Olivia raced toward the red beam in the sky. She’d seen Aiden run this way when the flare had gone up and even saw the traces of what remained beside it. With her speed, she blazed across the land, barely perceived by those she passed.

Her heart raced, and panic settled across her skin, the wind that did break through her windshield prickling against the layers of sweat to chill her to the core. Everything felt cold as she ran, and no amount of pushing herself faster would make her get to the destination any sooner. No amount of attempting to push would make her undo her choice to confront Aiden or run off, forcing him to go face whatever had happened alone.

She was a terrible sister for that, and he’d been right. Olivia had bolted up so much resentment and didn’t try to see things from Aiden’s angle, but at the same time, why should she have to?

Maybe their time to part ways was coming sooner than either of them could’ve imagined. Then again, who could imagine being teleported to another world where you had to survive against monsters, where magic was real, a place literally in a different plane of existence.

None of it made sense, even though, by now, it made enough sense for her to rationalize. But emotionally, her fears consumed her. Her fear of losing her brother, of watching him suffer, of suffering herself and ending up alone.

All she could do was run faster, Zeal soaring above her head and cawing every so often. She could feel his scorn toward Aiden, the dissatisfaction coursing through her companion due to the turbulence her brother caused her to feel, but was it all his fault?

Olivia didn’t know, didn’t want to know.

So she ran faster and hoped. Aiden had a tendency to throw himself at things he shouldn’t by himself. The short war against the Valkyr and subsequent domination of Midrath was the most evident proof of that, but he’d always done it. Always thrown himself into harm’s way for others, trying to play the hero.

Why?

A question she’d never understood. No matter how fast she ran toward him, he always seemed to get farther and farther away, his back fading in the distance. Her speed meant nothing in the face of his departing back.

DANGER ZONE AHEAD!

Enter Unclaimed Rank 3 Territory?

Warning: This area is far above your current level of power.

Yes. | No.

And then she was there, crossing these weird territory lines into an absolute massacre. The blood was everywhere, as were the corpses. She couldn’t force herself past the gore and gruesomeness without retching twice.

Tears streaked down her face as she approached the sound of bestial chomping, slurping, and growling. In addition to the monstrous sounds of ravenous feasting, Olivia heard shouts from the other side of the territory.

The place was large, and she couldn’t pinpoint their location. With a few bursts of wind magic to propel her upward, she leapt away from the horrifying scene of death, leaving it behind in hopes she could prevent more from occurring.

“Where are you?” she asked, frantically searching for the shouts.

The buildings were large and obscured her vision, so she called a gutter to her to use as a ramp and lightened her steps as she ran up to the top of the building. With her hands over her eyes, she continued her search.

Zeal’s warning caw gave her just a moment to leap out of the way of a bestial creature. Its claws rent the ground where she’d leapt from, but its tail seemed to have a mind of its own and lanced at her, stabbing through the short distance to impact a hastily projected wall of wind.

Groaning, she realized quickly she couldn’t remain there. More monsters prowled up the side of the building and toward her position, their mouths frothing with hunger. The first that attacked and fastest of the bunch also had wings that had helped it scale the building faster than the others and three total heads.

The more she looked, the more she recognized the mythological creature as a chimera. Its three heads resembled a lion, goat, and eagle, and the tail that had tried striking her as it passed was that of a large python.

The two slitted serpentine eyes rose above the back of the chimera to regard her, its tongue flicking in her direction.

“Time to go, Zeal!” she shouted, turning and running to the edge of the building without slowing. “Here goes nothing!”

Olivia leapt off the building as the monstrous beast of legend charged her. She arced a short distance upward before gravity brought her speeding downward. But not for long.

Zeal was there, as reliable as ever. He’d grown a fair amount in recent days as she continued feeding him Essence, allowing him the strength to catch her in his talons carefully and descend downwards in a glide.

Fancy falling was better than plummeting to her death, but the chimera behind her didn’t seem content to watch her flee in peace. It soared after her, the goat bleating, lion roaring, and eagle shrieking its prideful descent.

Olivia didn’t wait for the ground to get close enough before she dropped, having found exactly what she was looking for. With a mental prod, Zeal loosened her grip, and she swung her arms carefully to create a wind tunnel to ease her down the last few feet to the ground.

But even on impact, she rolled to absorb the impact of landing, though she’d practiced the maneuver enough times to roll and spring to her feet, continuing running as if she’d never taken a foot off the rooftop at all.

The thing she’d looked for would aid her in escaping her pursuers for long enough to make her escape. Once she stood underneath the fallen light pole, she turned and watched as the chimera drew closer.

Holding up both hands, she pointed one toward the chimera and the other toward the fallen light pole. When she knew the monster drew close enough for the effect to be absolute, a radiance befitting of a solar flare exploded out of her hand and caused the monster to shriek and careen away.

It landed heavily, but she wasn’t done yet. With her second hand, she wrenched the light pole from the ground and bent its metallic length atop the chimera, anchoring it in place.

