Raina began to tremble. The voice reverberated through the forest like a thousand voices speaking in unison. Every syllable sent chills down my spine.

“Where aaaaaaaaaaare yooooooouuu?” the whisper carried an almost sing-song tone that just made the whole scene even worse.

And yet…

I squirmed free of Raina’s arms, crawling onto her shoulder before jumping down onto the soft dirt. If I could just get a look at this new element…

The barkhounds still prowled the clearing above our hiding spot, but I was starting to suspect that we were relatively safe. One of them had come close enough for us to see its breath, and yet it hadn’t found us. That meant they didn’t rely on scent like their uncorrupted brethren did. If they hunted by sound or sight, I could afford to take a few more risks.

I lowered my body to the ground, sliding into the underbrush like a fish into water. My black fur would hide me from all but the keenest of hunters, and my paws were silent as I crawled up the hillside and waited in the bushes.

In the clearing, twelve barkhounds roamed in circles, noses to the ground despite likely being unable to smell anything at all. Their wood creaked with every step.

However, it was the woman at their center that was my quarry. She was the master the barkhounds clearly served.

The woman was not unlike the hounds who served her. Much of her skin had the rugged texture of bark, and she had the same eerie blue eyes they did. However, unlike them, she also had a potent aura that shone from her body like the glow around a silver flame.

Silver locks of hair floated around her, almost like they were supported by water. They shimmered in the light of her aura, each hair highlighted against the darkness beyond. Her dress was black and seemed to be made from blackbird feathers.

“Come to me, with thy last breath,” she sang in a soft whisper that echoed far further than it should have in the oppressive mist, “and I’ll deliver thee to death.”

Inspecting hostile creature:

Name: Qelona

Species: Human

Type: Mana Corrupted.

Level: 29

Description: Formerly an absorption caster, this creature has been warped beyond memory and recognition by an abundance of forest magic.

So, this is what happens when corruption goes too far…Raina was right to be worried. She and I were both absorption casters. We drew mana into ourselves and purified it for our use. In doing so, we opened ourselves to the risk of taking in impure mana and being changed by it over time. The more mana we used, the greater risk we’d find ourselves under.

Even now, Raina had indicated that my eyes were glowing, if only slightly, from the fire mana we absorbed from the fire sprites. That was a relatively low level of mana, I suspected, but it had still sparked a change in me.

Maybe it was time to find ways to up my corruption resistance ability. I was meant to protect both Raina and me from corruption by filtering the mana we gathered…or so she told me. It seemed I was looking at an example of our future, should I fail in that task.

Qelona looked around, still searching for Raina and me in the darkness. She seemed to rely on her hounds to hunt for her, and they were confused by our deception.

“Come out, my lovely,” she whispered with a thousand voices. “Where are you?”

A howl echoed from my right. I looked in that direction instinctively before correcting and looking the other way. Sure enough, the strange mists had bounced the sound far from its source. Three hounds burst into the clearing a moment later, dragging a green-haired bundle between them. A fourth trotted in after, carrying Terrowin’s glaive like a puppy trying to play fetch.

So, he’d been outrun. It wasn’t surprising. Raina and I would have been outrun, too, had we not found a place to hide.

“Oh, what’s this, my dears?” Qelona knelt next to Terrowin’s unconscious form. “Poor thing was born imperfect.” She stroked his cheek with a bark-covered hand. “But, we can fix that, can’t we, hmm? Yes, yes, we’ll fix him right up, make him complete…bring him to the other one.” She stood, and the barkhounds dragged the glaive knight back into the woods.

I held a moment of silence for Terrowin. He’d been a good hench-human. He’d been one of the only ones to show me the proper reverence and had done me a good service by coming to my rescue in my hour of need.

Qelona looked around the clearing one last time. “Come, my dears. I believe we lost the trail.”

As the corrupted woman and her pack of barkhounds began to follow Terrowin and his captors, I crept back to the hiding spot, only to find Raina sitting on the ground, hugging her knees close.

“Are they gone?” she whispered.

I nodded. “We need to go. I saw which way they went, so we should have a clear escape.”

“Wait,” she said. “I…I heard she caught someone…did you see who it was?”

“Does it matter?”

She thought about it for a moment. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.” Excellent. She was learning.

Raina stood and peered out of her hiding place with wary eyes. “Which way did they go?” I pointed with a paw before turning the opposite way.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

However, she did not turn. Instead, she began to walk towards the danger. She crawled up the hillside to the clearing where Qelona had appeared.

“Raina, you’re going the wrong way,” I called.

“Didn’t you say this was the way she went?”

“Yes, but that’s exactly why we aren’t going that way.”

Raina took a deep breath. “Malzy, there are people who need saving. There is a good chance that one of them is Aelisra.”

“Raina, she’s level 29. There is no way we can fight her. We can barely handle one of her dogs!”

“It doesn’t matter. Aelisra would do it for us.” The witch began marching into the mist.

I didn’t understand. What on earth was she on about? Why did it matter if Aelisra would do something stupid for us? What mattered is that I didn’t want to die! How could she walk towards the enemy knowing full well the 21-level gap between us?

This was it. If I let her go, we would both die, but how exactly could I stop her?

I raced ahead, planting myself in front of her and hissing. “Raina, we will die if we do this.”

“I won’t leave them behind. We’ll just have to be sneaky. You like that, don’t you?” The determination in her eyes burned like fire and I was left in speechless confusion once again. She was right, of course. I was excellent at stealth. One might call me the e-paw-tomy of sneaks. When I wanted to go undetected, there was no creature alive who could spot me.

But that didn’t matter! Death, Raina. Death! She was literally singing about it, and she’s so much more powerful than us! We’d never make it!

I darted before her again. She knelt and picked me up…before continuing again!

