Time had softened Rheell and Lumis's rough edges. A month under the Upper City sun—that golden light filtered through an immense sky—had transformed them.
On the outside, they were just like humans.
Lumis, her golden hair now duller, more earthy , tied it back in a disheveled braid like the other girls in the neighborhood. Her skin, once pale as the abyssal moon, had taken on the warm hue of baked clay. Only when she concentrated, when danger loomed, did her tail emerge from between her lumbar vertebrae, a whip of muscle and sinew that could cleave flesh like paper.
Rheell, for his part, had learned to laugh.
Not like humans—those spasmodic, chest-shaking bursts—but with a low purr, like a large cat. Tobin said it sounded "like a furnace about to explode ," but no one cared.
Inside... that was more complicated.
Each devoured brain left them with more than memories.
It left them with doubts.
— "Are we human now?" Lumis asked one night, looking at his hands in the light of a beetle oil lamp.
Rheell did not immediately respond.
Echoes of other people's lives resonated in his mind:
— A blacksmith who missed his dead son.
— A prostitute who dreamed of the sea.
— A thief who cried every time it rained.
— "We are... what we decide to be," he said at last.
Mareth was a woman with strong arms and a weary look. She had buried three children—one from Netherfever, another in a Level 3 collapse, the last devoured by a Ghul-Teke—and yet her hands remained gentle when she stroked Lumis's head.
" You're going to get burned, kiddo," he scolded her one afternoon, pulling her away from the stove where a pot of bone soup was boiling.
Lumis blinked. The heat didn't hurt him. Nothing human did anymore.
But he nodded, feigning awkwardness.
— "I'm sorry, Mom Mareth."
The word "mom" came out without thinking.
Mareth stood still, her eyes shining. Then she coughed, wiping her hands on her apron.
" Go on, take this to old Dalk ," he said, pushing an iron bowl toward her. "You can see his broken rib from here."
Lumis smelled the contents. Bone marrow broth, bitter herbs, a hint of opium.
" He doesn't eat grass ," he said, recalling the former hunter's habits.
Mareth smiled.
— "That's why you give it to him. He doesn't say no to you."
While Rheell and Lumis were playing at being human, the Abyss had not stopped moving.
Lucy noticed it first.
The Skavrith—those cowardly gray creatures that stole food and fled at the first cry—now hunted in packs.
And they did it well.
The Destroyed Lab was a scar on Level 2. The walls were covered in claw marks—not random ones, but symbols—and the technicians' corpses had been stacked in spiral patterns. He had learned something from the humans.
" This isn't normal ," muttered Finn, a novice with a Karnash tusk spear.
Lucy didn't respond. She was too busy studying the remains of the lab.
The glass jars were broken, yes. But not by brute force.
They had been opened with precision.
As if someone—or something—had wanted to release what was inside.
— "Lucy! Here!"
The voice of Renn, another recruit, brought her out of her thoughts.
In a secondary chamber, they found the nest.
And in it, the Alpha.
It was different.
Taller—almost two meters of sinewy muscle—with grayish skin so thick it looked like tree bark. His face was a mask of scars and broken teeth, and in his right hand he held a rusty butcher knife, stained with old blood.
But the worst thing was the eyes.
Too human.
Smart.
Calculators.
Sitting on a throne of corpses—merchants, novices, even two veteran hunters—the Alpha looked down on them like a king looks down on his subjects.
" Don't run," Lucy whispered, feeling the sweat freezing her back.
The Alpha turned his head.
And he smiled.
In the Upper City, Lina felt like she was chasing ghosts.
The rumors were vague:
— "A boy who was cured of black fever."
— "A dog who was resurrected after being crushed to death."
— "Two orphans with eyes that glowed in the dark."
But when she questioned Mareth, the midwife just shrugged.
" People invent things to make themselves feel special ," she said, pounding herbs in a mortar. "Everyone here is hungry, afraid, or both."
But Lina was not convinced.
