They were three Emergents preparing to fight one Wretch.

Under normal circumstances, they would have obliterated it.

But, of course, nothing was ever that simple.

This Wretch was a dweller of the Dead Sea.

It was far from normal.

There were many theories. Some believed the Wretches were vestiges left behind by the Absolute Beings—those that dwelled in the absolute light of day. Others believed they were entirely separate entities, beings that only emerged under the moonlight.

What mattered was that they were stronger under the moon.

And the only reason the Hunters knew this was because of a hunt years ago.

That night, the Chief of Hunters, Olav, had led an expedition. A famine had struck, and too many Hunters had died, forcing them to train new Awakened at a rapid pace. They had two goals:

- Gather food to sustain the settlement.

- Capture a Depth Dweller alive for study.

It was a calculated risk—one that could save future generations of Hunters.

And so, under Olav's leadership, they set out early into the night.

The hunt had gone well. They managed to capture two creatures from the depths.

The first was a Whispered, a lesser Depth Dweller. It had been fleeing from something stronger and was already weakened when they found it. Capturing it was easy—decapitating it, even easier.

The second was a Wretch.

That was where the real struggle began.

At the time, Olav was an Emergent, but his subordinates were not. Only the Vice-Chief had reached that stage. With nothing but Awakened Hunters and their abilities, they had to subdue something far beyond them.

The battle was brutal. The Wretch did not fight like a beast. It fought like a thing that had seen a thousand deaths and learned from each one. It did not attack wildly—it adapted. It turned their own tactics against them.

By the time they brought it down, many had died.

There was no time to mourn. The world did not stop.

The captured abominations were brought to the Light Bringer Chamber—a place designed to test the effect of Absolute Light.

No natural light touched its walls. Only artificial illumination, created by Awakened abilities, could exist inside.

The goal was simple: to test the limits of the Depth Dwellers' strength.

And what they discovered changed everything.

The experiments yielded three results.

The Whispered, despite being weaker, deteriorated at a slow but constant rate. It seemed to unravel the longer it was kept away from moonlight.

The Wretch, on the other hand, did not weaken immediately. It resisted. It fought. Only after hours of containment did it finally show signs of weakening.

When exposed to the Absolute Sunlight, both creatures reacted violently—but not in the same way. The Whispered dissolved instantly. The Wretch screamed.

And that was the key difference.

The Whispered belonged to the night.

But the Wretch was something else entirely.

It could survive in the moonlight. It could endure in the dark.

And when the sun touched it—

It didn't die.

It resisted.

It was not just a hunter of the night. It was something caught in between.

Something that should not exist at all.

And now, on this night, Orn and his Emergents were about to fight one.

One that had already begun shaping the battlefield around them.

―

The Wretch was not attacking.

It was waiting.

Orn knew the difference. He had faced beasts that lunged on instinct, Abyssal Beings that thrashed without strategy. They were dangerous, but simple. Predictable.

This was not the same.

This was a Wretch.

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The Wretch had already exerted its influence—it had woven itself into the water, into the ship, into the very fabric of the battle before it had even begun. That was what made it deadly.

And that was what made it a mistake.

Because it was not the only one here that had the ability to shape reality.

Orn turned his head slightly, eyes moving from one Emergent to the next. They did not need words.

They had been through too many hunts for that.

They knew their roles.

Ikar, to his left, adjusted his grip on the railing, his breathing slow and measured. His power was in displacement—not the raw, distance-breaking transfer of a Hunter's ability, but the ability to divide space into segments, separating and shifting parts of the world like a puzzle.

Alya, the woman with the scar, exhaled through her nose, her expression unreadable. She was their anchor, the one who stabilized the ship's presence so it would not be pulled under a domain other than their own.

Tark, the youngest, shifted slightly at Orn's right. His ability was reverberation—not simply amplifying force, but layering it, so that each strike did not merely hit once, but echoed through an object again and again, compounding into devastation.

Each one of them had forged their place in reality.

And so had the Wretch.

This was not a battle of mere strength. It was a clash of existence itself—of which side could dictate the rules of engagement.

But it had made one mistake.

It had assumed that it was the only one in control.

―

Of course, he did not move with body.

He moved with presence and will.

Orn reached out—not with hands, not with weapons, but with something deeper. The moment his will surged, the Wretch responded.

The ship lurched violently, its wooden frame groaning under an unseen force. The sails flapped wildly, not from the wind, but from something else—something that had wrapped itself around them like invisible chains, dragging them down, slowing their movement even though the waters remained still.

The Dead Sea twisted, the waves bending at unnatural angles. The ship did not simply drift anymore. It sank. Not physically—no, that would have been too simple. It was being drawn into another state of being, pulled into the domain of something that had already claimed this space.

