“Yes, sir!” Mona snapped off a salute and activated Dash. Qi shot down the back of her legs, trailing long luminescent strands that trace along her muscles and pool in her feet. She pressed one foot down hard, and the empowering Qi solidified for a split second under her soles. When she pushed off, she left a footprint of Qi that dissipated not a second later.

With speed far beyond a sprint, each step carried her three times as far as a normal running stride, and after four full strides, the skill bled away with her Qi. She stumbled slightly and yelped at the sudden change, then forced it to activate again.

Noem caught up in a few strides and clicked his tongue. “That’s why you need to practice before you get into dangerous situations.”

“I was practicing! For, like, two days!” Mona argued, looked away, then snapped back with wide eyes. “How’re you keeping up with me?”

“Because I’m using a skill too. Obviously.” Noem said while Sprint coursed through him. “Four continuous skills, so if I have to swap over to a combat skill, there’ll be a pretty big delay. Speaking of, have you turned off Resilient yet?”

Mona shook her head without taking her eyes off of him, paused, then tapped on her interface and nodded. “I guess I did at one point. Should I turn it back on?”

“Definitely not. You’re going to need all the Qi you can manage when we get to the tunnel.” Noem swept his hand through the air to brush aside a strand of hazy smoke. “No point in making it worse. But be ready to use Block at any second; whatever’s in there’s got its eyes on us.”

“Gotcha.” Mona confirmed as she reactivated her skill once again.

The sound of pounding footsteps overtook everything except for Noem’s quiet breaths of exertion. He paced himself and split his attention between watching the area in front of him and checking over Mona’s shoulder for the apex in the smoke. There was no reason to disbelieve the goddess’ words, since she hadn’t known she’d been watched, but the mere possibility that a wild apex still existed was alien to Noem.

All known apexes were bonded to the best of the best. And for the few days they weren’t bonded, tournaments and displays of skill were held all over the country that just lost an apex bonder. One never went unbonded for more than a month, and if one lost their bonder, the entire world would know within hours.

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So what was one doing inside the Great Quarry? From the smoky haze and the goddess’ declaration that the apex would give Mona air and darkness skills, Noem was fairly confident it wasn’t one that had been previously bonded. Which meant it had been wild for a long time or it had just become an apex. The strange creature he’d fought a week ago didn’t help either way; apexes affected their environment just by existing, but a powerful change in environment could breed much stronger spirits.

Noem shook his head and refocused on the situation at hand. One way or another, he’d have an answer by the end of the day. He reached up to brush aside another tendril of smoke. His knuckles knocked against a solid core of whipping wind inside of it, and the smoke began to burn his fingers.

Noem grit his teeth and snapped back to Mona. Two tendrils slowly made their way towards her, and she reached out with one hand to brush them away just as he had. Except she didn’t have Resilient on.

“Block now!” Noem yelled at the top of his lungs.

Mona jumped at the sound of his voice, but she activated Block nonetheless. Her hand brushed against a tendril as her Qi roared to life around her arm, thick and solid as metal. It sprayed off in tiny chunks as the tendril ate away at Block.

“What the heck!?” Mona yelped and jumped away from the other tendril instead of trying to block it. A move that saved her an immense amount of pain. The tendril pressed down on the path and kicked up a massive storm of dust that pelted against Noem’s Qi, then dissipated and left a deep indent where it had been.

The one Noem brushed aside disappeared as well. A deep bellow echoed from somewhere inside the mass of smoky haze that had grown to spill over the path, and a pair of vibrant light blue eyes opened up a good hundred feet down. Completely unobstructed by the smoke. And then another pair opened. And another. And another.

Nine huge pairs in total, all curved down what Noem assumed was a crested head. From where he stood, only three of the eyes could’ve fit inside of a skyrail car. And there were eighteen of them.

“What the heck.” Mona repeated in a weak whisper. She turned to Noem for confidence and shivered at what she saw. “Noem? What do we do?”

Noem summoned his knife and shoved Mona onward. “Keep running until we get to the tunnel, but get as close to the wall as you can while you run. If the smoke spills over the edge and traps us in here, we need to climb out right away.”

Mona took a deep breath and nodded. The fear didn’t leave her eyes, and her body didn’t stop shaking, but Noem appreciated that she didn’t panic when death stared her straight in the eyes. That was the mark of someone who survived.

He maneuvered himself between her and the smoke, gently herding her towards the wall as he ran. The smoke rose in a strange bubble–as if the edge of the path had forced it to have a strong surface tension. The eyes rose with it to tower over Noem like the apex the spirit was named for.

Tendrils sprayed free from the smoke with the apex’s bellowing roar. Cores of shearing winds coated in some form of darkness that let them keep their shape and their deadliness. Noem raised his knife, let Focus drop, and summoned a glass orb that swirled with a vicious miniature cyclone of mint green Qi.

“Stay behind me no matter what.”