It started slow, just to not dislocate the human’s shoulder, and quickly sped up within three bounds, thankful that the absolutely deafening clamor of the trash pit was covering the sound of the human’s pain and discomfort, as well as the scrape of her foot coverings against the stone.

Despite the awkwardness of running while hauling a heavy human at its side, destroying its balance, the girl’s Skill made it so blindingly fast that it didn’t matter.

The panic and the deafening racket of breaking and bending materials covered for their charge perfectly, the rodents only turning to notice them when they were ten or so feet behind them. Far too late to stop their charge.

One shrill squeak prompted another, in a chain reaction that took less than a second as they quickly abandoned any notion of self-preservation, charging at them mindlessly.

[Bloodrush] activated, and the wolf’s eyes bulged, the bonuses in Perception, Speed, Strength and Endurance all combining into an incredible feeling of absolute power. The world slowed to a crawl, and the wolf sped to a blur.

It could feel every vein pulsing under its skin, every individual hair tugging back from the wind, could individually count how many rats there were in and around the pit from a mixture of hyper sensitive vibrations, the sounds of their breaths, the scents wafting into its nostrils. Its sight sharpened, and it could probably individually count each hair on the rodents' hides.

Not that it needed sight.

Every soundwave brushed the microscopic hairs of its antennae, every vibration of its paws smacking into the stone moved through its muscles and bones to rattle the base of the organ, feeding the antennae information without any actual touch. It could run through the human’s nest with its eyes and ears shut if it wanted.

It felt, in one word, amazing.

Lowering its center of gravity, it pushed its limbs to the limit, and just before it collided with the semi-circle of rats rushing at them, used its lower body like a whip, kicking forward with its back legs before curling them up to the side of its stomach while its forelegs turned to the left and dug into the stone to add to its momentum, its nails acting like razor hooks to stab into the stone.

Its right side, hip and legs, smashed into the rats, and its speed and power allowed it to weather the hit with nothing more than the dull ache of a bruise as half the rats went flying into the pit, and before its momentum could bleed off completely, it slammed its back legs onto the stone and pushed away, digging its nails into the ground, and yanked the human away just as the remaining rodents to their right were about to leap onto her, adding almost three feet of distance.

Just half a foot away from the lip of the pit now, it was relieved to see the human using that fire Skill to blow the rats back for a moment, buying the wolf the moment it needed.

It forcibly tugged the human away again, just enough to get itself into the right position. Its lower legs moved back, and met air before curling in to press against the wall, the wolf’s lower body hanging over the trash pit.

The human suddenly jerked with a guttural battle cry and blasted the rodents again, the scent of burnt fur and fabric momentarily cutting through the poisonous miasma in its nostrils.

That sudden movement, however, caused the abused fabric its teeth were clamped around to tear apart, the wolf barely managing to hook its foreleg’s nails into the stone to delay its fall by a second as it jerked back, its elbows digging into the sharp corner of the pit. The tiny scraps of fabric its jaws were holding onto were the only thing keeping it suspended, and those were quickly tearing.

A flash of panic chilled its gut, and it swung its head onto the human’s right shoulder, only to remember a moment too late that the right side was ripped too.

With its nails sliding out of their stony sheath, there was no time to think of an alternative.

It bit down on her collar, barely managing not to sever an artery in its panicked chomp, and dragged its forelegs down to brace against the wall, curling all four of its legs under its chest.

It had been expecting a blast of fire to the face, but besides some short yip of surprise, she didn’t react, still blindly shooting sparks out at the rodents.

With a growl of exertion, it pushed with its legs as hard as it could while wrenching its head back, throwing the girl backwards into the trash pit.

She screamed as she was launched over the wolf, a sound that was somehow still only barely audible past the cacophony filling the pit. It opened its jaws and let go of her collar to let her tumble off into the trash pit, a movement that it followed, with much less momentum.

For all the power the boost gave it, it only managed to flail midair enough for it to land in a diagonal with its legs extended, the impact of a twenty foot drop not nearly as painful as the dozen sharp metal edges and bits of glass that slammed into its hip and then its side, bruising its bones and tearing its skin as it sank into the fragile waste with the sound of a thousand and one things breaking underfoot.

