The auxiliary brains were really struggling to parse all the added information.

  There was just too much impact.

  It could tell a lot of things were rushing up from below but it couldn’t really focus on them all that much with everything else going on.

  The eye on the back of its neck tracked the apocalyptic sight of everything above them slowly crumbling down.

  A building broke into dented segments to their left and finally gave out, tumbling over them, and the wolf paused just long enough to think of a new path over the uneven footing around them, activating [Bloodrush] and kicking at the dented, overturned railing it was on to abruptly change direction.

  There wasn’t enough time.

  ‘Emreeil’s’ wing-hands clamped around the edge of a window sill and a broken support beam, launching herself and ‘Scruffy’ forwards by pulling her wings back. Ahead, the wolf slammed its hands onto a crumpled filter machine to stop its momentum and duck, allowing ‘Emreeil’ to leap over its head while its tails extended to ‘Katherine’.

  She grasped them without question, and with a twist of its hips, it tossed her over the crumbling sea of jagged debris right as the heavy machinery of the building slammed onto the ruins she’d been standing on with a brain-rattling thud, the scent of oil and dust billowing over them.

  ‘Emreeil’ dashed forward as ‘Katherine’ rolled to her feet, taking the lead, only to halt suddenly and stumble when she realized she couldn’t see anything over the dust cloud that had settled over the entire area like a smokescreen, only vague shapes and haunting yellow-orange lights flashing through the smoke with the imprint of abstract shapes while she whirled around in confusion.

  The wolf had no such problems, so it dug its claws in and leapt over the small hill of jagged debris, landing heavily on a sparking cylinder that snapped and threw its body into a stumbling roll, which it righted with a quick twist and a snarl before shooting forward again.

  The humans followed.

  There was only so much space to maneuver to when everything was falling apart around them.

  Something exploded in the distance, sending another shockwave to scatter the ruins, much weaker than the first, yet enough to make something below crack with a thunderous rumble of cracking stone and cover the air and sky with yet more debris and dust.

  The ground lurched and broke into jagged teeth of stone with a heaving, rumbling rasp, swallowing a cylindrical building ahead of them, all the while the giant tower above was still falling, still growing bigger with every moment they ran, almost in slow motion from its sheer size and distance.

  It couldn’t afford more detours. They had to just run.

  It leapt onto a jagged piece of stone, and into the hissing cloud of gasses spewing out of shredded pipes, careful to blunt its claws to not ignite anything, then immediately ducked under a stream of superheated steam that boiled the air with heat, its pack following closely, albeit clumsily.

  A rectangular wall heater ahead of them, a grated rectangle a dozen feet tall and wide,, suffered one more impact than its construction could handle and exploded, sending flaming debris and red-hot metal bolts and pieces to pepper the air, some of them meeting chemicals in the distance and starting a chain reaction of fire and exploding dust clouds.

  Dust and smog and a nauseating, nostril-rending mix of chemicals seemed to slowly waft into every speck of air, smoke mixing in, making it hard to breathe, compounded by the wolf having to shoulder aside metal beams, jumping and scraping up the side of shifting, cracked buildings.

  In the middle of trying to figure out how to go up instead of forward, it activated one of its templates to keep its blood oxygenated, hoping it would prevent its body from passing out.

  The eye on its left hip jerked towards sudden movement, faster and larger than the rest.

  It briefly jumped back to slap away a sharp piece of flying steel that was about to impact ‘Katherine’ through the smoke , letting it harmlessly bounce off its fur then raking its claws to spin on its hand behind her, swerve around, and jump back forward to keep leading through the breaking maze of iron.

  It felt ‘Emreeil’ follow, using one wing-arm to yank ‘Katherine’ along much like it had done before, forming a loose line of scrambling bodies.

  Some container popped to their right, a high-pressure spew of water dousing the wolf as it crossed the building, opening its eyes to another swirling mass of metal bits of debris and swirling dust that clung to its wet fur.

  To the right, a solid wall of broken beams and spewing pipes, most spewing sewage water or some kind of liquid fuel. To the left, a chain of buildings twined around a lift, all crumpling down like paper into a ball as something from even further away pushed on the structure.

