JASMINE FLAMESWORTH
I peered up at the sun, little more than a bright patch behind the clouds, to gauge the time of day. It was well after noon, which meant I'd been trudging through the Beast Glades for several hours without seeing a single edible creature.
Mana beasts were plentiful, but I couldn't just kill and butcher the first thing I saw, especially the more dangerous ones. Many were poisonous, like the giant, toad-like sludge hopper, while some weren't made of meat at all. Others were simply unpalatable.
Twenty feet ahead, something darted toward me. With a quick flick of my wrist, one of my daggers whirled through the air and struck with a wet thud.
Stepping carefully up to it, I tugged my blade out of the tough hide of a fanged musk, a stinking mana beast that looked like a hairy brown ball, but was mostly teeth and jaws. No one would eat such a thing; they tasted as bad as they smelled.
"Starving," I muttered, nudging the small corpse with my boot. Fanged musks were incredibly aggressive, but wouldn't normally hunt creatures larger than themselves.
Just ahead, two more burst from under a bush and tore away into the forest.
As I prepared to launch my dagger after the fleeing beasts—their cores were still worth a little something—a branch creaked above me. Keeping still as a statue, I pushed mana to my ears and listened carefully. Chitinous scraping and sharp claws cutting into the bark suggested some kind of buglike mana beast.
Slowly, I slipped my second dagger from its sheath, holding a blade lightly in each hand.
A branch cracked as something heavy lunged toward me. I sidestepped the attack and spun to find a huge, hairy spider with razor-sharp blades where its legs should have been.
The spider ripped its sharp appendages from the ground and swiped at me, but I took two quick steps back, avoiding the cut, then darted forward myself, driving one dagger into the center of its eye cluster and the other up into the joint where its head connected to the rest of the bulbous body.
The sharp legs flailed as the creature lost control of its movements, but it was already dead. It just didn't realize it yet.
Ripping both daggers free, I leapt up onto the sword-legged spider's back, causing it to collapse. After a moment, the twitching stopped.
I slid down from the back and walked around to its bloody face, kneeling down to get a better look. Its mandibles were each about as long as my hand from wrist to fingertip.
"Ugly, aren't you?" I said before breaking off both large fangs and storing them away. I would have taken the legs and core, too, but movement through the trees nearby distracted me from my kill.
Something was sprinting away through the underbrush, making a whole lot of noise. It wasn't large, from the sound of it, but only prey animals made that much noise.
Three round, eight-legged shapes skittered away through the treetops, probably sensing an easier meal. Not wanting to lose potential prey to the mana beasts, I sprinted after it, cutting through the trees much more quickly and quietly than it was.
The spiders had a head start. One of them dropped from the trees thirty feet ahead of me, but it was met with both daggers, spinning within a disc of wind-attribute mana that caused them to sheer through three of the sharp legs then return to my hands.
I ran past the screeching mana beast without a second glance, sure that it wouldn't survive long missing three legs.
The others must have realized that they had competition, because one of the remaining mana beasts slung a spray of sticky web into my path.
I wrapped my body in wind mana and plowed into the webbing, expecting to burst through. I did, but what I hadn't expected was for the fine fibers to cut through my protective barrier and leave a dozen shallow lacerations on my exposed skin.
The little cuts burned painfully, though this subsided to a raw itch as my mana began to heal the tiny wounds.
Grunting in annoyance, I took up the chase again. The undergrowth cleared somewhat, and suddenly I could see what I was chasing.
Instead of the prey beast I had assumed, it was a young girl. An elf. She was fifty feet ahead of me, and the quickest spider was nearly right above her.
Wind condensed around my legs and beneath my feet and I sprang off it, flying up into the air. Using the tree branches like springboards, I jumped up higher and higher, until I was on the same level as the mana beasts and had closed the distance to the closer of the two. Letting out a piercing whistle to draw their attention, I launched myself off a tree trunk.
The sword-legged spider twisted nimbly around, its long legs supported on a handful of different branches. The bulbous body swelled and a stream of spider silk splashed through the canopy around us, creating a tangled web between me and it.
Just as quickly, my daggers cut a gap in the sharp filaments, and my momentum carried me through so that I was face to face with the mana beast.
Two of the razor-sharp legs slashed out, ringing off my daggers. The impact threw me off course, however, and I spun awkwardly over the spider's head and landed on its broad, hairy back.
Its legs were surprisingly limber, bending up and around its own body to continue thrusting and cutting at me. I parried with one dagger as the other plunged into the mana beast, punching several holes through the thick hide.
