“Fwoosh.”
Dragonflame bloomed and died in a deserted alley, lighting the damp stones for the length of a heartbeat.
Skye—currently a black cat with a temper and far too much pride—watched the oversized gray rat collapse.
If Red Falcon wanted a divination, that was his problem. Skye wasn’t a real seer, and she definitely wasn’t about to admit it to the Earth Ring.
So she’d done the next best thing: gathered “evidence” in the dock district, the kind of scraps she could later weave into something convincing.
She hadn’t expected to find anything. Demons from the sea rarely came ashore anymore.
And yet here it was—an animal that shouldn’t exist.
The rat was bigger than normal. But the truly wrong part was the left side of its neck.
A second rat head had been stuck there.
Not grown. Not born. Stuck—like someone had forced it onto a living body and dared reality to complain.
Worse, the grafted head was alive. It shared blood with the host. It bit and tore with frantic, savage hunger.
Skye had ended it quickly.
Now, as she sniffed the air, her pupils narrowed.
Demon taint.
So Bishop Frey’s dream didn’t need a prophecy.
It was already happening.
Skye should have turned back immediately.
Instead, she thought of Ethan.
He was a cleric at the Violet Goldenflower Church, living out in the outer district—close to the docks. Too close.
Demons weren’t pirates. They weren’t wounded Awakened. They were ancient things that belonged in deep water and sealed places.
If one had come up…
Skye rubbed a paw over one furry ear, then sprang up onto a low wall and vanished into the maze of roofs.
—
Ethan stood in the alley, sucking air into his lungs, staring at the notifications like they might change if he blinked.
[SYSTEM] Piercing hit – wound expanded.
[SYSTEM] Target ignited.
[SYSTEM] Kill confirmed.
[SYSTEM] Flint Fusion +3%.
Minutes ago, the first mate had snapped—rats erupting from his shoulder as he lunged.
Ethan had been ready.
Flint came up. Three shots. Three hits.
And the thing wearing the first mate’s skin went down.
The relief didn’t feel clean.
His mind spun anyway, juggling thoughts that didn’t belong together.
Three Mithril rounds… nearly four hundred gold. A painful number, but not as painful as dying.
There was the grim gratitude he hated admitting: if he hadn’t survived his first life in the apocalypse, his hands would have frozen now.
In his second life, he’d spent more than twenty years without ever touching a real firearm. No way he would have learned a revolver fast enough to aim while a target charged.
Even with his Hunter (Class) Skill—Wind Arrow, a forty percent boost to accuracy—instinct and experience still mattered. Without them, he would have been a beat too slow.
But the real problem was that last line.
Flint Fusion +3%.
Ethan had spent days thinking up ways to fuse the Relic Flint—everything from “oyster exterminator” jobs to signing onto a hunting ship.
Most of the plans hadn’t even started.
And yet one ambush had handed him three percent.
Every gift had a price.
And sometimes the price came first.
He pulled up the quest panel.
[PANEL] Quest: Fuse the Relic Flint Description: … Fusion Gain (per kill): – Ordinary creatures: +0.01% to +0.1% – Awakened creatures: +0.1% to +1% – Demons: +1% to +10% Tip: At 100% fusion, the Relic reaches its highest level. Current Fusion: 3%
Three percent in one go.
That meant the first mate had been…
Ethan’s scalp prickled. Two days ago they’d been crewing the same ship. Now the man had turned into something that tried to drag him into an alley and split itself into rats.
Why come for me?
Where was he taking me?
A pulse of power slid into Ethan’s chest like cold water.
He focused. Recognized the signature.
Skye—through their Everlasting Pact.
[CHAT] Skye: The docks reek of demon influence. Dawncaller power can suppress their taint. Stay inside the church. Don’t go wandering.
Ethan swallowed a laugh that wasn’t humor.
So it really was demons.
And not just one.
He didn’t want to leave the church. He didn’t want to see another shoulder-full of screaming heads.
But demons were also the fastest way to fuse Flint.
He looked down at the revolver in his hand.
Flint. A Relic built to be paired with Mithril rounds—built, apparently, to burn demons.
That was the only reason three shots had been enough.
Ethan remembered something he’d read in the church library:
The fastest way to fuse a Relic was to make it do what it was meant to do.
He tightened his grip until his knuckles ached.
He started planning again—this time with demons in the equation.
—
Fifteen minutes earlier, in the dock district…
Bishop Frey had come personally, drawn by the sheer wrongness of the situation.
“Any sign of them?” he asked Red Falcon.
Red Falcon shook his head.
Windrest City’s docks sprawled for blocks, packed with sailors, warehouses, cheap inns, and alleys knotted together like fishing net.
Trying to find two people in here was a needle in a haystack.
“My sailors are looking,” Captain John panted as he jogged up. “And friends from the shipping office. But we’ve got nothing. Should I—”
“John.” Frey cut him off, firm but gentle. “Rest. You’re still weak. Let us think.”
Captain John stopped arguing. He just exhaled, long and heavy.
Ethan had saved his life.
And the first mate… the first mate had been his partner through half a lifetime of storms.
Now—
John lowered himself onto a stone step, staring at the ground like it might give him answers.
“If it really is demons,” Bishop Frey said quietly, “we can try this.”
He produced a pale-gold seed—one end sharp, the other rounded.
A Sunblossom seed.
It didn’t carry much supernatural weight, but it was sensitive to demonic corruption. Dawncallers used it to track tainted traces.
Frey laid it on his palm.
The seed spun violently.
Its pointed end snapped toward a slanted alley ahead.
“That way,” Frey said.