  It smelled like fire and chemicals and distant blood as its paws scraped across the broken environment for a half-stable foothold, more scrambling away than running.

  The humans were speaking with the mind-link but it couldn’t even hear their thoughts with how loud everything was. Its auxiliary brains were barely holding off sensory overload.

  Just keep moving. It was a simple thought, and it was the only thought it needed.

  It jumped onto a grid of thin metal rods protecting a window, curling its fingers around them as it scrambled up, then swung over the building’s tilted edge and ran around some precariously leaning machinery to race up a steep incline formed from a fallen vent.

  Something broke above, and the eye on its neck gave the wolf enough warning to brace and lift its upper body, opening its arms.

  Its legs buckled for a moment as the human-sized piece of flaming building slammed into its upper shoulder and chest, but with some help from its tails and back tentacle, it twisted and heaved the piece over to the side, transferring its momentum, jerking its body around to get rid of the smaller bricks that peppered the area and its back before they could light its fur on fire.

  It dove into the tilted window in front of it, its right side using the tilted railings of a staircase like steps while its left side used the actual steps in an awkward shamble, before diving out of another window half a floor above and to its right, coming out into a blocky, V-shaped crevasse of ruins, its forearms tingling from the impact as it dropped and rolled.

  They were starting to get buried, the light in the environment shifting and lowering with every passing second.

  There were too many things above, all falling on top of eachother and adding more weight to drop on those at the bottom.

  And they weren’t even at the bottom, not really. The main plate was hundreds of feet below. But they weren’t high enough to not get crushed as well.

  It slowed a little bit to not create much distance between its humans and itself as they dove through the window themselves, and resumed its run the moment they had their feet below them.

  Then the entire world dropped below its feet, making its paws slap the air in confusion before the rattling sea of debris bounced up to slam past its arms and legs and into its chest, billowing clouds of dust and debris consuming it from all angles as it bounced a couple feet off the ground, crashing down awkwardly.

  An obscured mass hid the light from above, its outline vague in the smoke and dust, leaning over them, only propped up by buildings beyond their sight. It felt a section bolted onto the structure’s side disconnect.

  [Pack Hunter] was a life saver.

  Specifically, ‘Katherine’s’.

  It threw a tail to her wrist and dragged her up, ignoring her tearing clothes as she got dragged up crumpled metal, and the ground shook with another impact as a half dozen tons of steel flattened the side of the building she had been on and crumpled the entire tilted wall like it was cheap paper.

  It raised its tail just high enough for her to kick her feet at the air, then let go, immediately leaping forward again, grabbing onto a steel support beam, generously tilted from its overturned platform, and used it to jump to a higher one, the tentacle on its back slapping away falling stones and pieces of metal.

  They had to go up.

  It jumped again, and turned its claws to the right, hooking onto the side of a criss-crossing mass of iron rods, extending both tails to its humans and keeping them there as they caught up.

  It took a short moment, and it almost lost its grip once since the world kept bouncing and tilting, but both grabbed on, and so it heaved upwards, feeling its muscles strain from the speed and force it needed to climb up, slime creeping over its forearms for added grip and being left behind in patches on the grimy path.

  Reaching the tilted roof of a building, covered in broken glass and ruined scaffolding, it jumped to the left on what looked like the edge of a roof, barely reaching it due to the added weight, chest hitting the edge and claws hooking into metal.

  Its humans hit the metal side of the structure, and it snarled with effort as it moved forward, its tails dragging its pack up, ‘Emreeil’s’ oversized wing arms helping tremendously by clawing at irregularities on the wall.

  They let go once they were on the roof, then they all dropped low to the ground, clutching at each other and whatever they could reach to not lose their balance, ‘Scruffy’ briefly turning to vomit off to the side.

  The wolf kept an eye in the sky, staring at the small glimpses it could catch of the falling tower between the sight of the world breaking around them, even as it leapt up an overturned exhaust pipe and onto the underside of an adjacent walkway above, hacking at the metal supports to lower it so its pack could run on it.

