It was Fyodor alright, and he sounded scared to his core. Hunter laid his hands on the wall as he had seen Brother Aurochs do the previous day and willed it to disappear, which it promptly did, leaving nothing but mist in its place. The direwolf bolted in the chamber with his bushy tail between his legs, panting heavily, too frightened to even sit still.

Alarmed, Hunter took a peek outside. There was no sign of anyone or anything else. No Fawkes, no Brethren, no low-dwellers, just still darkness and the ever-present, muffled heartbeat of the Halls. Whatever had happened, Fyodor had made his way back alone. That didn’t sit well with Hunter. Ever since they’d entered the Halls of the Cor Ancestors, the direwolf hadn’t veered more than a few feet away from them. Whenever he wasn’t at Hunter’s own side, he was at Fawkes’s. To wander in the dark like that, scared and alone… Something bad must have happened.

“What is it, boy?” he asked Fyodor, scratching him behind his ears. “What happened? Where’s Fawkes?”

Visibly in distress, the direwolf looked at the dark corridors, then at Hunter, then back at the dark corridors. It was as if he was trying to tell him something but didn’t know how. He padded up and down the room, whining and whimpering as he sniffed around in the flickering torchlight, increasingly restless and agitated. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for; he grabbed the shaft of the glaive in his huge teeth, dragged the great weapon to Hunter, and looked him straight in the eyes, almost pleading.

Well, shit.

Though unable to put it into words, what Fyodor was trying to tell Hunter was all too clear; “Something happened over there in the dark that scared the shit out of me, boss, so grab your big pointy stick. You’ll definitely need it.”

He didn’t have to repeat himself. Hunter wasted no time. He grabbed the glaive and the rest of his gear and got ready to see what had gotten the direwolf whimpering like a pup.

He considered bringing a torch with him to light the way as he left the room behind, but ultimately decided against that. He had his Low-Light Vision to guide him–which also extended to his familiars, by the way. The direwolf didn’t seem to have much trouble finding his way in the dark. Carrying a torch would probably just give him away to low-dwellers and who knew what else, so he simply snuffed it out. Fyodor didn’t like that; he let out a low whine and moved closer to Hunter, so that constantly brushed his thigh with his flank.

Hunter put a hand on the direwolf’s big head to calm him and concentrated on his mental link and summoned his familiars. They landed on his shoulders and gave him the mental equivalent of a question mark.

“Have you guys recovered from yesterday’s rough-and-tumble?” he projected to them.

They stumbled for a moment, as if surprised, then projected they had. Figures. Hunter had to keep reminding himself they were spirits of the Aether given flesh, yes, but barely subject to that flesh’s restrictions.

He instructed them to scout ahead and keep him up to date with what they found, but try not to draw any attention. He didn’t need them baiting any low-creatures back to him this time; the previous day’s ambush tactics wouldn’t work, not without Fawkes and the Brethren ready to make short work of the uglies. Signaling their now-customary ‘aye aye, sir!’, they took flight and vanished into the dark.

“Alright then,” Hunter told the direwolf and him behind the ears. “Show me, boy. Take me to Fawkes.”

Despite his fear, Fyodor didn’t waste any time. Only stopping to sniff the ground and reorient himself, he led Hunter through the lightless labyrinth that the lower levels of the Halls were with purpose. Biggs and Wedge scouted the corridors and side-passages around them, making certain that nothing was going to flank them or get them from behind. Three or four times they signaled Hunter to tell him they’d come across dead things, but other than that, there didn’t seem to be anything of note around them.

About ten minutes later, the direwolf took Hunter through the rooms and corridors where they’d fought the previous day. The remains of low-dwellers were strewn all around on the floor, along with the arrow-peppered hulk of odious flesh that was the dead low-ogre. He didn’t have to rely on his Low-Light Vision to find those. Their stench was so powerful he couldn’t miss them if he tried.

Fyodor gave the dead and mangled bodies a wide berth, but Hunter wasn’t as fussy–not when it came to body parts he could loot and use to fuel his newly-acquired passion for arts and crafts. He stocked up on Warped Flesh and low-dweller essences, and also found a particularly chunky-looking Essence of A Low-Ogre.

