The first morning of the New Year brought a blizzard. It fell hard, and it fell for three days straight, until the snow stood above the knee. In a hundred and twenty-three years since the sky had torn open, Lunguo had never seen snow like it.The weather on Earth was getting worse, year by year."This snow just keeps getting worse. Can't even get the door open." At Ethan's villa, Duan Zhao's group had gathered. They were days from deploying, so they'd spent the holiday together, eating and drinking off Ethan. The vegetables and fruit were endless, and there was real wine. It was paradise. If one of them died the next moment, going out with a full stomach meant the life hadn't been a waste.Watching the flakes drift down, Duan sighed."It's thirty below out there. Damned if last year had snow like this, or cold like this." Ruirui Qi rubbed her hands together. People had Classes now and hardier bodies; otherwise weather like this would kill them by the thousands. It wasn't even the cold

"Do you guys hear something?" Ruirui Qi spoke up, confused, her eyes a little lost. She'd heard something strange and couldn't place it.Duan Zhao, Yilin An, and Yi Hu were spirit-types. They heard it too. Their faces changed."It's someone calling for help." Duan Zhao pointed. "Seems to come from over there.""I hear it from this side.""Me, over there."Each of them heard a voice coming from a different direction. But they were all anxious the same way. The sound was doing something to them—pulling, tugging at the feet, making the legs want to move before the head caught up. Every minute they wasted, the odds of whoever was out there made it dropped.Ethan looked where they pointed. He didn't see a living human. He saw a large pack of Aberrations lying in wait. The strange voice was bait, leading them out of formation and into the ambush.Before he could say a word, Duan Zhao's group was already itching to move, to go rescue the people crying out.Anhou Wu frowned. His spirit ran de

The buzzing grew louder the deeper Ethan dug.It wasn't a sound that reached his ears so much as a pressure behind his eyes, a needle-thin whine that wormed through the snow and the dark and tried to push him back. Something underground was hurrying. Something underground was afraid. It was throwing everything it had at his mind, hoping to spook him into running.Ethan's spirit power had broken ten thousand long ago. A spirit attack on that scale was a mosquito slamming into a tank.It was not, however, harmless to the people behind him.He glanced over his shoulder without stopping his hoe. Mr. Wu's team was twenty paces back, crouched in the snow, heads down. Qingwu stood among them like a small statue, eyes bright and calm, utterly untouched. Everyone else had gone gray around the mouth. Yilin An had one hand pressed to her temple, the other clamped on her sword hilt.Ethan drove the hoe down again. Three meters. Four. The blade struck something soft and gave.He cleared the dirt a

"Fell," Ethan said. "Your whole war zone fell. And you walked out with forty-two men."He did not say it as an accusation. He said it the way he said everything, level and unhurried, but his eyes did not leave Tianhe's face. He had seen enough battlefields to know that a clean collapse meant one thing, and a collapse that left a handful of officers alive to carry the story meant something else entirely.Tianhe's mouth set. He did not look away."Commander Zhenghui Song turned. The relief force we went in with was two hundred thousand. He lured us into a kill zone. He burned us from the inside out. Command center was overrun before we realized what was happening. Men who had fought beside him for twenty years died covering our retreat so that one platoon could walk out with the warning. That's all that walked." His voice did not waver until the end. "I would have taken the fight. I would have stood and died. I would have followed him to the last second. That is the part I cannot swallo

Ethan ran like a man who had somewhere to be.He had somewhere to be. Center command center was five miles east, and his legs carried him over the broken ground faster than they had any right to, his boots eating the frozen earth in long, loose strides. Behind him, the chickens he had sent west were already meeting the thing. He could feel it through the colony—a flicker of consciousness, a pop as one bird after another stopped existing.The monster noticed him running.He knew it the way you know a camera has locked on to you. The ground behind him went silent. The cawing stopped. Then the silence folded forward, and in his peripheral vision the presence that had been half a mile behind him was suddenly a hundred meters away, and then suddenly on top of him. It did not run. It did not fly. It teleported, in jumps of hundreds of meters, leaving a bruise in the snow wherever it landed.Ethan's sanity did a backflip. He had seen a lot of ugly things in the last six months. He had seen a