Before anyone could react, it released a dense, choking smokescreen that erupted outward and swallowed the forest around them in seconds, reducing visibility to nothing.
Adam's instinct screamed at him to gain height. He shot above the trees, trying to gauge the area covered by the smoke. He still couldn't see anything below, everything beneath him was swallowed in darkness, but at least up here he was aware of his surroundings.
Then Adam looked up.
The sky was tearing. Dozens of black portals split open simultaneously above, and from them, things fell. Flying beasts with membrane wings thin as razors. Armored hulks that hit the branches like falling boulders, bark and wood exploding under their weight. Bloated sac-creatures that burst on impact. Giant rocks, trees, and other random debris, it was as if some vast inventories were emptying itself over their heads.
"Don't separate, stay as close as possible! We need to get out of this fog without losing each other!" Adam dropped back to the ground, letting the darkness engulf him, and rejoined the others.
The rumbling of the eldritch monsters came from all sides. They pulled into a circle formation to cover every angle, though they could barely see one another.
"Eliminate anything that gets too close, and keep moving west until we're out of the smoke!" Lian Mei shouted.
The first wave came from three directions at once.
Lian Mei met hers without turning her head. Her arm snapped out, that unnatural, jerking speed, there and back before the eye could follow , and a swarmer's head separated from its body mid-dive. The second one she caught out of the air by the wing and folded it in half against her knee.
On Adam's left, Renn drove his fist through a sac-creature before it could burst, then used the deflating carcass as a shield against the spray. Sable worked in silence behind him, daggers low, opening throats as fast as the smoke offered them.
Adam felt the ground shiver, something big, charging straight at the boy's section of the circle. He stamped his heel and Ticked. The gravity pulse flattened a lane through the smoke, and whatever had been coming hit the earth so hard the impact bounced them all an inch off the ground.
We can hold this.
They held it for thirty seconds. That was how long it took to learn the beasts were almost incidental.
The portals were the weapon.
Lian Mei drove into the guard of a massive Eldritch beast, heavily armored, troll-built. She threaded inside its reach and thrust her palm toward its chest. A white portal materialized between her hand and the beast's sternum. Her palm went into the void. A second white portal opened two inches from her own temple. Her own strike came out of it. The impact snapped her head sideways and sent her stumbling.
"They're linking our attacks!" Sable screamed. She swung both daggers at a swooping membrane-beast and watched a portal swallow the slash whole. The exit point detonated open directly behind Renn, both blades erupting from it at full velocity, missing his spine by a margin.
"Watch yourself!" Renn bellowed, twisting to shield the boy with his own body while driving a beast backward with his free hand.
Adam punched clean through something that dropped onto him from behind, he felt the ribs go, and the next beast that came at him, he refused to punch at all. He stepped into it instead, caught the thing by its jaw with both hands, and wrenched. The neck gave.
It takes attacks. Things that travel, so punches and kicks are risky, which mean I will just shred these weak monsters apart.
Across the circle, Renn arrived at the same answer his own way. He stopped throwing punches, seized an armored hulk by its hind leg, and swung the entire beast like a hammer into the swarm pressing Sable. A white portal flickered open in its path , hung there for half a heartbeat , then sealed without taking anything, and four hundred pounds of eldritch carcass swept the ground clear.
Sable didn't answer. A sac-creature had burst against her shoulder at point-blank, and its slick violet contents were eating smoking holes into the bark at her feet. She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist and kept cutting, short strokes now, blade never leaving skin-contact range, no room for anything to open between her and the wound she was making.
Adam Ticked again, a wide pulse this time, slamming three small flying beasts out of the air. A white portal snapped open directly in front of him, positioned to swallow the force.
Nothing went through. The beasts behind the portal dropped anyway, crushed flat, and the portal hung open on empty smoke.
My gravity can’t be absorbed by the portals it seems.
The portal winked shut faster than any of the others had.
Adam launched himself onto a branch, buying three seconds of elevation and relative quiet.
White portals: instant spatial transfer between two fixed points. That's what took Voss. Black portals: storage. Pre-loaded with beasts, smoke, debris, and probably more we haven't seen yet. If they could drop us into the black portals, this fight would already be over. Which implies a limitation: the black ones can't take us. Only the white ones can. Why? What's the rule?
He didn't have an answer. But the question mattered.
He dropped from the branch, pulled a flying swarmer out of the air with a gravity pulse, drove it into the ground hard enough to crush it into a pool of blood, and kept moving.
