The smell of burnt earth still lingered in the valley.

  Three hunters stood among the remains of the bus wreckage, their boots blackened by ash and dried blood. The fire had died hours ago, but heat still pulsed faintly from the broken ground where the Rift had first opened.

  One of the hunters crouched beside the corpse of a Rift-born creature.

  Or what was left of it.

  The thing’s body had already begun dissolving into dark ash, its shape collapsing inward as though the world itself rejected its existence. The hunter pressed the tip of his spear into the creature’s skull, then grunted.

  “Clean hit.”

  Another hunter, taller and wrapped in a dark traveling cloak marked with the silver insignia of the Hunter Guild, looked across the battlefield in silence.

  There were bodies everywhere.

  Most of them were monsters.

  Very few were human.

  “That’s not the strange part,” he said quietly.

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  The first hunter stood.

  “Then what is?”

  The cloaked hunter walked slowly between two broken sections of the bus, his gaze moving over the dead with measured attention.

  “These things don’t die easily,” he said.

  He nudged another corpse with his boot.

  Its neck was broken.

  Its skull had been crushed.

  “But most of them didn’t die fighting.”

  The third hunter frowned.

  She had a long scar across her jaw and a blade strapped across her back that looked almost too large to draw quickly.

  “What are you saying?”

  The cloaked hunter stopped near the edge of the treeline and looked toward the mountain road where the survivors had fled.

  “I’m saying they were interrupted.”

  The first hunter gave a short laugh.

  “By what? A better monster?”

  No one answered.

  The wind moved through the valley in a low, dry whisper.

  The cloaked hunter crouched near another body—this one half-burned, its claws still embedded in the dirt as though it had tried to turn and flee before dying.

  He studied the angle of its corpse.

  The torn ground.

  The direction of the tracks leading into the forest.

  When he spoke again, his voice was quieter.

  “These creatures came out hungry.”

  He pointed to the body.

  “They should have pursued the survivors.”

  The scarred hunter crossed her arms.

  “And they didn’t.”

  “No.”

  The first hunter looked around again, slower this time.

  His earlier confidence had faded.

  “So what stopped them?”

  The cloaked hunter straightened.

  For a long moment, he said nothing.

  Then he looked toward the forest once more.

  “Something scared them.”

  Silence settled over the valley.

  The first hunter let out a breath through his nose.

  “Monsters don’t run.”

  “They do when something worse is nearby.”

  The scarred hunter’s gaze sharpened.

  “You think something else came through the Rift?”

  The cloaked hunter shook his head.

  “No.”

  He looked down at one of the shattered windows of the bus. Reflected in the cracked glass, the broken sky still hung above the valley like a wound that had never fully closed.

  “I think something survived it.”

  Neither of the others spoke after that.

  The three hunters stood in the valley a while longer, surrounded by cooling ash and dissolving corpses, listening to a silence none of them trusted.

  Far above them, hidden beyond the clouds and the fading light, a faint ripple moved through the wounded sky.

  The Rift was not finished.

  And neither was the world.