A piercing wail resounded through the forest before the creature went limp and tumbled from its perch. My stomach did a little flip as I found myself plunging downward, but I was able to push off the spider's descending body and land on a nearby branch. Below me, the heavy mana beast hit the ground with a wet crunch.
A thin, high-pitched scream came from nearby, then cut off.
The third sword-legged spider was no longer in the trees, I realized, and my stomach did another flip. My gaze tracked swiftly across the forest floor, but I didn't see the mana beast or the elf girl.
Harnessing my wind mana, I leapt from branch to branch, moving in the direction she'd been running.
The high perspective increased my visibility through the undergrowth, but I still nearly missed it: in a hollow between three fallen trees, there was a dark, web-choked hole, largely covered with leaves and broken branches.
Something was moving within the shadows inside the mouth of the hole.
Without time to think things through, I jumped from the trees, aiming directly into the cave opening.
Wind whipped past, causing my hair to flutter behind me like a flag. I used the mana imbued around my legs to push down and out to better control my fall. Both daggers were held in a reverse grip, poised to strike.
The sword-legged spider didn't even have time to sense my presence before I crashed into it, the force of our collision cracking its hardened carapace and knocking us both through a dense wall of webs. At the same time, my daggers bit down into its back, between where the legs all connected.
We bounced off the wall of the cave—which, it turned out, was actually a deep hole that plunged nearly straight down into darkness—before coming to rest, suspended in the sticky, ropelike webs.
Below me, the sword-legged spider twitched feebly, its bladed legs sawing at the webbing, its insides oozing out through the crack in its abdomen and the holes in its back.
Wheezing, terrified gasps came from above.
Stuck like...well, like a fly in a spider's web, the elven girl was pulling and tugging at the trap, but made no headway in freeing herself. Her eyes, colorless in the dark cave, were wide with terror, and her entire body was expanding and contracting with quick, shallow breaths.
"Easy, the spiders are—"
I was cut off by her screaming as something lunged up from below and ripped the dying sword-legged spider from the web. The strike was so fast that the creature had already disappeared with its catch before I could get a look at it.
The appearance of this even larger, more dangerous mana beast sent the girl into spasms of terror. She twisted and turned in the sticky strands, only catching herself more thoroughly with every movement.
"Damn it, stop moving!" It was no use though. My words fell on deaf ears, and the girl's thrashing was sure to draw the mana beast back to us once it had finished with the sword-legged spider.
Using my daggers, I began to cut through the ropes of spider's silk, careful to make sure I was still supported and wouldn't plummet down into the waiting jaws of whatever subterranean horror lived in this cave.
Once I was free and crouching safely on a rough ledge worn into the cave wall, I focused mana into my eyes and ears and peered down into the dark.
I could just make out part of a coiled, segmented form in a cavern below. It twitched as it devoured the sword-legged spider, the ensuing clacking and crunching noises resounding through the cavern entrance.
Although I could only see part of the beast's body, I could tell it was huge—thirty feet long at least, perhaps more.
It was made up of segmented parts, each supported by several legs, and reminded me of a giant centipede. What little light reached the bottom of the drop shaft reflected off thick plates of chitinous armor.
I didn't recognize the beast, or know its classification, but I was sure it was powerful.
The elf girl was still thrashing wildly against the webbing, sending tremors through it, like ringing a dinner bell for the creature below.
I knew I could get myself out easily enough, but reaching the girl would require I throw myself back into the middle of the web, putting me in a very poor position to defend against another attack.
It would be a lie to say I didn't consider just getting out and leaving the elf to her fate.
Instead of jumping up and out of the cave, though, I went farther down. As carefully and quietly as I could, using wind mana to buffer the noise, I hopped from ledge to ledge until I was just under the lip of the cavern roof that opened off of the drop shaft.
The cavern wasn't as large as I had expected, though I could just barely make out a handful of dark holes where other tunnels exited the mana beast's lair, perhaps extending into a larger network of burrows.
It was twenty feet from the roof of the cavern to the rough floor, and perhaps thirty or forty feet in diameter. The huge mana beast was right below me.
As I'd thought from above, it looked a lot like a giant centipede covered in thick plating. It was larger than I'd guessed, though. Much larger.
It had two long antennae that sprouted from the top of its flat head, constantly probing all around it, and two curved mandibles, each as long as I was tall. The thing could snap me in half with a single bite.