  Some small part of it registered the fear in the background of its mind, and used it for fuel.

  The walkway’s connecting hinge finally snapped, and the whole section jerked. It rode up on the railing, and swiped its left hand claws through a straining steel wire, sending the walkway to slam down on the roof below, glass mingling into its wet, dust-matted fur.

  It scrambled out from under the walkway and began to run up, then on it, the humans following behind.

  For a moment, another explosion sent a shockwave that cleared enough dust for the eyes on its left side to see what was going on rather than feel it.

  Somehow, the sight was even more apocalyptic than the feeling.

  Flames were dripping down buildings, or shapes that might once have been able to be described as such. Beams and wires and walkways had fallen into a haunting tangle covering all the space in-between like the web of a colossal spider, nothing like the one whose leg ‘Ghoul’ had offered. Pipes and industry spewed black and green smoke, thick like oil, into the air, some igniting and some melting the very metal they met, a chorus of screaming and a thousand other sounds assaulting its ears as it focused on distinguishing the noise.

  It could see shapes, moving, people and not, but something about seeing them flee in terror was more visceral than just feeling them do it.

  Then it felt something above shift and begin to topple towards the walkway, and the moment was lost, its attention shifting.

  Its pack could make it. On flat ground like this, they were far faster.

  And ‘Emreeil’s’ boost cost mana it did not want to waste on itself.

  It turned and grabbed the squared railing with its hands, allowing its lower body to swing up and plant its feet on it, shoving an urgent command to 'run past me' to its pack as it gathered a [Sonic Blast], barely managing to balance on the railing.

  It was so glad it had eaten that ‘cat’ what felt like ages ago.

  Its pack did as it requested, blurring past it with speed that made it realize it had been holding them back on this flat plane, for once, then it aimed its head down, threw itself back, and let the ball of air expand and hit the walkway.

  The walkway exploded.

  Its body spun above its pack like a ragdoll, all of its unsheathed limbs jerking and whipping around with its spine to straighten its body, which it managed a moment before it slammed into some kind of hollow gas tank and dented it inwards with its legs, then rolled off to land on the edge of a plate which was probably a building’s glass-covered floor before all this.

  The eye on its hip saw the sharp fall below, the toxic smog hissing out from screaming pipes, choking the people running for their lives below, and it quickly scrambled away from the edge.

  To the left, a man glowing purple zipped through the air, and its eye tracked him until the smoke consumed him, shocked at the ease and speed demonstrated.

  It had never seen a human just casually fly like that.

  From behind them, it heard and felt the walkway, or what was left of it, be suddenly disconnected as something large slammed into it and took it out. It didn’t stay long enough to feel how much the falling debris had to travel before it hit the next section of buildings, instead choosing to claw up the tilted floor and dive through a latticework window shoulder first.

  It must have repeated motions like this another dozen times in a frenzied whirlwind of jumping, hacking and slashing through, and exploding all obstacles in their way, a short frenzy which felt like hours as it scrambled to keep them from getting crushed.

  Eventually, they stumbled into an enormous elevator shaft turned on its side, the first straight section they’d seen for what felt like long, continuous minutes.

  Its humans ran ahead, far, far faster than itself, especially with [Bloodrush] having run out already.

  ‘Emreeil’ exited the shaft, using her Skill that made Mana a tactile sensation to guide her through the thick smoke and dust, disappearing into the cloud that was wafting into the shaft-turned-tunnel, zipping forward with light footsteps.

  It was about to send her a snarling order to turn back, because if they lost cohesion as a unit, someone or something would get cut off, only for ‘Katherine’ to dash out after her in a similarly physics-ignoring blur, mere feet ahead of the wolf.

  It expanded the order to ‘Katherine’, and sent it, a mental scrape of 'go behind me' ringing out right as its head crested the exit.

  ‘Katherine’ didn’t listen, using [Pack Hunter] to locate ‘Emreeil’ and blindly run into the smoke.

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  ‘Emreeil’ stopped, skidding to a halt, but didn’t turn back for them, likely waiting for them to run ahead of her again.

