It took nearly two entire days for it to regenerate what it had lost and implement improvements. It had to force itself to remain asleep, to spare itself the boredom of being cognitive.

  The ephemeral notion of the ‘System’ rewarding it, had given it many boons for its performance. First of which were Attribute Points.

  Path: [Hound of The Keeper] Level 32 → Level 36

  It quickly split the four Attribute Points it had gained between Intelligence and Strength.

  Strength ( +5 )

  Speed ( +8 )

  Dexterity ( +2 )

  Endurance ( +14 )

  Perception ( +7 )

  Resolve ( +3 )

  Intelligence ( +10 )

  Soul ( +3 )

  With how strong each of these ‘Points’ were, the difference in its thoughts was immediate.

  The intelligence it had lost by carving that runic pattern out of its skull seemed to have returned.

  The changes to its strength were a lot more drastic. Relying on its own biology for strength seemed to have made its baseline, non ‘System’-assisted strength, incredibly high. Thus, a proportional increase in strength already so great, felt like its muscles turning to corded steel.

  Much, much more importantly, it had gained three new Skills.

  -New Skills:

  [Gluttonous Core - Level 1]

  [Ichor of Corruption - Level 1]

  [Edge Projection - Level 1]

  -Acquired Skills:

  [Pain Resistance - Level 38]

  [Infection Resistance - Level 9]

  [Poison Resistance - Level 29]

  [Corrosion Resistance - Level 8]

  [Disease Resistance - Level 4]

  [Magic Resistance - Level 7]

  [Mental Resistance - Level 31]

  [Electricity Resistance - Level 5]

  [Restful Awareness - Level 35]

  [Tough Skin - Level 18]

  [Iron Stomach - Level 7]

  [Mana Perception - Level 16]

  [Mana Manipulation - Level 19]

  [Soul Perception - Level 4]

  [Echoes of Oblivion - Level 25]

  [Bloodrush - Level 22]

  [Logotexnia - Level 19]

  [Sonic Blast - Level 16]

  [Tremor Sense - Level 12]

  [Maddened Frenzy - Level 8]

  [Mana Conversion - Level 20]

  [Danger Sense - Level 7]

  [Unearthly Howl - Level 1]

  [Spike Shot - Level 4]

  [Gluttonous Core - Level 1]

  [Ichor of Corruption - Level 1]

  [Edge Projection - Level 1]

  … It was getting too many Skills. It kept forgetting what it had and didn’t have.

  It had a pretty good idea of what his new ones did from the vague visions the System provided, but it wished to test them for itself.

  Before finally waking to check on its pack and try its new Skills, it implemented a few biological changes to itself.

  It had thought that its protections were enough, but if those golems were the kinds of threat it would be facing in the future, it was doubtful.

  It added a few simple things. A fire-resistant oil that secreted from its skin when the temperature got too high. Enough to keep its fur from catching fire. Then, it chose something that it didn’t particularly enjoy experimenting with.

  Its own brain.

  It changed all of its muscles by adding more secondary nerves to them, giving them twitch-reactive nerve endings, which it connected to its brain on a secondary nerve tract, allowing them to completely bypass the parts of its brain which thought consciously.

  Implanted reflexes. Faster than conscious thought. They might have saved it from a few injuries in that fight.

  Even with as many eyes as it had, and as many auxiliary micro-brains that flowered around its brain stem, being in that fight had still been so overwhelming it had slipped up. Each injury then led to another. A cascade it couldn’t afford.

  It wished to do more, but it was running out of ideas on how to improve itself. It already had armour everywhere, multiple layers of it, differing in purpose and design. It had venom, fire, electricity, more limbs than it knew what to do with.

  It had backups upon backups, self-closing arteries to prevent bleeding-out, which it suspected was the sole reason it survived, it had molded one of its own teeth into a hollow sphere to surround its own brain, an indestructible shell. It was slowly and steadily moulding several other of its teeth into plates and blades deep within its abdomen, to be made into armour and weapons.

  And it had still barely been enough.

  It needed more power, but it didn’t know what else to augment itself with.

  Maybe the simple solution was to simply grow larger. More mass, more power. More room for it to make biological changes.

  In the human’s nest however, size was a disadvantage, not an advantage. Too many tight passages and areas.

  It stirred awake eventually, tired of its half-dreaming haze of thought.

  The by-now-familiar scrape of metal on metal rasped with the wet click and crack of its joints popping as it subtly stretched.

  One eye cracked open. Two. Four, then seven, tracking motion across the room.

  The trapper was still here. Mere feet away, using a rattling kitchen table as a workbench of sorts.

  The wolf didn’t rise.

  Instead, its eyes flicked down to a chain that the trapper was handling.

  Extending a long secondary arm, claws gently scraping along the floor, it grasped the chain tight. Holding, claiming it.

  The trapper paused, his head still trained on the bench.

  Fleabag rose with a pleased rumble, flexing limbs, yawning. Still holding the chain, kneading the links with soft clicks.

  Its shoulders were level with the trapper’s waist, and easily twice as wide as it sat down on its haunches, staring at the trapper’s head.

  The odd construct turned its head to Fleabag. Slowly, it let go of its tools, straightening. The chain remained on the table.

  The wolf wondered why a construct was designed or formed in the shape of a male human, in an idle manner. Much better forms existed.