No matter how much it struggled, it stayed there, thrashing, hissing, cawing, and growling at her in a rage.

She didn’t have time to challenge the creature and see what kind of Essence she might be able to gain from it, unfortunately. She still heard shouts, even louder now. After she was absolutely certain the chimera wouldn’t reappear, she took stock of the locations of those monsters that chased after them but didn’t have the benefit of wings.

“Gotta make this fast,” she said, turning on her heels and exploding into movement.

Zeal guided her from above to the location of the shouts, and once she covered two blocks and rounded the corner, she understood the panic she’d heard from so far away. Four fighters postured defensively around a fifth downed with a sixth member trying to administer aid to the downed member.

The four defenders were arrayed in a semicircle with a building at their backs, a dozen tall and thin mantis creatures clicking and chittering around them, each toting a third scything arm from either their left shoulders with thick chitinous armor on the right.

Action took precedence to thought, and she’d fought long enough to not need time to think. With enemies approaching from the rear and an encirclement of targets to her front, time was of the essence.

Clicking her heels against the ground, she activated Hermes boots. Instantly she felt her body lighten and mind clear as the enhancement stimulated her Alacrity by a large margin. In the next moment, she activated Zenith and darted forward.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Rapier drawn, all wind parted away for her, each step enhanced by the boots of Hermes and carrying her forward leaps and bounds beyond what she could otherwise achieve. Then she struck.

Precise and absolute, her thin weapon punched holes through the reinforced exoskeleton of three of the three-armed mantises before they realized she flanked them. The moment they did, they leapt back to regroup and encircled her.

The party they’d had pinned down didn’t let her efforts go in vain and quickly gestured her forward before the mantises blitzed her with overwhelming force. But Olivia had other ideas. This level of foe paled in comparison to what she’d faced back on Midrath.

To compare the two would be like comparing a geck to Blizzy.

That didn’t make them any less of a threat. She hadn’t stacked a ton of Durability like Aiden or Ian, but she didn’t need to. These monsters moved like they were frozen in time, and she’d let them retreat only to observe their behavioral patterns.

Not to mention the development of forging and enchanting made her simple looking armor she wore underneath her clothes a veritable fortress for these creatures. Their auras alone gave her the confidence she needed to wade through them without fear, and her confidence pushed her forward.

Even if these weaklings wouldn’t pose a threat to her, she didn’t trust the chimera to stay trapped forever, and there were plenty of other monsters rampaging around this territory to worry about. And, if she worried about the party too, they looked as fatigued as their sixth member was injured.

Meaning very.

Since the mantises chose to surround her instead of attack, she continued her forward assault. They moved nimbly, despite the layers of natural chitinous armor attempting to protect them. Each one stood slightly taller than her, about the height of Aiden, and looked far more imposing than her.

That thought made her smirk. In this day and age, looks were quite deceiving.

Since her initial attack, less than ten seconds had passed. Her initial assault took less than half. Hopping in place, she grinned to herself and started hopping from one foot to the other in place, rapier casually hanging by her side.

Zenith demanded she move to stay active, and the Hermes’ boots enhancement would fade in another twenty seconds. More than willing to oblige, she took a step forward in the middle of a bounce and crossed the distance to her next target.

The mantises seemed more perceptive than most things she fought. Two of them leapt between her and her target, but they might have moved at a snail’s pace for all the good it did. Rapid steps enhanced by the boots of Hermes and Zenith allowed her to instantly change direction to evade their blockade and step again to propel her forward.

Bug-eyed and as prepared as the mantis could be, her rapier slew her fourth target. However, she wasn’t done.

Like a dancer, she turned one-eighty and lunged, stabbing forward with an explosive drill of wind. Neither had time to process the half of their torsos being obliterated before death took hold.

In the same time it took to slay the three, their corpses fell to the ground, thudding simultaneously.

Having watched six of their three-armed friends fall with very little effort on Olivia’s part, the remaining mantis monsters must have reasoned her to be too strong a foe.

In coordinated fashion, almost as if rehearsed, all of them leapt back three times in rapid succession, clearing a large distance, and then turned entirely to retreat.

For a brief moment, she thought to give chase, but the adrenaline coursing through her wasn’t a feeling she still let take over her mind. Bidding them farewell with a flourish of her rapier, she returned it to the loop in her belt where it hung by her side normally.

Afterwards, she hurried over to the party, keeping her eyes locked for any other monsters in pursuit. The ones that followed her with the chimera stopped their chase and regarded her from a distance, slinking off and out of sight moments later.

Whether they were truly gone or if they were biding their time, she didn’t know. Only time would tell. For now, she had more pressing matters.

The Alacrity steroid from the boots of Hermes faded after a few more seconds of her standing there. She patiently waited for the party to get around to finally processing that they weren’t in mortal danger any longer.

They stood there long enough for even Zenith to run out. As she stood there, she recognized something about each of them. Pointy ears and gold eyes.