  Its lips curled into a frustrated snarl as it awkwardly bound forward on the tilted, jagged rubble, dust settling on its open eyes, the antennae on its legs and snout writhing for information, unable to see anything past outlines after six feet.

  The only warning was the light coming from above suddenly lessening, and the shape that suddenly blocked the remnants of light through the dust doubling in size over the course of a mere second.

  ‘Katherine’ didn’t see it.

  It was far too wide and large.

  The wolf didn’t have time to think, so it simply acted.

  It unfurled all its limbs, four insectile legs, four humanoid arms, two legs and two tails all digging into the uneven rubble below them, activated [Bloodrush], and sent a blast of air to whizz past ‘Katherine’ and explode as it lunged forward.

  She was sent flying back into its tackle, her arms covering her head.

  Her upper back collided with its chest, and it had only enough time and leverage to extend its limbs as her momentum turned her to her side, slamming her down on the rubble.

  It felt ‘Emreeil’ zip towards them, but she’d moved too far, and with the dust in the way and the suddenness, she couldn’t use either her fields of force nor her ‘haste’ buff to speed them out of the way.

  Its limbs locked in place, bracing a mere millisecond before it felt something.

  The first sensation was something sharp pressing into the space between its ribs, ineffectually. The weight of the stone slab it was attached to followed, and the rod of what it assumed was enchanted metal did not bend.

  In a mere instant of hyperactive focus, it felt the moment the rebar briefly met resistance, then punched through with sheer mass behind something unfortunately angled in the worst way possible, its lung rupturing under the force of its own sheet of plant armor it had placed just under the ribs, before that too tore and spread open, crushing and dislocating the entire right side of its ribcage in the meantime.

  The eye on its neck had a mere moment to catch a blurry sight of how much length the metal piece had before the stone hit its back and stopped falling.

  Too much.

  It would pierce them both and ‘Katherine’ couldn’t move an inch when so tightly under its own body.

  The wolf couldn’t reposition either. It was fast, it couldn’t teleport.

  So it moved up, every limb taught with resistance as it grit its teeth and pushed back.

  It did not have the strength to uphold what must be more than a several dozen tons of stone and metal, but it had hoped its body would be tough enough to negate that weakness by simply locking its limbs in ways they would refuse to bend, leveraging the toughness of its joints and muscles more than its strength.

  In some ways, it was right, because even though it felt its heart briefly skip a beat from the impact that traveled through its numerous organs as the flat stone slammed into its back, the stone broke before its body did, aside from its two human arms that snapped backwards and keeled from the force.

  Unfortunately, the stone did not shatter into pieces it could conveniently shrug off, merely cracking and bending with the rebar embedded within it to almost curl around them, boxing them into a tight space without much air or light, beside the glow of its eyes.

  Other than a momentary stumble and a small whine of muted agony, it managed to stay upright, tails and tentacles and spidery appendages all quivering with effort as the wolf activated the template it had made for its chest and another for its arms.

  The feeling of its flesh and organs trying to squirm back into position and regenerate around the bar was so horrid it wanted to vomit from sheer revulsion. It could feel its rib bones scrape and grind at the textured ridges of the rod, reverberating through its chest and brain and antennae as they tried to straighten against the iron wrenching them apart.

  It dry heaved, blood and frothing saliva falling onto the panting ‘Katherine’, who flinched suddenly, as if torn out of a daze.

  For a moment, their enclosed little pocket of pain and rubble was silent, its limbs quivering, then ‘Katherine’ moved, pawing blindly around, then trying to rise, only to stop when she noticed the sharp piece of steel positioned over her heart, barely an inch off her chest.

  It squirmed, just a little, growling in effort, trying to keep the weight from pressing it down and skewering its stupid human alongside the wolf.

  Unlike Fleabag, she probably couldn’t take a bar of metal through the lung and feel nothing but a relatively mild amount of agony. It may not like her as much as the other two, but if she died, it would only be by its own jaws because it chose so, and nothing else. She was part of his pack, and it had pride.