  After a moment of thinking, the wolf pointedly tugged at the chain, barely a light sway, lips curling into a snarling warning. A claw tapped the floor impatiently in tiny, hollow clinks.

  The trapper seemed to take a long, long moment trying to parse what it wanted. Eventually, he glanced at the table, grabbed the bundle, and simply tossed it to the floor between them in a deafening rattle of metal on metal.

  For a moment, it kept staring at the trapper, trying to think of how to best get its point across.

  The trapper didn’t move to pick his tools up, nor the chain. Just stared down at the wolf, waiting.

  It tried to remind itself that eye contact wasn’t a challenge for bipeds, even as its fur began to bristle.

  With a thin-eyed stare, Fleabag jerked its snout to the table with a quick chuff, tossing the chain to the rest of its pile.

  The trapper bent down to pick up his bundle of half-finished chains, dumping it back onto the table to resume his work without any further reaction.

  The wolf had expected more… friction, in establishing the hierarchy. It was tired of being around bipeds who couldn’t listen.

  It walked past the trapper, looking around the human dwelling it was in. It seemed abandoned for years before their arrival.

  It couldn’t find either of its humans, just Scruffy in the central room who was busy disassembling one of the construct’s traps, something the wolf couldn’t quite make heads or tails of.

  Scruffy turned around at the sound of its chuff, face brightening with a high croak of joy as she rushed towards it, throwing herself around its neck.

  It rumbled, some of the tired wariness of it all washing away as it lowered itself a bit for her to get a better grip.

  Scruffy couldn’t even wrap her arms halfway around its neck anymore, it noted, nosing at the side of her head.

  A quick lick to the face had the small biped recoiling, releasing it.

  Faintly amused at Scruffy’s furiously wiping her face with her clothes, it sat on its haunches, straining its ears and vibrational senses.

  Due to [Restful Awareness], it knew that both of its humans had come along to this resting spot. It had heard, felt, and seen them while it slumbered. Mostly Emhreeil.

  Without Emhreeil’s mental link being present however, it couldn’t quite ask Scruffy where they had gone, so it twisted its body to and fro to stretch, getting ready for a quick hunt until Katherine and Emhreeil came back.

  It was pretty hungry, and its reserves were far too low.

  It didn’t particularly like to hunt small humans.

  All things tended to be protective of their young, and for a long time, it had simply thought that it was not worth the ire of the human nest to pluck their young. Not to mention how bony they were, or how Emhreeil and Katherine seemed to both dislike the practice immensely.

  However, it was fully aware by this point that humans were not one, unified pack. They were a collection of thousands of little competing packs, or so it seemed.

  And Katherine and Emhreeil both weren’t around at the moment to be upset by it.

  So, when a woman and her kit wandered into the alley below it, it only hesitated for a moment from where it was lazily lounging on a platform formed of heated pipes, before descending down to kill them.

  Their death was practically instant and whisper-quiet. Two tails wrapped around its bounty, it quickly clawed back up the walls of the tight alley, bringing them back up, only blood left behind to hint at their fate should anyone come looking.

  The platform made of pipes bent and creaked under the added weight, but held as the wolf dumped their bodies atop it.

  It was so hungry it almost forgot to test its new Skill before digging in.

  [Gluttonous Core] activated with a slight flex of will.

  The visual effect of it was a lot more dramatic than what it actually did, it noted, tilting its head down to stare with furrowed brows at its stomach. A pulsing red light shone from deep in its abdomen, bright enough to show through its own flesh, inner armour, and fur. Veins pulsed along, ephemeral and wrong, once in one spot, then in another.

  It raised its head, tilted in curiosity as it watched the bodies.

  They seemed to dissolve as if in accelerated time, releasing a strange black-red mist which obscured their forms and features, lazy and thick, twisting through the air in its direction, fading from sight as it drew close to the wolf.

  The red was almost luminous, the black a complete void, twisting and eating at each other until both faded.

  And the wolf… could feel itself gaining essence for [Devourer].

  It was much, much slower than actually eating. Infinitely less satisfying too. Even worse, it didn’t seem to fill its stomach as much as normal consumption, meaning the essence was being somewhat wasted.

  The advantages were that the wolf could do other things while feeding on multiple things at a distance.

  Figuring the distance out took a little bit, but it was surprisingly long. About thirty feet.

  Leveling the Skill up would make its range longer and the process faster, more efficient, so no matter how much its mouth watered, it only nibbled and gnawed at a limb or two that it tore off, teeth blunted, to give itself the illusionary satisfaction of eating. Hopefully by denying itself like this, the Skill would level quicker.

  It took an atrocious amount of time until the only thing left on the pipe were their bloodied rags, empty and wet.

  Satisfied with its testing, albeit slightly disappointed, it moved to the second Skill it had gained.

  [Ichor of Corruption] was much easier to test. It was a passive Skill, turned on or off with little else to it.

  The wolf turned it on.

  Immediately, its entire body felt like it was on the edge of being electrified, some kind of cold heat twisting through its blood. Mildly uncomfortable, but it could get used to this.

  It put its claws to its forearms, dug in, and sliced through with a sharp jerk.

  It knew the pressure of its own bloodstream. That pressure didn’t correspond to the way its blood sprayed out of its veins like a volatile chemical exposed to air it should have never contacted.

  Slimy, ruby red and bubbling, the wolf curiously watched the blood steam and scream and pop against the metal, eating through it as if some horrid acid.