Its back end split and narrowed, curling up into two barbed, scorpionlike tails.
Then I realized what it was. A ravager…
The S-class mana beast shifted, unwinding from around its short-lived meal. Now that I was closer, I was sure it was at least fifty feet long, but the way it coiled around itself disguised its true size.
Ravagers were burrowing creatures that generally lived deep in the wildest parts of the Beast Glades. They hunted other S-class mana beasts, like the iron hydrax and midnight grizzly, setting traps like this drop shaft and baiting them with other, weaker beasts.
Or little elven girls, I thought bitterly to myself.
Little tremors were running along the network of webs, which continued down to the cavern floor. The ravager already knew it had more prey in its trap, I was sure, but the sword-legged spider had taken the edge off its hunger, and so it was taking its time getting around to its next snack.
Maybe I'd have enough time to get myself out of the tunnel—if I was willing to leave the girl behind. Even then, it was a maybe.
And the creature would still be here, much too close to the Wall for comfort.
Scrambling back up, I crawled around the edge of the vertical tunnel, clinging tight to the earthen wall just above where it opened into the wider cavern.
I could hear the ravager moving, its hundreds of legs churning up the dirt with a deceptively quiet scraping sound. Its head appeared below me, the antennae feeling along in front of it, prodding at the webs and running up the walls. They reminded me of a couple of giant worms crawling through the dirt.
A ragged scream came from above.
The ravager stopped, its entire body quivering as it prepared to lunge up the tunnel and devour the girl.
Out of options, I dropped straight down, landing on the S-class mana beast's back just behind the head, and drove both blades toward a gap between two of the bulky plates that made up its exoskeleton.
Suddenly the ravager was moving, the body retracting backwards out of the entrance tunnel with surprising speed. I stumbled and fell to my stomach, my blades missing their mark, scraping across the hard shell instead. The ravager continued moving, twisting away from the tunnel to spin inward into the cavern, bringing me closer to the twin scorpion tails curling up from its other end.
My body slid across the smooth armored plating until I was rolling down the ravager's side.
Not wanting to fall into the path of the churning legs, I shoved outward, throwing myself away from the mana beast, then sent out a quick burst of wind mana to right myself and land on my feet.
The ravager encircled me like a living wall, its legs stomping through the soft soil while the wide, flat head floated back and forth, the long antennae feeling the roof, floor, and along its own back.
The barbed tails hovered above it, poised to strike. I expected them to fall down on me at any moment, but the ravager held back.
I kept my place, crouched on the ground in the midst of the writhing mass of legs and armored segments. The ravager was slowing down, and after a few more seconds, it stopped moving entirely, except for the feelers.
The whole massive body lowered down, pressing to the earth. The antennae ran across the floor of the cave, very slowly. The head—and mandibles—were pointed directly at me.
The ravager didn't have any eyes.
This mana beast was entirely subterranean, and, I realized, blind. It hunted large, powerful prey by the vibrations they made as they moved across the surface. It wasn't used to fighting things so much smaller than it, which normally wouldn't pose any threat.
But how sensitive were those antennae?
Carefully condensing a marble-sized bullet of wind-attribute mana in my hand, I fired it at the back wall of the cave, where it impacted with a dull thud.
The ravager twisted with horrible speed and its twin tails lashed out, gouging deep furrows into the dirt. The body unwound around me as it moved to inspect the spot, the antennae feeling for its kill.
I examined what I could see of the cave again, looking for a way out of the situation. It didn't look good.
I had no way to know where any of the other tunnels went, and I couldn't make it to any of them without drawing the ravager's attention. It could move faster than I could, and a killing strike could come from either end.
If I ran for the cave mouth, could I climb up and out quickly enough to escape the mana beast's mandibles? Perhaps, if the ravager could be distracted.
Earlier, it hadn't immediately found me after I fell off its back, which made me think that my movements weren't detectable over its own. If I could get it moving…
Condensing another bullet of mana between my fingers, I shot it over the ravager's wide back and into the mouth of one of the connecting tunnels. By the time it impacted the tunnel wall, however, it was so indistinct that even my mana-enhanced ears didn't hear it. Since the mana beast didn't immediately lunge down the tunnel, I could only assume it hadn't noticed either.
The tunnel was too far away. As an augmenter, I could only send my mana so far out from me. The bullets just didn't have the energy to cause enough noise to draw the beast's attention.
A whimpering cry came from the vertical tunnel behind me, causing the ravager's head and antennae to turn in that direction.
