silent promise to always carry matches from now on, and began his long run back with the creature dragging along behind.
Boring stretches had a way of making the mind wander — especially with something that might represent one of his possible futures crawling after him.
If I lost control, would I end up like that? That ugly, and completely mindless... basically just a punching bag.
He didn't dwell on it too long. By then he'd be dead anyway, so it really wouldn't be his problem. The only thing he could do was try not to lose control somewhere crowded, so as not to terrify innocent bystanders.
As for what happened to his remains afterward — Ryan had never cared about that sort of thing. Funerary rites were comfort for the living, not the dead.
He had to admit: when the torchlight at Birkoff's edge came into view, and he spotted five or six official Extraordinaires on patrol, he felt something very close to the relief of seeing family.
Then he noticed two of them had already spotted him — still running Shadow Lurk — and were closing in.
The relief flipped immediately to panic.
How does everyone see through this? No wonder the ability isn't called invisibility.
He spun and bolted. Any plan of quietly slipping past the officials and letting them handle the creature had just collapsed. Now he just needed to outrun his accidental allies.
He dodged a lunge from the creature — which had started to feel almost familiar — flipped it a middle finger, the first and last it would ever receive, and ran full speed upstream along the Tasok.
The officials, fortunately, hadn't immediately noticed the headless creature chasing him from behind. Only two gave pursuit at first — and they couldn't abandon a shadow-merging creature to chase someone who had already gotten much farther away.
By the time they signaled the others and finished off the creature, Ryan was long gone.
"What happened here? Is the rogue already dead?" The four who arrived on the signal stared at the remains with mild surprise.
"We just finished it off — but one of its legs was already broken before we got to it. Must have been that Extraordinaire we spotted through Spiritual Vision earlier."
Someone considered the sequence of events and almost laughed. "He was trying to lead it back to the city to deal with it using the light — and then we startled him into running back out?"
"Almost certainly. Otherwise he would've just gone straight into the city from the start. He compensated for my mistake. He may have saved quite a few people." The Nighthawks officer who had originally engaged the creature spoke up. "Did anyone get a clear look at him?"
"No, Captain. He also has an ability to conceal his form. Through Spiritual Vision we could only make out that he was very large."