I closed my eyes briefly, extending my senses the way I’d been trained. As an Ophis, I could detect disturbances in space that normal zodiacs couldn’t sense. The Abyss felt like reality itself was stretched thin here, the fabric of our dimension rubbing against something else.
“They’re close,” I murmured, opening my eyes. “Three o’clock, maybe fifty feet.”
Percy gave me a skeptical look but checked his tracker. His eyebrows raised slightly when the reading confirmed my assessment. “How did you?—”
“Experience,” I cut him off. “I’ve been hunting these things for three years in the wild.”
We moved forward cautiously, the blue markers on the wall guiding us deeper into the cavern system. The ceiling grew higher, the chamber expanding into a cathedral-like space filled with those infected black crystals. Some were as small as my finger, others as large as a person, all of them pulsing with a faint purple glow that made my skin crawl.
“The crystals absorb dark matter,” I explained quietly as we walked. “They’re like batteries storing negative energy. In major incursion sites, they can grow to the size of buildings.”
“You sound like you’ve seen a lot of them,” Eris commented.
“Too many. My first assignment with the Assembly was cleaning up after a major breach in Queens. The crystals had taken over an entire apartment building. They had to demolish it afterward.”
Draco moved closer to examine one of the larger formations. “The texts say these can be used as anchors for portal magic.”
I nodded. “For bane, yes. They use them to stabilize their entry points. For us...” I hesitated, not sure how much to reveal about what I could do.
“For you?” Percy prompted, suddenly interested.
Before I could answer, my tracker went wild, the needle spinning rapidly. At the same moment, the temperature plummeted. My breath frosted in front of my face, and the hairs on my arms stood up.
“Contact,” Aiden hissed, drawing his blades.
And then I saw it. A ripple in the air about twenty feet ahead, like heat rising from pavement, except cold and wrong. The ripple coalesced into a form that human eyes would never register, but to a zodiac, it was unmistakable.
The bane was roughly humanoid, but that’s where any resemblance to humanity ended. Its limbs were too long and too numerous. I counted six arms ending in elongated fingers that dragged along the ground. Its head was misshapen, bulbous on one side, with no discernible facial features except for a gaping maw that seemed to be constantly opening and closing. Its body bent at impossible angles, joints moving in directions that defied anatomy.
“Shit,” Eris breathed.
“At least it’s a small one,” I said. The bane I’d encountered in New York had been twice this size, some even larger. “Level two, maybe three at most.”
The bane hadn’t noticed us yet. It was moving slowly around a cluster of crystals, occasionally reaching out to touch one with those too-long fingers. When it did, the crystal pulsed brighter, and the bane seemed to grow slightly more solid.
Percy motioned for us to spread out, a standard containment formation. “Remember, observation only. No engagement unless it attacks first.”
I took my position on the right flank, careful to move silently. But I’d barely taken three steps when my foot dislodged a small stone, sending it skittering across the floor.
The bane froze. Then, with a movement so fast it blurred, its head swiveled 180 degrees toward us. The maw opened wider, revealing nothing but darkness inside, a void that seemed to pull at the light around it.
“So much for observation,” I muttered, drawing my staff and extending it with a flick of my wrist.
The bane moved, a jerking, disjointed motion that covered ground with terrifying speed. It wasn’t coming for Percy or Aiden or Eris. It was coming straight for me.
“Black, move!” Percy shouted, but I was already in motion.
I dove to the side as the bane lunged, feeling the cold rush of its passage like a blast of arctic air. Rolling to my feet, I called on my magic, silver light flooding my vision as it coursed through my veins and into my tattoos. The serpents on my arms writhed with power, glowing bright against my skin.
The bane screeched, a sound like metal tearing, and recoiled from the light.Thatwas interesting. In my previous encounters, they’d been drawn to my magic, not repelled by it.
“It doesn’t like your light,” Draco called, his own Scorpio magic manifesting as purple energy around his hands.
“Then let’s give it more,” Aiden growled, golden Leo magic blazing from his palms as he drew his twin blades.
The chamber erupted into chaos as all five of us engaged our magic at once. Percy’s Aries magic crackled red around his body, turning him into a living weapon. Eris’s Gemini magic created duplicates of his movements, after images that confused and disoriented the bane.
And my Ophis magic sang through me, pure starlight channeled from some distant place, filling me with power that felt ancient and alive. I shaped it into a spear of light that extended from my staff, turning my weapon into something far more deadly.
