The werewolf chieftain’s easy swagger blew away like fog in a cold gale. His body locked as if iron frost clasped his joints, not a nerve could twitch. Then changes roared through him like an elemental squall, muscles piling like thunderheads until he felt a strength he’d never dreamed of.

“Golden Aegis, break the hex!”

Roni’s mouth curled with a knife-thin smile, and the shield in his hand bled like a fresh wound. He never looked down, and his hands kept moving like a river that refused a dam.

“Roni! You bastard!”

Helpless terror surged first through Lewyn, and her fingers clutched the crystal orb like a lump of winter ice. Resolve set in her chest like stone in a riverbed, and she could only watch the storm she couldn’t stop.

“Equivalent exchange!”

At Roni’s last command, the shield woven by his gift shattered like frost-bitten glass. He only turned his head, lips brushing a sound like a prayer lost on the wind.

Time froze in Lewyn’s eyes like a pond under moonlight, every motion slowed to syrup in her pupils. Even Roni’s collapse broke into a stuttering reel, like frames torn from a film. The moment snapped, and Roni slammed to the deck like a felled tree, while ash fanned from the werewolf chieftain at a speed the naked eye could track.

“Aaaah!”

The werewolf chieftain dropped to his knees with a knife-edged howl, a dying beast clawing at the night. His spear slid from his palm in a red streak, and before he could snatch it back, Hercules’s gunblade spun out and nailed the withering hand to the deck like a black iron pin.

“Her… hurry!”

Roni, sprawled on the planks, forced his body up like a broken marionette, and his flesh withered faster than the chieftain’s, as if a drought burned him hollow. The rot raced him like wildfire up dry grass.

Hercules pulled a deep-blue round from the belt at his back, and the round glinted like a shard of dusk. He pressed it toward the magazine, then froze, his thumb locking it in place like a wedge. He looked at Lewyn, words rising like smoke, but his throat gave him nothing.

“Do it… now!”

Panic knifed through Roni before he moved, because his body was collapsing like a tent with cut ropes. He knew exactly what he’d done: Golden Aegis had bound his life to the enemy as the price, and shoved both bodies along the inverse path of flesh, like rivers forced uphill. The end would still obey the strength of the vessels.

The werewolf chieftain was a front-line butcher, forged by battle like steel in a forge, while Roni and Hercules were a tier below in raw body. Roni only wanted the chieftain driven onto a cliff’s edge, a narrow ledge for Hercules to strike from.

He couldn’t stomach one heartbeat of Hercules’s hesitation.

“Fire!”

“Ah!”

Hercules bit his lip until it bloomed with blood, then his hands flowed on instinct like a drill. He locked the round, and in his pupils burned Lewyn’s grief, the chieftain’s despair, and Roni’s… relief.

Bang!

The trigger broke like a twig, and the muzzle flowered deep blue like cold flame. A bullet, a pillar of light, ripped out with a wake of cobalt fire. The path it carved turned the air to pitch-black void, and that strip of nothing was more terrifying than the blue that birthed it.

The shot tore his right hand apart with its brutal recoil, bones splintering like dry sticks. Warm blood sprayed his cheek like rain, and he didn’t blink, only watched the round streak for the werewolf’s skull like a falling star.

The chieftain’s body had withered to a husk that barely moved, only the head still able to snake like a cornered serpent. He should have no strike left in him… right?

Hercules’s calculations guttered out like a lantern in wind, and blood loss smeared his thoughts like ink in water. He pinned his last shard of clarity in ice, because he had to watch the bastard die. They were elite hunters, but they weren’t Aphelia, not a queen on the board who could decide the battle with a single move.

If he had to act, he’d leave no cracks for fate to seep through.

He exhaled heavily, his breath like smoke from a burned field, and Angel’s Dust gnawed his mind with a hornet’s nest of pain. He wanted to put the barrel to his temple and end the buzz, but he couldn’t; the enemy hadn’t truly died, and a werewolf’s recovery was a spring that snapped back without warning.

Angel’s Dust didn’t just remake his body like tempered steel; it turned his bullets uncanny, a hunter’s miracle that erased dark-born things like chalk on slate. He’d used Angel’s Dust before, but never like this, never scraping the bones of his limits. He didn’t know if that one extreme shot could truly end a chieftain here.

