Two of the scarflock ran behind her, almost at all fours, more animals than human in their primitive state, screaming and growling like rabid beasts with foam at the mouth. The moment her feet left the balcony on the second floor of the museum, she knew there was no other option but to use one of the failsafes Alice had made for this kind of situation.

Evelyn wanted to save it for the underground lab, as she only got the one, but there was no other option. There was too big a gap between the balcony and the next rooftop, and she had lost her staff, leaving it behind as a melting sludge over the charred remains of the reanimated corpse. The cable vines in her arm were gone too, burned away by the electric fire, and Evelyn was tapped out on mana.

She puffed out a mana battery and a hard ball of soap engraved with runitronic circuits and runes—one of Alice's harder to make creations, but one that had saved her many times before.

"[Bubble Lift]!" She screamed, activating the Runeskill with the mana of the battery. Her Core groaned from the effort, sending an intense spike of pain as she forced it to translate the mana from the battery to the Runeskill in the ball of soap.

The scarred puppets jumped behind her, weapons and hands forward to catch her, ignoring any potential damage to themselves. They only cared about the prey their master pointed them to.

The runes and circuits shone with mana, and from the ball in her hand, a bubble began to form on its surface, first covering her hand, then her arm, and finally, her entire body became engulfed in a giant bubble that floated in the air, defying gravity.

Evelyn kept holding on to the ball of soap, slowly foaming and slippery, with both her hands to make sure it didn't escape her grasp, and booked it at full speed, running with all the strength her legs could muster.

The scarflock was met only with air, as Evelyn floated away at the speed of a leaf in the wind. To anyone watching, the scene would have looked rather comical, as she was moving the bubble like a pet rodent would a ball of plastik while holding the soap ball with both hands forward.

Her pursuers hit the street hard, leaving imprints on the already damaged concrete. She didn't have much hope that, even with some broken bones, it would be enough to stop them for long. Even if they were to die, that would only make them all the more dangerous. Looking back, she noticed they both had longer scarves than the woman she had just barely defeated.

That was not a fight she could win as she was. Not with her mana depleted and her main weapon destroyed. Even less with their leader still around.

She had gotten more than she could have ever asked for. She remembered Doctor Crowley now. She knew the general direction in which he was after using [Pulse Link] on the dead scarflock's runescars, which was how she was deciding to call as lack of a better term.

He was in the direction of the central abyss, tangential to it, but not straight to it. And below. Which meant he was probably in the underground lab, his old stomping grounds.

Has he been hiding there all these years after the Day of Ruin? After he ruined her life? But why? Had he been biding his time? Amassing more of his scarflock in the meantime from survivors and scavengers that went a little too far and too deep into the dark zone? Was that why the Scarflock roamed about District Zero, hunting people unlucky enough to cross their path?

Then why didn't he attack Menagerie if he was in control of such a force? Just a dozen of his meat puppets could take the little town with ease if they were all so dusting hard to kill.

And yet the scarflock had never even come close there before, ever. He didn't seem to know for sure that Evelyn was alive either; his tone and wordings made it seem like he had only suspected it. That meant he had no spies there, which made no sense.

If Crowley could really control whoever he had engraved his runitronics on at large distances, what was stopping him from sending them there, even if just to gather intel?

Evelyn made it to the closer roof as she pondered these questions. Once she was over it, she deactivated the Runeskill on the ball of soap, popping the bubble with a push of her will. Stepping on solid ground once more, she turned around and looked below, where the scarflock were already getting up, their broken bones leaving their bodies in disgusting shapes. One of them had a bone poking out of his arm, breaking apart the skin where some of the grotesque scarring was, his in particular covered in yellowish mucus.

She was about to run for it, putting as much distance between them as she could, when her Awareness called her attention to the one with the poking bone. There was something wrong with him now.

The arm where the scarring had been damaged from the protruding bone was twitching like crazy, its spasms only damaging it more. Then, the arm stopped for a moment, as the other scarflock turned his head after forcefully putting his own bones back together, before it did something totally unexpected.