Flirting with crossing from being pragmatic to being full on ghoulish, he also bagged the disembodied head of a Kannewik–probably the one the low-ogre had chucked at him. It was better than plucking hair from a live one, he told himself. Another day, another dollar–that was another of the truisms he’d inherited from his old man.

As they delved further into the Halls, Biggs and Wedge found signs of a large-scale scrap, as well as more butchered low-dweller bodies. They had been dead for a while, though the sterile air of the Halls made it impossible to say for how long exactly.

Amidst them, Hunter found a saber.

Fawkes’s saber, its blade caked with dried-up black blood.

No Fawkes though.

She could have been disarmed. She could have dropped it. It was okay, Hunter tried to tell himself. She was skilled, crafty. She had other weapons. She had to be alright. He picked up the saber and let the direwolf lead him.

Weirdly enough, he stumbled upon more low-dwellers a few minutes later. Those had been downed by the Brethren’s brutal spear wounds and Fawkes’s clean, almost surgical cuts. They were fresher, too. Some of them weren’t even cold yet.

Whatever had transpired, wherever his companions were, Hunter was getting closer. Fyodor must have thought so–or, more likely, known so–too, because he was getting progressively more cautious and skittish with each hall and corridor intersection they left behind.

Predictably, the ravens were the first to figure out where Fyodor was taking them. Hunter might often grumble about their penchant for curiosity and meddling, but when it came to scouting, the two feathery fucks were starting to prove themselves really dependable.

“Uglies!” they projected. “Very angry, very many! Look at wall, scratch at wall!”

Wondering what fresh kind of fuckery that meant, Hunter went on. Nothing good, judging from how reluctantly the direwolf followed.

Hunter could hear them, along with the ever-present heartbeat of the Halls; a distant cacophony of growls and claws scratching the dark stone of the corridors’ walls. Hunter peeked behind a corner and saw them, too. Hell, he smelled them, too; there they were, a throng of twenty-or-so frenzied low-dwellers swarming around what looked like a random, nondescript spot on the wall of a random, nondescript corridor.

Having seen a thing or two about how the Halls were designed and built, he didn’t need more than a couple of moments to realize what had probably happened. The wall was quite obviously the entrance to a room or a vault. Fawkes and the Brethren must have stumbled upon the large group of low-dwellers and, not able to fight off so many at the same time, retreated there as a last resort.

They’d saved themselves, yes, but now they were probably trapped in a vault with nowhere to go. Fyodor must have somehow escaped from the monsters and made his way back to the other vault to get Hunter. An impressive feat, especially for what was essentially a wild beast with zero training, but one that still left them with almost two dozen murderous low-dwellers to deal with.

“Is Fawkes in there, boy?” Hunter asked and patted the direwolf on his big furry head. Fyodor whined what could only be taken as a ‘yes,’ but Hunter barely heard him. His mind was already racing, calculating, looking for ways to get his companions out of there in one piece.

He had to consider his options, few as they were.

Taking them on all at once was out of the question, of course. He could maybe manage a couple at a time, provided the direwolf wasn’t too frightened to help, but not without drawing the attention of the rest, too.

Fawkes and the Brethren couldn’t be of any help either, assuming that they were indeed in that vault and still alive and well. Not while the low-dwellers were waiting to tear them apart the moment they peeked their heads out of their hiding place.

He racked his brain for other ideas and solutions, and came up painfully short.

What would Packman do in such a situation?

Had he and his gaming group ever faced anything like that while raiding?

Τhey had, Hunter realized.

In fact, the similarities were almost uncanny.

They’d been casually raiding the Tomb of the Thousand Dead for a while at that point, doing runs three or even four times a week to get their hands on extra loot to sell at the auction house.

Things were going smooth as butter, until one day they weren’t. One day they got too careless, or maybe it was too greedy or too unlucky; it didn’t matter. It didn’t even matter whose the blame was; things like that have an unfortunate tendency to happen, sooner or later. It was what Packman called Murphy’s Law.

