My lord, I must advise you to cease your elimination. Take the three cores, and the core dust, and leave. Your mana is currently low, and if a mimic-slime is being hosted, it means you are more likely to encounter further deviants deeper within.

  The nausea came first, a rolling, rising sickness that felt like my stomach had forgotten which way was down. It churned in slow, miserable waves, each one cresting just shy of revolt. My head followed immediately after, a deep, brutal pressure building behind my eyes. Not a sharp pain, not something that stabbed and retreated, but a constant, merciless pounding. Like someone had taken a hammer and decided rhythm mattered more than mercy.

  The apples and leaves that made up my hair swayed as I moved, brushing against my temple, my cheek, the side of my neck. Each soft tap might as well have been a blow. Every touch sent a dull echo through my skull, the migraine blooming outward with each careless movement. Even the sound of them rustling felt too loud, too close.

  And then there was the cold.

  Not the bite of winter air, not the chill of standing still too long. This was deeper. Internal. As though my blood had thinned, warmth leaching out from the inside with no intention of returning. My fingers felt numb despite being clenched tight around my cane. My arms trembled faintly, not from exhaustion alone, but from something missing. Something spent. My chest felt tight, breathing shallow not from injury, but from effort. Each inhale felt like work. Each exhale carried a faint dizziness with it.

  “Okay. Okay.” My voice sounded wrong to my own ears, distant and unsteady. “Lead… Lead the way.”

  The words barely finished leaving my mouth before the pounding resumed. Two rhythms now. The migraine hammering away at my skull and beneath it all, that infernal gong. Each strike reverberated through my thoughts, overlapping with the next before I could even process the last. Skill acquired. Skill improved. Threshold crossed. Notifications stacking atop one another like a cruel joke.

  I wanted to scream at it. I barely had the energy to think.

  My legs moved because they had to. Because stopping felt worse. The world tilted slightly with every step, my balance lagging behind my intentions. I focused on the ground. On placing one foot in front of the other. Anything more complex felt dangerous.

  Somewhere along the way, without me noticing, the damp stone walls gave way to open space. The sewer’s heavy air thinned. Light filtered in, too bright, stabbing into my eyes. I flinched hard, pain spiking instantly.

  A sanitation worker stood nearby. He nodded at me, casual at first.

  “HOW MANY DID YOU GET, SIR?!”

  The volume hit me like a physical force. My entire body recoiled, shoulders hunching, hand flying up to clutch at my head. The sound drilled straight through my skull, rattling against the migraine until my vision blurred at the edges.

  He froze, realization dawning fast.

  “Ah.” His voice dropped immediately, barely above a whisper. “Mana-sickness. How many did you get, sir?”

  I swallowed, throat dry. Even that simple motion felt exhausting. “Technically two,” I said after a moment. “One regular. And… one that took my form.”

  Speaking felt like pushing words through mud. My mouth moved slower than my thoughts. Or maybe my thoughts were the ones lagging. It was hard to tell. All I knew was that forming sentences took effort I did not have to spare.

  I leaned more heavily on my cane, bark-covered hand pressing against my temple as if I could physically hold my head together. There was no injury. No blood. No broken bone. And yet I had never felt so close to collapsing.

  The cold refused to leave. It clung to me, settling into my bones, making my muscles feel sluggish and unresponsive. My heartbeat felt distant, muffled, like it was happening to someone else. Every sensation arrived a fraction too late, dulled and distorted.

  I stood there, swaying slightly, surrounded by normalcy. People. Stone. Air that did not stink of rot. And all of it felt unreal, as though I were watching myself from behind a pane of fogged glass.

  The sanitation worker then steadied me. Swiping at the air.

  “Just relax. This happens to newbies all the time. It’s why we sanitation workers exist, and we keep that area slime ridden. So new casters like you can feel this feeling. Don’t worry. The guild is coming sho–”

  Before he finished speaking, a tall minotaur was approaching us. He simply gave the sanitation worker one single nod, before grabbing my shoulder gently, lifting me, and escorting me away. He only said one thing, and it knocked me out. “Sleep, kid.”

  ***

  Bang.

  The concussion rolled through the kill zone like a bad memory that refused to stay buried. Dust leapt from the broken asphalt, windows rattled in their frames, and the half-collapsed storefront to my left shed another layer of brick like dead skin.

  “Damn it, Jericko.” I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to. The channel carried my words clean and sharp through bone-conduction implants and aether-threaded comms alike. “We have been over this. Reduce. Civilian. Awareness.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Another explosion answered me instead.

  “Stuff it, Barlow!” Jericko shouted back, laughter bleeding through the static. “They’re Ghosts! We’re fucking exorcists! The government wants them gone, scorched, salted, erased!”

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he flipped his phone open one-handed, thumb flying over the cracked keypad like it was second nature. Antique hardware, retrofitted beyond recognition. Copper runes etched into the casing. Aether conduits braided through plastic never meant to carry anything more dangerous than a ringtone. The thing glowed faintly as he finished dialing.

  A fireball bloomed into existence above his palm, fed by the phone’s conversion lattice. Aether in. Mana out. Crude. Effective. Loud as hell.

  He lobbed it into the field with a pitcher’s ease.

  The blast illuminated what we were really fighting.

