Ironically enough it wasn’t my shield that came into play with the first attack, it was the TK blast I’d been holding in my hand.

I’d thought that I was keeping my guard up, that I was prepared to act at a moment’s notice. However, some things you can’t really prepare for, and one of those things is some sort of massive boar-thing the size of a large van suddenly charging out of the woods at you like some sort of runaway train!

Seriously, the thing was massive, and it came out of nowhere, as though the forest had launched it at me from some sort of hidden cannon. Something so large had no business moving so fast, yet it managed it. With a squealing roar, the massive hog came at me like some sort of tusked meteor.

Had this happened before I’d had to deal with the living blender that might once have been a squirrel, I’d probably have frozen up.

Unfortunately for my attacker, I was now better prepared. So, instead of freezing in shock, I reacted like a coiled spring that had finally been released!

The TK blast that I’d been holding in my hand flared as I instinctively dumped into it the largest surge of power I could manage in a split second. Instantly I was sending it hurtling towards the huge boar with a crude pushing motion. Had it been any other sort of projectile I’d probably have ended up missing. I was off balance, surprised, moving on pure reflex, none of which was generally conducive to any great display of accuracy.

However, the great thing about my telekinetic bolts was that they didn’t go where you aimed them, rather they went where you wanted them!

The blast of colourless energy flew from my hands and slammed into the oncoming boar, the collision occurring so close that I could make out the individual bristles upon the huge hog’s snout.

The thing was massive! This boar . . . it might be somewhat smaller than an elephant had been, but there was something about it that made it loom over me. Maybe it was the sheer aggression that it was radiating, maybe it was the way it was crashing through the undergrowth as though it was as insubstantial as air. Whatever it was this thing was somehow even scarier than the demon things that had attacked my Awakening ritual!

I knew that a full-grown boar was a dangerous creature, and even a regular-sized one could hit hard enough to smash bones and pulp organs. So, one as large as this one should be capable of reducing a human to paste if it hit. All that mass, all of it moving so fast, all of it backing tusks like spears and a body like a tank, that had to add up to a lot of force!

A lot of force that my TK blast slammed into.

The moment seared itself into my memory, an instant that confirmed that I really was both dangerous and powerful. The blast started out at about the size of an apple, but quickly grew over the intervening space until it was the size of a basketball when it hit the boar. Proportionally the bolt was small, but the effects were spectacular and undeniable.

For an instant the beast itself flashed, a brief sheen of red light playing across its dark form, each bristle momentarily lit up by the bloody light. I felt a surge of power, of magic that I’d never felt before. If I had to describe the ‘colour’ that it had in my mind then I’d have called it a hot bloodred. It was angry, aggressive, and very carnal. It was the red of meat, muscle, blood, and sinew. It was animal and savage, and it fought against my own arcana to protect the monstrous creature before me.

Still, bloody and savage though it might have been, its magic wasn’t as strong as mine, and so it broke like cheap glass.

For the boar, the results were immediate and violent! The globe of colourless energy slammed into its snout below its eyes, more or less on the centre of balance for it, the full weight of its body being behind that spot, and then stopped it dead. There was a horrible cracking noise, one similar to that which the squirrel-thing had made. Only it was louder and deeper, as the warped boar’s own momentum drove itself against the telekinetic sphere. In the weird slow motion that came to those with a truly absurd amount of adrenalin running through their bloodstream, I watched as the boar seemed to fold in on itself, its form crushing up against the arcana blast. I watched flesh rupture and blood spill forth. I watched its skull being forced to the side even as its neck broke. I listened as the sound of its squealing cry was cut off into a broken gurgle.

Time resumed its normal progression, and I had to dive to the side as the power of my blast exhausted itself, allowing the now-dead body of the beast to continue charging at me. Much of its momentum had been lost in the collision of forces, but there was still some left, and given its mammoth size having enough energy to keep moving at all made it dangerous! My evasion was a clumsy one, but I was able to fold my wings in closely enough to avoid getting tangled in the underbrush or caught on the nearby trees. On the other hand, I didn’t really have time to see where I was going and ended up bouncing off a tree that body-checked me. The impact was enough to wind me, so I had to take a moment to collect myself before I turned to inspect the remains of the boar.