Lian Mei had stopped killing beasts. She was hunting the portals themselves.
She moved through the smoke in stuttering bursts of displacement, striking and pulling the strike, striking and pulling , and every feint dragged a white portal open somewhere ahead of her, a fraction late, guessing. Each one that opened on empty air told her something. Where the caster was looking. How fast he tracked. How far ahead he could read her.
Range-limited. Slower each time. He is not limitless.
An eldritch looking like a rock with six eyes loomed out of the grey, and she read the trap layered on it before it finished forming, the portal waiting at its chest for her thrust. Bleeding from a redirected cut across her forearm, she feinted, pulled her strike, pivoted to attack from the flank instead.
The ambusher had layered it twice.
She avoided the first portal clean, shifted her weight for the pivot, and stepped her full momentum onto a floor-level white portal hidden in the smoke beneath her leading foot, completely invisible until she was already in it.
She dropped through. The portal sealed.
Thirty thousand feet above the clouds, Lian Mei came out of the white portal in freefall. The cold of altitude hit her. No ground visible, only the forest, a dark smudge impossibly far below. She didn't scream. She spread her body flat to slow the tumble, oriented herself, and started calculating the fall.
The enemy had succeeded in separating her from Adam.
What a ridiculous power, I kept only using the portals to redirect hits, just so I don’t expect a different trap like this one.
But as she fell, a realization settled in. The portal user wasn't showing himself. He fought only through his stockpile of weak eldritch beasts and the white portals, which meant he was, at most, no stronger than her. Almost certainly weaker. Diamond Tier classification was so rare that in all of Sutra, except of Selena’s Three royal guards, only seven Eldritch holders had earned it, every one of them from a noble dynasty. This attacker was likely an outsider who had somehow stored this many eldritch beasts with his power alone. And that was the true source of her unease: there was every chance he was a member of Utopia, or its ally.
She angled her body toward the dark smudge of the forest and let herself fall faster.
Back on the forest floor, the collapse was immediate. Without Lian Mei anchoring the perimeter, the sheer volume of the horde made holding position impossible.
"Where is she?!" Sable shouted.
"Gone! Move!" Renn roared, kicking a hulking beast hard enough to send it through a tree and launching himself into the branches with the boy locked against his shoulder.
Adam and Sable followed, abandoning the ground, the fight converting into a high-speed aerial skirmish through the smoky upper branches.
It was better up there, because the smoke thinned near the canopy, and for the first time since the ambush began, Adam could see his own hands clearly.
He could also see the boy, a small shape jolting on Renn's shoulder, eyes squeezed shut.
A flier dove at them. Adam Ticked it out of the sky, the creature slamming into the earth far below. Two more crossed in behind it, one high, one low, forcing Renn to choose which to dodge. He chose neither, planted his foot against a trunk, tore off a limb, and swatted the low one into the high one. Both went down in a tangle of shredded membrane.
Sable moved between branches like she'd been born up here, her daggers finding the gaps in carapace and wing-joint, never swinging anymore, only placing, the blade already waiting where the beast was going to be. Portals opened around her constantly now, and took nothing. There was nothing to take. She had stripped her fighting down to the one thing the enemy's power could not hold: contact.
The ambusher adapted.
Renn crossed a wide gap between two heavy branches, fully airborne, committed, no ground to push from. A razor-winged beast dove for his blind spot. He pivoted mid-air and swung. It was the first true punch he'd thrown in a full minute, and it was the one the enemy had been waiting for. The white portal intercepted his fist at the apex of the arc. The exit opened at his own shoulder. His full striking force hit his own shoulder joint at maximum velocity, the impact jarring through bone and muscle, his grip spasming open.
The boy slipped.
"The kid!" Renn crashed onto the receiving branch and lunged downward, one arm outstretched, but the drop was already too far and too fast. Below, between the massive trunks, in the long smoke-filled gap, a white portal opened like a waiting mouth directly in the boy's fall path.
He jumped.
Adam applied the gravity pulse on himself to fall faster.
The smoke screamed past him. He could see the boy falling. He could see the portal below, patient, open. He pushed more force into the descent, closing the gap, arms reaching.
He caught him. Both arms locked around the boy just above the glowing threshold, close enough that Adam felt the air change temperature at his fingertips.
Then the portal below them winked shut.
A new one opened directly in Adam's propulsion path, precisely calculated for his speed and angle, placed where there was nothing to brace against and no way to bleed momentum.
I was tricked.
The thought arrived at the exact same moment as the portal.
It took them both.
"We lost Adam!".