It all went to hell in a handbasket when they decided to pull two groups of undead at the same time, thinking that they could trap them in a dead end and have Aries burn them to a crisp all at once with a well-placed Wall of Fire. It would have worked just fine if a particularly aggressive ghoul hadn’t bum-rushed Aries. It crashed in her and interrupted her casting, leaving their raiding party exposed to the rest of the monsters.

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Only Packman made it out of that scrap alive, somehow managing to slip away with the party’s healer’s corpse thrown over his shoulder as the ghouls were finishing off the rest of them. It was the right call; as soon as they were out of aggro range, Packman used a rare and expensive Phoenix Elixir to bring the healer back to life. He, in turn, would be able to revive the others, if he somehow managed to reach their corpses and cast his long-winded Mass Resurrection spell without getting killed by the ghouls again.

By that point, Packman knew the floor plan of the Tomb of the Thousand Dead dungeon like the back of his hand. He had the healer hide in an out-of-sight safe area, then went and drew the attention of the monsters, leading them away from the corpses of the rest of the party. He corralled them all and had them chase him in a circular course through the dungeon for the better part of ten minutes, giving the healer ample time to get Alex and Aries and the rest of the group back on their feet.

Once they were back in battle shape, they ambushed the distracted undead, flanked them, and cut them down in half a minute flat.

Maybe that was the right play here, too.

The idea of running around the Halls and being live low-dweller bait didn’t exactly thrill Hunter, but he didn’t see any other choice. Worst case scenario, they’d catch up with him and kill him. It would be excruciating and it would traumatize the hell out of him, but he’d respawn.

As a Transient, that was a luxury he could afford.

Fawkes and the Brethren couldn’t.

It was settled, then; that’s what he’d do.

For starters, he had Biggs and Wedge pick out a suitable course for him, a series of halls and corridors and intersections that were safe to move through and formed a circuit. It took him a while to convey the concept to the feathery buffoons, but in the end, they understood well enough.

When it came to Fyodor, on the other hand, Hunter didn’t have the advantages of communicating through a direct mental link. He scratched him behind the ears, explained to him what they were about to do, and prayed the direwolf would follow him instead of doing anything unpredictable. He steeled himself, took a deep breath, and stepped around the corner and in clear view of the low-dwellers.

“Hey, assmunches!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, hopefully loud enough for his companions to hear him in their hiding place. He couldn’t but smirk at how the low-dwellers turned their ugly heads his way all together and in near-perfect unison. Fyodor, on the other hand, didn’t find it so funny. If anything, he looked horrified by Hunter’s attention-grabbing antics.

“Yeah, you lot!” Hunter shouted again, now grinning from ear to ear. “Come over and see if you can get a hold of me, you bunch of motherless turd-apes! You’re all worthless and weak!”

The low-dwellers didn’t need to be told a second time. Driven into a frenzy by his resounding shouts, the screeched and growled and scrambled after this new target, practically trampling one another.

“Run, boy!” he told a bewildered Fyodor, and turned to get the hell away as fast as he could. He didn’t even bother to look at the throng of monsters that was after him and already gaining.

Now wasn’t the time to think things twice.

Now was the time to run like the wind.

Even when he’d been fit, back then in the Triassic period, Alex hated running. He hated cardio exercise in general. Mr. Lipkowitz, his old kickboxing trainer, used to joke about how Alex would rather get the runs than get to running–that’s how much he hated exerting himself. Seeing how eager he was to run like hell now, Hunter was starting to think Mr. Lipkowitz hadn’t been using the right kind of motivation. The rabid horde of malformed aberrations that was hot on his heels was working wonders.

When alone, low-dwellers weren’t much of a threat; they were more-or-less blind, cowardly, and frankly, not the sharpest bulbs in the sky. Banded together, however… that was a different story altogether. Hunter couldn’t fight them, he couldn’t escape them, he couldn’t hide from them. It was too late for any of that. All he could do was sprint from one corridor to another and hope he could keep going long enough for Fawkes and the Brethren to free themselves, catch up, and come up with a new way to deal with their little low-dweller horde problem.

Fyodor was by his side, running and panting too, probably wondering what the hell Hunter had been thinking. Biggs and Wedge were bringing up the rear, lagging behind long enough to curse a few of the uglies with Ill Omen and hopefully slow them down a bit. Not that it would make much of a difference. The low-dwellers were simply too many.

