“Don’t let him in there!” I yelled to Tansy, and started running toward her voice. “Keep him out!”

Wren raced past me, growing two inches with every step. “Usim! Usim!”

When she reached the junction, I shouted, “Left!”

She veered leftward, shockingly agile despite her size, and two heartbeats later I followed. Losing ground to Wren with every step because she sprinted like a monster. Except I caught sight of her again as she raced toward the rusted fence that warned people away from the entrance to the Old City.

Tansy--on the other side of the fence--raised her sword when she spotted her and snarled, “Fucking Sixer.”

“Stand down!” I yelled. “That’s her kid.”

“How many of our kids did she--”

“Stand fucking down!” I bellowed, and she stepped aside.

Which was a good thing, because Wren would’ve hit her like a freight train. (Actually more like an SUV, but I’m trying to get past that.) As Tansy said, “He’s already in there,” Wren tore through the rusted fence like it was made of cardboard.

She skidded to a halt at the top of the sharp slope that dropped off toward the white-walled streets of the Old City. “Usim! USIM!”

Her voice boomed and echoed, then faded away.

None of us spoke. I wasn’t sure if any of us breathed. Even Tansy looked disturbed.

Then, in the silence, a quieter voice called, “Mom?”

I exhaled in relief. Usim was alive. He was okay. I couldn’t see him, but he was hiding around one of the corners in the Old City below us.

“Thank the gods,” Wren said, before raising her voice again. “Where are you?”

“I’m coming,” he called. “Hold on!”

Wren pressed her eyes with her palms and repeated, “Thank the gods.”

“Can I kill her after we save the kid?” Tansy asked me.

“You can try,” Wren said.

“No killing her in front of her son,” I said.

Tansy sheathed her sword and scowled at Wren. “Fucking gemmed. So that’s what yours does, huh? Makes you grow till you’re almost like an olifarn. Not quite, though, because you’re still a shitbird with--”

“Mom!” Usim trotted into view from a nook thirty or forty feet past the bottom of the slope. “I was hiding, I thought--”

A pale shape blurred from a side street, grabbed him, and dragged him away.

He was out of sight in a fraction of a second. He screamed once, then fell silent.

Wren leaped into the air to chase after him. A second later, I slid down the slope, my new armor skating across the stone with a grinding rasp. Tansy followed me, then Wren landed with a bang in the street ahead of us, and I noticed that her clothes expanded with her when she grew. Which was so weird. Although on the other hand: magic.

She didn’t seem to notice the jarring impact when she landed. Well, she didn’t seem to notice anything but her son. She stayed laser-focused as she sprinted after Usim, chasing the creature that had grabbed him into a narrow street between two half-domed white-walled buildings.

“The fuck kind of monster was that?” I asked Tansy, running forward

She scowled beside me. “An overgrown Sixer with a gem.”

“I mean the thing that grabbed Usim!”

“A skinbear,” she told me, lagging slightly. “What are we doing, Alex? What do we care?”

“Usim helped save those kids’ lives. Without him, they’d be dead. You sister would be--”

“Oh. Oh!” She sped up. “Right.”

The street curved sharply, and I caught single flash of Wren ahead of us as I asked, “What are skinbears?”

“You know bears?”

“Yes, I know bears.”

“Like that, except with skin instead of fur.” Tansy scrambled with me around another corner. “Also, they only eat meat. And live underground. And their hide is tough like, uh, boiled leather. Tougher. They’ve got nasty fangs and claws like dire pumas.”

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

I grunted. “So carnivorous bears with rhino skin? Great.”

“Fun, right?” she said, as we raced through a series of junctions.

A minute later, we turned into a hallway that was lined by entrances to dimly-lit courtyards. I heard faint noises, craping and grunting, but I couldn’t tell from where. Except then, after trotting past four or five, a roar sounded behind us.

Nothing was closing in, thank god. I knew that because webtouch hadn’t alerted me to danger. We’d just missed the right turn-off. So we scrambled to a halt, eyed the empty street, then backtracked. Grunts and growls and scuffling sounded louder, coming from one of the courtyards we’d passed.

When I rushed through the entrance, I spotted Wren crouching in the center of an open rectangular space with a flagstone floor. Crumbled stone plinths dotted the area, beneath a pale, dark-veined ceiling.

Wren was circling a skinbear that stood two feet taller than her, even in her She-Hulk form. Pale, wrinkled skin covered the beast like a hairless sharpei, and its head look more like a velociraptor than a bear. Also, its feet looked more like frog toe-pads than bear paws, like it had evolved to maintain a grip on these stone streets instead of the forest floor.

Usim lay motionless on his side near a pile of stones, and the oversized skinbear swiped at Wren. She blocked with both forearms and the bear roared in her face and her tail swiped from the side and caught its head with a whipcrack that made it stagger.