  One of the pipes at its feet popped, a pressurized, awful smelling gas whistling through the small hole straight to the wolf’s jaw, making it sneeze and back off in a hurry, shaking its head to dislodge the smell.

  Its secondary eyes noted that a single drop of its blood had borne through the massive pipe while it was distracted staring at the wall, where thin lines of thick, slimy ichor carved channels into steel.

  In a fight, this one was much more useful.

  For the third Skill, it was much, much more excited.

  A mental flick, a vibrating humm running through its claws, its teeth, the venomous spikes covering its extremities.

  Aiming far up at a distant pipe, it swiped its claws through the air.

  The air distorted with the motion as if something warped through the space, but much to its disappointment, only a tiny, weak scraping sound was heard from the pipe. It couldn’t spot any damage.

  Annoyed, it tried something closer. The alley floor below. A small distance, twenty, maybe thirty feet.

  Another forceful swipe.

  Three thin scratches on the dirty stone. Barely visible.

  It hung its head with a long, disappointed exhale. It had held much higher hopes for this Skill…

  It sat on the heated pipes, turning to the opposite wall of the alley, maybe ten feet from it.

  Another swipe.

  The result was much better, but still barely useful.

  Walking closer and trying again, it found the sweet spot, where the metal furrowed in shallow cuts with ragged gouges and a faint screech, at about six feet.

  At three feet, it was a much smoother cut, much deeper.

  At just one foot away from the wall, it was a nearly perfect cut, like those its claws usually made, as if consuming through space itself.

  It had been hoping that the Skill would work with the perfect cutting of its claws, but this was still very useful.

  Having an extra foot of reach with its phasing claws was a nasty little surprise for anything tough enough to get so close. It also solved the problem of the golems being too thick to cut through, much more importantly. At six to seven feet, it doubted anything human without very good armour could possibly force through. If a golem got close enough, it could cut it in twain with a good swipe now, without worrying over the length of its claws.

  A bit disappointed but largely appreciative, it decided to do some live testing.

  Another man in an alley. It dragged him up to a ledge and ate him, blood thick in its throat, flesh in its teeth.

  Two armed men outside a door, banging on it and screaming for the inhabitant to open up. The racket was annoying. It cut them down and quickly slunk down into a sewer grate with their bodies dragged along.

  A lone woman in her nest. Vibrational senses showed many more like her. Easy, isolated prey.

  It simply cut through her window’s metal bars and dove in through the glass, [Echoes of Oblivion] consuming any and all sound as it calmly walked up behind her and with a quick swipe, cut her head off.

  It ate… whatever she had been cooking, for good measure. It was too strange a flavour for the wolf to enjoy, but food was food.

  Repeating this process was as easy as it could be. From one box-like enclosure to the next, it simply tore through buildings without care.

  All it left behind were the intestines, full of waste, usually left in a nest of blood-soaked clothing, and the claw marks to denote what it did.

  After what must have been over a dozen meals, it was sated enough to decide to return, only to feel Emhreeil already making her way to its last location through its vibrational senses, likely guided by [Pack Hunter] flaring up whenever it got into a ‘fight’.

  It paused.

  It should give her a gift. She was still far too frail and a subpar hunter. Maybe food would make her stronger.

  It still didn’t know why she randomly collapsed, back during their escape.

  …She could be sick?

  Resolved to assist his helpless first companion, he went to grab her a snack.

  She startled, whirling around at the heavy thump that shook the alley floor behind her, something heavy slamming into it like a boulder wrapped in flesh.

  Then she blinked, and relaxed, relieved.

  She hurriedly established the mental link and straightened again as Fleabag trotted up to her, head high, tails faintly wagging, a man’s corpse dangling from his jaws, almost as tall as her, boots scraping the cold stones.

  He dropped the corpse at her feet with a wet squelching thump.

  Looked up, tails flicking once.

  Waiting.

  She stared at the mangled corpse blankly, faintly amused and quite confused.

  When she didn’t react, he snapped his jaws shut around the waist and picked it up again, shaking it like a wet rag, making her squint away from the spray of blood and viscera that hit her face, bones snapping with meaty cracks and flesh tearing wetly, limbs blurring and cracking out of place.

  Her tongue darted to lick a drop from her cheek.

  Fresh kill, male, died fast or instantly. Still warm.

  Fleabag then placed it at her feet again with much increased care. Sat back on his haunches, licking his upturned snout with a faint click of teeth. Pleased. Proud, chest puffed out.

  He looked so weirdly cute to her at that moment that she almost burst out laughing, brows raising and smiling wide.

  She glanced back down at the body, bemused, tilting her head in a wordless question. She was... also having trouble figuring out if she was looking at the corpse’s backside, or frontside.

  The vague notion of ‘gift for weak human to become stronger’ pushed through the bond from the wolf, speckled with images of her collapsing back when they had been running, tainted with confused concern.

  Ah. Aaah.

  That was… weirdly sweet of him. He was usually such a greedy little bastard. She’d caught him trying to steal her food often, only for him to pretend he was just going to smell it and slink away, his plans foiled.

  He must have been worried for her.

  She smiled wider as she snickered, stepped over the body, dropped to her knees, and collapsed forward, arms barely closing around his neck, her wing arms awkwardly draping over his back as she bumped his head with hers in a clumsy nuzzle.

  Gods above, she could barely hug him. It felt like yesterday that he could curl up against her chest. He was so fucking big now. She missed how much cuter he had been.

