Chapter 92: Chapter 92: Voices in Dry Scar

The three dead scorpions changed the shape of the day.

Neo and Alice did not speak right away after finding them. They stood in the sand with the wind dragging grit around their boots, each one reading the same thing in the carcasses ahead. Other awakened had passed through here. Recently. The cuts were clean, the bodies not yet half-swallowed by the dunes, and one of them had been opened at the core with enough precision to say whoever killed it knew exactly what they were doing.

Neo broke the quiet first.

"So much for empty hunting grounds."

Alice kept her axe low and scanned the dunes ahead. "We were warned."

"Yeah. I preferred it as a rumor."

She turned toward the next rise. "Are we leaving?"

Neo almost laughed at that.

"No. We came all the way out here. I’m not going back because someone else had the same idea."

Alice gave a short nod.

They moved on.

Dry Scar widened around them in long folds of sand and old stone. Some dunes curved gently, almost smooth from a distance, until the wind peeled their surfaces and showed darker earth beneath. The dead trees rose here and there like pillars left from a kingdom no one remembered properly, huge trunks clawing up into the pale sky. Between them, half-buried ruins broke the ground at odd angles.

It was ugly in a way Neo liked.

A place that did not ask to be admired usually had fewer idiots walking into it with false confidence.

The next beast came out from behind a collapsed slab of stone, a lean thing with eight legs and a back covered in needle-like ridges of hardened sand. Alice reached it first. Her axe came down in a clean diagonal stroke that split shell and body in one motion. The creature dropped without even earning a second swing.

Neo stepped over it and crouched at the forming core.

"That was fast."

Alice rested the axe against her shoulder. "It was weak."

"Try saying something surprising one of these days."

She glanced at him with the same cold calm as always. "You talk enough for both of us."

Neo took the orb and crushed it into his soul.

[Soul-Window]

[You have consumed Dune Needleback - Ember Core.]

[+2 Souls]

[204/2500 Vein]

The glow vanished into him.

They kept going.

The next stretch gave them two ash-colored hounds half-buried near the roots of one of the dead trees. These moved better than the scorpion had, low and ugly, jaws long, limbs wrong in the way desert things often were, like the bones had been designed by something that cared more about speed than beauty. Neo met the first with Beast Strength alive through his body and drove one blade under its jaw. The second came for his side and Alice cut it out of the air with a single brutal swing that sent sand spraying.

They split the cores without discussion.

By the time the dunes shifted again and the sun climbed higher, they had fallen into rhythm.

A lizard with stone-plated shoulders tried to bolt between them and died with both of Neo’s blades buried in its ribs. A burrow eel exploded from beneath a patch of cracked ground and almost got a bite out of Alice’s leg before she stepped off-line and caved its skull in with the butt of the axe. Another scorpion came out of the sand larger than the first. Neo opened it with both fangs in quick succession, the Mourning Venom spreading through the wound while Grave Wound made every movement tear the inside farther apart. Alice finished it after Valkyries’ Call washed over them in a pale surge and gave his next step more force than the beast could handle.

The day moved like that.

Kill. Core. Move.

They divided everything evenly. No arguing. No counting aloud after each beast. When one of them killed, the other covered. When a core formed, they split the gains by instinct, the same way people passed water around when they knew the road ahead was long.

At one point, they stopped beside the leaning remains of an old wall while the wind pushed sand along the stone in thin hissing lines. Neo sat on the broken edge and rolled one shoulder. Alice stayed standing.

"You can sit, you know."

"I know."

"Does your body reject comfort on principle?"

Alice looked out over the dunes. "Someone should keep watch."

Neo clicked his tongue. "That sounds like an excuse."

"And you sound bored."

"I am."

"Good." She adjusted the grip on the axe. "Bored people make mistakes less often than excited ones."

Neo stared up at her. "That might be the bleakest sentence I’ve heard all week."

He let that go and checked the total after the next few kills.

[Soul-Window]

[222/2500 Vein]

’Twenty more.’

Not bad.

The number looked better than it had that morning, but Vein Core stretched long in front of him, and he knew it. Dry Scar was useful. Gray Hand would be better. Breaches better than that. A Godscar Ruin better still.

He rose from the stone and flicked dry blood from one of the blades.

"We keep moving."

Alice nodded. "There’s a ruin ahead."

He had seen it already.

A wider structure this time, mostly buried, with three stone teeth rising from the dune around it and a section of broken floor still exposed to the air. Near it lay another dead beast.

Then another.

Then another.

These were not fresh enough to shine. The sand had started claiming them, but not fully. Different kills too. A dune hound cut through the torso. A stone lizard with its head crushed. Another scorpion opened neatly where the core should have been.

Neo slowed.

Alice came level with him and studied the bodies in silence.

"Same people?" she asked.

"Probably."

His grip tightened slightly around the twin fangs.

Other awakened in the same hunting grounds was one thing. Other awakened leaving a trail through the same area at almost the same pace was another. The driver’s rumor returned to him then, ugly and plain.

An awakened killing awakeneds. Maybe this was nothing, or maybe not and it was exactly that.

The wind shifted.

Neo felt it before he fully understood why it bothered him. The dunes ahead had gone quiet in the wrong way, as if the whole stretch of land had inhaled and chosen not to breathe out yet. Alice must have caught the same thing because her stance changed beside him, the axe lowering from rest into readiness.

Neo’s voice came low.

"Someone’s there."

Alice answered without turning. "I know."

A shadow moved near the broken ruin. Just stepping into view with the easy confidence of someone who had already decided the field belonged to him.

A second figure stood a little behind him, half turned, strange even from a distance. Neo’s expression flattened.

"Two," he said.

Alice adjusted her footing in the sand, axe lowering into a more useful angle. "Awakened."

"Yeah."

The first one stopped near the exposed ruin floor and tilted his head, studying them with visible interest. The second remained behind him without speaking, the wind moving around his clothes while he stood there like something placed instead of someone arrived.

Then a voice crossed the dunes, light on the surface and ugly underneath.

"Oh? There are more awakened hunting out here?"