Maybe Hunter should take a page out of the direwolf’s playbook and send the ravens to make sure help was on the way.

“Biggs, Wedge” Hunter projected. “Go back to where the low-dwellers were. Go get Fawkes or the Brethren. Bring them back to me.”

With a telepathic nod of acknowledgement, the familiars immediately split off and vanished into a side corridor.

Hunter hoped they’d got the message. Hell, he hoped Fawkes and the others were already on their way to pull his ass out of the fire, because he’d severely overestimated his stamina and ability to run for dear life. His lungs were burning and his legs didn’t feel like his own anymore. It was simply a matter of time until he tripped or ran out of breath and dropped his pace. In either case he’d die a brutal and horrible death, but at least it would be quick. Thank God for silver linings.

“Alexander Fucking Rulin, a.k.a. Hunter the Transient” he thought as his mental focus was beginning to slip, too. “Bad decision champion for twenty-something years straight. Quite the surprise tactician indeed.”

He’d almost completed a whole circuit and was nearing the corridor where he’d spotted the low-dweller horde in the first place when things finally turned his way. Biggs and Wedge sent him a wave of excited chattering through the mental link they shared, but his brain was too numb to make sense of what they were saying.

Not five seconds later, a torch-wielding figure stepped out of a side corridor about a hundred feet ahead of him. It was Brother Aurochs and he was carrying the biggest, most wicked-looking greataxe Hunter had ever seen. The big man dropped the torch to the floor, wielded the axe with both hands, and planted his feet firmly on the floor, as if bracing himself for the skirmish that was undoubtedly about to come.

“No, run, they’re too many!” Hunter said–or at least he tried to. What little breath he could muster was cut short, taken away in surprise when Brother Aurochs started to change.

Illuminated only by the torch’s flickering firelight, the large man’s silhouette started to grow and meld into something even bigger–and so did the horned buffalo skull headdress he was wearing. His already thick arms and thighs grew to massive proportions. His chest and torso grew so tall and broad it hardly looked humanoid anymore. Brother Aurochs was now a buffalo-headed, minotaur-like creature, standing on its hind legs and still growing larger and scarier with every passing second.

Beside Hunter, Fyodor was terrified. He let out a panicked yelp and almost slowed down and bolted in another direction, but then Fawkes’s familiar, silver-haired head peeked from around the corner ahead of them and waved to them.

“Over here, quick!” she shouted. “Don’t slow down!”

However unnerving the sight of Brother Aurochs turning into a twelve-foot axe-wielding were-buffalo was, seeing Fawkes alive and well and offering them a way out of their predicament gave both Hunter and the direwolf a new, much-needed burst of energy. They bolted past the gigantic, buffalo-headed Brother Aurochs, who didn’t spare them a single glance, and dove into the side corridor. Fawkes and Sister Peregrine were both there, weapons in hand and ready to fight.

“Stay behind," Fawkes snapped, her eyes already burning with fervor. “Catch your breath. We may have to run again.”

Hunter and Fyodor did just that; they ran a couple dozen feet past the swordswoman, then almost collapsed to the ground. The sheer intensity of the aura Brother Aurochs gave off was enough to fill Hunter with a primal sense of fear and awe, pure and unthinking. He’d felt that kind of power once before, when he’d faced the short-lived but absolutely overwhelming wrath of Arjen, the bear-shaped aspect of an ancient forest god. That added even more to the sky-high pile of questions he already had about, well, everything, but he wasn’t about to look a gift were-buffalo in the mouth. Not when he was just a few short breaths away from being eaten by a rabid horde of low-dwellers.

The low-dwellers in question, on the other hand, didn’t pay much heed to the new threat that was blocking their way. They were too frenzied, or too stupid, or both. They ran after Hunter, singularly focused on their prey, only to be met with an earth-shattering roar. One brutal swipe of his gigantic greataxe decimated at least three of them right there on the spot, launched another two in the air, and stopped almost all of the rest dead in their tracks.

Even the three or four that managed to slip through weren’t much luckier. Sister Peregrine shot her arrows faster than Hunter could count them, and each one of them found its target with precision that seemed almost impossible. Fawkes danced her deadly dance with immaculate grace, slicing and dicing and cutting her unfortunate foes down almost effortlessly.

