Kasumi trained all her life to hunt the creatures of Keth. Her heart was barely beating as she worked around the parameter.

The darkness swallowed her whole the moment she cleared the gate. Keth's night was a living thing, thick and wet like breathing into a cloth, pressing against the skin. Three moons hung low and bloated, casting just enough sickly silver to outline the jagged terrain — twisted rock formations, dead shrubs clinging to life in cracks, the occasional bioluminescent fungi dotting the landscape like dirty little eyes.

Kasumi's bare feet were silent on the cold stone. Her braids hung heavy down her back, swaying with each step. The blade at her hip pulsed faintly — a low violet hum that responded to her proximity, hungry for use. The runes along her dark skin caught the moonlight and threw it back, faint trails of blue light mapping her arms like veins of electricity.

She was beautiful in the way a loaded weapon is beautiful.

Ahead, maybe two hundred yards out, the terrain dipped into a shallow canyon. Perfect ambush territory. Perfect nesting ground. The kind of place where stalkers liked to coil up and wait, their tails buried in the rocks, scales blending with the stone until you were close enough to feel the tongue on your throat.

The air shifted. Something was wrong.

Not a smell — not yet. More like a pressure change, the way your ears pop before a storm. The fungi nearest the canyon had gone dark. Every single one. As if something had swallowed the light right out of them.

Then, a sound. Low. Rhythmic. Almost like breathing.

Two different pitches.

Kasumi felt the stalker and Wick through her senses. Her skin began to shimmer purple becoming irresistible bait

Stalker and Wick. Come on out
I've never seen your species share with each other. Very interesting.

He came out of nothing. One moment the canyon mouth was empty, the next a massive shape filled it, low and wide and pale as bone. He stood on four legs, his body thick with muscle beneath that dense fur, and he was big enough that Kasumi could see the individual plates of his shoulders shifting as he moved. His pupils were black holes set in a face that was almost handsome if you didn't look too long.

He didn't speak. He just... stopped. Head tilted. That lion's jaw hanging slightly open, and from the darkness of his mouth came a tongue that was too long, too wide, slick and pink, tasting her scent from thirty yards away.

A low rumble rolled out of his chest. Not a growl. Not yet. More like a cat purring over something it hadn't decided to kill.

Above her. A whisper of scales on stone, and then a shape descended from the canyon rim on a tail that coiled and uncoiled like a snake's. Long, sinuous, covered in dark iridescent scales that caught the moonlight. His face was inhuman — scaled, angular, those yellow slit eyes already blown wide and dilated, fixed on Kasumi with an intensity that bordered on worship.

His tongue flicked out. Tasting.

They flanked her. Wick left, stalker above. The fungi stayed dead.*