“Oh oh! Redjaw! Brother! The Maker-Mine has returned!”

In the bleary space between sleep and wakefulness, Nic felt Gwungo around him. The slimy cocoon dissolved, reforming as a single lizard that scampered about his shoulders, trying to pester him awake!”

Nic’s eyes snapped open. All four of them.

And for a moment he was disoriented, trying to resolve four separate streams of sight, before the four visions blurred into one.

He saw the dhampir, a one-armed figure puppeteering a massive skeleton of gold.

He saw Redjaw.

The water boiled with foam as the two clashed again and again, the assassin trying to break through, Redjaw placing his body in the way each time. And that body had paid the price for loyalty. Massive cuts bit down into Redjaw’s skin and muscle, his flesh hacked apart with crude, cruel force; Nic could see where a ragged cut had split his back down to the bone, and barely come short of severing his spine.

And still the beast stood in the way, even as its body shook and trembled with the exertion of standing.

“Come back.” Nic whispered.

Redjaw became a shadow and flew to rejoin the tattoo on Nic’s arm.

Leaving him alone with the assassin. The woman paused, hesitating- she had been ready to go all out when he was helpless, defended only by his familiar beast.

Now she saw death coming for her. A moment of silence held-

Then she tried to run.

Nic flickered forward, teleporting twice in rapid succession. His hand reached for her leg, trying to drag her back. She turned. The massive skeleton swept its hand down to strike him-

He slipped past, evading easily in the water. His limbs were longer now, more flexible, filled with a power that made movement easy, weightless, every motion imbued with a dancer’s grace. The massive hand clawed past him and his own weapon whipped out…

Her head was severed from her shoulders in one clean cut.

---

Nic emerged from the waters tracing his hands over his face, trying to understand how he’d been changed. His body was a strange hybrid, full of unfamiliar sensations, new muscles; even the flow of blood and breath within him had been restructured. He took it all in slowly, refusing to let the flood of new sensations overwhelm him.

Time was of the essence.

He had to adjust to his body, and then make it into a weapon he could trust.

He turned back, staring into the waters.

What he saw…

His basic form was still amphibian, slimy and soft. But the set of his muzzle was more elongated, with a distinct ridge running down the center to the two small holes of his nostrils. That ridge was a deep, saturated scarlet color, picked out with tiny scales. It stood in stark contrast to the deep purple-blue of the rest of his skin.

Four eyes. Two sets of two, stacked above each other, all made of crystal…

Teeth. They bristled from the outside of his lips, hard and keratinuous. Small tusks emerged at the edge of his mouth.

From the back of his head tendrils emerged, coming together into a writhing bundle that vaguely resembled hair and dripped over his shoulders. Each tentacle was surrounded by feathery pink frills that made them resemble the ‘fronds’ of his axolotl form…

A pang of regret.

Nic would miss being the tiny pink blob of death.

Extending from the sides of his head were long, flaring crests of thin, transparent membrane spread between jet-black quills. They expanded to either side of his face like a war mask, colored in bands of night black and electric blue.

His limbs were longer. His powerful forearms reached past his knees, and his legs were bent like a frogs, coiled up for powerful singular motion. Webbed fingers and toes still retained a dexterous grip.

He resembled something from the deep sea now…

Something old and strange.

Abyssal Fisher. E-Class // Sapient. A hybrid of many lifeforms, the Abyssal Fisher was created by merging the bloodlines of the Salamandrian clan with demonic influences, alongside a gift from the masters of the Abyss. Serves those powers as a herald of change and unrest. Unique.

Serves the abyssal powers?

He didn’t feel as if the force he had encountered in that dark place beyond the bloodline sea had wanted him to obey any kind of order or command; he had felt only hunger and hatred in its gaze.

Nic would be damned before he served a creature like that.

“Cultivation map…” He whispered.

The water rippled.

Titles -

Witness of the New Dao

---

Bloodline Progenitor

(You are the first of your kind. All costs related to innate abilities are halved. Title is lost if you lose your current form without furthering the bloodline.)

Ferocious Beast

(Rewards 18,500 First Wave Credits to your killer. Increase bounty by 500 with each Native you kill. Each dawn, gain credits equal to one tenth of your bounty.)

Sage-Artisan

(The Hand of Ash technique is recognized as your creation, and all costs related to it are halved.)

Cultivation Base (Unranked)

XII Physical Strength (0/6,000)

III Mental Acuity (851/8,000)*

II Spiritual Clarity (1,917/8,000)*

III Gift of Life (824/12,500)

Mistwater Step (41/5,000)

The Old Speech (0/50,000)

Bloodline Progenitor…

So he had become something new. And the reward was simply staggering - the costs of his abilities had been cut in two.

Which meant…

The Old Speech had originally cost 100,000 Essence to raise a single step.

He knew instantly that this was what had escaped from the darkness by burrowing into his soul. The ‘gift’ of the Abyss…

“What…”

He opened his mouth to speak, and a wave of force unfolded. The waters froze in place; frost raced across the surface of the lake.

“I…” The earth underneath him dried and crumbled apart as if it had suffered years of drought. The grass receded into yellow stubs, barely alive.