The tunnel I had chosen for my distraction was directly across the cavern from the entrance, as far away as possible. I had wanted to lead it farther from where I needed to make my escape, but there were other, closer tunnels.
Before the ravager could decide to return to its trap and have the elf girl for a snack, I sent three quick bullets of air at the closest side tunnel.
The first hit the ground just in front of the tunnel mouth, sending up a spray of loose dirt. The second hit the wall of the tunnel a moment later, and the third thumped against the roof about twenty feet in.
The ravager was moving before the third bullet even impacted, unwinding its long body and filling the cavern with the sound of hundreds of rapid footfalls.
Disguised by the noise, I sprinted toward the exit and began leaping up the tunnel, each jump empowered by mana swirling around my legs.
The girl was still stuck in the webs, but I was amazed to see four vines winding their way down from the forest above, snaking through the webbing to wrap around her, trying to pull her free.
I shot past her and out of the mouth of the cave. Grabbing the thickest vine, which was wrapped around her waist, I heaved.
Sticky ropes of ravager's web clung to her even as she was lifted free from the cave and set gently on one of the large logs that obscured the trap. As soon as she was safe, the vines twisted toward me, becoming a barricade separating me from the girl.
She was looking at me with wide, fearful eyes the color of fresh mint. Her thin, angular face was smudged with dirt and blood, and her bright blonde hair was a tangle of leaves, twigs, and webs.
Very quietly, I said, "No time. We need to go," and gestured for her to follow me.
She didn't move.
I took a step toward her, but one of the vines snapped out at me like a whip. My forearm came up to block it, and when it coiled around me, I gave a sharp tug that snapped the vine in half.
The girl flinched and tried to scoot away from me, but her palm slipped against the slick moss covering the log and she tumbled backwards off it with a short, sharp yell.
An instant later, the rumbling sound of a couple hundred legs pulling a fifty-foot long, armor plated body up an earthen tunnel drowned out everything else.
I barely had time to spring up into the branches leaning out over the cave opening before the ravager burst out of its hole. I wasn't careful, going out of my way to break some of the thin limbs as I scrambled up the tree, making as much noise as possible.
The ravager was quick to follow, its long body rising up higher and higher out of the hole, then leaning into the tree with the crash of snapping limbs. The scythelike mandibles closed with a resounding crack just a few feet below me.
On the forest floor, the girl was scurrying away, putting distance between herself and the battle.
Planting my feet firmly at the base of a thick branch, I made a mana enhanced leap that took me nearly twenty feet up the tree, giving myself a second to breathe.
The ravager had pulled itself entirely out of the tunnel now, and had wound itself around the tree's trunk in order to continue climbing after me. There was a groan as the roots ripped free of the ground and the tree listed dangerously to the side, unable to support the massive mana beast's bulk.
Would it follow us if I jumped and made a break for it? Even if it didn't, how long before the ravager found the Wall? It could burrow right under the outer barrier and straight into town.
It would be a massacre.
The antennae were nearly at my level, wriggling back and forth as they sensed for me—and without which the eyeless ravager would be crippled.
I felt my face twist into a snarl of concentration as I dropped from the branch on which I stood, daggers ready. As I passed by the mana beast's head, I swept the twin daggers outward, each one moving in a smooth arc that bisected one of the long feelers.
The rubbery flesh parted easily, but the mandibles snapped shut like a spring-loaded trap, catching a few strands of my hair and ripping them out of my head as I fell past. Letting out an angry yell, I flipped both daggers around and drove them into the ravager's underside, which wasn't thickly armored like the plates on its back.
A shrieking noise like a giant cicada put my teeth on edge, but I held firmly to the handles of my daggers as I continued to slide down the length of the ravager's body, ripping two long gashes in its belly.
Yellow, slimy blood fell around me like rain. The noise grew so loud and so terrible that I worried I might pass out. Suddenly I was crushed between the mana beast and the tree, pinned there, stunning me. Then I was falling again, surrounded by splintering wood and the deep red flesh of the ravager.
The mana beast's scream had flushed all thought from my head. I couldn't even focus enough to use mana, and so fell freely until I hit the ground with a bone-jarring thump. A distant pain tugged at my left side, and I wondered idly how many ribs I'd broken. The crashing of the ravager's plated, segmented body striking the ground around me seemed to last for a very long time.
***
Lying on the forest floor, my eyes closed and ears ringing, I wondered idly if the elf girl had survived. Beneath the insistent buzzing left behind by the ravager's scream attack, the forest seemed silent. No noise from the mana beast was a good sign, at least.