That night, while Lumis helped Mareth wash clothes and Rheell listened to old Dalk's exaggerated stories, Lucy and her team fled Level 2, with Alpha Skavrith howling her name in the darkness.
Meanwhile, somewhere on Level 2, Alpha Skavrith's knife sliced through the air before Lucy could blink.
—¡SCHIIING!—
The rusty blade passed millimeters from her throat, tearing out a lock of blond hair that floated in the thick air of Level 2 like a bloody feather.
" Shield formation!" Lucy shouted, stepping back with her black sword raised in low guard.
His companions—Finn, Renn, and Vex—grouped behind him, forming a semicircle of steel and tanned hide. The Alpha watched them, tilting his head as if studying a new piece of game.
He wasn't like the other Skavrith.
He didn't run around. He didn't scream. He didn't launch into blind attacks.
I was calculating.
And that made it a thousand times more dangerous.
The Alpha kicked one of the bodies at his feet—a merchant with his belly cut open—toward the group.
Finn, the youngest, instinctively lowered his spear to dodge.
Error.
The Alpha charged at that moment, taking advantage of the opening. His knife pierced Finn's shoulder with a wet crunch, sinking to the bone.
— "AAAAAGH!"
Lucy reacted before she could think. Her black sword slashed through a perfect arc, cutting through the air with an unearthly whiz. The blade struck the Alpha's arm, but...
—¡CLANG!—
It bounced.
The monster's gray skin was like petrified bark, hard as wrought iron.
The Alpha smiled—too many teeth, too sharp—and twisted the knife inside Finn's flesh.
Renn shouted something.
Vex cursed.
Lucy just acted.
With a fluid motion, he plunged his bone dagger into the Alpha's side.
This time, the blade did penetrate.
The monster howled, releasing Finn, who fell to the ground with a stifled gasp.
The Alpha stepped back, feeling the wound in his side. His blood wasn't red.
It was black and thick, like tar mixed with soot.
Lucy took the opportunity to drag Finn back.
— "Vex, the blinding dust!"
Vex—a thin girl with acid-scarred arms—pulled out a leather flask and smashed it against the floor. A cloud of abyssal fungus spores erupted into the air, filling the space with a toxic green glow.
The Alpha coughed, momentarily blinded.
But he did not withdraw.
On the contrary.
He closed his eyes... and sniffed the air.
" Shit, he's tracking us by scent!" Renn shouted, adjusting his obsidian axe.
Lucy didn't have time to respond.
The Alpha leaped at them, piercing the cloud like a demon shrouded in fog.
The Alpha's knife found Vex's belly first.
The blade slid clean through, piercing Ghul-Teke's hide armor like paper. Vex screamed, but the sound was drowned out by a red fizz that burst from her lips.
Lucy saw red.
His black sword moved on its own, striking the Alpha's arm once, twice, three times in the same place.
—¡CLANG! ¡CLANG! ¡CRACK!—
The third time, something gave.
Bone.
The Alpha's forearm snapped in two, and the knife fell to the ground with a macabre clink.
The monster roared, but Lucy gave it no respite.
He leaped up, using Renn's shoulder for support, and plunged his sword into the Alpha's left eye.
The black blade penetrated to the hilt.
The Alpha's body convulsed, muscles tensing like ropes about to snap.
And then...
Speak.
— "They... are coming..."
The voice was harsh, full of phlegm and hatred, but unmistakably intelligent.
Lucy didn't have time to process it.
The Alpha, with his last strength, grabbed her by the neck and threw her against the wall.
When Lucy woke up, the Alpha was dead.
Renn had finished the job, plunging his axe into the monster's skull again and again until it was reduced to a gray pulp.
Vex breathed heavily, pressing her insides against her own belly.
Finn, pale as death, tried to bandage his shoulder with strips of his own shirt.
And on the Alpha's chest, just above his heart, Lucy saw something that chilled her.
A brand.
An inverted spiral, carved into the flesh.
The same one I had seen in Lina's reports.