The gravefang came out of the undergrowth like something fired from a siege weapon — all mass and speed and open jaws, the sound of it arriving at the same moment it did, which was already too late for anything reasonable.

"Renji!"

He was already moving when Ayra screamed it, twisting hard left on pure reflex, and the jaws snapped shut on the space his head had just occupied. He felt the displaced air on his ear. He hit the dirt shoulder-first and rolled and came up with dirt in his mouth and the beast already turning, faster than anything that size had any business being.

It hadn’t slowed down at all from the fall. That was new.

The three of them hit it from different angles before it could fully reorient — Kaede from the left, Renji from straight ahead, Ayra’s telekinesis slamming into its hindquarters from behind and torquing its weight sideways. The gravefang absorbed all of it and kept moving. It spun, used its tail as a weapon, forced Kaede to jump clear, then lunged at Renji again with its forelimb extended and the claw raking down toward his chest.

He got his sword across it. Barely. The force of the strike drove the blade back into his own shoulder and he grunted and held, and the pressure kept building for a long, grinding second before Ayra yanked the limb sideways and broke the angle.

Renji stepped back. Breathed. His sword arm was numb to the elbow.

"This one’s different," Kaede said. She wasn’t breathing hard yet but she was watching the beast differently — tracking it the way you track something that’s been surprising you.

"Noticed that too," Renji said.

"Any thoughts?"

"Several. None of them helpful."

The gravefang came again. It wasn’t strategic about it — it wasn’t trying to pick them apart or find a weakness. It was operating on something older than tactics, throwing its full weight into every strike like it intended to break the world apart through repetition. A claw caught Renji across the forearm and opened a cut before he got clear. Another swipe clipped Kaede’s side and staggered her two steps, and she swore under her breath and came back in harder than before.

"Don’t stop moving!" Renji called.

"I know how to fight—"

"Then move!"

She moved. She hated that he was right and it showed in how viciously she engaged the next exchange, sword cracking against the bone plating in a burst of sparks, her essence burning hot along the blade. Three strikes in fast succession, the third finding the thin gap under its jaw and drawing blood. The gravefang snapped at her face and she leaned back just far enough and came forward again immediately after.

Behind them Rei was making small sounds she probably didn’t know she was making — barely audible, involuntary, the sounds of someone watching things happen that they can’t stop fast enough. Her hands moved from Renji’s forearm to Kaede’s ribs to a gash on Ayra’s temple that had appeared between one blink and the next, spreading her reserves thin and thinner, the glow of her healing dimmer now than it had been at any point tonight.

"Rei," Ayra said sharply between movements. "Save what you have left."

"You’re all bleeding—"

"Save it."

Ayra turned back to the gravefang and her expression had gone to the cold place again. The gentle version of her — the one that steadied Rei on slopes and laughed quietly at Renji’s jokes — had stepped back and left this one in charge. She was pulling debris from everywhere now, whatever the forest floor offered, a rock here, a root there, a chunk of bark the size of a shield that she sent spinning into the gravefang’s temple hard enough to snap its head sideways. When it lunged at her she didn’t retreat. She grabbed its foreleg with her mind and pulled, redirecting its momentum so it crashed past her and into a tree trunk, and she followed that immediately with everything loose in a ten-foot radius launched at its face in rapid succession.

"Stay down," she told it. Same quiet voice as before.

It got up.

It always got up.

Renji wiped blood from his forearm on his trousers and rolled what was left of his essence through his sword arm one more time. It was enough for one more real effort. Maybe one and a half if he was careful. His shoulder ached in three distinct ways and he was running the kind of tired that lived behind your eyes and pressed forward.

He looked at Kaede.

She was already looking at him

They’d developed a language for this over the last several hours — a shorthand built out of necessity, communicated in nothing more than angles and timing. He tilted his chin slightly toward the gravefang’s right side. Her eyes moved there. Came back. She almost nodded.

Ayra locked the beast’s foreleg. Not both — she didn’t have enough left for both — but one, held rigid and useless with the last real concentration she could sustain, and she poured everything into making it last just long enough.

The gravefang lurched, imbalanced, furious, jaws snapping at empty air.

Kaede leaped.

She came down with her sword two-handed, all her remaining essence behind it, and drove it through the gravefang’s skull. The sound was singular and final. The beast dropped and didn’t move and the silence that fell after it was total.

Nobody spoke.

The forest sat around them, indifferent as it had always been. The mist continued its slow drift between the trees. Somewhere distant, something that wasn’t a gravefang made a small sound and went quiet.

Renji lowered his sword. Looked at the others. Alive. Damaged, exhausted, and alive.

He let out a long breath through his nose.

They carved the crystals out in silence — the glowing cores embedded deep in the gravefangs’ chest cavities, pulsing faintly even in death, worth something to someone somewhere if they ever found somewhere to sell them. The work was grim and methodical and nobody talked while they did it. When it was done they walked back to the road.

The carriage was exactly as terrible as he remembered.