Finally, after what might have been a few seconds or a few minutes, I attempted to roll onto my side and push myself into a sitting position. A deep, dull pain below my ribs took my breath away, forcing me to lie back.
I let out a hissing breath and tentatively moved one hand to the spot: something was sticking out of my side.
With effort, I forced my eyes open and looked down at myself.
The barbed stinger of one of the scorpionlike tails had stabbed into my lower back, piercing all the way through me to jut out my front.
"Shit."
I knew I needed to pull myself free of the stinger, but that was easier said than done.
Scanning the ground around me, I spotted one of my daggers half stuck in the dirt several feet away. Too far for me to reach.
I grabbed the barbed tip of the tail and attempted to break it off by hand, infusing my arms with mana to give myself strength, but I couldn't get any leverage on it lying flat on my back.
"H-hello?"
The light, frightened voice came from the other side of the mountain of ravager meat.
"You're alive," I said, the movement of my muscles around the mana beast's stinger causing a fresh wave of agony to ripple out through the rest of my body. "That's nice."
"Y-you sound…are you hurt?"
"I'll be fine," I groaned, not sure if it was true. "Can you get to me?"
I heard creaking, like trees blowing in the wind, then felt the girl's footsteps approaching.
"Oh my—"
Wordlessly, I pointed to where the dagger was sticking up from the soft ground.
The girl ran to it, then returned, holding it out gingerly.
Taking it, I began to saw on the stone-hard stinger, trying to remove the barb so I could lift myself free. After a few seconds, I realized my muscles were fatigued, so tired I was having a hard time gripping the blade.
My breathing was shallow, and I could feel the heat radiating from my chest and neck.
"Venom," I said softly, letting my arms go limp for just a second.
The girl's wide eyes somehow grew even wider, and she held out a shaking hand toward the dagger. "I can t-try…"
Snorting, I went back to sawing at the stinger as best I could. It was about as thick as my wrist, and as hard as a horn. Under different circumstances, I probably could have done it without too much trouble, but as things were, I knew there was a real chance I would die of the venom before I could free myself.
The girl watched for a while, her huge mint colored eyes staring down at me, tears making them shine even in the dim light. I resisted the urge to snap at her, saving my strength for the work. After a minute, she seemed to shake out of a stupor and began to run around, staring at the forest floor.
"What are you doing?" I snapped, unable to hide my irritation. Couldn't I even die in peace?
"Looking," she shot back over her shoulder, then I lost sight of her.
My tired, poisoned brain couldn't think of anything else waspish to say, but a crack from the ravager's stinger refocused me. I'd carved a little over halfway through.
With the blade still lodged in the black stinger for leverage, I grabbed the partially-sheared tip and heaved. It twisted, snapping and cracking, and then finally broke free.
Several drops of thick, black goo pulsed from the severed end.
Not wanting to poison myself any further, I tore free a piece of my shirt and wiped away as much of the venom as I could, then began to slide myself up the stinger until I felt it slip out of my back.
My legs shook and everything hurt like hell, so I sat back down, one hand over the hole in my stomach. Blood was running freely through my fingers.
"Listen," I said when I heard hurried footsteps approaching. "There is a place you can go. The Wall. Not too far." My words were slightly slurred.
The girl's bright hair bounced as she kneeled down in front of me and began stuffing something into the wound. "Twist around a bit so I can get the back too."
I did so, though I couldn't process what she was doing, and so continued giving her directions. "Straight west, then follow the mountains south. Just a few hours away."
After she'd finished with my back, the girl moved around to sit in front of me and handed me three small green pods. "Here, chew these. Quickly."
I raised an eyebrow and looked at the pods, each one about the size of my thumb.
"Til seeds. They're a natural anti-venom—and the ocimum leaves will stop the bleeding."
With a shrug, I popped the three seed pods into my mouth and chewed quickly. Each one contained dozens of tiny seeds that had a slightly sweet, nutty flavor.
The girl put one hand on my shoulder and pushed lightly. "Lie back and rest. Let your mana heal you. I'll—I'll stand guard, okay?"
The tremor in her small voice didn't exactly inspire confidence, but if her remedy didn't work, I was going to die anyway, so I eased myself down onto the ground and closed my eyes again.
"I'm Camellia, by the way. Thanks. Thank you for saving me, I mean."
"Jasmine," I mumbled tiredly.