Werewolves, short of the deep ones, healed like nightmares made flesh, a fact scored into hunter graves like tally marks. Hunters had looked away too soon before, certain of victory, and got torn to rags by a beast reborn in fury. The clans had paid for that lesson with centuries of blood.

Load. Chamber. Like feeding fire to a furnace with burned fingers.

Movements that were once breath-smooth now shook like leaves in a storm. Two fingers plucked a dark red crystal from his belt, glistening like clotted sunset. Under Angel’s Dust, the crystal twisted between his fingers and became a bullet of living scarlet, glassy as frozen blood.

That simple act drove him to one knee like a hammer on the anvil. He coughed blood in a hot arc, and his grip on the gunblade slipped like wet rope. Pain burned through him like a red river, and his sight cleared for a heartbeat. In the blood he spat lay tiny slick shards—bits of organs, torn like wilted petals—which meant his insides were collapsing like a house with rotten beams.

“Damn… it.”

The words slurred out like a broken reed, and fresh blood crawled from the corner of his mouth like a thin snake. His body had gone past the point of no return, a cliff with no handholds, and death waited like winter. He still forced himself up, step by step, to stand over the werewolf chieftain who hadn’t fully turned to ash.

Only half a torso remained, and that beast’s recovery still fought the annihilation rounds like roots clinging to rock. It looked like a matter of time, a long fuse burning down. Hercules watched the lower half try to form and then vanish into nothing, bloom and wither in the same breath, and he laughed like gravel. He walked forward, strength from nowhere, and drove the gunblade toward the chieftain’s skull like a stake for a restless spirit.

The lunge woke the beast’s last cruelty like a spark in dry tinder. No one could say how a half-body found that much fight, but both claws slammed the deck like mallets, and the head wove past the blade by a hair’s width. Teeth bit down on Hercules’s neck like a rusted bear trap, and his blood burst outward like a crimson fan.

The chieftain fared no better; Hercules’s last slash carved off half his skull, a red crescent torn from the moon. With annihilation’s burn in his nerves and pain scorching the head like wildfire, the chieftain finally became a mindless animal, frenzy chewing Hercules’s flesh to stoke his healing like a starving thing at a feast.

His arms began to vanish like smoke, and only a torso and head clung to existence like driftwood in a flood. That didn’t matter, not to him; more human flesh would feed the furnace…

But the more he ate, the colder fear crawled up his spine like black vines. For the first time, death showed in those feral eyes like winter in a pond. The flesh he swallowed was empty, dead meat without the shimmer of life, worse than common carrion, a mouthful of ash. He couldn’t draw one spark of essence from Hercules’s body, as if he were chewing a corpse dug from a snowbank.

Hercules smiled, pale and wolf-bright, and flipped the gunblade in his hand like a falling coin. He roared from his gut like thunder and threw all that remained of his strength into his grip, then rammed the blade into the chieftain’s skull like a nail through old oak. His red eyes dulled to ash-gray, and his trigger finger completed its last sacred task.

Bang!

The hot casing spat free like a golden seed, and the scarlet crystal slug drove into the chieftain’s brain with unerring malice. Power burst like a buried mine and blew the beast off him in a spray of dark and fire, and with it tore away Hercules’s left arm like a branch ripped in a gale.

That red crystal round was a butcher’s tool, forged from the blood of dark creatures like a curse set in glass. It exploited the hatred their flesh had for itself, and Hercules sent it to the brain, the throne room of the beast. In that instant of dazed silence from the internal shock, the crystal blossomed to dust, a storm of poison that gnawed the nerves like acid, then struck again like a second peal of thunder.

That should be enough.

Sight left him like lamps going out, and even the rip of his torn arm couldn’t find him through the dark. He fell backward, heavy as a puppet with its strings cut, and hit the hard deck like a sack of stones. At the edge of life, no lantern show unspooled before him; only cold spread like winter water, and black settled like night.

Did I help Aphelia? If I did…

That last thought rose like a paper lantern, and from the deep well of memory came a figure from a dozen years ago, when he was a boy and the world was bigger. She had stood before him, a rampart against the dark, gold hair like sunlight on steel, a queen out of legend.

Hercules’s mouth found a smile on its own, soft as dawn.