Anyone, anything would be mortified by such a swift and brutal show of force. Not the low-dwellers. The low-dwellers weren’t built for fear; they were built for serving as fodder; unthinking, unflinching, murderous fodder. Instead of turning on their heels and running away for dear life, they set their sights on their new target, overwhelming a foe as it was.

A few of them rushed the transformed Brother Aurochs head on, drawing his attention. He destroyed them with a wide sweep of his greataxe, not so much slashing as crushing them with the heft of the massive weapon. The rest, however, instinctively knew the ruse for what it was. They circled around the were-buffalo, tearing at his powerful legs and launching themselves at the small hillock it had for a back, aiming to reach for the throat. They were almost a dozen. Given the chance, they might have done Brother Aurochs enough harm to bring him down.

Fawkes and Sister Peregrine, however, never gave them the chance. Sister Peregrine loosed another salvo of arrows, aiming for the low-dwellers that were trying to climb on her Brother’s back. Fawkes rushed in and made short work of those who were trying to hamstring him. And the were-buffalo himself, unable to use his huge but unwieldy weapon at such a short range, simply punched, stomped, and pulverized anything that was unfortunate enough to be caught in range.

Hunter was planning to catch a few breaths, then join the fray himself. By the time the were-buffalo crushed the last of the low-dwellers under his hoof, though, both he and Fyodor were still winded, and their other companions hadn’t even broken a sweat.

“Are you alright?” Fawkes asked him, wiping the black blood off her blade on one of the corpses at her feet. “Were you injured?”

“That’s…” Hunter wheezed, still trying to catch his breath. “That’s my line. What happened?”

“Went off to scout ahead," said Sister Peregrine as she was picking among the carnage, looking for arrows that weren’t too damaged to salvage. “Got ambushed.”

Hunter looked at her, waiting for a more in-depth explanation. He got none. Her face hidden under her hawk-shaped headdress and illuminated by nothing but a couple of torches, she was even more inscrutable than before. What Hunter did notice, however, was that she avoided looking at her Brother.

The man-turned-werebeast was still standing among the dead bodies of the low-dwellers, calf-deep in spatters of viscous black blood. He didn’t seem like he was paying attention to anything, now that the skirmish was over; he simply stood there, massive greataxe in hand, staring at the darkness of the Halls.

“We were careless” Fawkes told Hunter and patted him down, taking a look at his now-almost-healed injuries from the previous day. “We took on more than we could chew, and the damn things corralled us to a corner. We had to retreat to one of the vaults and wait until they lost interest. Turns out they can be very patient. The rest... well, the rest you know.”

“What about him?” Hunter cocked a thumb and started to ask, but Fawkes cut him off with a sharp glance. Too late. Sister Peregrine had already heard him.

“He did something he shouldn’t have done to save us” she said, and her voice grew very bitter, very fast. “To save you.”

“Not to sound ungrateful, now, Sister, but–” Fawkes intervened, but the Sister gestured to her to stop.

“I do not wish to sound ungrateful either, pardon me. It is just…” She glanced at the huge form of Brother Aurochs and took a deep, pained breath. “To be Brethren is to sacrifice. Still, some sacrifices are too big even for us.”

“I feel for you” said Fawkes, “even if I cannot fathom your pain, or the significance of your Brother’s sacrifice.”

“And I thank you for that.”

The two women set to act as if they were straightening up their gear and cleaning their weapons, fooling nobody. The awkwardness in the air was almost palpable. Fyodor, haggard from the overexertion, licked Hunter’s hand and looked at Brother Aurochs’s way, visible concern painted on his lupine face. Hardly anybody talked for a while. Hardly anybody moved. Then, as if having just snapped awake, the werebeast that Brother Aurochs had become turned his head towards the dark, let out a bone-deep sigh, and started walking.

“Come” said Sister Peregrine, following after him. “It’s not far now.”

“Oh, Fawkes, by the way,” said Hunter and reached into his backpack. “I found your saber. You must have dropped it. Good thing you had a spare.”

The woman blanched.

“What saber?”