The scarflock with the almost ripped arm started to attack himself with the protruding broken bone, half of his arm now hanging uselessly by the remaining muscles it was still attached to. But the attacks were not as wild and unpredictable as his previous behavior. Instead, the sharp bone pierced wherever the scars were, starting with his legs. What was more fascinating about the scene was that his other arm was trying to stop himself from self-harm.

It was like watching an internal battle of sorts, promptly interrupted as the watching scarflock picked up his scrap metal weapon where it had fallen and, with a single hacking motion, removed the rebel arm of the other scarflock.

But then, his legs, now with damaged scars, started to kick back, all of it as the kicking scarflock wailed and groaned, contorting his body as is trying to stop his own legs from attacking his companion.

The show was cut short with the reintroduction of another member of the troupe, as the pack leader, who Evelyn had decided to call Furtooth, due to the hair and dog teeth growing on his scars, swung his big club down and exploded the head of the rebelling scarflock.

Evelyn crossed eyes with Furtooth at that moment, who grinned at her with a profound malice before taking another swing of his club. Only this time, he got to a batting pose and hit the corpse from behind and upwards with such a tremendous amount of strength that he sent it flying.

Straight to the roof where she was.

"Dust!" Evelyn cursed as she turned to run as fast as she could before jumping to the next roof. The corpse crashed right where she had been moments before with an arc of terrifying precision. Whatever Runeskills that Furtooth had in his runescars must have given him mastery over that club in raw power and the accuracy of projectiles hit with it.

Even without looking back, she knew the dead scarflock would be getting up to pursue her, which was exactly why Furtooth had launched it. How much of his strategy was his own and how much the control of his master, she couldn't say, but at least one thing was certain.

Not even at full mana would she be winning against that guy. Not without some serious upgrades, which certainly didn't have time for at the moment, preoccupied as she was with jumping from building to building.

As she feared, her Awareness increased ears caught the sound of frantic steps behind her as the headless meat puppet hunted her. Evelyn was sure to be dead if she was caught, but there was another thing she was sure of.

Her pursuer didn't have as much experience as she did in the ancient earthling art of urban parkour.

Not even stopping for a second, Evelyn used her superior spatial awareness, thanks to her Stat, to calculate in an instant the speed, distance, and force necessary to jump from one roof into a taller building as she had many times before, only this time specifically aiming for a broken window. There was no doubt, no fear, no hesitation.

Evelyn jumped swiftly as the corpse was quickly gaining on her and, making herself into a ball, crashed right through the window and onto the interior of the building. The glass cut her in several places, including her face, but they were already starting to heal by the time she landed and rolled back up into a run thanks to her Endurance, so she just ignored the pain and looked for another window, this time turning left instead of going straight again to confuse her pursuers.

There was a sound of something hitting the outside wall, which her Awareness let her know immediately corresponded to a human body. The meat puppet may be strong and its puppetmaster smart, but neither of them was an urban explorer at her level.

Another thing that her secondary Stat of Endurance gave her beyond slight regeneration was high stamina and shorter recovery time, so Evelyn just kept going. There was the temptation to go straight towards where she had felt Crowley was, but beyond her hatred, she was a woman of a deeper pragmatism than the psychological scars left by that monster.

Going there now, on her own and with her mana reserves just beginning to refill, would be the longer version of just letting herself be captured.

"You'll need better than some goading to pull me into an obvious trap, you puffing son of a dust pile. And better servants than that to catch me before I get to you first. But don't worry, Crowley, we'll meet soon enough. Once I'm ready for you."

Making sure she had lost her pursuers proved a little harder than she thought it would be, having a couple of close calls. Furtooth launched a bunch of debris that almost got her, destroying half an apartment floor before she jumped to another through a bathroom window, but eventually, after almost two hours of non-stop running, her Awareness relaxed, indicating she was safe for now.

Unsure of what to do next, she sat down, legs crossed, and focused on recovering her mana and stamina as fast as possible in case she needed to make a stand on her own. If no other scarflock had joined them, she only needed to worry about Furtooth and the remaining living member of his pack. Would the corpse puppet be in pursuit still? Somehow, she doubted it.

