Chapter 83: Mira

Mira moved steadily through the desolate environment, her posture alert and cautious as she navigated the ruins of the Forgotten City, her eyes constantly scanning her surroundings as she continued her increasingly frustrating search for Dabba.

She kept her pace controlled and measured, resisting the urge to rush despite her growing impatience. Rushing meant making mistakes, and mistakes in a place like this meant death.

Suddenly, she heard movement nearby that was distinctly different from the ambient sounds she’d been filtering out. It was a heavy, scraping noise, the sound of something large dragging across stone.

The rhythm was irregular, suggesting multiple sources rather than a single creature. The noise immediately put her on edge, her body tensing as adrenaline began flowing through her system.

Recognizing the sound as potentially coming from Dabba, finally, after all this searching, Mira immediately shifted her approach. She dropped into stealth mode, lowering her profile by bending her knees and hunching her shoulders to reduce her visible silhouette.

Her movements became even more deliberate and quiet, each foot placement carefully chosen to avoid loose debris that might crunch or shift beneath her weight and announce her presence.

She moved quietly toward the source of the sound, using the ruined structures around her as cover.

From behind the cover of a partially collapsed wall, Mira finally got a clear view of what was making the noise. Her eyes widened slightly as she observed four Dabba gathered together in what appeared to be a small clearing between buildings.

These weren’t like any Dabba she’d seen before, these were massive, crab-like creatures with thick exoskeletons that looked nearly impossible to break through with conventional weapons.

Each creature was roughly the size of a small vehicle, their bodies protected by segmented armor plating that had a dark, almost metallic sheen to it. Multiple legs, she counted eight on the nearest specimen, supported their bulk, ending in pointed tips that allowed them to grip even unstable surfaces.

Their claws were proportionally enormous, each one large enough to crush a human body with a single squeeze. The scraping sound she’d heard was being produced by their movements across the ground, their armored bodies and leg tips creating friction against stone and metal debris.

Mira quickly judged the situation quickly. Four Dabba of this size and apparent defensive capability, working together as a group—this was absolutely not something she could take on alone.

Choosing survival over confrontation—the smart choice, the only choice really—she carefully backed away from her observation position without drawing attention to herself.

Her movements were even slower in retreat than they’d been in approach, knowing that a single sound or visible motion could trigger a response from the group. Crab-like creatures often had excellent peripheral vision and vibration sensitivity. One wrong move and all four could turn toward her simultaneously.

She maintained visual contact with the Dabba group until distance and intervening structures finally blocked her line of sight. Only then did Mira allow herself to breathe more normally, her heart still racing from the close encounter. That had been both exciting and terrifying—finally seeing Dabba in their natural habitat, observing their behavior and group dynamics, but also recognizing just how vulnerable she was out here.

As she continued onward through the ruins, traveling in a different direction now to avoid the crab-Dabba group, Mira stayed focused on her surroundings. She was hoping to encounter a single, isolated Dabba instead of another group.

One creature she might be able to observe safely, might even be able to approach if it was distracted or injured. One creature wouldn’t require her to fight—she could simply watch, learn, gather the data she’d come here to collect.

The area grew noticeably quieter as she moved, the ambient sounds becoming more sparse and distant. The ruins here were more collapsed, less structurally intact, creating a landscape of rubble piles and debris fields rather than the semi-standing buildings she’d been navigating earlier.

The change in environment made her slightly nervous, but it also suggested she was moving away from the more populated Dabba territories, which might increase her chances of finding solitary specimens.

Her guard dropped slightly as the minutes passed without incident, her mind beginning to wander back to thoughts of her brother Marcus and the research they’d discussed. She was thinking about how excited he would have been to see those crab-Dabba, how he would have immediately started sketching their anatomy and hypothesizing about the evolutionary pressures that had created such heavily armored variants.

Then her foot caught on something hidden beneath a thin layer of dust and sand covering the ground.

Before Mira could react, a trap snapped shut around her with mechanical precision. The sensation was instantaneous and completely disorienting—one moment she was walking normally, the next she was being lifted off her feet and enclosed in a reinforced net that tightened automatically around her body.

The net was made of some kind of synthetic fiber, thin but incredibly strong, woven in a pattern that became more restrictive the more she struggled against it. It had pulled her completely off the ground, suspending her roughly a meter in the air, attached to some kind of spring mechanism that had been buried and camouflaged.

Mira’s training kicked in immediately despite her shock. Her first instinct was to use her cloning ability, intending to create a duplicate outside the trap that could then work to free her original body.

It was a standard escape technique she’d practiced many times—the clone would have full mobility and could manipulate the trap from the outside while the original remained safely contained.

She reached for her power, mentally triggering the familiar sequence that should activate her ability. Nothing happened. No sensation of energy flowing, no feeling of her consciousness splitting to inhabit a second body, nothing at all.

Confused and increasingly alarmed, Mira tried again, concentrating harder this time and putting more mental effort into forcing the activation. She still felt absolutely nothing. It was like the ability simply didn’t exist anymore, like she’d never had it in the first place.

Panic began setting in as she realized with growing horror that her powers were completely unavailable. She tried repeatedly, cycling through different mental approaches to activation, but the result was always the same—absolute silence where her ability should have been responding.

Understanding dawned with sickening clarity. She understood that the net carried a power dampening effect built directly into its structure.

She was trapped and completely powerless, with no way to free herself and no backup coming.

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