The monster emerged from its hiding place still wearing that wretched smile.
Elia identified it immediately — a spawn, and a foul one at that. Before she could move, Ivel raised a hand toward her.
"Don't," he said.
She was reluctant. Every instinct she had told her to step in. But she held her ground and respected his request, folding her arms as she pulled back from the clearing.
Ivel turned to face it alone.
Up close it was even worse than he had imagined. The creature towered over him, its body a grotesque arrangement of angles and darkness that seemed to shift even when it was standing still. He steadied his breathing.
It's a full core step above me. I just can't get hit. He swallowed. Simple enough.
He almost believed it.
The nightcrawler struck first — a burst of speed that gave no warning. Ivel threw himself sideways and the claws carved through the air where his neck had been. The creature gave him no moment to recover. It came again, and again, moving like a violent torrent, each strike more ferocious than the last. Ivel kept moving, reading the rhythm of it, ducking beneath a wide swing and driving his sword toward the creature's abdomen.
In the same instant, the horns that protruded from its body extended outward and curved inward, locking together like a shell across its stomach. His blade connected — and shattered against them.
He leapt back.
"Curses."
He looked down at his chipped sword, then at his arm where several broken horn fragments had caught him, tearing open shallow wounds along his forearm. When he looked back up, the creature's horns had already healed, smooth and whole as if the exchange had never happened.
The monster smiled at him.
Ivel stared at it for a long moment.
"I don't think I've ever wanted to kill something so much in my life."
Purple sparks crept along his knuckles, climbing up his arm.
"Fine," he said quietly. "If you won't be fair, neither will I."
The smile vanished from the creature's face. In its place came something darker — a malicious, twisting expression that rippled across its features as it drove its horns outward, launching them like projectiles. They came at him like striking vines, dozens of them, relentless and from every angle. Ivel sidestepped and parried, his movements sharp and fluid, though every deflection cost him — the chipped blade grew worse with each impact, notch by notch losing what remained of its edge.
Nearby, Elia had not been idle. Monsters drawn by the noise of the fight had begun filtering through the treeline, and she moved among them without urgency, dispatching each spawn and stray genesis creature the forest sent her way.
Ivel glanced at what was left of his sword.
I should have known this wouldn't be enough.
The creature seemed to sense it too. Something like relief passed over its face as it regarded the ruined weapon. But that relief lasted only a moment — Ivel hurled the sword directly at it. The creature sidestepped the tumbling blade and lunged forward to finish him.
Ivel was already there.
He was inside its guard before it could adjust, close enough to see the hollow darkness of its eyes. He drove his foot into the creature's right leg with a speed that made the impact sound like a crack of stone. The leg shattered. The nightcrawler buckled and dropped to one knee.
Ivel placed his hand on the top of its skull.
The creature looked up at him. The towering thing that had smiled and taunted and healed itself as though it were untouchable now looked at the boy in silence. There was no smile. There was nothing of what it had been before.
"Where is your smile now, nightwalker?"
Lightning surged through it.
It convulsed, writhing against the current as Ivel increased the voltage, and then it dropped — smoke rising from its body in slow, curling columns as it lay still on the ground.
Ivel stood over it.
He exhaled.
Then he went and retrieved his ruined sword from where it had landed, tucked it under his arm, and dragged himself across the clearing toward Elia, who had since finished with her own work and was now seated with an air of complete ease atop a small pile of monster corpses — spawns and genesis creatures alike — her legs crossed, expression bored.
She yawned.
"Are you finally done?"
Ivel nodded without a word. He crouched beside the nightcrawler's body, gripped the hilt of the chipped sword, and drove it into the creature's chest, probing for a nexus core. He felt it give — and there it was.
"Lucky, too," he said, holding it up.
Elia leaned forward and held out her hand. He passed it over with some reluctance, though he knew she had her reasons. She turned it over slowly, studying it, then handed it back.
"Don't get too excited. The quality isn't good."
Ivel frowned. "How can you tell?"
"Rune language. Every core a monster leaves behind is imbued with it — it describes the quality directly, if you know how to read it." She nodded at the core in his hand. "That one is physical. Protrudes horns from the body. Practically useless."
He looked down at it. As much as he didn't want to admit it, she was right. The horns had barely protected the creature even in the fight. There were qualities that could harden a person's body far beyond what a shell of bone spurs could offer, and this wasn't one of them.
He sighed.
"Sorry, kiddo. Rare doesn't always mean good." She tilted her head. "Though the claws do sell well. People pay for the poison inside them."
Ivel looked up sharply. "Poison?"
"Mm."
"Why didn't you tell me that before it scratched me?"
Elia glanced at the wounds on his arm, then back at him with a complete absence of concern. "You're still alive, aren't you?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at her.
He had no argument for that.