“You won’t convince me. Mother always said that it is our duty to right the wrongs of the world where we see them,” she whispered. “We have to rescue our friends, or else I’ll never be able to live with myself.”

Despite the confidence in her words, now that she’d picked me up, I could feel her hands shaking. Her heart was beating fast with fear as we walked closer and closer to our doom.

She was terrified…

She knew the dangers we faced, and yet she still walked headfirst towards it? How could she go forward with such…conviction…knowing the threat that lurked before us? It just…made no sense.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” I muttered.

“Me, too.”

* * *

The mist grew even denser as we continued following Qelona to our inevitable doom. Raina held me tight, betraying her own fear as we continued closer.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked…not for the first time.

She nodded. “We must be getting close, right? This Qelona can’t have that large of territory.”

“We have never encountered something this strong. Your guess is as good as mine,” I answered, still wishing I was anywhere else but here.

“Not sure how we’ll be able to know when we’re there with all this mist,” Raina muttered.

Just then, my ears flicked behind us. It was…singing. My heart fell as I realized we were almost there. With the befuddling fog, she must have been just ahead.

“If you have a stealth spell, I’d use it now,” I said.

“Give me just a second.” Raina drew upon our mana, focusing very hard on the desired outcome. Nothing changed.

“Is that it?”

“Hold on, I forgot the somatics.” She put me on the ground and took a step back.

“The what?”

“The gestures. Some spells are easier when you channel the mana in a certain way,” she explained. I watched, curious, as she shifted the mana inside her once more, this time moving her finger before her in a strange oblong circle. It was…an eye? Maybe? I didn’t know. It was so hard to tell without a trace left behind.

However, the effect was clear. Raina’s skin and clothes began to fade into the background. Within a few moments, it was difficult to tell where she was by sight alone. I could, however, still hear the shifting fabric of her dress.

“It’s a slow cast, but an effective one.”

“Why the need for the…somatics?” I asked.

“Helps me to focus it more than anything,” she whispered. “Mother always said that it was a good memory technique to practice. Command casters actually need such things, but you and I could get away without it. It just makes it simpler.”

We crept forward, Raina invisible and me pseudo-invisible in the darkness. Eventually, we poked our heads out of the mist and into a small clearing. Qelona sat upon the roots of an enormous tree decorated with dozens of blue motes of flame, not unlike tiny blue fire sprites. Though they were clearly some kind of fire, they didn’t lick the wood, nor set the canopy ablaze. They lit the leaves and the clearing in an eerie blue glow.

The barkhounds rested at the base of the tree in several small piles. They seemed almost listless without a hunt to occupy their time, some wandering from group to group while the others just slept.

“Look!” Raina whispered. “In the tree by the trunk,” I followed her indication, to find a squirming bundle of vines hanging from the branches. Aelisra hung upside down, her mouth and body wrapped too tightly for her to move.

As for Terrowin, I spied him, too. He was still unconscious, but he definitely was not hanging from the tree. Qelona seemed to take a special interest in our directionally challenged knight. His head was in her lap as she stroked his hair gently.

The corrupted woman sang softly to him, as if soothing him with a lullaby. Though I couldn’t make out the words from here, it was more than a little creepy.

“How are we going to get him out without her noticing?” Raina asked.

“We won’t. We should leave,” I reiterated once again. Though I couldn’t see her, I could imagine her scowl. I sighed. “If we survive, I expect to be praised.”

“If we survive, I’ll treat you to a fish dinner, sound good?”

“Done.”

I surveyed the area one more time. It was sparce, with no furnishings beyond the tree itself. However, that didn’t mean there was nothing to work with. Raina needed a distraction to get Qelona away from Terrowin, preferably one that didn’t involve getting him killed in the process. It would rather defeat the purpose of our little adventure here if we accidentally burned him alive in the process.

Aelisra would be a useful part of the distraction if we could get her down…but until then, she was still a silly hench-human in need of, but undeserving of, a rescue.

I paused. Where was Cithrael? Had he escaped the monsters? Did he have the good sense to flee in any direction so long as it was away from here? Surely that was it. Still, despite the soundness of his strategy, I found myself wishing he were here. Someone who could work at a distance would make an excellent tool for the plan I was brewing.

Without him, though, I would just need to find something else, something I knew for certain was somewhere in Qelona’s camp. I crept across the ground, keeping low and letting my black coat keep me out of sight of the barkhounds that could easily rip me to shreds.

I inspected several of them. It seemed they ranged from level 10 to level 20, meaning the one we faced back at our own camp was on the younger end of the pack. As suspected, if we got into a fight, it would be a rather short and tragic one.

However, in the jaws of one of the level 10 hounds, I found what I was looking for: Terrowin’s glaive. It shone in the light of Qelona’s aura. The hound who’d found it was chewing on the haft of the weapon. I just needed to get it…

Turns out I was just full of distractions today. I needed to be, in order to distract from my own impending death at the hands of Raina’s bleeding heart.

Taking a pebble with Telekinesis, I threw it near the wolf. It clattered on the ground. Every head of every barkhound turned to face the sound. I threw another pebble, this time outside the clearing.

Several hounds, including the one with the glaive trotted over to investigate. Siezing my chance, I gently lifted the glaive off the ground and maneuvered it back to the edge of the clearing.

Now, the plan had been to sprint across the clearing, use the glaive to free Aelisra, and somehow figure out how to get out of danger before Qelona swooped down to capture and/or murder us.

Not my best plan, I know, but my best plan had been to run as far from here as possible.

Luckily, I never got the chance. As four of the barkhounds left the clearing, a brilliant flash of fire and light soared across the clearing, slicing clean through the vines holding Aelisra off the ground and sinking into the tree behind her.

Qelona shrieked bloody murder and chaos broke loose in the clearing.