Runitronics need mana to function. Even if Crowley had put mana batteries inside the bodies of his scarflock, they would eventually run out. Controlling a dead body would consume just as much, if not more, mana than controlling a living body that had its own Core, even if the affected people had no powers of their own beyond the engraved Runeskills in their runescars.

It was a rather risky assumption, but a fair, educated guess given the circumstances. Even her Endurance had its limits; it was only Tier 1 after all, she still needed to rest for a bit to let it do its work.

She had noticed that her stamina had felt somewhat better than what she was used to. Remembering what little she knew about how Classer progression worked, the secondary Stat of a Stat with an assigned Archetype would benefit from any improvements to that Stat, which came through improving its associated Skills.

That meant that her improving two Skills to Adept had given her a little more of an edge to her Endurance, which was really nice to know. Evelyn decided to check her notifications and Status Screen as she recovered.

[You have defeated Tier 1 Scarflock - Humanoid]

[Your Ecologist Passive Skill [Pulse Link] leveled up to Adept]

[You have defeated Tier 1 Scarender - Construct]

[STATUS]

[Evelyn Anima]

[Hybrid Core - UNSTABLE]

[Class - Undefined - Tier 1 (Novice)]

[STATS]

[STR - Unassigned archetype]

[DEX - Unassigned archetype]

[END+ - Unasigned archetype]

[AWA - Ecologist (AWA, END) - Tier (Novice)]

[Action Skill - [Hylosynthesis] - Tier 1 (Adept 17%)]

[Passive Skill - [Pulse Link] - Tier 1 (Adept 6%]

[Utility Skill - [Verdant Toolset] - Tier (Novice 21%)]

[INT - Unassigned archetype]

[WIL - Unassigned archetype]

[PRE - Unasigned archetype]

[TRUE RUNES]

[Primeval]

[Harmony]

[Technogenic]

Evelyn was happy about the improvements to the mastery levels of her Skills and managing to activate [Verdant Toolset], but her attention went to the notification about her kills.

While the scarflock woman was marked as a humanoid, the second kill notification made her alarms ring.

"Scarender? After it died, the body was considered a different entity? And construct? As in construct monster?"

That meant that the meat puppets, these scarenders as the Overseer called them, weren't just controlled corpses. They were monsters. And if they were monsters...

There was a sound behind her, and her Awareness flared in warning. If her Archetype hadn't been assigned to Awareness, Evelyn Anima would have died right there, as the same headless scarender as before jumped at her from behind, having pursued her relentlessly.

It was a monster now, not just a runitronic tool made from a person. And monsters did not need mana batteries when they had their own Core powered by dark mana.

On top of that, construct-type monsters had unlimited stamina. There was no tiring them out, no matter how low-tier they were.

Evelyn knew in that moment that she had puffed it up.

She looked around for a way to retreat, but there would be no point. It would keep going after her, again and again, until she was too exhausted to keep running.

It had to end right there.

Pulling the verdant taser, which she hadn't even had enough time to inspect yet, she lunged at the scarender and sent what mana she had managed to recover into it.

"Dust you!" She screamed as the cobalt blue flowers of the verdant taser hit the chest of the monster and discharged a bright bolt of amber colored electricity.

Evelyn kept sending all the mana she could muster, every last drop of it, hoping to repeat her last method of victory, but she wasn't so lucky this time.

The scarender was momentarily stunned, but it was stronger than the woman was, as prooved by its longer human skin scarf. Its one remaining arm managed to escape the stun enough to reach for Evelyn's neck, strangling her with an iron grip.

She gasped for air, kicking and punching the flesh contruct to no effect. Her normal hits did nothing to something that cared not for pain. If she only had more mana, she could have won.

So she puffed out all her remaining mana batteries from her Inventory. Her consciousness was fading as the air didn't reach her lungs, so she failed to grab any of them as they manifested in the air, watching as they fell and rolled on the rooftop out of the reach of her touch to absorb the precious mana they contained.

Darkness was taking over, her mind fading away as the dead fingers were sealing her capture. Just before losing consciousness, she heard a thunderous sound from above.