  Her fingers followed the bar, likely noticing the incongruence in their positions, the warm blood and gore smeared all over the metal and dripping onto her coverings, and she gasped, her hand retreating, head swerving.

  “Oh.” She breathed out, taking stock of their situation.

  It tried to growl in reproach, strain, pain and sheer anger because if they’d just listened they would all have been fine, or at least the wolf would be, but all that came out was a frothing gurgle mixing with a throaty rasp.

  It moved its snout down so that she could see the expression, one of the few humans and canines had in common.

  A glare.

  The entire pile of rubble bounced and jerked like the wolf was in a box held by an angry giant, without warning nor prelude.

  It only barely managed to clamp a hand over the sharp point of the bar before it slammed into ‘Katherine’s’ chest, and despite its best efforts, it burrowed through its hands and cracked through ‘Katherine’s’ armor, slipping an inch between her ribs before the rocking forced the rod out, and sent it stabbing an inch to the side.

  It didn’t punch through this time, making ‘Katherine’ wheeze at the pressure as she writhed beneath it.

  Slowly, its mind processed what that impact was, and felt inordinately relieved when it felt the edges of that titanic tower crashing through the broken ground just a couple hundred feet away, the broken environment parting to let it through and below rather than cushioning the whole impact.

  They had at least escaped the main danger to their lives.

  Unfortunately, by the time the aftershocks had stopped and the wolf had fully gained its bearings, ‘Katherine’ was breathing harshly with pained gasps, her injury registering.

  The blood didn’t smell like lung blood, so it was a superficial wound.

  It tried to shift, only for nothing to happen. It didn’t have the leverage to straighten up, it could barely hold this position as it was.

  Push with your hindlegs, it sent, a nonverbal command with a mental image of what it wanted her to do, and she complied, squeezing and writhing to the side to squeeze her feet past its waist and push the rubble upwards, her hands redoubling their efforts to push the wolf away.

  She almost halved the load on its back yet doubled the strain on its chest, her palms pressing the wolf up enough to readjust its footing and brace again as she groaned in effort.

  As it worked on breathing through the bloody froth in its mouth, eyes unfocused, it realized that ‘Katherine’ was strong.

  Was that where she put her attribute points? It explained why she wasn’t that fast or tough.

  It grit its teeth, pushing the thought aside, feeling ‘Emreeil’ frantically throwing debris away from them and blasting sections of rubble off, yet despite the four arms and her tail, with how the rebar was threaded through the stone, her progress was slow.

  With a heaving groan, it pushed, and pushed until its elbows were quivering with tension and the stone was grinding around them, giving ‘Katherine’ an inch to breathe, despite the jagged, white-hot needles of pain tearing through its chest cavity.

  And with enough room to remove its hand from where it had been impaled, it did so, yanking it off and doing its best to ignore the muted, fiery pain that pulsed along its hand when it set it down on the uneven ground.

  Endurance gave it stamina and toughness, and its templates were regenerating its flesh and blood enough for it to not feel mortally wounded, despite the grizzly injury, but all that strain had combined with the lack of oxygen in their little box and the ruptured lung to make it feel like it was being choked, achingly slowly, bit by bit.

  What could it do here?

  Fire wouldn’t help. Electricity wouldn’t.

  An immensely overcharged [Sonic Blast] would likely blow the entire pile of rubble off of them, but it would also probably kill ‘Katherine’ and injure the wolf further.

  So it was trapped and helpless.

  A familiar, enraging situation.

  For once, it had a pack to help it, but it was a little too angry at them to appreciate their assistance at the moment.

  She knew the wolf was alive and… probably not going to die from that, but there was something worrying about that glassy eyed glare that seemed to look through her as it focused on not letting her get impaled.

  She was thankful for that, she really was, but she was also inwardly worrying over him because she had chunks of lung on her fingers and it was dripping a bloody froth onto her collar as it breathed in wet, harsh rasps.

  Even more prominent was the worry that its strength would fail it and she’d get impaled through the chest again, this time a more final injury than the first poke.

  Unlike Fleabag, she wasn’t special in any way. She only had five Endurance, and not a single title, while her traits were generic and weak.

