“Sorry, boss. We just wanted to live. I didn’t mean to sell the defense map. Their price was… too good.”

Kapuen rolled the wrist joints. Pale-blue arcs danced across his Mechanical Arm. Gears hissed and chugged. A dull roar matched the heaviness in his chest.

He didn’t want their babble. They were rot in human skin. Masks and lies. Nothing useful in their mouths.

Under a sky split by violet rifts, Kapuen hefted a man-high chainsaw. He cut the speaker clean in two, like slicing timber. Blood rained. The iron scent crawled over the outland scrub.

Monsters from the crack adored blood. Scarlet eyes pinned Kapuen, and the weaklings trembling behind him.

Kapuen turned his back. The chainsaw dragged a thin diagonal scar across the dirt. He ignored the grunts. No point demanding answers. They wouldn’t escape anyway—the outland Monsters would shred them to pieces.

“I don’t know what they offered you. The base map, sold… That’s not all.”

He tore the blueprint to confetti. Sparks from jumping arcs landed on paper scraps. Flames bloomed and devoured them.

He glanced up at the rift with a thin worry. It was deep as a gorge, dreadful as an open maw. Flocks of Monsters poured out, far beyond what decades on the border had taught him.

It was worry, nothing more. He’d prepared for everything. He could bail anytime. The Twelfth District was just a place to make money. Clean up these moles, then leave—still not too late.

Screams behind him wouldn’t stop. Monsters licked blood off stone. Teeth chewed bone like dry sticks. Blood slicked their manes. They feasted, single-minded, on a rare meal.

He split a reckless Monster with a lazy swing. He readied to leave this broken stretch of nowhere. Empty earth, Monsters running wild. Ten-plus years on the job, and still no change.

He sighed. His Mechanical Arm snapped up. A steel spike inches from his temple met his palm. Pistons punched forward. The spike crumpled, then clattered away.

“Been tailing me for a while, huh? Nothing blocks your path here. I don’t know your hidey-hole, but thermal says you’re right in front of me. Looks like two of you…”

His rasp carried through the barren field. Silence held, same as always. They didn’t want to be seen. Odds were high Kapuen had crossed paths with them. Memory slipped, though. He’d dealt with too many Magic Maidens these years…

“Not just one, right? Memory tricks, vanishing bodies—one’s a mind-type Magic Maiden. The other steers metal. Two prime killers for Augments. What an honor.”

Standard Augment gear was metal frames and electricity-driven limbs. Most Augment minds stayed unstable from rejection reactions. Mind, metal, and lightning were the three great banes for Augments.

He forced memory to line up. Two silhouettes overlapped the faces in his head. In that instant, sparks burst from his thermal visor and body grafts at once.

Orange heat-sources in his eyes fell back to black. His mechanical limb systems died, limp as dead vines. A few sparks guttered along his arm.

Blackness stripped all color. No rustle, no footfall. The quiet felt like a mourning hall. Memory surged to the lip of death, and thought slowed to a crawl.

A veteran of the border, Kapuen felt his mind sink into a bog. Survival panic snapped awake. His body rolled hard to the side.

A steel spike shaved his cheek. A red line opened. Another spike speared his leg’s graft. It pinned him to dirt. He had to ditch the limb.

He hitched his weight on the other leg. The chainsaw propped him up. He inched toward the writhing black tide of Monsters.

Teeth tore his flesh like wet cloth. Needle pain kept him lucid. The Monster tide kept eating, bite by bite.

Even so, the enemy didn’t want him escaping. They wanted him rooted here, down to the last breath.

His metal limbs warped under terrible force. Old comrades-in-arms turned to shackles. Steel leashes sprouted barbs inward. They pierced skin. They crawled inside.

They didn’t crush his brain outright. They drove metal through his meat. They ruined the scraps of flesh he had left.

They played with him. They refused him an easy death.

Mind shocks came in waves. Dream and waking blurred, then stood divided like a canyon. He couldn’t tell dream from real.

He only knew life was ending.

He’d killed countless people and Monsters. Today he was meat on the board. The knife could be anyone’s. He didn’t know whose.

He could smell metal, sharp and close. In a heartbeat, blood drowned that stench. The spike hung above his skull. Next second, it would skewer his head.

“Ah—life is so fragile… But you’ll leave me something. A price for killing me!”

He raised a hand flayed to bone. He lunged. The steel spike punched through his torso. Using the last of his strength, he dove at the source. His bare-white fingers brushed someone’s skin.

He’d guessed right.

Light burst, gorgeous and cruel—the second firework over the plains in days.

Boom!

Fire rolled out. It swallowed the attacking Monster tide.

His last clarity clicked. Those two were the “trusted hands” his brother had once recommended. He’d rejected them.

But his foolish, inept brother… didn’t seem capable of this. So who wanted to turn his brother into a puppet?

He smelled a plot and had no strength left.

The thoughts thinned with the blast. Smoke drifted away. Black earth cooled under an empty sky. A nameless skeleton lay in the hush.

Two girls walked out of the dust. One wore tattered Magic Armor. One arm was gone, blown clean off.

Even with mind and dream braided together, that burst of will had kicked back hard. The mind-type Magic Maiden took the backlash. Kapuen clamped her arm. She didn’t dodge.

To handle Kapuen, the higher-ups sent two Magic Maidens of his caliber. They were tailored to kill him. Still, carelessness cost them an arm.

“Mission complete.”

The mind-type Maiden tasted a sour loss, but said nothing. She sealed blood with Mana. She followed the other Maiden. They vanished into the wild.

