20 days later, in the capital city of Calot.
A hooded figure crouched on the rooftop of one of the buildings in the rchant quarter with the ease of soone who had grown comfortable in high places, his outline unremarkable against the stone and the bright midday sky.
Nobody below looked up. People rarely did when they had sowhere to be, and the capital had found its rhythm again.
The streets were busy and the market stalls were doing reasonable business. Children moved between adult legs without looking where they were going.
The hybrid rain had beco one of those events that people discussed less and less as the days passed, becoming another event that could be filed away alongside other things that had happened and been survived.
Noah watched it all from the roof and felt none of the comfort it was apparently providing everyone else.
The hybrids present in the crowds pressed against his senses like a bruise being touched repeatedly.
He could feel them moving through the streets below, carrying their abyssal energy with them, each one a small addition to a sum that was quietly making the world worse.
They had beco common enough that nobody flinched anymore when they learned the stranger they just t was one. They had beco normal.
But unlike them, he had not beco used to them.
His attention had been on the rchant house across the street for the better part of an hour. It occupied a wide frontage on one of the busier comrcial roads and was the kind of building that moved significant amounts of money through it on an ordinary day.
From the outside, it looked like every other establishnt on the block.
From the inside, when he extended his senses through the walls, it felt like sothing else entirely.
There was not one ordinary human inside it. Every person in that building, from whatever was happening on the ground floor to the figures moving through the upper rooms, carried the sa signature.
Every single one of them was a hybrid.
That was not a coincidence. Noah refused to believe that it was.
The hybrid rain had distributed its payload randomly. Not every mber of a family was even a hybrid.
That was a building that had been staffed deliberately, filled with purpose, and shaped into sothing that wore the appearance of comrce while serving a different function entirely.
Lady in Dark built things slowly and with intention. He had learned that much.
And he had learned sothing else over the past twenty days as he fought for his life in the monoliths, feeding on everything worth consuming.
He'd used Feast to its fullest, devouring every creature that crossed his path, no matter how big or small. The process had been unglamorous and occasionally painful and completely worth it.
Now, he was a SS-rank mage. His mana capacity and magic control were also on the sa level, both sitting stubbornly short of SSS-rank.
And beyond the rank itself, the array of what he could bring to bear had expanded considerably. He now had a considerable arsenal of Affinities and spells, way more than anybody in existence.
He was not the sa person he'd been a month ago.
He straightened and stretched his hands, swords made of darkness condensing in them.
He didn't need to go all out for this. The swords would be enough.
He dropped from the roof, landing on the street. He took the passersby by surprise, but he didn't care. He wasn't trying to hide his handiwork. In fact, he wanted everyone to know it was him.
He walked up the steps and kicked the door open.
Imdiately, every face on the ground floor turned towards the sudden intrusion, expressions filled with surprise before hardening into sothing else.
He moved before the door had finished swinging.
The first three went down before any of them had processed that he'd attacked. His swords moved efficiently through the air, severing heads and sending their blood spraying through the air.
The hybrids began transforming to combat him, claws extending and bodies thickening with the instinctive response of abyssal energy eting a threat, but the response ca too late for each of them.
By the ti the room understood what was happening, the ground floor had already been decided.
Thirty seconds. That was all it took.
Blood ran down the front steps and onto the street below, and the screaming outside started a mont after, carrying the particular pitch of people who had seen sothing through a door that they would spend a long ti trying to unsee.
Noah heard their footsteps scattering in every direction and paid them no attention.
He walked to the staircase.
The hybrids were already coming down to et him, several of them, the ones who were mages already casting before they had line of sight, spell formations materializing in the stairwell.
He simply raised one hand and cast Feast.
A maw of darkness materialized on the floor, hands forming from it in the sa motion, moving through the air faster than they could process.
The hands of darkness caught the spells first, pulling them inwards and consuming them before they completed their travel.
Then they caught the hybrids themselves, wrapping around limbs and torsos, dragging them down regardless of how they fought it.
Notifications flickered at the edge of his vision but he ignored them and kept walking.
The second floor took thirty seconds, sa as the first, but the third floor was different.
They ca at him fast and without hesitation, the strongest ones first, streaking across the room with attacks that arrived almost simultaneously from multiple angles.
He read the attacks and stepped once. The attack that should have connected passed through empty space. His hand lashed through the air, destroying the attacker's head.
He mowed through the rest of them.
When the last one broke, backing against the far wall with his hands raised and his voice tumbling over itself in panic, Noah stopped.
He listened to approximately two seconds of the begging, then he raised a finger and a sliver of bone crossed the room, sinking into the brain of the hybrid and killing him.
Noah exhaled slowly, looking at the room, satisfied with his handiwork.
Then a voice ca from the doorway.
"We've got to stop eting like this, Noah."
He didn't need to turn around to know who it was.
But he turned anyway.
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