A mighty roar.

A fist of fury descended from the heavens as Kornos the King Chimera crushed the scarender into a pink puddle with a single meteoric blow, its pitiful remains splattered all over the roof in a rain of flesh, bone, and rotting blood.

Evelyn coughed wildly, holding her neck, her thirsty gasps for air met with the heinous odor of the corpse pudding that covered everything in a radius, including her and her saviour.

"Are you hurt?" Kornos asked, scrapping the remains of the construct monster from his giant claw. "Why weren't you at the museum like we agreed to?" He asked, in a more concerned than accusatory tone.

"Kornos *cough* I thought I was dust. It's the *cough* *cough* scarflock." She took some air, but regretted it immediately as her increased sense of smell only made the stench even worse to handle.

"Let's get on the air first. This thing stinks." He said, taking her in his enormous arms like she was little more than a doll.

With a jump of his powerful legs and a few flaps of his dragon wings, they took to the sky, soaring away from the remains of the scarender.

Once she got enough clean air, she told him what had happened, to which he kept nodding in silence. When it came to the part that mentioned Doctor Crowley, Evelyn had expected Kornos to react to the mention of one of his personal heroes and an old friend, but he still said nothing.

"Where are we going?" She asked, noticing he was soaring through the sky almost in a straight line. He still kept silent as they landed near a children's park, and he let her step down on her own.

"This way." Was the only thing he said in response.

Evelyn was getting concerned, but she followed after him.

"What's wrong, Kornos? Where are we?"

This direction is... she thought, confused for a moment.

"There's an entrance to the underground lab here. We'll get Alice out of you very soon."

"How do you know that?"

"Robert told me." He admitted.

"What? When? He is here, in District Zero? Now of all times, he decides to come back? Why?"

Kornos said nothing, just kept walking in silence until they were at the park. The playground toys were almost unrecognizable; rusted, gnawed by wandering monsters, or deformed by bolts of black lightning from the now dissipated manastorm, but there was no doubt what this place once was if one knew what they were looking for.

"I almost forgot. Here." He said, giving her something he had been holding with his scaly and feathery tail.

It was a staff of wood, or maybe metal; it was kind of hard to tell given its unusual mix of textures for Evelyn, so she decided to keep it simple and call it metalwood for the time being. It was covered in runitronic circuits in a very strange, combined pattern with more natural-looking shapes on the metalwood.

Even so, Evelyn understood what it was. The engine staff of the Firefly, her broomwheeler. Which gave her the answer to a question she hadn't dared to ask out loud about the fate of the dear vehicle.

"Try not to lose it again. We all worked together on it, so it must be important for you, right? The rest of the Firefly was too damaged to recover anything else, but as long as you have this, you can always rebuild it. We can always... rebuild..."

His speech got progressively slurred as she took the metalwood staff from his hand, making her immediately anxious.

"Kornos? Kornos, what's wrong? Talk to me!"

But the powerful chimera could only groan as a soft light came from behind him. From his back.

The place in his mighty body where once Kornos had displayed with great pride the symbol of his membership to the group he had helped found. A great patch of once tattooed skin with a broken spear surrounded by flowers, logo of Overbloom, that he, at some undetermined point in the past, for reasons known only to him, before Evelyn had even met him, had clawed out in fury.

Leaving nothing but a myriad of flesh-deep scars.

As the eyes of Kornos started to fog out and brighten into the same pale blue glowing on his back's scars, Evelyn contemplated in horror as another distinct voice, a familiar but far more horrifying voice, came out of the mouth of her father figure, her mentor and friend.

"Hello again, my masterpiece. Welcome home."

Before she could react to the horror before her, Kornos' hand snapped closed around her human arm, stopping her from running away.

The floor under them trembled and cracked as the children's park crumbled from a sudden earthquake. Evelyn tried to tear herself out of his grip, calling to him by his name in desperation as his face contorted into an evil smile.

They fell into a pit of darkness, a gaping open maw into the depths below District Zero.

To the lair of horrors where she would meet her maker.