  He nosed at her scalp, her canine ears, mimics of his own. Began licking her, soft pleased grumbles leaving his chest, vibrating her ribs like piano keys.

  She smiled through the gross sensation of bloody saliva being smeared on her head and tugging it back with force, only squirming away a little bit. She’d wipe it off later.

  He was pleasantly warm. And despite how much he stank, she could feel his blood pulsing, and it made her mouth water. She’d ask him to let her feed from him, later. His blood always felt like the most filling ecstacy, compared to mere human blood.

  “Love you too, buddy. I kinda worried you would leave too.” She breathed out, eyes fluttering shut in relief, a momentary relaxation from days of being alone, hunting, losing her mind with worry for both of the most important things in her life.

  He let out an annoyed chuff.

  Right, mental link.

  She relayed the rough concept of what she meant.

  Curiosity and confusion returned as it nudged her away, squirming out of her grasp, nudging her to the body hurriedly.

  She gave in with a quick glance around, lifting what was probably a leg and biting into it, feeding hurriedly as the blood drained onto the floor.

  While she ate, she explained what the wolf had missed through the mental link in fumbling attempts of thought-speak.

  Slowly, its tails stopped wagging, instead curling and lashing in agitation, pacing in a tight circle, ears pinned back with rising anger.

  While finishing her meal, the wolf relayed through the mental link a simple fact that almost had her horrified at her own fucking stupidity.

  It could follow Katherine’s scent. Its senses were biologically enhanced thrice over.

  If she had woken him up earlier, the trail would be fresher. It might not have been quite combat ready yesterday, but it would have been able to lead them around at least.

  Pushing the guilt aside, she quickly cleaned herself up, which Fleabag insisted on helping by licking her face incessantly, seemingly unable to understand why she didn’t want a damn spit bath and treating her like a disobedient pup by pushing her down, even nipping her with blunted teeth until she gave up and pursed her lips shut, letting him groom her while squirming away from its forceful lapping.

  Damn mother hen.

  She should start carrying rags with her for clean-up.

  At least the boots she’d pilfered off one of her victims was keeping her feet dry.

  After that slight moment of pack-coded humiliation, it led her back to their hideout to pick up Scruffy and get going.

  It was only as Scruffy secured herself to Emhreeil’s back, that she realized that the trapper was also packing up, as if to follow them.

  She was about to protest that he was going to be making too much of a damn racket to ever follow them without being a hindrance, but the more she watched, the more her brow furrowed.

  Sure, she could hear him. But he wasn’t loud.

  It was unnatural, how silent he was when he wanted to be. He was covered in chains and dangling metal traps. He should have been a walking hearing hazard.

  Some Skill perhaps?

  She directed a vague question to the wolf, jerking her head to the strange man as he packed up trap, after trap, after trap, piling them on his body and tying them around his haphazard armor, dangling extra layers that would bite and snap back at any who struck it.

  The wolf didn’t seem too certain either, throwing back a vague notion of competence and conditions, indifference.

  In her own head, that translated to ‘if he can keep up, he can stay’.

  She wasn’t exactly thrilled about his presence. He saved them all, yes. Once. Another time, he almost killed her and Kat. Although he hadn’t really done much except watch, that time.

  … More importantly, something was wrong with him.

  She refused to use [Psychometric Sight] on him. She was scared to use it on strange things, after what it did to her last time.

  So she tried with other senses.

  Her mana senses didn’t catch on him. She couldn’t see through his armour at all with her mana fields or her mana ‘sight’. It made her uncomfortable. To be unable to perceive anything about him.

  Aside from refusing to speak, he also just didn’t move right. The armour always moved first, like it was shifting before the body inside it did. When he turned, it didn’t look like bones shifting, it looked like something was rotating the entire armour pieces in a mimicry so near-perfect it unnerved her.

  Sometimes, his movements became weirdly snappy, mechanical, then at others, he moved as fluidly as any person could.

  She had never seen him relax, eat, sleep. Two and a half days of coming in and out of the safehouse while he continued his repairs using his bizarre gear. Never sitting. Never anything but perfectly straight and tall.

  Her canine ears could pick up the faint, almost inaudible sound of something creaking faintly under his armour, like something thick twisting. It was hard to hear over the rattling cacophony of chains and plates, but when she was looking for it, she heard it.

  Frankly, she was pretty sure he wasn’t a human. What he was, however, eluded her. He showed too much intelligence and something akin to character, to be any kind of golem.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Ghoul was the only person she felt confident would know enough to give her information on whether she should trust the trapper to be riding with them. And she wasn’t even certain she could trust Ghoul himself. He was obviously supporting them so he could have allies, and she vaguely remembered something about him having a grudge to settle with Tillenhall, but that was all she really knew about him.

  It didn’t really matter in the end because no matter how hard she tried to locate that communication crystal she could faintly remember Ghoul giving her to contact him, she couldn’t fucking find it. It must have been lost in the mad dash for safety with most of their gear.

  That, or… Katherine took it with her for some reason.

  Slowly, they set out.

  Being alone again left Katherine with too much time to think.

  She counteracted it by mostly observing, trying to keep her mind silent.

  It felt like floating within her own body, her guard Skill numbing her emotions as she trudged back down, ever downwards.

  The evacuation and resettlement of the survivors of that explosion didn’t seem to be going well. There was no mercy to the unfortunate in the dungeon, after all. No value to life. No authority to care for them.