I froze in dread for a moment, staring at Usim. Then I saw him twitch faintly. Still alive! I took a step toward him ... and four more skinbears shuffled into sight from the edges of the courtyard. Smaller than the first one, but not much smaller.

“Oh, and also,” Tansy told me, drawing her sword, “they hunt in packs.”

INTUIT: Skinbear, Level 7

INTUIT: Skinbear, Level 6

INTUIT: Skinbear, Level 7

INTUIT: Skinbear, Level 8

“So do we,” I snarled, and summoned my hatchets.

Drawing her sword, Tansy stepped into place at my side, probably to defend me.

The first skinbear shook its horrible, bleeding head then charged Wren. She sidestepped gracefully. She drew and thrust her short sword--which hadn’t grown to match her--in a single motion. The blade bit through the beast’s rough hide but didn’t seem to bother it much, and another bear rammed into Wren from the side and I didn’t see what happened next because two bears started prowling toward me on all fours while a third tried circling around.

Tansy pivoted until we stood back-to-back, and I threw a hatchet at one of bears. The blade chunked deeply into its flank. The beast yelped and I threw my other hatchet then recalled them both and the one circling lunged at my side but juked away when Tansy’s sword flashed, then the other two charged me. I chopped and spun and blocked and dodged, and pain flared in my thigh through my hauberk and leggings as one of the fuckers bit me with dinosaur jaws.

I saw red. Pain? Yes, but also fury. With a roar of my own, I domained my left-hand hatchet and took the other one in a two-handed grip and chopped through that skinbear’s spine at the base of its neck.

The fucker dropped and a moment later I did, too, because its friend had tackled me. It felt like a wrecking ball made of ground beef smashing into me. I found myself sprawled on my back, and I’ll tell you this: a velociraptor-looking mouth, when opened wide to bite your face off, is quite large. It’s the size, more or less, of a yawning grave--except with about a thousand dagger-like teeth.

The horrible gaping maw snapped shut like a bear-trap ... and closed on smoke.

My heart somehow pounded wildly even though it didn’t currently exist. That had been too goddamn close. Damn. I’d felt spittle on my face, and one tooth had actually touched my cheek.

Tansy’s sword slashed the skinbear’s eyes as I reformed between her and the third bear, which was standing on two legs about to lunge at her. I buried both my hatchets in its chest. Bone splintered beneath my blade. The bear still managed to bat at me before it died, but not hard enough to break my armor and crachen-tough skin. Still, it took me a few seconds to clear my head.

When I spun to help Tansy I found her jogging toward Usim, having already finished off the blinded skinbear. Meanwhile, Wren was choking one of the smaller bears to death with her tail around its neck while she yanked her short-sword from the bigger bear’s skull.

INTUIT: Skinbear, Level 12

Oh! That bigger bear hadn’t just been larger, it’d also been substantially higher level. Well, that made sense.

When the smaller bear went limp, Wren returned to her normal size. Her tail shrunk then disappeared toward her butt, and she beheaded the unconscious bear with a two-handed swing of her sword. She looked tired but untouched, except for three stripes of blood on her arm where claws had sliced through her sleeve. I was in slightly worse shape, as my thigh was bleeding from tooth punctures. To my surprise, the wound didn’t hurt that much. Still, I leaned against a fallen plinth, pulled fabric from my domain, and started wrapping the wound. I could’ve disinfected it with the vodka-like liquor I’d stored for that purpose, but I didn’t think the cuts were deep enough to mess with my Fortitude.

“He’s breathing,” Tansy told me, crouching beside Usim.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“Yeah, cause you protected me, like an absolute mudskull. I’m supposed to protect you, Alex. That’s the entire idea, drill that fact into your thick head.”

“Get the fuck away from my son,” Wren snarled at her, striding closer.

Tansy smiled venomously. “Yeah, I’m a danger to children.”

“Tansy,” I said.

She shot me a look, but she backed off as Wren knelt beside Usim. She started digging around in his pouch, and after a minute emerged with a gold bead. She took his head in her lap and opened his mouth and--

LEVEL UP!

You saved Erdinand!

Which means, yes, he’s safe.

QUEST: Now save Usim, too. As of right now he’s trapped in the Old City, and the new commander of the Ryetown troops wants him dead. Oopsies.

REWARD: More expoi.

FAILURE: A dead kid on your conscience. You don’t want that. That would ruin your whole day.

You ruin my whole day, you weird automated update goblin. That wasn’t even the same fucking format as the previous notes. Would you just tell me what the hell is going on without the snark and hints and vagueness? The bad jokes and the stupid sarcasm? How come nobody else has levels and boons? How am I supposed to defeat a Plague? How am I supposed to ... to save Usim?

My temper cooled at that last thought. That’s what really worried me. Not just saving Usim, but that ... this was my fault. He was here, trapped underground, hunted by the Sixers, because of me.