  ‘Hardworking’ might help her get less tired from straining activities and recover mildly faster, but that would hardly get them out of this.

  She could feel Em digging and burning her way through the giant wall of concrete that fell on them and sending hurried messages, but her attention was focused on what was in front of her, the yellow-lit little tomb that had probably saved her life.

  Or, no. Fleabag did.

  She tended to be relatively collected, but coming a foot away from getting crushed had left her somewhat dazed. She focused instead on pushing the wolf away and helping him uphold the load, squirming under and between his numerous limbs to feel the rubble with her feet, adjusting with every tremor and shift.

  The rubble barely moved despite her best efforts to push up, but some of the quivers in the wolf’s tails seemed to ease as one of his arms crunched back into position, his elbow jerking into place like a mannequin under repair.

  All they could do was wait, it seemed.

  She didn’t like their chances of surviving now.

  She had no strange or overreaching senses, but even so, she felt it was quite likely that they’d eventually leave this little coffin only to find themselves within a catacomb of rubble.

  She took a deep breath, and stopped ignoring Em’s messages.

  “Kat! Speak to me!”

  She sounded… understandably hurried.

  “I’m alright. Fleabag isn’t. There’s a spike through his chest and if he stops holding himself up it’s going to go through me as well. We can hold, but…”

  She focused on the wolf’s eyes, a deep gold like honey and fire, unfocused and slowly getting more and more dilated as a stream of blood trickled out of its mouth, the only sign of life being its wet, strangled breaths and its growls of exertion whenever it shifted.

  “He’s not looking well. I’m sure he’ll live, so don’t panic, but he’s got a spike going clean through his right lung, and he can’t push it out or away. Hurry.”

  Em sent back a nonverbal rush of whatever she felt, a mixture of guilt and heart-crushing worry along with a frenzied sense of urgency.

  “Send an image, what are you looking at?”

  The wolf gave a short growl of reprimand, but they couldn’t focus on being legible to its mind, they had to communicate fast.

  A mental image came, and she worked her jaw as she shifted her feet, feeling her muscles slowly begin to burn and shake.

  She couldn’t help the wolf for much longer.

  The pile of rubble on them wasn’t a mere wall, but a hollow, cracked hallway of concrete run through with rebar and a couple steel wires, likely something meant to be stuck on the underside of a plate above.

  The image Em sent was that of a crushed mess of broken stone and rebar, extending almost thirty feet in length. They were close to the edge of the thing, luckily, the majority of it continuing onwards and past them.

  A thought came to her, wondering if she’d have been stuck here at all had the wolf not thrown her back, and was then discarded.

  Even with a mental image, she couldn’t tell what would have happened had it not done that.

  If anything, she should have just listened and stayed behind him instead of following Em like she’d always done.

  A grueling minute passed before her limbs started to burn with an intensity that was slowly ramping up enough to give her a [Pain Resistance] level up.

  She carefully bundled a message, and sent it to the wolf.

  It let out a short grunt of acknowledgement through its teeth.

  Scruffy, who was outside and pulling stones away as Em cut through the rebar holding the rubble together sent an idea that had them all pause.

  The bombs.

  If they put them in between the cracks…

  The wolf sent back denial and the idea was discarded.

  Probably for the best.

  She liked Scruffy, but she didn’t trust the goblin enough to bet their life on it, especially with something as volatile as pyrotechnics.

  She slowly let her limbs slacken, pushing less and less, and the wolf slowly adjusted to her trying to rest her limbs, its teeth grinding with an audible sound like pieces of porcelain being rubbed together while its claws scraped furrows into the rubble around her shoulders.

  She took the chance to try and writhe away from the bar, as much as she could, to put something under it that was less likely to kill her if she was impaled, to little success.

  The terrain shifted with a sudden, almost bouncy motion a few seconds after, and she inhaled sharply as the wolf buckled for a moment, the bar compressing her leather chest armor and grinding it into the base of her ribcage with enough force to drive tears to the edge of her eyes, but not piercing through yet.

