"You have eyes on her?" Arkai cut him off. "Show us."

Damon stepped aside, gesturing toward the central monitor. The three brothers moved as one, their shoulders filling the entrance. Inside, their eyes locked onto the screen.

The drone feed filled the monitor in high-definition thermal and night vision, the world rendered in shades of gray and green and the occasional bloom of thermal orange. And there, in the center of the frame, was Cecilia.

She was marching forward.

Her pregnant belly was visible even through the drone’s impersonal lens, a soft curve beneath her shirt that made the scene feel somehow more wrong.

Her hands moved in fluid gestures, and the world moved with them. Zombies were lifted and hurled aside in waves. Debris became weapons, chunks of asphalt, shattered fence posts, an entire abandoned bicycle that she folded around three undead at once and launched into the treeline.

The horde pressed in from all sides, and she simply... refused them. Every advance was answered. Every grasping hand was swatted away. She was a walking storm, and the storm was pushing toward the purple light.

"What is she doing?" Eastiel hissed, his hands clenched at his sides.

The drone feed shifted, pulling back to show the broader scene. Ahead of Cecilia, perhaps a hundred meters now, the twin rifts had come into view.

They hung in the air like wounds, two jagged tears in reality facing each other across the road. Sickly purple light bled from their edges, pulsing in a rhythm that felt almost like breathing.

Between them, the air shimmered and warped, and from both openings, more dark shapes were emerging.

"Who are the two civilians behind her?" Oathran asked. He leaned closer to the screen, his eyes narrowing. "They don’t look like hunters."

The drone camera zoomed in.

The man behind Cecilia was tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a white t-shirt stained with black ichor and dirt. He was clutching the woman in front of him like a child clutching a blanket, his face pressed into her back, his eyes squeezed shut.

And yet, even blind and terrified, his shovel lashed out in a perfect horizontal arc and impaled a lunging zombie through the chest.

He yanked the blade free and hurled the body aside without turning his head or opening his eyes. He didn’t even break his grip on the woman’s waist.

"We noticed them too," Damon said. "We are still unable to identify them, but we noticed that the man is quite strong. And the woman he carried around..."

He trailed off, gesturing helplessly at the screen, where the devastatingly beautiful blonde woman was being carried like a ragdoll and yet somehow managing to look elegant about it.

On the monitor, the man spun blindly and his shovel described a perfect 360-degree arc that cleared five zombies in a single rotation. He didn’t break stride, just kept following Cecilia and clinging to the blonde woman while destroying everything that came within range.

"Let’s go," Arkai said.

His brothers nodded. They turned and strode toward the tent flap.

"WAIT! WAIT!" Damon lunged after them, scrambling to grab something from a nearby workstation. "TAKE THE COMMS!"

***

Cecilia reached the twin rifts and stopped.

The purple light was overwhelming this close, painting the world in shades of bruise and sickness. The two jagged tears hung in the air maybe thirty meters apart, facing each other like broken mirrors reflecting different versions of the same nightmare.

Between them, the road had been scorched black, the asphalt cracked and bubbling from the heat of corrupted mana bleeding through. The grass on either side had withered to gray sludge. Even the air tasted wrong.

Then she saw the source of the roaring.

It was a giant. A mound. A mountain of human limbs fused together by black filth corruption, spilling over the back of the two rifts like a wave of flesh that had forgotten how to die.

Arms twisted at impossible angles, fingers still twitching, still grasping. Legs bent backward and forward and sideways, some still trying to walk, still trying to move, still obeying commands from nerves that should have been silent decades ago.

Faces emerged from the mass and submerged again, mouths open in low roars, eyes rolling white and unseeing, hair matted with black ichor and worse things.

It was made of people. It had once been people.

Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Melted together by the corruption into something that was neither alive nor dead nor anything that should exist.

Cecilia narrowed her eyes. Her stomach turned, but her hands stayed steady.

Even as she sent the undead bodies flying with her telekinesis, or crushed and hurled and tore, she remembered that they had once been humans.

They had once had names, or families. They had once been someone’s lost friend, someone’s unfinished story. And now they were this. Now they were puppets made of rotting flesh, forced to keep moving by a force that didn’t care about the sanctity of rest.

She couldn’t save them by being gentle.

Trying to keep the bodies intact was ineffective. It drained her strength, prolonged the fight, and worst of all, prolonged the desecration.

Every second these corpses spent animated by corruption was a second their memories were being violated. The kindest thing she could do was end it fast. Destroy them completely. Let them finally stop moving.

She needed to go to the source and deal with it as quickly as possible, but then she looked past the flesh mound.

