"Hey! You lied to me!" I screamed, voice cracking, as the purple fire on my cloak fred brighter, casting wild, writhing shadows across the trees. "That's bad!"

  Chiisana threw her head back and ughed. Gleeful, completely unbothered. It wasn't a human ugh. It was the kind of sound that made small animals bolt and birds fall silent.

  "AHAHAHA! A fox-kin," she crooned between gasps of ughter, licking her fingers with a slow, thorn-sharp seduction. Her tongue flicked like a bde. "Lecturing me about lying?" Her eyes gleamed with something feral. "Your kind betrayed us first. You really like being a hypocrite, don't you?"

  I blinked, tilting my head in genuine confusion. Betrayed...? Us? The words rolled off me like water. I didn't know anything about grudges. I barely knew anything about my own supposed kin at all.

  Mostly because I wasn’t really one of them.

  I shook my head hard, shoving the thoughts away like smoke from a fire I didn’t have time to understand. "I don't care!" I shouted, the desperation rising in my throat like bile. "Just leave me alone!"

  Without waiting for a response, I turned and sprinted, feet pounding against the leaf-littered ground, wings heavy and awkward behind me.

  I didn’t get far.

  A sharp whistle cut the air and before I could even fully spread my wings, Chiisana’s scorpion tails shed out, moving with a terrible, fluid precision.

  CRACK!

  Pain exploded across my back as the barbed tips smmed into my dragon wings. The force was like being hit by a falling tree. I stumbled forward, almost face-pnting into the dirt, my vision going white at the edges from the shock of it.

  The impact didn’t pierce the wings, the scales were too tough but the sheer weight of the blow sent me sprawling, breath tearing from my lungs in a ragged gasp.

  "You think you can run from me?" Chiisana’s voice purred from behind, closer now, practically vibrating with wicked glee. "You woke it up, little fox. You think you get to walk away after that?"

  The forest loomed around me, blurred and twisted by pain and fear. Purple fire still hissed across my cloak, trailing flickering embers in the air. I tried to push myself up, wings shuddering, my hands scrabbling against the dirt. I had to move. I had to get back to Yuzu.

  "Ugh, please, I’m taken!" I shouted over my shoulder, my voice fraying at the edges as I sprinted full tilt through the forest. My boots tore up clumps of moss and dirt, leaving ragged scars in the earth behind me.

  The world became a smear of frantic motion—trees blending into streaks of green and brown, the scent of crushed leaves and damp soil stabbing my nose. I didn’t dare look back. I didn’t need to. I could feel Chiisana’s presence chasing me like a shadow stitched to my heels.

  FWOOM!

  A monstrous wall of fire exploded up from the ground just yards ahead of me, snarling like a living beast. The fmes weren’t natural, they burned with a coppery, sickly tint, twisting in unnatural spirals. Embedded inside the inferno were glittering, needle-thin shards, hovering like suspended knives, each one humming with malicious energy. Just looking at them made my skin crawl and my breath hitch.

  I skidded to a stop so hard I nearly pitched forward, throwing my arms up instinctively as the heat smmed into me, searing my skin even through the cloak. My heart hammered against my ribs like it was trying to escape.

  And before the full panic could sink its cws into me, a voice unfurled in my mind.

  Low. Ancient. Heavy with a promise that wasn’t mine to make. It wasn’t my voice. It wasn’t even human.

  "Must... Protect..."

  A searing fsh of purple burst in the corner of my vision and then, with a sharp, tearing sound like reality itself had snagged, a glowing text box snapped into existence right in front of me, pulsing like a living heartbeat:

  [Activating Frurvierth Rutirth Level 2...]

  [-2 Dragon Essence]

  The world shifted.

  Suddenly every detail snapped into unbearable crity, the texture of the bark, the individual strands of ash falling from the sky, the electric hum of life and death thickening the air. Dark clouds spiraled around my body, dense and writhing, ced with static. Purple lightning arced and spat from my fingertips. I could feel the weight of a storm condense into my muscles, coiled, waiting, hungry.

  And then before I could even choose to act, a surge of that crackling energy burst from me.

  The wall of fire didn’t just part, it exploded. The needle-shards shattered into blinding motes, scattering like dying stars across the smoking battlefield. A bst of purple wind ripped through the clearing, hurling ash and debris into the choked sky.

  The forest beyond y exposed, bckened, smoking, trembling but the path was clear again. For a heartbeat, only the hiss of cooling embers filled the air. Then from somewhere inside the smoking wreckage behind me, Chiisana ughed.

  It was sharp and joyous, cutting through the ruin like a sword through silk. A sound so bright and wrong it made every hair on my body stand on end.

  "That power..." she crooned, her voice a silk glove stretched over broken gss. Pure ecstasy dripped from every word, as if she were witnessing the return of something she'd waited centuries for. "I knew it!"

  Her silhouette materialized through the mist. Graceful, but terrible. Her scorpion tails shed the air in sweeping arcs, not out of rage, but excitement, like a dancer warming up before a blood-soaked performance.

  The scorched wind tugged at her bck dress and her silver-white hair, making them ripple like torn fgs. Shadows twisted and seethed around her feet, hungrily curling toward the pces my light could not reach. And her grin, that grin stretched impossibly wide, illuminated by the raw, violent purple still sparking around me.

  "You’re just getting started," Chiisana whispered, stepping forward into the glow, eyes shining like a beast that had found its favorite meal.

  Chiisana dropped to all fours with a sickening crack of her joints, her scorpion tails fttening low like a predator about to pounce. With a savage snarl, she dashed toward me, cws outstretched, slicing the air in front of her like she was already imagining my throat torn open.

  CLANG!

  A fsh of steel, a katana intercepted her cws, stopping them cold with a shower of sparks.

  "Mashiro, bery oki?" chirped a cheerful voice.

  A bck-haired girl in a dark cloak stood protectively in front of me, her smile wide and fearless despite the deadly situation. She winked once, casually holding her bde against Chiisana’s frenzied assault.

  "My girlfriend!" I shouted, grinning like an idiot despite the danger crackling all around us.

  Yuzu froze, blinking at me like I’d just sprouted a second tail. A pink blush dusted her cheeks, creeping all the way to the tips of her ears.

  "…nnai, girlfriend?" she mumbled, tilting her head slightly, voice small and bewildered.

  Before I could even gasp, another voice, a smaller, cuter one called out sharply from behind:

  "Code Nine, stay focused!"

  The shout came from a second figure, this one wielding a gigantic, brutal-looking greatsword that she swung toward Chiisana with shocking speed. The massive bde hummed through the air, a blur of silver and menace.

  Chiisana twisted her body at the st second, barely dodging the crushing swing. The ground cracked under the greatsword’s missed impact, sending chunks of earth flying.

  The second newcomer was dressed in a white cloak, her hair just as snow-white, mirroring the first girl’s bck-and-dark aesthetic, like inverted reflections of each other. Her eyes fshed with calm precision, a stark contrast to the chaotic battlefield.

  "Yuzu know, Code Seven!" the bck-haired girl, Yuzu, sang out, seizing the opening. With a fierce cry, Yuzu lunged forward, her katana a streak of silver as she aimed for Chiisana’s exposed side.