“You’re not… human,” she muttered, wondering if they could even understand her. Much to her dismay, they couldn’t. Racking her brain, she tried to think of a way to communicate with them.

“Skrii!” Zeal’s alerting cry and mental prod instinctively caused Olivia to switch over to his view.

And from the falcon’s eye view, she saw a second and third chimera freeing the first, rending the light pole. Once the first was free, they started in her direction at full speed. Not only that, the scavenging beasts hadn’t left. They’d simply hid.

But Zeal saw them all and conveyed his worry to her succinctly.

When her vision returned and she looked at the party, she grunted in frustration. “We don’t have time for this!”

She stomped over to the fallen mantises and gestured at the large group, pointed in the direction of the trio of chimeras. Then she pointed toward their group and continued miming running, but this time while pointing in the opposite direction of the hostile beasts—and hopefully toward somewhere that wasn’t filled with more hungry beasts looking for an easy snack.

The four of them looked between where she pointed, Olivia, and the group healer who worked to heal the downed party member. Their uneasy gazes kept landing not on the healer but the downed sixth elf.

“Oh shit,” she swore, realization dawning on her. “They don’t know what to do without their leader.”

Now she had a hard choice to make. Turn and confront the trio of chimeras and the beast horde accompanying them or leave these people behind. Without being able to communicate, taking them to a place not here wasn’t likely, given the condition of their team’s decision maker.

“Damn, damn, damn!”

As much as she wanted to stay and help, she wasn’t as strong as Aiden.

Taking on three chimeras might be a morning’s workout session for him, but Olivia had been working on understanding the enchantments and helping Claudia and Magnus with the influx of materials in order to arm Zion for the continued fight against the never-ending hordes of monsters and campaign to continue settling Midrath.

The amount of resource disparity between the two of them, her essentially a researcher and developer of magical crafting and him the leader of Zion and acknowledged strongest human, was a chasm she couldn’t even imagine crossing.

Not that she had any desire to.

She liked being able to help others. It’s why she even came over to these pointy-eared folk in the first place, but now she didn’t know what to do.

Faced with a rock and a hard place, she screamed internally when she wished Aiden, Anna, Josh, or even Ian were here to make the choice. She didn’t know what to do, and investing into Alacrity gave her the clarity of mind and all the time in the world to contemplate everything in depth.

The chimeras were coming though.

“Get a hold of yourself, Olivia!” she nearly screamed, slapping her face to anchor herself in reality. The sound cracked and echoed about, drawing the attention and concern of the party.

With their eyes on her, she decided what to do. She’d make them come with her and get out of this hellish monster-infested territory first, then deal with the lack of ability to communicate later.

Plus, it’s not like healing their leader would be worth a damn if doing so caused the death of their entire party by doing so.

She grabbed the hands of the two closest to her and forcefully dragged them to their downed leader and to the side of the healer. Olivia shoved the healer out of the way and gestured for the two of them to pick up the wounded leader, gestured for the others to follow, and then, again, pointed in the direction that would lead them to safety.

If they could get out of the rank three territory, she doubted the chimeras would follow.

The healer looked offended and talked very quickly, pointing toward the two Olivia had dragged over and then gestured to the rest of the party. They visibly winced at some of the words she said and tried to go back to healing their leader, but Olivia stopped her from crouching.

“It’s time to go!” Olivia shouted, pointing toward the way out for the third time. “Let’s go!” She pointed at the two elves and growled, “Get him, or I will, and let’s leave before all six of you are dead!”

She met the golden-eyed gaze of each of the pointy-eared folk. They seemed to get the point of her message. One carefully crouched to pick up their fallen leader, and the other picked up the leader’s fallen shield and spear.

Thankful they were finally moving, Olivia felt a chill run through her spine as Zeal let out a warning shriek.

They’d been too slow.

Turning on her heels, the three chimeras approached them, the horde of beasts surrounding them. Even the way out that was clear but a second ago now had a couple of monsters.

Olivia drew her rapier and shouted, “Go now! I’ll hold them off!”

They stood stunned for a moment, but the one carrying their leader took off in the direction she’d gestured. The other five followed, leaving Olivia to fend off the very unhappy looking chimeras.

She’d have no problem escaping from them, but the pointy-eared folk, as weary as they were, would likely die if she retreated now. And she’d already invested herself into seeing this through.

She could find Aiden another time. It’s not like he wasn’t powerful and competent.

But these people needed her, so she’d buy the time needed for them to make it out, even if she never saw them again. She only hoped they’d escape in time.

As the trio of chimeras growled, posturing to attack, Olivia took a quick look to see them breaking through the small blockade. Of all of them, only one gave her a second look.

Then all of their departing backs faded from view as they continued running, turning a corner and disappearing out of sight.

“Now, where were we?” she hissed, glaring at the chimeras.

The middle one, the largest of the bunch and one she bound, leapt forward.