She saw the world beyond the rifts.

It was a dead world. Gray sky, black ground. The landscape stretched flat, corrupted and featureless in every direction, dotted with more shapes, more mounds, more bodies.

The corruption hadn’t just infected this world. It had consumed and digested it. Left nothing behind but a hollow shell full of undead that would never stop walking, never stop hungering.

Even if she closed the rift... the undead bodies beyond it would still continue to suffer. Forever. Or until the corruption decided it was done with them. Whichever came first.

"Do these rift worlds also created with rift seeds?" Cecilia asked, her voice quiet.

"No." Momo said gently, trying to soothe her. She was still being carried by Bunny, but her attention was entirely on Cecilia. "The world beyond was also a pre-existing world. One of those that had been ransacked by corruption."

Cecilia’s breath caught.

It was... like Ierofey’s original world.

The world he had desperately sealed to stop the spreading of corruption.

"Could it be..." Cecilia whispered. "The voidcrawlers were..."

ROAAAAAAAAARRR—

The flesh mound surged forward.

It was trying to squeeze through one of the rifts, its massive bulk compressing and distorting as it forced itself through an opening too small to contain it.

The edges of the rift tore wider, purple light bleeding more intensely. She moved before she thought.

Her telekinesis slammed into the mound, catching it mid-squeeze and hurling it backward.

The creature tumbled end over end, its fused limbs flailing, its mouths wailing, black ichor spraying in all directions. It crashed into the dead earth beyond the rift with enough force to leave a crater.

And in the brief moment before it started to rise again, Cecilia saw something.

Nestled between the folded layers of corrupted flesh, pulsing with a light that was not purple but something darker, was a core.

"Goddess," Cecilia called, her eyes still locked on the rift, her telekinesis already swatting away a cluster of zombies trying to flank her. "What is a rift core?"

Behind her, Bunny screamed as a zombie grabbed his ankle. He shook it off with a blind stomp, then impaled it with his shovel. Momo swayed with the motion serenely.

"Is it the same as a rift seed?" Cecilia pressed.

Momo hummed, a note of genuine approval in her voice. "Smart."

"A rift core is a corrupted rift seed."

Cecilia’s eyes widened.

"Just like how we can plant a concept and let it grow, or integrate ourselves into a pre-existing world..." Momo said patiently, "the corruption, whose sole goal is to spread and infect more worlds, created an open gate between the world they already thrived in and a world that can still fend for themselves."

"They have no use for creating a completely new world, nor do they want to just integrate. They conquer."

The corruption didn’t want to create. It also didn’t want to coexist. It took rift seeds and it corrupted them. Twisted them. Turned them into open wounds between worlds, highways for infection, bridges for the endless tide of undead.

The twin rifts pulsed in front of her and the flesh mound roared. Cecilia tightened her grip on her mana, feeling the egg stir in response.

She had a lot of questions. But first, she had a core to destroy.

But—

ROAAAAAAAAR!!!

Cecilia turned.

And immediately wished she hadn’t.

It crawled through the rift on a sound that wasn’t footsteps. It was wet and sticky, the noise of something moist dragging itself across dead earth.

It was a collection of eyes and mouths. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Melted together into a single shivering mass the size of a small car, every eye a different size, a different color, a different state of decay.

Some were bloodshot and rolling wildly. Some were milky white with blindness. Some were still blinking.

And it moved on fingers.

Hundreds of fingers sprouting from its underside like centipede legs, each one twitching and grasping and pulling the mass forward in a horrible, skittering crawl.

The fingers had fingernails. Some broken, some torn off entirely, leaving raw, wet tips that left smears of black ichor on the ground as they scrambled toward the rift opening.

The eyes found her. All of them. At once.

Cecilia—"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH—"

"WAAAAAAAAAAHHHH—" Bunny screamed too, his voice somehow reaching an even higher pitch than before. His eyes were still closed, but apparently his other senses had told him everything he needed to know. "WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT IS THAT?! MOMO, WHAT IS THAT?!"

"AAAAAAAAAA—" Momo screamed, and it was perhaps the most terrifying sound of all, because Momo hadn’t screamed until no—"WHAT IN THE EVER-LIVING—WHY DOES IT HAVE FINGERS—WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MANY FINGERS—"

"YOU’RE A GODDESS! HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW?!" Cecilia shrieked.

"I REMEMBER MANY THINGS! I CHOOSE TO FORGET THIS!"

"FORGET IT FASTER! BANISH IT TO THE SHADOW REALM—"

"SPARE THE SHADOW REALM, THEY WON’T CLAIM THIS SHI—"