A lesser crew would have panicked.

A lesser group of Awakened would have screamed.

But this was not a lesser crew.

This was a ship carrying Hunters.

And they had already survived what the Dead Sea had thrown at them for years.

Alya acted first.

Her power, her Emergence, was not in offense. It was stability. It was a refusal of change, a force that could make reality unchanging in her presence. That was why she was called an Anchor—because when she willed it, things remained as they were meant to be.

Many have been fooled by her ability, thinking it was a Utility emergence.

Of course they were also dead.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and pressed down.

The ship froze in place.

The unnatural sinking halted. The bending water lost its strength. The force dragging them down broke like a taut rope snapping under too much pressure.

Alya exhaled, her presence cementing reality in place.

But the Wretch was not done.

The ship steadied, but the water around them did not. The waves began to split—as if something beneath the surface had parted the sea itself. Blackened water peeled away, revealing an abyss beneath them, deep and yawning, lined with jagged, twisting shapes that looked like they had no place in reality.

A low sound—not a voice, not a growl, but something in between—hummed from the depths.

Ikar was already moving.

He moved with separation and division.

The Wretch was trying to expand its claim again. Trying to turn the very sea into its weapon.

So Ikar did what he did best.

He cut.

His power was space itself, the ability to define where something should be and where it should not.

He reached out, and with a sharp flick of his fingers—

The battlefield broke apart.

The abyssal opening fractured into disconnected sections, like pieces of a shattered mirror. The Wretch's claim over the water became disjointed, cut into unnatural angles where its influence could not reach.

It's hold had weakened.

That was when Tark acted.

He moved with momentum and force.

Tark's power was reverberation—a manipulation of impact, of the way force echoed through reality. When he struck, it was never just one strike. It was many.

A single impact would carry through, repeating itself over and over, multiplying in strength until whatever was in its path simply ceased to exist.

Tark stepped forward, slamming his boot against the deck. The motion was small—barely even a stomp.

But the sound rippled.

It traveled through the ship, through the water, through the very space that the Wretch had begun to weave into its domain.

And then it hit.

The force repeated, layering on top of itself again and again, turning a single impact into an inescapable cascade of destruction.

The abyss below them shattered. From the outside it looked like it was a infinite wave.

The split sea collapsed back into itself, crushing anything that had existed within its false depths. The Wretch's domain recoiled, forced to retreat, its claim unraveling before it could fully solidify.

And then, at last—

Orn moved.

―

The Wretch had formed now.

It had no choice but to take a shape.

A beast that should not exist, pulling itself from the reflection of the shattered moon above. Its body was half-formed, a shifting, twisting mass of limbs that did not belong to a single creature.

Of course it wasn't just one.

It was many.

And even under the immense will of the Emergents, it did not attack wildly of course. It learned.

It had seen their response. It had already begun adapting to them, its form shifting to resist the very forces they had used against it. It was swift, as if not giving them a chance.

Orn did not give it the chance, either.

His blade was already drawn.

And of course, he did not move with body.

He moved with erasure.

His power did not shift space. It did not stabilize. It did not amplify force.

It removed.

A single cut—clean, precise, and absolute—and everything that existed in its path simply ceased to be.

Orn swung his blade.

Of course Orn had waited till it's will was weakend by his teammates. Otherwise, his blade's will would have not done much damage to reality, or the Wretch for that matter.

But now it was weakend, it had assumed its form.

And his blade had assumed it's will.

It passed through the Wretch's twisting body—

And for a moment, nothing happened.

Then—

The Wretch failed to exist.

Not torn.

Not cut.

Just... gone.

The air trembled.

The sea stilled.

The unnatural presence that had lurked just beneath the surface vanished, its claim severed entirely from reality.

And just like that, the hunt was over.

―

Of course, it wasn't actually over.

They still hadn't met their quota for the day.

But it was too risky to continue for now.

And on the ship, the silence stretched.

The younger Hunters had stopped breathing.

They had never seen a battle like this before.

It was not a struggle of brute force, nor was it a test of speed or endurance.

But a battle fought through will itself.

A battle where the world had been shaped, pulled apart, and rewritten in a matter of seconds.

One of the Hunters, his face pale, whispered, "That was... easier than I thought."

Orn turned his head slightly. His voice was quiet.

"It wasn't."

The Wretch had not fought back.

Not because it was weak.

But because it had been watching.

An hour later, the deck was silent.

A droplet of water fell onto the deck.

However, it did not fall from the rain. Or even come from the sea.

It came from above.

The ripples in the reflection were already spreading.

And this time—

The moon was not the only thing looking back.