“Sofia?”

No answer.

“Sofia!?” He called out. The earth tore apart.

Nic bit down and cut himself off.

So this was his gift, then. A voice that destroyed the world. Simply from speaking those two little words, he felt a faint pull against his soul; every force had a cost and Nic suspected using this ‘gift’ might actually damage his spirit if he relied on it too heavily.

But that was a worry for later.

When Nic looked up, he saw the wretch-queen towering above his city. He saw fire and destruction.

Winterhome needed him.

Bracing his new body, Nic pushed his power into his legs. With a single leap, he flew up onto the air, skimming above the rooftops. He landed, the impact pushing his legs back into position. Another leap, another long moment of drifting.

In three steps he crossed the entire city.

---

Melville watched in horror as the beasts pressed in to the killing field again. Three times they had tried to breach the barriers. Three times they had died.

With the two defenders dead, the leader of the dhampir had brought out his weapon. It was a massive, bone white bow that produced a crystalline, aching note when the string was drawn back and tension ran through the frame. Each arrow was the length of an arm and tipped with hooked spines.

Each arrow was a life taken.

Whenever a beast found the courage to hurl itself into the barrier of swirling leaves, dozens more would follow, counting on the forerunner’s body to cut a safe path before being torn apart in turn; they would slam into the second barrier, clawing, biting, trying to rip through.

The bow would sing.

The second barrier wasn’t unbreakable. He had seen warps appear, scratches cut across the surface, once, there had even been a moment where a massive boar had been able to pierce one tusk through…

But each time, the bow cut down the attackers before they could break through.

Melville had one hope left, as he looked towards the sky.

The dhampir hadn’t noticed yet…

But Winterhome was rising. The winds pushed the floating city higher and higher, lifting it towards a wall of black stormclouds…

And while the beasts had failed to break through…

They had given Melville the cover he needed to shape one small wisp of cloud after another. His weathershaping Shard was pushed to the limit as he sent each cloud-puff drifting across the ground, creeping through the flurry of leaves to gather around the blood-colored wall of the second barrier.

First one…

Then three…

At five his fingers started to shake, and he could feel the warm, comforting energy of what Winterhome called cultivation beginning to run dry…

At seven…

At seven he could feel his limit.

Melville uttered a prayer as he closed his eyes and detonated the cores of lightning within each wisp.

Seven thin, crackling threads of purple electricity shot out- not towards the barrier itself, but upwards, up into the sky and the swirling malevolence of the fat-bellied gray clouds that gathered into a maelstrom overhead.

For a moment there was a silence, and Melville felt his hope creep away with every breath…

And then a crack of all-powerful lightning split the sky. It dropped from the anvil-shaped core of the clouds like a descending spearpoint, following the charged path the original, weak lightning had cut through the air. In a jagged line it descended, too fast for the eye to follow.

One moment there was nothing but hope.

And the next there was a purple-white scar on the face of the sky, crashing down into the barrier.

Shattering it to pieces.

The dhampir screamed as the weakened remnants of the lightning bolt cut into his flesh, igniting his hair and pushing him down to one knee. The humans, the beasts, the defenders of Winterhome all roared with a single voice of triumph.

Melville just laughed in a weak, reedy way, and watched.

The defenders were storming in, fighting their way through the leaf-storm. Altogether they had the strength of numbers and the weight of inevitability They reached for the blue-skinned creature that had attacked their city with angry hands…

The dhampir swept his hand out, and a row of stone soldiers appeared. They carried long spears that stabbed outwards, cutting down the first wave. Blood soaked the ground as stone mouths opened and let out a unified, chanting roar.

So what if they could only hold the ground for a second?

They would buy their master time to escape.

The dhampir smiled triumphantly, and began to run. A single leap threw him high onto the rooftops. Another let him evade the arrow that struck the thatch roof where he’d been as second ago. He was a darting shadow, drifting away from danger at incredible speed.

---

Norman perched on a rooftop, cradling the rifle. He’d spent days hunting with his talents, trying to find himself a weapon, something from the old world and his old life as a soldier. It was a beauty- he’d pried it out of the mud and spent days polishing, cleaning, trying to scrape and burnish it back to life.

Even so, he didn’t have the tools to calibrate it properly. As best he could tell the scope was off…

And the barrel was a little out of touch…

And right now, the wind was blowing, rain was coming down, the earth and the sky were conspiring against his shot as he lay there, old bones aching, one eye closed and one to the scope. His crosshairs tracked the dhampir as it fled…

“Fast lil fuck…” He grunted.

By all accounts, it was an impossible shot. Moving target, high wind, shitty gun.

His tongue hung between his teeth. His breathing was held just-so.

No amount of skill would make that shot happen.

So Norman closed his eyes, and in the dark, tilted and turned the barrel, searching for where lady luck told him to aim.

When fortune whispered his name, he fired.

The shot went on a long, high arch, up into the sky; the wind bent it back down and sent it tumbling on a strange, curved arc.

An arc that ended, explosively, by cleaving through the back of the dhampir leader’s skull and blowing a fist-sized load of blood and shrapnel out through the crater of his right eye.