Night Frost, Qianchun, and Chen Xiaoyin clustered in the yard. Monster screams rattled the gate. Hao Wenqian was hurt. Kids from the orphanage needed care. Qianchun’s Mana was nearly gone. They were stuck inside the Yunyang Orphanage.

Illusory Glass’s “prophecy” was landing, one line at a time. Monsters gathered slow and sure outside. Soon, thousands might trample the orphanage flat. Staying wasn’t wise, but leaving wasn’t possible.

So an urgent defense meeting began in that cramped yard, barely a few dozen square meters.

Chen Xiaoyin, Qianchun, and Hao Wenqian were all at First Symphony. Night Frost could be stretched to Cantata Two. Add a worldly but powerless Mr. Eye Orb. That was all the strength in Yunyang Orphanage.

On that alone, they couldn’t stop a Monster tide.

One thing in their favor—Night Frost used a Cantata Two Magic Stone to lay a Formation. It was simple, but it could block several First Symphony strikes. Beasts and common Monsters couldn’t shake that invisible wall.

The Formation turned the whole orphanage into the sole haven inside the tide. A place to breathe and regain Mana.

Night Frost told Eye Orb and Qianchun to fetch the guns and ammo they’d bought days ago. She handed them to Chen Xiaoyin and Hao Wenqian. She crouched in a corner and thumbed rounds into magazines.

She felt she’d made the right call. They weren’t waiting to die anymore.

Guns didn’t do much to Monsters above First Symphony. But they shredded the rankless horde in a tide. That raised their odds of living.

Chen Xiaoyin hadn’t imagined Night Frost knew Qianchun, or knew guns so well—and carried them on her.

Most districts strictly limited firearms. But Order Keepers, underground outfits, and other forces had some guns anyway.

So the news sometimes flashed gun injuries. Border shootings showed up more than once.

Twelfth District numbers said yearly gun deaths ranked third among causes. First was Monster incursion. Second was traffic accidents. Across all twenty-four districts, gun deaths ranked second overall.

Raised on that, people feared guns on sight.

It was a crisis. Crisis needed tools. Chen Xiaoyin wasn’t rigid. She knew without guns they wouldn’t pass this trial. Even so, when the cold weight hit her palm, her body trembled.

Hao Wenqian, a Reserve for the Order Keepers, had trained in firearm basics and shooting. Chen Xiaoyin, stuck in the Mutual Aid Society, hadn’t. She’d only picked up stray knowledge.

“Don’t be scared. It’s just for defense. Don’t hit our own. Sister Xiaoyin… ahem—take the side gate. The front’s mine!”

Night Frost passed over the ammo and slipped away fast. From a distance, she checked the battle. The pure-white knight raised a greatsword. He fought the insect like forty to sixty, and the scale tilted against him.

Illusory Glass’s warning had sunk in. Each strike hit the thinnest seams in the shell. The first blows wounded that giant beast. Even so, the outlook stayed grim.

Fate held its line. Light burst from the Order Keeper branch. Space tore. The Moon Owl, stamped with Cantata Three, rose silent behind the insect Monster.

Fresh scratches crossed her face. Dust smeared her cheeks. The harm wasn’t deep.

Just like cycles before, she saved lives from a Cantata Three Monster’s maw. Just like before, her body squeezed out no Mana at all. Slabs fell from the building. They were about to crush the students below.

Moon Owl dove. She meant to shield the kids with her body. At the lip of burial, she felt the building’s corner breathe a whisper of Mana. Fine patterns edged the shadowed ground.

A Formation!

A paper note sat beside the lines—Premium Defense.

She didn’t know who left it. She knew it was hope. She spent her last drop of strength. She slid inside the Formation. An invisible curtain lit. Falling stone met its stop.

The Formation slowed the slabs. Moon Owl took light bruises. Mana drained, and she blacked out.

Chains on the gates snapped with a crisp crack. When she woke, she sent the students back to the branch. Same as before, she smashed her shackles and fought shoulder to shoulder with Yuan Dai.

The white knight swung the greatsword. Moon Owl opened a rift. Together they cut off the insect’s tendrils.

The rolling bulk raked Yuan Dai’s armor, two or three shallow lines. Acid from its maw tracked Moon Owl in midair. Swarms flooded in. Acid burned through them and splashed her. Her Magic Armor smoked black.

Their rhythm faltered. Momentum returned to the Monster.

Night Frost pulled her gaze back. That fight was a storm. This yard wasn’t better. At this speed of gathering, the tide would break the Formation soon—even with a Cantata Two Magic Stone as its base.

The chamber compressed. Mana pooled inside the chamber. Mana slammed into Mana, sparking like flint, and drove the Mana bullet. It punched through several Monsters clustered in the overlapped spot ahead. The backlash hurled Night Frost away, a swallow blown off a branch.

“Better to strike first than wait to die, right? That’s the saying, yeah? Still… this hits like a thunderclap.”

Annoyance pricked at Chen Xiaoyin like cold needles—was Night Frost a little too hyped? Back when they’d first met, she’d already wanted to snark at her.

Catching Chen Xiaoyin’s stare, Night Frost flashed what she thought was a cute face, sugar over steel, trying to bluff it off.

“Ehehe!”

She drew her gaze back, shutters closing. Her left hand lifted; pale-blue Mana condensed into a light shield before her. Her right hand gripped the stock, braced on her left arm, just like Qianchun.

She pulled a deep breath, cold as mountain air. She knew there was no path back, only a cliff. Fear is a shadow; you step through it. Whether it’s the bite of the gun or the howl of the Monsters.