  Anyone near the center of the blast, like they had been, was most likely dead. Thousands upon thousands.

  The impact of that factory combusting sank in slowly, pebble by pebble until it was a shape of something she couldn’t quite recognize yet, large and looming.

  So many people had survived, rushing up to the third floor where the Butcher’s trapper had taken them, now seeking a new home. It was suffocating to be a part of, but she endured it.

  A procession of survivors and the dead they carried in their hollow eyes.

  She wondered how hers looked.

  Many times, she would see people stop and start and look around, eyes wide and lost. Their mental landmarks, the streets they knew, all gone, warily asking their fellows for direction or deciding to follow the crowd.

  Families huddled close in uneven numbers. Too many children with people that weren’t their parents. Some part of her wondered if they were headed for the mines or if their chaperones would offload them to the whorehouses for quick coin, only to close her eyes at the mere thought, vaguely nauseous.

  There wasn’t much screaming. Sounds of agony from the injured, carried or dragged by their loved ones, but never screaming. Sometimes, someone would start sobbing, usually the children, trying to muffle themselves to little success. It would prompt someone else to do the same, a contagion of emotion amidst numb misery. It would fade quick, return later. Fits and bursts.

  Coughing, hoarse and raw. Wet, sickly breathing. The scrape and thumps of countless boots dragging and walking down the endless spiral of steps.

  Sometimes, someone would lose their footing, tumble down the stairs, only stopped by those around them or those they crashed into. Sometimes fights broke out from such impacts, blood boiling at the prospect of being injured or crippled by the carelessness of another, leaving small pockets of action that people numbly walked past. One fight resulted in a body she tried not to stare at as she passed.

  A child asked when they could go home. Nobody answered.

  A man walked beside her for a while. Eyes wide with grief too deep to comprehend, bandages covering his face, allowing only shredded lips and the teeth they should have been protecting as he mumbled the same words over and over again under his breath, hobbling.

  “Pass the salt. Pass the salt. Pass the salt.”

  She inched away, eyeing the injured.

  Deep pits of flesh packed with gauze, done by hurried, botched surgery, to dig out shards of glass that had likely shot into them faster than arrows ever could. Missing legs, arms. Weak and dying, strapped to others who simply bore with it. A man with half his face missing, the contours and inner tubing of his face visible, pink and throbbing, tongue convulsing in a jaw that barely held it, nostrils dry and winking, flesh charred, eyes rolling.

  A child struggling to descend the steps with a crutch, his leg missing.

  They carried things that echoed a shared, contagious madness. Useless nonsense.

  A man carried half a door. Another, a store sign, clutched to his chest. Clothes too big or small for them. Cracked light crystals, sputtering in white-knuckled hands. A child’s shoe. An empty animal carrier, half-crushed. Supplies, for those who could afford them, and the sharp bits to protect them.

  Grit and grime swam with soot-stained rags, a sea of it beneath the dim orange lights of the stairway, two hundred feet across and countless thousands long.

  The dungeon air tasted wrong. Metallic, bitter, like burned insulation and ozone and a faint, putrid sweetness that Katherine recognized too late as cooked and rotting flesh, wafting from below, where a plate-city lay in rubble.

  It mixed with the chemical stink of industry vaporized and splattered far and wide, like the choke of burnt hair mixing with the putrid miasma of stagnant sewer sludge thick with waste.

  A stench to burn the nostrils, intense enough to make her pull her scarf up as they neared the city’s newly set boundaries, hoping it would filter the burning sand that seemed to float in the air, grainy and awful in her sinuses.

  Her mind, unfortunately, began to wander. There was only so much she could observe before the horror of it all began to numb.

  She thought of how distinctly unfortunate it was, that such a tragedy happened right as they were entering the center zones of the explosion.

  She thought of how the golems acted, how they sprung out of nowhere as if in ambush this far up the Dungeon, as if knowing this would happen, hunting the wolf. All human opposition shattered and scattered, leaving only their prey to scramble along the ruins.

  The conclusion was simple. Whatever guided the golems, whoever, they wanted the wolf.

  And the explosion was just a means to get him. A backdrop, sabotage. Meaningless, callous chaos. She refused to believe it was a coincidence. Too many things happened too quickly.

  Close to fifty thousand dead, about to be, or missing, from what she’d heard. Just as many people whose lives have been ripped apart.

  All for that fucking wolf, whatever they wanted him for.

  It was a unique circumstance where again, she couldn’t quite be angry at the actual wolf itself. Just the vague ephemeral notion of its presence. Because its presence brought agony and death and little else, whether it knew it or not, whether it meant to bring it, or not.

  Even then, the wolf itself was a backdrop to her most pressing concern.

  Emhreeil.

  The objection to Em’s actions was always something she had held close to her chest. Unspoken besides a slight tightening of the eyes and a frown. Maybe when she felt fed up enough, an attempt to voice her disappointment in her dearest friend.

  The reasons for that were… many.

  The habit of a slave, to endure and hold thoughts close to her breast. She never could quite break it for long. Always in fits and bursts when the pressure peaked. She didn’t know why. She had trouble making habits, breaking them.

  None of her few voiced objections had taken hold of Emhreeil, as she knew they wouldn’t.

  At most, dismissed.

  They had felt like monumental efforts only to be given an eye roll in return, however unfair that was to Emhreeil or warped her memory of it.