  The wolf snarled, a wet sound like a failing, waterlogged chainsaw, and she shifted her feet to help him push back, her hands practically forming imprints on its sternum. Inch by inch, she got room to breathe again, and even more than before, the rubble slowly lightening as Em burned through rebar and yanked off giant chunks of concrete to the best of her ability.

  Another minute passed, and by then, the wolf didn’t look like he was struggling as much as he looked like he was getting increasingly tired.

  Another minute that felt like a century, and she saw a flash of light bleed through the cracks.

  “Em?” She asked through the link, and felt her bob her head right outside through [Pack Hunter].

  Em took the time to reply with a nonverbal message notifying them that this should be the last piece of rebar she had to burn through before she could lift the main chunk of debris off of them.

  The wolf send back a message filled with so much acidic anger that she grimaced, watching his eyes tighten as his ears peeled back even further atop his head.

  A few seconds of flashing light and sparks bleeding through the gaps, and Em sent them a ready message.

  Katherine cautiously removed her hands from Fleabag’s chest.

  He barely moved at all, still emptily glaring at nothing.

  Pull where? Em asked them, faster than usual, and the wolf directed her to Katherine’s right.

  The blanket of rubble finally shifted, before beginning to peel off.

  Go, Fleabag sent, and moved his limbs out of the way, adjusting.

  She crawled under the lifting blanket of cracked stone, and pushed up while Em pulled, lifting it enough so she could squirm out from under it.

  She opened her eyes with a soul-deep groan of relief, only to find a vague darkness framing two golden eyes the exact same hue as Fleabag’s.

  “Wh-” She went to speak, and coughed on the dust in the air, moving her head to try and figure out what had happened.

  An anemic light coming in from their left through a crack of metal alleviated her worries of them being buried alive.

  “Help me get him.” Em rushed out, and she shook herself, hurriedly getting to her feet and grasping pieces of concrete, yanking them and using the rebar and wires within the stone to pull the whole thing away.

  They’d only lifted it up enough to reveal his left side before he sent them an order to stop and hold, using his tails and limbs to squirm off the bar.

  God, it was so much more horrifying when she saw it from the side. Watching his flesh cave and be pulled one indent at a time as he panted and squirmed forward and to the side in awkward shuffle.

  She felt sick.

  She wanted to apologize, but she wasn’t sure what for. She didn’t really blame anyone for this.

  The wolf seemed to disagree, as the moment he was free of the bar, he panted for only a moment before lurching forward and punching Emhreeil in the face hard enough to send her flying several feet back in a wild spin, a rattling snarl like a bandsaw and a chainsaw mixing together coming out of its chest, eyes full of fire.

  She gaped for a moment, then backed up, letting the rubble fall on his hip.

  It just shrugged it off, and stalked towards Emhreeil, who was groaning on the ground, spitting blood as she staggered upright.

  The wolf rumbled in warning, and she was torn, wide eyed, confused.

  The message he sent through the bond made them all pause.

  The best translation she could give the bundle of thoughts and images was “you almost killed Katherine and hurt me, by not listening to me”, and a wave of fury that made her heart speed up and pump even faster than it had been for the past twenty minutes.

  Reflexively, she wanted to defend Em, but she just wasn’t sure what to say. How to say it.

  And on some level, he was right. He was the toughest of them, and the most aware. He should be taking point, but Emhreeil… what, got impatient? While Katherine followed her, because… that’s what she’d been doing her whole life, and so she did again, like always.

  Emhreeil swallowed as she straightened and turned, eyes on the sooty, broken rubble beneath them, thoughtful, while the wolf stalked forward, vibrating with anger.

  She didn’t get to keep that dignity, Fleabag’s tails lashing at her legs while the tentacle on its back wrapped itself around her waist, a bloody hand clamping shut around Emhreeil’s mouth as she was slammed into the floor.

  She didn’t fight, eyes clenched shut.

  I’m sorry, the thought came from Em, full of genuine guilt and regret, and the wolf’s snarl petered off into deep, heavy breaths. He let go, and backed up a step, stumbling and grunting in pain, sending back acceptance.

  She should thank him. Verbally or not.