  Not specters. Not clean, translucent dead. These were hauntings that had festered. Pressure-cooked grief given mass. Regret that had learned how to crawl.

  A millipede made of human heads surged across the torn earth, vertebrae fused into a segmented spine. Each face was frozen in a different moment of terror. One sobbed endlessly. Another screamed without sound. The one at the front, the “head,” wore the face of a woman clutching an invisible child, mouth open in a silent plea that had no one left to answer it.

  To the right, something worse rolled itself forward. A swollen fetus curled into a ball, its skin translucent, organs visible beneath, pushed along by a beetle made entirely of arms and hair. Fingers dug into the ground, tearing clumps of soil free as it advanced, nails snapping and regrowing with wet little pops.

  Farther back, coiling through the wreckage of a bus, a serpent of interlocked human skeletons undulated, skulls clicking together as if whispering secrets only the dead could understand.

  Every one of them anchored to the same thing.

  Unresolved desire. Unspent emotion. Death without closure.

  The Dunewatch called them Ghosts. That was easier than admitting what they really were.

  “Jericko,” I said again, jaw tight beneath my respirator. My HUD scrolled threat vectors, mana density readings, and civilian heat signatures all at once. Too many yellow blips too close to the red. “I will reprimand you once this is over.”

  He didn’t even look back at me this time. “As I said, Barlow. Stuff. It.”

  I hated the Dunewatch.

  I hated their recklessness. Their obsession with spectacle. Their absolute confidence that overwhelming force solved everything. They were a hammer in a world that needed scalpels, and they kept acting surprised when all they produced was shrapnel.

  Earth wasn’t built for magic.

  The mana density here was abysmal. Not zero, but close enough to make precision work a nightmare. Aether, on the other hand, saturated everything. Static in the air. Pressure in the bones. Raw potential without the structure to shape itself safely. That was why magi-tech existed at all. Why we built machines to do what the planet refused to support naturally.

  Convert aether into mana. Shape it. Burn it fast before it tore you apart.

  Jericko thrived on that chaos.

  I did not.

  I dropped to one knee, palm slamming against the cracked concrete as my gauntlet’s sigils flared to life. The ground lit up beneath my hand, lines of blue-white light spiderwebbing outward as my rig sank probes into the subsurface. Sensors tasted the field. Read emotional residue. Measured torsion in the local aether flow.

  The data streamed straight into my mind.

  “Analysis completed,” I said aloud, already sorting it, filtering the noise. My voice sounded calm because it had to be. Panic wasted time. Time killed people. “Primary anchor located. Jericko, sending coordinates now. Lob three fireballs and a flame spike at the target location.”

  A beat.

  Then Jericko whooped. “Finally! An order I can agree on!”

  Coordinates flashed across his HUD. A point thirty meters past the millipede. Beneath the writhing skeleton-serpent. A mass of condensed emotional residue buried under the street, feeding the manifestations like a tumor with legs.

  He didn’t hesitate.

  First fireball. Impacted short, splashing flame across the serpent’s ribs. Bone blackened and cracked, skulls screaming as one.

  Second fireball. Direct hit. The street collapsed inward, asphalt folding like wet paper as the anchor screamed back at us, a psychic howl that made my teeth ache.

  Third fireball. Overkill. I winced as the blast wave rippled outward, shattering what little glass remained in the block.

  Then the flame spike.

  A spear of condensed mana punched down into the crater, driving straight through the anchor and pinning it to whatever cursed fault line had birthed it. The air screamed. Literally screamed. A sound like tearing silk and breaking ribs all at once.

  The Ghosts began to unravel.

  The millipede of heads collapsed in on itself, faces blurring, melting, expressions finally slack as the force animating them burned away. The fetus rolled once, twice, then split apart into harmless ash as the arms-and-hair beetle disintegrated beneath it. The skeleton serpent convulsed violently before collapsing into a pile of inert bone that clattered uselessly to the ground.

  Silence followed.

  Not peace. Just the absence of immediate violence.

  My HUD lit up with civilian vitals stabilizing. Yellow dots retreating. No new casualties. Barely.

  I exhaled slowly, forcing my heart rate down.

  Jericko snapped his phone shut and grinned like he’d just finished a great show. “See? Clean enough.”

  I stood, dust rolling off my coat, and turned toward him. “You leveled half a city block.”

  “And the Ghosts are gone.”

  “For now,” I shot back. “You scorch emotional anchors without containment and you seed the area for recurrence. You know that. You just don’t care.”

  He shrugged, already lighting a cigarette with a flick of residual flame. “That’s tomorrow’s problem.”

  That, right there, was the difference between us.

  I was a scientist. A surgeon. And a soldier last. I believed in understanding the wound before cutting it open. In minimizing collateral. In leaving something behind that could still heal.

  The Dunewatch were soldiers first and last. They believed in eradication. In making the problem stop moving.

  I logged the site, flagged it for quarantine, and sent a report up the chain before command could spin this into another victory reel. Somewhere, some analyst would read my notes and sigh, knowing damn well they’d be ignored.

  As we moved out, the smell of ozone and burned aether clung to the air, metallic and bitter. I glanced back once at the crater, at the scorched earth and scattered bones.

  I hate the Dunewatch. I hate how they took the knowledge of magic and force everything to become a hammer.

  I just hope that society isn’t the nail.