  Speaking out was difficult. Even moreso, was putting her concerns to words. Trying to claw out that wordless sense of drowning, of not belonging, of increasingly feeling like an out of place ornament in Emhreeil’s little team of… inhuman forms.

  That familiar feeling of being left behind, just like that day Emhreeil had released her from her service and vanished into a crowd, headed for the dungeon, but instead of one shocking, agonizing moment that had left her frozen in shock, it was stretched out into a long, soundless scrape against her soul, the dull drag of a blade over fabric until it snapped in twain.

  How could she possibly put all… that to words, and make it mean something? Make Emhreeil change something?

  Even worse, Emhreeil’s most core characteristic was the fact she never stopped pushing forward, never listened to anything contrary.

  Katherine could talk until her tongue fell out, and it would go in one ear and out the other if Katherine was trying to change her direction, her momentum.

  That stubborn reckless streak was the most unchanging part of her.

  It was what had led to Em being assigned the role of broodmare by her own mother, little more than breeding stock for her father to sire another child out of her flesh. One that wouldn’t be so 'disobedient and insolent'. It was what led her to seek out the dungeon in bright eyed rebellion, all those years ago. What separated them, what broke them, what landed them to find each other again through sheer chance.

  Emhreeil had been given warnings. Orders. Room to stop. She never did.

  She charged forward without regard to who or what she left behind. She charged forward even if there was a cliff right in front of her. She couldn’t stop.

  That was the only thing about her that seemed to remain of her old self. It was the thing Katherine disliked most, because it left her no room to convince her, or so it felt. Not only would she not change direction, she was attached to the wolf. Like a beloved friend. Like with Katherine.

  She couldn't explain to herself, why that hurt so much.

  Emhreeil had lost her body. Perhaps her mind, by now. The soul only remained for Katherine to save.

  But with the way she hunched a little more every day like a prowling predator more than a proud elf, the way those canine ears atop her head seemed to move and twitch more naturally, the way she eyed people she didn’t know like meat without realizing it, every glance accessing how to kill or run from them…

  How long would Emhreeil's soul last?

  Emhreeil was caught between Katherine and the Wolf. Tugged between the two of them.

  Anything Katherine said felt like it was driving another wedge between them. Emhreeil might not reprimand her, might not even disagree, but every tiny interaction that didn’t end well felt like she had relaxed her grip just enough for Emhreeil to slip, another inevitable inch, towards Fleabag.

  Tears slowly welled in her eyes, refusing to retreat or fall.

  A sardonic part of her noted that finally, she looked just like all the other refugees around her.

  She had a decent memory or two from the wolf too, which made this even harder. Its snout large enough to fit her entire head in with room to spare, nosing at her in concern. Little chuffs and squeaky yawns. A tongue trying to lick her face. Being warmed by its body in exhausted rest on dingy overhangs. Tails as large as her torso, wagging idly with enough strength to blow her hair back. Watching it act like a giant, murderous puppy when ‘playing’ with Emhreeil, no matter how rough it got.

  Being saved by it.

  No matter how much she cursed the fact it existed, she couldn’t hate it. Him.

  As if the guilt wasn’t enough already.

  Swallowing, she just focused on putting one step in front of the other.

  Pushing away her doubts.

  Silencing the part of herself that feared failure, which would surely leave her as a purposeless doll, waiting to die.

  And eventually, the quarantine zone around the little plate-city was in sight.

  Chain-link fencing, raised in a great net above her, towering hundreds of feet high.

  Scaffolding everywhere, cutting off other entrances, workers hard at work sawing through metal bridges to cut off access. Checkpoints manned by armed men.

  There was a yawning chasm of nothingness, far, far above, where the beehive-like structure’s upper buildings and towers had descended to crush those below, leaving a yawning expanse of cables and wires and hanging beams of iron like strips of flesh of something torn away.

  It was only a ‘quarantine’ because it sounded better, more benevolent, than ‘looting grounds’, she realized quickly.

  Men carrying crests she recognized walked through the checkpoints, minor houses of the dungeon, Barons, gangs, even minor merchant families. A mixed sort, more than the usual.

  Each seemed to have different looting rights, hauling materials and anything of value into carts rumbling and whistling with steam, an unimaginable luxury so far down, or more conventional carts pulled by men.

  People wanting to look for their loved ones in the rubble paid in fealty, service, or coin to pass the checkpoint. She could hear faint echoes of names called out by those searching, through the perforated curtain of iron raised between the ruins and the wider world.

  All that replied was the groaning rumble of shifting ruins, reverberating down the spires which twisted above and around her like veins of glasswork and steel.

  A small part of the procession broke ranks to turn towards their old city, a tide of people hoping to enter.

  She didn’t join them.

  Just to confirm, she took out the piece of metal that the trapper had engraved for her, staring at the emblem, the instructions written in crude, sharp lines.

  She walked on, tucking it back into her pack.

  Aitra was the last one left of her adventuring party.

  She had survived The Factory’s innards, if only barely. That expedition had killed two of her three teammates.

  She had survived the manufactory’s explosion. That blast had killed countless thousands. Would kill countless others through exposure and starvation in the coming months.

  She had survived the clash of titans that followed. Dozens upon dozens more, dead. Silthen among them, crushed, extinguished.

  But not her. She survived.