  Instead, she looked around them, trying to gain her bearings, trying to remember where on Ergos they were at right now.

  She didn’t get to, finding a tail around her neck all of a sudden, yanking her to her knees, eye to eye with the wolf.

  It took a moment for her to parse the message it sent, a firm command with an undecided or else behind it.

  You listen to me, not Emhreeil, she translated, and her eyes flicked to Emhreeil, who avoided her gaze with open shame and guilt on her face.

  She wanted to object, because Emhreeil was smarter, Emhreeil had the perfect Skill for a leader, Emhreeil was not a bloodthirsty monster yet, but… she forced herself to think.

  Was the wolf really inferior to Emhreeil as a leader?

  Emhreeil had always had this tendency to rush ahead and not look behind her, not thinking of those she left behind, metaphorically and literally.

  The wolf rushed ahead while keeping perfect distance, batting away debris and blocking what it couldn’t warn them about. She remembered how it had leapt back to bat away a piece of sheet metal that would have no doubt damaged her armor or bowled her over on the floor, and then dragged her out of a collapsing building's path just a minute after.

  This was neither the time nor place to talk about any of this, but she couldn’t exactly object or try to change the subject, and the adrenaline and urgency in the air forced her to make a decision quickly.

  She nodded, staring into Fleabag’s eyes, to the background of shifting rubble and distant screams.

  His glare lessened into a mildly annoyed glower, and he let go.

  She wanted to say thank you, but again, she just… couldn’t. Not quite.

  She instead dug into the metal container on her hip, and dug out a small vial of healing potion, offering it as an apology instead. Her chest hurt, but he could go first.

  It wordlessly pushed its side into her, slightly limping.

  He was healing, but no reason not to speed that up, so she uncapped it, found the slowly closing, gruesome entry wound, and carefully dropped a few drops of healing potion on it.

  She wasn’t prepared for the sudden yowl he let out, jerking away from her and crashing into the floor on his side, nor was she prepared for how his flesh suddenly bubbled and warped and grew like a twisted tumor, or like it was regenerating a shredded lung outside his ribcage.

  She jumped forward, hands extended, then paused, because what could she really do about whatever the hell was happening?

  He twisted his spine in a way that had to be painful, and literally clawed the extra flesh off, his entire body jerking and spasming while they hesitantly stood around him a circle, sending each other wide eyed stares.

  It took her a moment to remember an old memory, and realize what had just happened.

  It took a few more seconds for him to calm down, sprawled out on the ground and gasping for air, spitting globs of blood out of his throat, eyes wide and jerking around.

  “What the fuck?” Emhreeil breathed out, and dropped beside him, cussing and hissing as she checked the bubbling, warping flesh on his back, fussing over him while he twisted onto his stomach and groaned, getting up on violently quivering limbs.

  “It’s-,” she started, and coughed when Em’s slitted eyes jerked to her, using a far too pale finger to dig blood out of her canine ears,“It’s a bad potion reaction. Lady… Lady Anna used to talk about how some species with regeneration or shapeshifting abilities had bad reactions to healing potions, but… she never mentioned anything this extreme. She just said some troll-blooded people might start spasming or some Mytrids might experience horrible nausea or… stuff like that. Not whatever just happened. Has he never gotten healed by a potion before?”

  Em shook her head, and Scruffy moved forwards to awkwardly pet Fleabag’s arm as if in moral support.

  She was about to suggest maybe explaining that tidbit about the potion to him before he decided to claw her throat out, but Emhreeil was already on it, sending rapidfire thoughts to the dazed wolf that literally tried to shake the haze off like shaking water off its fur.

  It didn’t seem to blame her, thankfully, or maybe it already knew what happened, briefly licking Em’s face to make her stop, then turning away to limp forwards with hurried steps, gradually speeding up as it got used to its limbs again.

  Follow, it sent, then gave them a bundle of thoughts that included a tactile sensation of approaching metal figures below, fighting with human ones and quickly cutting through them to gain on them.

  Her eyes blew wide open, and she jumped forwards, Em picking Scruffy up again beside her and then following in his steps.