Leonardo's left arm wasn't just sore anymore.
It felt like someone had shoved molten metal under the skin and left it there.
He hung in absolute dark, all one hundred and sixty pounds of him suspended from the shredded tendons in his left shoulder. His fingers, raw and slick with sweat, clamped around a twisted pine root jutting out of the cliff face like a crooked bone.
Below him there was no safe angle, no slope, no second chance.
Just a three-hundred-foot drop straight into the belly of the Elinor Woods.
The mist down there wasn't passive. It moved like a thing with intent, thick and freezing and gray, curling upward in slow coils that seemed to pull at his boots. Waiting. Patient. Sure that gravity would eventually do its work.
Above him, the nightmare kept moving.
Two shapes paced at the lip of the chimney, all jagged silhouettes and nervous hunger under thin moonlight. Click. Click. Their scythe-legs tested granite with short, metallic taps. Through the corrupted filter in Leonardo's left eye, they weren't shadows at all; they were bruised violet heat signatures pulsing in and out, sensory pits throbbing while toxic color bled into the fog.
They were looking down the shaft.
They were hunting him.
Creak.
The sound was tiny, almost nothing, but in that dead mountain silence it landed like cannon fire.
The root gave a weak groan. Dry vibration climbed his forearm and settled in his gut like cold iron. Loose dirt rained onto his face. Pine needles brushed his cheek and stuck to his eyelashes.
He didn't blink.
He didn't twitch.
Reflexes were a luxury and he was bankrupt.
Vazio wasn't camouflage anymore. It was structural support. A lie holding his life together.
To keep the root from snapping, he had to sink his core deeper into nothingness and make reality believe he weighed less than he did. Light as shadow. Hollow as fog.
His body paid the price for every second.
The two souls he'd harvested were still fighting inside him, thrashing in the cold vacuum of his core like trapped animals tearing at a cage. It felt like swallowing jagged radioactive glass. Corrupted mana slammed into Vazio's absolute zero and the friction cooked him from the inside out—organs first, blood after.
Focus.
His jaw locked hard enough to ache.
The air has no weight.
The air has no fear.
Be the air.
A shriek cut through the night.
Not exactly a sound. More like a low-frequency blow that skipped his ears and rattled his bones directly.
One of the Seekers moved.
It wasn't peeking anymore.
It was descending.
Pitch-black armored limbs reached into the shaft. Hooked claws found microscopic crevices with obscene precision. The creature climbed head-first, calm and deliberate, as if gravity were someone else's problem. Its vertical mouth twitched open and shut.
Leonardo looked up once and understood.
His death was crawling down the wall toward him.
No good options left.
Let go and become a stain on the forest floor.
Stay put and get carved apart.
Then the left eye flared again, hard and sudden, like a heated nail pressed into his cheekbone.
The soul-fragment kept bleeding into his optic nerve, forcing his brain to read information no human mind was built to process.
The cliff stopped being rock.
It became geometry.
Friction vectors where claw met granite.
Load paths under each limb.
Stress lines through the chimney wall.
Hairline fractures, dense nodes, rotten seams one bad movement away from collapse.
Climb up?
Impossible.
Just a louder death.
So he swung.
He dumped what was left in his burning core and threw his body sideways toward the inner wall, directly beneath the descending Seeker. Boots scraped wet stone and skipped over slick moss.
Nothing.
Nothing.
There.
His left toe caught a ledge that barely counted as one—an inch-wide flaw in the granite.
He released the root.
For one split second he was pure falling weight.
Gravity yanked him down.
Then his back slammed into the chimney wall. He flattened against the stone and jammed bloody fingers into wet moss to kill his slide.
The Seeker crawled past him.
Close enough to hear wet mandibles grinding.
Close enough to hear fluid shift in its joints.
Close enough to smell spoiled meat smashed together with rusted copper.
Inches from his face.
One random twitch and he was gone.
But it didn't register him.
In that creature's sensory map, Leonardo didn't exist. Vazio swallowed his heat signature. To the Seeker he was only another patch of freezing stone.
It kept crawling lower, scanning the void beneath.
Then everything snapped.
The pine root broke with a violent CRACK. Splinters and dirt dropped into the abyss like shrapnel.
The Seeker froze mid-motion.
Its frame locked rigid. With a nauseating crunch, the eyeless dome rotated a full one-eighty and tilted toward the falling debris.
Tiny window.
Microscopic.
Enough.
Through the violet eye, Leonardo caught the exact instant the creature's center of balance shifted down.
No thinking.
Thinking was slow.
He moved.
He drove off the inch-wide ledge with every scrap left in his calves and launched upward while the beast still looked below.
Not the armored back.
Not the head.
The anchor.
The eye gave him the point: one multi-jointed limb jammed deep into a granite crack, carrying the load.
Leonardo drew the Sting.
He cut in a short, vicious arc. The blade hummed, bit through shell, and vacuumed the life from that limb. Outer chitin shattered like thin glass while mana got torn out of muscle beneath.
The limb died.
Went slack.
The iron claw lost purchase and became dead weight.
The Seeker understood too late.
It hissed, sharp and panicked. Hanging vertical, head-down, trapped in a narrow shaft, losing the primary anchor was catastrophic. It couldn't twist free. Couldn't right itself.
Gravity took control.
The beast slid.
Its remaining limbs scrambled wildly, scythes screeching over wet granite, carving white gouges and throwing sparks into darkness.
Leonardo was already dropping back.
He reached blindly and found a jagged outcrop of flint. His fingers hooked it as gravity caught him. His left shoulder answered with a wet, sickening groan, threatening to pop out of place. White pain detonated behind his eyes.
He held on anyway.
The Seeker's massive body thrashed past him, vertical and unstable. Leonardo twisted his hips, drove the Sting forward, and aimed for the exposed soft underbelly.
The dagger sank deep where thorax met abdomen.
As the creature's own weight dragged it downward, he kept his grip and let that momentum do the work. The blade ripped upward through segment joins, opening a brutal, jagged vent in the armor.
Corrupted ichor—freezing and toxic violet—erupted over Leonardo's hand and hissed when it struck stone.
The blade tore free.
The Seeker tumbled backward into the void.
No scream.
No dramatic flailing.
It just fell, swallowed by the mist hundreds of feet below.
No impact sound came back.
Only silence.
A second later, bruised violet light pulsed from inside the fog—the violent rupture of a third soul being extinguished.
Then there was nothing but mountain wind.