I’d have liked to have taken a moment to look it over, to really see how huge it was, how long the tusks were, how wide its hoof-like trotters were. After all, this was the first monster that I’d fought and beaten on my own. As reflexive and thoughtless as my actions had been, they had at least been backed by my own preparations and strategy, simple though it might have been. It wasn’t an epic victory, but it was a fight. My first fight and I would have liked to savour it at least a little bit longer.

Unfortunately, the massive red wolf thing that suddenly leapt out of the woods to my right proved to be something of a distraction.

This time it was my shield that saved me. The creature was so fast that I had no opportunity to react, I only became aware of its existence when it slammed into my protection with force comparable to Hadriel when she wanted to make me feel the pressure.

I felt my shield crack under the force of the blow, but despite that it held. As for me, it was only due to reflexive use of my flight that I was able to remain where I stood, rather than being sent careening back like a kicked football. I was able to stay in place as the beast stumbled back, one of its front paws rubbing at its snout, letting me get my first good look at it.

At a glance, I’d have said it was on par with a horse, but I’d never seen a horse with teeth and claws like these. The creature was unquestionably canine, but it was as though some caricature had somehow come to life. The snout was too long, the body and limbs too thin, the claws too big. There wasn’t enough fat upon the beast’s body, all I could see were muscles and sinew stretched almost painfully taut across its frame. Even the fur seemed unnatural, a mixture of oily black and blood-like red.

It was just . . . wrong! A creature like that, it should have been curled up on its belly, too weak from hunger to even move. Instead, it was already recovering from its impact with my shield and was staring at me with clear hunger, bloody droll leaking between its teeth. Hell, even the eyes looked off, too wide, too much white, the pupils seeming to be swimming unsteadily on a pale sea.

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“RRRrrrrrrhhhh . . .”

The low rumbling growl sounded a large engine that was starting, rather than anything coming from a living being. It wasn’t loud, but it was penetrating. The sound carried on the air, and I had little doubt that when the canine thing wanted to be heard then the whole forest would know.

What I wasn’t expecting was for the growl to be answered by a chittering from behind me. It took effort, but I was able to resist the urge to turn until after I’d reinforced my shield. My first impulse had been to spin immediately, but Joan had kept hammering into my head that I should never let an enemy out of my sight. Given that the creature before me tensed in apparent preparation when it heard the other cry . . . well, maybe I was thinking of it as smarter than it really was, but it looked like it had been getting ready to take advantage of any distraction.

“SSSSsssssss . . .”

This time the sound came from an entirely different direction, off to my left and from low to the ground. Yet again, I didn’t bother with conscious thought, instead, I trusted pure instinct and just reacted my flight propelling backwards and to the right as though I had been tied to a missile that had just been launched.

My instincts served me well, as I saw a green and grey blur pass through the space I had just vacated. As I moved, I heard the chittering again, this time rising into a shriek that was all too similar to one I’d heard only a short time ago. I felt something hit my defences, though it lacked the force to inflict any significant damage, but didn’t take my eyes off the foes before me. Instead, I reached out with my hand to grab at the empty air as my magic reached out to seize the attacker at my shield. In a single motion, I clenched both my fist and the telekinetic force I was applying, an action that was accompanied by a sharp squeak, and then a wet crunch.

Any other time my crushing an attacker like that, without even looking at it, would have been something I’d have taken pride in. It would have been like a badass moment in a film, the hero not even looking at the explosion he set off. However, that was impossible given what I was looking at, a thirty-foot-long snake that had come slithering out of the undergrowth and was now rearing up cobra-like!

The snake before me was recognizable as one of its species, but like the other creature, it seemed to be more a caricature of one, rather than a real animal. No snake had ever had jaws like that, nor such a fang-filled maw of a mouth. The eyes seemed to be more insectile than reptilian, even the scales were wrong, more like flat knife blades than anything else.

Then I noticed that the previously quiet forest had begun to come alive with sounds. Hooting, growls, hisses, there were lots of new noises, but none of them sounded natural. The cadence was . . . distorted in all of them, just slightly off, but enough to be very disturbing.

Out of the corners of my eyes I could see the brush starting to move, things I could barely make out moving through it. Some of them seemed to be small, not much larger than a housecat, but others were great indistinct masses pushing their way through. None were larger than the boar, but even so they were intimidating.

And there were so many of them.

