Chapter 75: 75. Outside the gate I

The mountain canyon was exactly where Owen’s coordinates had placed it.

Yuki had received them forty minutes ago, a precise geographic pulse through their bond, the kind of information that didn’t need words, just location and urgency. She had relayed it to Odessa before the Hunter Association van had finished loading, and Alfred had driven with a focused efficiency that suggested he had navigated emergency situations in vehicles before and hadn’t always been operating within legal speed limits.

They arrived at the canyon entrance on foot after the final half-kilometre, the terrain too narrow for the vehicle.

“Coordinates check out,” Alfred said, scanning the rock faces with the methodical attention of someone who had been doing threat assessment for longer than Yuki had been a hunter. “The portal gate should be approximately two hundred meters ahead, around the bend.”

Uru jiggled on Yuki’s head with a nervous, rapid pulse that it had developed as a shorthand for danger-sensed.

“Something’s coming out,” Yuki said.

She heard it before she saw it, boots on stone, multiple sets, moving fast. The sound of people who weren’t trying to be quiet because they had already decided the canyon was behind them and speed mattered more than stealth.

They came around the bend in a group.

The guards came first, six of them in tactical gear, running with the focused desperation of men who had witnessed something that had fundamentally reclassified their risk tolerance. Behind them, Rogers Trump, expression locked into professional neutral but moving faster than professional neutral usually required. And beside Rogers, Vonn, flushed, furious, his hand on his sword hilt, the kind of anger that was mostly fear redirected.

They saw Yuki at the same moment Yuki saw them.

Everyone stopped.

The canyon held the silence for exactly two seconds.

Then Vonn’s expression shifted from startled to something uglier, and Rogers’s hand moved to his inventory space, and six guards spread into a formation that said they had done this before.

“Well,” Rogers said, his voice impressively steady for someone who had just fled a dungeon. “That’s unfortunate timing.”

“Actually,” Odessa said from Yuki’s right, her Azure Sky Dragon already materialising above the canyon walls with a crystalline shimmer, its compressed water breath building in its throat, “I think the timing is perfect.”

Alfred planted his tower shield.

Yuki drew both katanas.

The guards moved first,

Three went for Alfred, the obvious chokepoint, the shield wall that had to be broken or bypassed before anything else could happen. Three came for Yuki, spreading wide to prevent her from focusing on a single angle.

Alfred met the first impact without shifting his feet.

The three guards hit his tower shield in a coordinated push, using combined body weight and B-rank physical enhancement to try to drive him back. Alfred’s stance absorbed it. Then he activated his shield bash, a short-range explosive skill that fired the shield forward in a controlled burst, the three guards bounced off it like water off stone and staggered into the canyon wall.

He followed immediately, methodical and unhurried, working the left-most guard’s weapon out of his grip with a leveraging technique that took three seconds and left the man’s wrist at an angle it hadn’t been designed for.

On Yuki’s side, the three guards came in sequence, not simultaneously, the canyon width preventing a true flanking approach.

Battle Intuition fired before the first blade arrived, the skill painting the incoming attack trajectory in a way that had become as natural as breathing over the past months. She activated Mana Reinforcement and the energy wrapped her body in a layer that caught the first strike and distributed the impact across her whole frame rather than the single point of contact.

She let it hit. Let the mana absorb it. Then stepped into the guard’s space before he could recover his arm, and Verida’s katana found the gap between his armour plates.

The venom hit his bloodstream and his legs went unreliable. He didn’t fall, but he stopped being a threat.

The second guard swung from her left.

Yuki activated Beast Shift, not on Owen as per usual. but On Uru.

The effect was immediate and strange and nothing like the half-dragon transformation she was used to. Her body didn’t surge with draconic power or alter its structure dramatically. Instead, where the blade connected with her left forearm, the flesh simply, gave. Became fluid. The steel passed through a section of her arm that momentarily lost solid coherence, the tissue becoming something gelatinous and translucent before reforming behind the blade’s passage.

The guard stared at his sword, which had passed through her arm without cutting anything.

Yuki headbutted him.

It was inelegant and extremely effective.

She activated Beast Sync while he was still reeling, pulling Uru’s shapeshifting through the bond, and her right fist expanded, the knuckles broadening, the whole hand thickening into something disproportionate and dense with the slime’s adaptive mass. The punch she delivered to the third guard’s sternum carried weight that her normal frame had no business producing.

He went down and stayed there.

Rogers had been hanging back, his green healing light already working, pushing recovery into the downed guards, re-knitting the wrist Alfred had bent, fighting the venom spreading through the first guard’s bloodstream.

Above the canyon, the Azure Sky Dragon banked and opened its mouth.

The compressed water stream carved a line across the rock face above Rogers’s position, not hitting him, but sending a cascade of shattered stone down in a controlled avalanche that forced him to move, to break his concentration, to choose between maintaining the healing channel and not being buried.

He moved. The healing faltered.

“Odessa!” Yuki called. “Keep him off the guards!”

“On it!” The Azure Sky Dragon banked again, positioning itself so that any direct path Rogers had to the downed guards ran underneath its breath attack range.

Rogers looked up at the dragon, looked at the guards he could no longer safely reach, and made the calculation of someone who was very good at knowing when a situation had stopped being manageable.

He raised his hands. Not in surrender, in preparation, green light building around his palms in a way that suggested offense rather than healing was also in his skillset.

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