  And now, with nothing left but mementos to remember her teammates with, eyes too hollow for their brilliant shade, her mind splintering into flashbacks and delusional paranoia, she had no more fuse left to burn before she snuffed out for good as well.

  Her mind was sick. She didn’t know how to recover.

  She saw brilliant golden eyes in every glass reflection, chest crushed under a phantom paw. She shaved her blue hair, hoping it would make her harder to find, that the monster wouldn’t notice another bald woman with blue eyes and a staff.

  She saw whirring saws tearing her to pieces like a crude surgeon, waking up with her throat raw and voice coarse, night after night.

  It had all started the day she saw that damn dog.

  Mere months ago, right before her first expedition into the Dungeon with her new team, she had seen a strange pup walking along the street, and tried to charm it, curious about its brilliantly glowing, golden eyes.

  It had shrugged her magic off with too much ease to dismiss. It had glared at her through eyes far too intelligent, even as it retreated into the darkness.

  Hard to forget such a thing, no matter how small the interaction.

  She saw it again the day Silthen died.

  Watched a silent sentinel drag it away in chains, still breathing, despite being a mess of trailing gore and broken limbs she couldn’t even recognize.

  This time, it had been bigger than a grown man. A twisted form of limbs and howling fangs, flashing claws. A thing of snarling howling fire, drowned in oil and screaming saws and still winning. Cut and crushed and gutted and burned, but still breathing.

  The mad titan that had sieged the Adventurer’s Guild put a name to it that she hadn’t quite been able to pinpoint, rasped and bellowed outside of windows rattling with its distorted screams.

  Fenrir. Wolf.

  Her ticket out of this hellish island. Information that nations would do atrocities for, to bury the past once more.

  So, she traveled upwards. To the first floor. Beyond it, until she was near to exhaustion.

  She couldn’t possibly get an audience that mattered, not with the nobility of Carmera. Notoriously hidden, notoriously cruel and sadistic, damn near madmen. As likely to kill her for the information as they would be to reward her.

  No.

  She went a few rungs of the ladder down. To minor lords and barons, to religious figures, to officials and information brokers.

  She went to the chapels of The Great Dragon, at first. Drove them to rage, calls of blasphemy chasing her out.

  The Grand Cathedral of The Six-Winged Dove followed. She pestered and pressed and persisted until The Patriarch himself descended from his white marbled tower, gray and frail, and lent her his ear.

  And she spread the word, for a price. To those that mattered. Those that could pay for it. Who could get her out.

  She took tests, magical and not. She had her mind prodded, invaded, seers and Septons swimming through her memories.

  She bore with anything they asked to confirm her words.

  All to buy her freedom, and never return to this gaping maw of an island, awaiting eagerly to consume all that sat within it. As far away from this evil, evil place.

  Whether they would heed her warning or not was no longer her concern.

  Aitra had nobody left to worry for in Carmera, after all.

  Seven days passed in a blur of steam and bloodied silence.

  It lost the scent trail, somewhere past the collapsed plate city they’d barely escaped. It dragged its pack through chemical-flooded corridors and furnace-lit alleys that never seemed to end, a shared frustration increasing with each step.

  The Dungeon did not give them their packmate back. It only offered the void of absence, of total silence.

  They still tore through it.

  They followed rumours.

  When rumours inevitably ended up to be old men’s barrel fire tales, they followed the scent of blood.

  When that too failed, they followed nothing at all, grasping in the dark for limbs to break.

  The wolf did what it did best.

  Dens of criminals, informant houses, old men rumoured to know a little too much, none were an exception. It tore through their bars, through their homes, their gleaming armoured walls, scythed through limbs as if wheat stalks, and dragged whatever was left before her, steam curling off its blood-soaked back, expecting answers.

  When voices stuttered and wavered too much, making the noises that the wolf knew meant no answer was coming, he began to eat them, bite by bite. When nothing of use was inlaid between their screaming pleas, it silenced them at last.

  Some talked a lot. About little, about big, about nothing. When Emhreeil frowned, detecting useless lies, it responded with claws and the crushing finality it knew best.

  Bloodsoaked clothes stuffed with intestines piled between the spaces nobody went to, places that smelled like paint thinner and rust and now, death.

  None of them knew where she was.

  By the third day, the wolf stopped waiting for Emhreeil to talk to them first.

  By the fourth, it stopped waiting at all.

  The undirected rage built a frustration without definition.

  Killing had always been enough before.

  It was all it knew how to do.

  If killing was not enough… of what use was the wolf?

  Emhreeil learned very quickly what [Psychometric Vision] cost when pushed to the edge, abused to the brink that she could manage.

  It cost learning too many details for the man she was about to let become wolf food. It cost the weightless emptiness of learning about the bastard beneath the faceless body, byproducts of trying to read between the lines of their lies, of trying to extract anything at all. Details that humanized the blood that licked at her ankles, cool and sticky.

  It cost headaches, swimming vision, blood running down her chin.

  It cost reality itself, fading in definition.

  Walking in lost planes, drinking wine with faceless demons in the dark. Following the wolf down a winding path again. Walking beneath a dragon’s baleful stare, falling apart like cracked bricks with every step. Hearing herself talk while her mind lay empty, climbing through shafts of groaning machinery, dying on a field, the sun at her back, free and warm, reciting questions in a monotone to a spitting, limbless gangster, his eyes wide with fear and rage, choking as a stream of gleaming butterflies crawled out of her throat, dispersing in the dark.