I was suddenly all too aware of the small vial in my pocket, the lifeline that Hadriel had provided me. As I tried to keep my eyes on the wolf-thing that was still just beyond my shield I also tried to be as aware as I could of all the other movement around me. The dog-beast was so close, its snout almost touching the magic defences, its fangs bared, and its eyes fixed on me. Letting it out of my sight felt very dangerous, but what about the things I wasn’t watching? Like some treacherous iceberg emerging from concealing mist the thought that maybe I should call for help rose up in my mind.

It wasn’t an unreasonable thought, I was surrounded, outnumbered, and, if I was being honest, severely rattled by the sudden appearance of so many threats. This was more than I’d been expecting, more than I felt ready for. Yes, there had been mention of dangerous animals, but I’d been unprepared for the sheer ferocity of what I was up against. When they’d said the animals were being twisted into monsters I’d thought of something like zombies or large lumbering mutations.

This was different though. The squirrel had been worrying, but if that had been the norm then I could have handled it. The boar had been too fast, too sudden to really have time to assess, but these new creatures . . . they weren’t charging in, they were taking time to size me up, inasmuch as they could. They were also giving me time to stew, to let my fear and uncertainty grow. One of these things I could handle, two or even three wouldn’t be beyond me, but there were at least five here, and that was just the ones I could make out!

This might be too much, that was the simple fact. I had power, and I had some training, but this was getting thrown in at the deep end of the pool and being told to swim or sink! I wasn’t ready for this! I wasn’t-

My increasingly panicked thoughts were cut off as something impacted my shield from behind me and to my left. I couldn’t see what it was, but the sound it made upon impact was forceful but muffled, making me think that whatever it was must have been heavily furred. Again, my defences shuddered, but held.

My eyes darted about me as my hands reached into my pocket and seized the vial. I could see them now, a crazy menagerie of warped and twisted creatures. There was the snake, the fox-thing, something that might once have been a weasel, several dog sized monsters that might once have been rats, more squirrel abominations, at least a dozen insectile aberrations the size of my hands . . . there were just so many!

My fingers closed tighter around the small bottle, not yet enough to break it, but not far from it. My fear was screaming at me to crush it, to call for help, to get away from the monsters surrounding me, but some small part of me hesitated.

Claws and fangs were scratching at my shield, but none were actually breaking through. Not yet. That meant I had time, time to think, time to compose myself, time to act like a rational being rather than a scared animal.

Over my head something that might once have been a bird smashed down on the upper portion of my defences. The creature was almost unrecognizable as to what it had once been, the placement of its wings and the general shape of its body being the only indicators. The head and beak had been replaced by a gaping maw of teeth that seemed to be twitching in place as they bit at the shield. The thing had at least five legs, each of them ending in a claw that would have put even an eagle to shame, every talon a hooked and barbed nightmare. All in all, it looked like something drawn from the fever dreams of a lunatic, and it seemed extremely eager to bite my whole head off.

Despite my earlier thoughts on rationality and composure I ended up reacting on pure reflex. My TK wrapped around the thing and squeezed!

I wasn’t sure what I thought was going to happen, but I hadn’t been expecting the creature to collapse under my grip as though it was simply hollow cardboard. That wasn’t right, at least not as far as what I’d been taught went. Hadriel had explained it to me, that most supernatural beings had at least some resistance to magic as an inherent part of their being. It was why gods couldn’t casually curse each other, it was why mages couldn’t rip each other’s hearts out without the use of complicated and potent rituals, and it was why I couldn’t crush either Joan or the angel using my arcana telekinesis.

They had explained that not only was this trait shared by other supernatural beings, such as demons, fey, spirits and the like, it was also inherent to the various monsters that had returned to the world. What gave them their supernatural powers also gave them the same protection, a protection I had assumed these twisted creatures shared.

But it looked like I’d been incorrect in that assumption.

My hand reached out to the side, the movement helping me to focus my magic as I directed a crushing grip of telekinesis at one of the smaller canine monsters. It was the work of a moment to wrap the arcana around its head, then press inwards as hard as I could. There was a momentary resistance, then with a wet crunching noise the beast’s head imploded, blood and dark oily fluids leaking out of the jagged breaks in the skull as it collapsed into the undergrowth.

This confirmed it! As things stood, they couldn’t reach me, but I could kill them.

I looked around myself, taking in all the monsters trying to break through my shield. Maybe if they had enough time to work with some of the larger ones, they would be able to manage it, but I wasn’t planning on being so generous. Taking a deep breath, I prepared for what was going to come.

This was going to be bloody work, I just knew it.