She laughed.
Then she ran.
Storm exploded through her legs and she launched back the way she’d co, the canyon blurring past her in streaks of black and grey. Behind her, the Razorfang column poured out of the canyon mouth like water from a broken dam, forty sets of bladed limbs chewing through the distance with the mindless, relentless speed of creatures that had evolved to chase prey until it died.
Luna was slower, but not slow enough that she couldn’t make use of her headstart. While running, she kept sending sparks of lightning back, more so to trigger their senses with the flashy show than to hurt them, receiving loud, hostile snarls in response.
Luna grinned. She needed them angry. She needed them committed.
Five hundred ters had never felt so short.
The basin ca into view. The sounds hit her first. The Colossus roaring. tal on stone. Chinedu’s voice cutting through chaos. And beneath it all, the rising panic of people who’d just realized their fight had a tir on it.
Luna crested the ridge at full speed.
Below, the scene was exactly what she’d expected. The Colossus blocked the southern exit, still raging, still unkillable. Chinedu’s squad had pulled into a tight defensive cluster, shields up, trying to find a way around the creature’s bulk. Ash was screaming at soone. Brittany was bleeding.
Luna sailed over the basin’s edge, airborne for a full second before gravity pulled her down.
Chinedu looked up.
Luna extended her middle finger at him as she flew past.
Ash’s head snapped toward her.
She gave him one too.
Then she hit the ground on the far side of the basin, rolled, and kept running, threading through a gap between the Colossus’s tail and the basin wall.
Behind her, the first Razorfang Slashers poured over the ridge.
Then the second wave.
Then the third.
Forty pack hunters crested the basin’s edge and found fourteen fighters already engaged with a level eighty Colossus, bleeding, exhausted, and boxed in.
The Slashers scread.
They charged.
Luna burst through the far side of the basin and scrambled up the slope, boots slipping on loose stone, Storm keeping her ahead of the fastest Slashers by re seconds. Two of them locked onto her, bladed limbs carving gouges in the rock where her feet had been a heartbeat earlier.
She looked up.
There he was.
Kaiden stood on the ridge high above the basin, silhouetted against the sky with his arms folded. The dark halo above his head pulsed with hostile light.
His girls surrounded him. Aria stood at the edge, silver hair catching the light. Nyx had her eyes tracking Luna’s arrival with open interest. Bastet hadn’t moved from her spot, golden eyes half-lidded with feline satisfaction.
And there was Calypso, grinning ear to ear, practically bouncing on her feet as she watched the carnage unfold below.
Luna’s eyes locked onto Nyx.
"Fatty! I need a lift!"
Nyx looked down at her.
"I don’t know..."
"NYX! You’re not funny!"
"But I’m having lots of fun."
Before Luna could begin cursing out Nyx’s whole existence, space compressed. Luna’s stomach lurched as Nyx’s spatial grip seized her body and ripped her upward, the Slashers’ claws swiping through empty air beneath her boots. The basin dropped away and the ridge rushed up.
While ascending, the gar girl remained locked into a glaring contest with the bubblegum bitch with giant cow udders who was standing there with her arms crossed beneath her chest, smug grin already in place, looking down at Luna with supremacy.
"You know, you might be onto sothing, gremlin bestie. It’s lucky that you’re so thin." Her eyes dropped to Luna’s delicate chest with the casual precision of a woman who knew exactly where to aim. "If it was another ’fat’ woman with my size I had to lift, it’d certainly be harder."
Luna’s eye twitched. "I will literally kill you."
"Lucky you’re so aerodynamic."
Luna flipped her off with both hands, but both of them were grinning.
Then she finished her ascent to the vantage point where the gang stood and without even landing her feet on solid ground, she jumped into Kaiden’s chest.
He caught her without moving. One arm around her waist, easy and warm, as if catching a woman launched through folded space was sothing he did between als.
Luna pressed her face into his neck, then turned just enough to stick her tongue out at Nyx.
Nyx smiled.
"I tried, Kai, but the pack was too strong." Luna pulled back with the most tragic expression she could manage. "I’m sorry..."
"You did your best." He looked down at her, and his grin matched hers. "That’s all that matters."
"We live and learn," Calypso nodded sagely.
"Indeed, indeed," Bastet nodded along.
Everyone was in agreent.
Below, the two Slashers that had chased Luna skittered to a halt at the base of the ridge, heads tilting upward, compound eyes locked onto the woman now standing safely above them. They shrieked and began climbing. They were not natural at it, but as high-leveled creatures born to hunt and kill, they were capable of making it up there.
Then the alpha scread.
The sound ripped across the basin from the center of the pack, a piercing chitinous shriek that cut through the roar of the Colossus and the clash of steel.
A command. Every Slasher in earshot responded instantly, including the two still chasing Luna. Their heads snapped away from the stormy girl, limbs already carrying them back toward the basin floor where the rest of the pack had found sothing far more interesting than a single runner.
Fourteen sothings, in fact.
Kaiden looked down with his amazing gar girl still in his arms. She’d just accomplished an incredible feat as a speedster, but there was no ti to celebrate. The basin had beco a killing floor.
The Razorfang Slashers had hit Chinedu’s formation like a bladed tide. The tight defensive cluster that had been holding the Colossus at bay shattered the mont forty pack hunters poured into the battlefield.
Fighters who’d been watching the Colossus’s flank were now fighting on two fronts, shields turned the wrong way, abilities aid at the wrong enemy.
Monster difficulty was never just about levels. A level eighty Deepvein Colossus was an apex predator from a high-tier dungeon breach, solitary, massive, built to kill everything in its territory and durable enough to outlast almost anything that tried to kill it back.
The Razorfang Slashers were pack creatures, individually weaker than an apex of the sa level, but that was the trap people fell into. A single Slasher was manageable. Ten were a serious problem. Forty, led by an alpha that coordinated their aggression, were the equivalent of multiple apex predators moving as one organism. The pack didn’t add its strength together. It multiplied it.
Chinedu was fighting well. S-tier class and high stats gave him an edge over the smaller Slashers, dropping them in three, four, five-hit exchanges that would’ve taken his squad mbers many tis as much. The larger specins pushed him harder, their carapaces absorbing his strikes and their serrated forelimbs eting his spear with enough force to send sparks across the basin floor.
"Call for backup!" Chinedu barked at the teammate who’d raised the alarm. "Now! Get Mariana’s squad here, get the Association, get anyone!"
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