  Swimming in and out of eachother. Daydreams and nightmares and reality, but which was which?

  She should have stopped using the Skill. She knew she should have. But these strange places she went to, she enjoyed most of them.

  She didn’t enjoy asking what happened to Katherine and receiving another blank stare from another one of Ironheart's cronies.

  She enjoyed snapping cartilage and flaying skin even less. The screams were deafening. The hatred gnawing and growing in her heart only grew with every babbled lie and empty truth.

  Answers came faster as the days went on.

  They always did when she and the wolf began their work.

  They were just never the right ones.

  The trapper disappeared constantly.

  Sometimes for minutes. Sometimes for hours. He left without a signal and returned without announcement, dragging people with chains cinched tight around shattered legs. Bear traps and more inventive designs bit deep enough for shattered bone to peek through flesh and fabric, gags barely muffling the sobs and delirious pleas and prayers of those he’d caught.

  No blood wasted. No movement allowed.

  He simply unrolled them from his chains, dropped them at the wolf’s feet, and left again, enchanted glove already tinkering away to make more.

  Sometimes, the wolf noted that someone was trying to find them. Follow their tracks.

  It almost always ended in the distant snap of a trap.

  Scruffy followed Trapper like a shadow that hadn’t figured out its own shape yet, whenever he was walking with them.

  She handed him tools before he reached for them. Watched how he set teeth at angles that pulled, how he hooked the metal with barbs. How he disguised them. She built smaller things from scrap and wire, crude traps that snapped too early or not hard enough, frustrated but always eager to try again.

  The first time one of hers worked, the trapper left it where she had placed it, though he put one of his own nearby for good measure.

  That night, she slept beside him, instead of the wolf, unable to fight her exhaustion as she watched him build another tool and tried to follow along.

  By the fifth day, the wolf began killing people who didn’t try to run.

  By the sixth, Emhreeil didn’t even notice.

  Steam vents became execution sites. Walkways dripped red into chemical runoff below. Gangs scattered before they could be questioned, leaving behind only fear and rumors that contradicted each other. Hideouts left abandoned, whispers in the streets, civillians walking in groups for safety, makeshift militias with quivering knees escorting people with darting eyes.

  Katherine’s name stopped appearing in answers, even as a lie.

  The wolf stood watch over corpses that night, chest heaving, claws sunk into metal that bent but did not break.

  It could protect territory.

  It could kill things much bigger and meaner than itself.

  It could keep a pack alive against overwhelming odds.

  It could not find one damn human.

  The thought sat heavy in its skull, helpless rage curdling deep in its veins.

  It hated feeling helpless and useless more than anything.

  Feeling like a bad leader on top of it all didn’t help.

  One of its packmates just walked away, and that was it? She was gone?

  On the seventh day’s end, it went out on its own.

  Not to gather information, no. It had accepted that it was no use on that front. It left that to Emhreeil.

  She was made for it.

  So the wolf did what it too, was made for. It went out to tear, and kill, and howl.

  It sat in the dark, steam hissing across its fur as blood cooled and hardened beneath it.

  Half-awake, it peered at words it couldn’t read but could understand. Level-ups and more it didn’t care for.

  [Gluttonous Core] licked red ribbons through the dark, spreading out across the entire room. The blood beneath its paws steadily drained, far quicker than it used to.

  It scratched at the walls with its insectile scythe arms just to keep its mind empty, [Edge Projection] carving furrows it didn’t seem capable of a mere week ago.

  Hundreds of feet above, Emhreeil leaned against a wall, eyes hollow, mind crowded with half-present thoughts she couldn’t fully purge.

  The trapper cleaned his traps methodically beside her, prying bone fragments and rotting fat chunks out of the moving parts with a sharp spike.

  Scruffy held a finished device in both hands and had no one to test it on, frowning.

  Katherine did not come back.

  For the first time in a long while, the 'Dungeon' felt bigger than the wolf. Bigger than the wolf could ever get, no matter how much it fought and bled and killed.

  On the eighth day, [Pack Hunter] flared up.

  Katherine was fighting.

  The wolf’s eyes snapped open as it jerked upright, launching itself off the outcrop they were all resting on to slam into an opposite building’s back wall, clawing up as fast as it could.

  It felt time itself slow down as Emhreeil gave it a quick shot of [Haste], rushed and delayed, Emhreeil still scrambling up from her sleep.

  It didn’t look back to see who could keep up, it simply sped upwards, inwardly baffled on how she ended up above them. They’d overshot their search?

  As quick as it began, it ended. The vague awareness of her position faded out.

  The wolf slowed, then stopped, hanging over an endless drop, claws dug deep into steel, peering deep into the clouds of steam that sighed and rasped out of groaning industry as if it could find some answer in the murk of their depths.

  It shifted its hip for an eye to catch Emhreeil’s gaze, her expression scared and thunderous in equal degrees. She shook her head.

  A message flit through the mental link.

  Scruffy and the construct Emhreeil had deigned to name ‘Trapper’ were already packing up. Good.

  Letting the claws sharpen again, it slid down the wall in a shower of sparks, then hopped off with a quick twist to land on the maintenance platform with the rest of its pack, ignoring the way the metal squealed and bounced from the weight, immediately turning to furiously pace along the small amount of room available, lips curling into a soundless snarl.

  Why was Katherine in this ‘Ironheart’s’ territory?

  And why did that fight end so quickly?