Mid-air, it managed to catch a glimpse of the human landing legs first on some of the softer bags of trash, a small mercy.

It scrambled to its feet and extended its neck. Its head peeked over a thin sheet of sharp metal, and rested upon her squirming, sobbing and groaning figure.

Groaning and sobbing was good, it meant she was alive and conscious.

Letting out a loud bark to be heard over the cacophony, it rushed forth to the lip of its crater and kicked once, twice, allowing its nails to partially cut into trash for a better grip, and quickly scrambled out, battering and kicking rodents out of its path as it moved to her side. After a few stumbling steps, it half hovered above her, quickly checking her for any urgent wounds, which it found none of.

Then it lifted its head to swivel around and keep an eye on the rodents for what little time it had to spare.

It hadn’t been expecting the fabric to tear, for some reason. It should have seen that coming.

Despite that hurdle however, they were right where they should be, on the top and right in the middle between two rows of spinning gears, even if it had to shift its footing every other second to not lose its balance.

They just had to hold their ground until the pipe revealed itself.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

It growled, an almost instinctual sound that served no real purpose as it watched a couple dozen rats jumping off their perches on the surrounding walls to charge at them. Even if most of them were not paying attention or just didn’t hear them over the deafening racket of the gears.

Some landed badly and got injured, some fell through the cracks and down into a cage of metal trash and got lost, buying them precious time, but most of the rodents landed perfectly fine, blazing a maddened line straight towards them.

A chorus of shrill squeaks from behind made it turn its gaze back to the wall they just jumped off of, and its eyes narrowed while its lips curled into a snarl at the sight of more than half a hundred rodents.

The vast majority of them now jumping out of their pipes and metal indents into a messy pile of filth just a few feet away.

Maybe it should have done something differently. Maybe there was just some option it hadn’t considered whatsoever. But there was no time to ruminate on such thoughts, nor gain its bearings, this was the best it could come up with. It chuffed to the whimpering human, moving a hind leg to poke her in the back, lowering its body in preparation.

“Fuuuuuuuuck." She sob-groaned out between grit teeth. "You p-piece of… ffnughngn psycho!” She grunted, lifting her upper body off the unstable ground with one arm, to flip over onto her back, panting. “Damn it…” She groaned out, her left hand reaching out to clutch its leg in a tight, desperate grip.

They were surrounded by vermin, but the vast majority of them were coming from the wall fifteen feet away, something the wolf was going to deal with, and hope the human wouldn't panic and throw sparks at its back.

She would just have to deal with whatever rodents were behind them. Its eyes swept over the shifting terrain one more time, forcefully shaking off her hand with a jerk of its leg, knowing it had mere seconds before the onslaught started.

And the image, one of a giant mass of five dozen rats squeezing between, under, and through garbage in a stuttered, split charge, was one that seared into its mind, a momentary panic freezing its limbs.

A panic that shattered like glass when a small rodent it hadn’t noticed bit into its right paw, and with a yowl, it snapped its leg up, to its mouth, bit the rodent hanging off its bleeding toe, and threw it into the horde with a whip of its head to buy time.

And so the fight began in earnest.

The rodent’s footing and movements were horrendous, even worse than its own, the tunnel vision making them utterly blind to everything besides tearing the wolf apart, which only made them stumble and fall over each other. A fact the wolf decided to exploit, hoping to catch rodents and use them as projectiles to break their semi-coordinated rush.

An isolated, speedy little rat rushed at it, at the forefront. The wolf used its speed to dash forward, snapping its jaws shut over its neck and spine, ready to twist its neck and toss the vermin back to its kin. However the moment it bit on, it stumbled forwards as something under its front paw broke from the gears, sucking the first section of its leg between fragile glass-like material before it could hop backwards.

It clumsily put its weight onto the squeaking, writhing rat with its neck to quickly dig out its leg, then flicked the soon-to-be-corpse into the horde, managing to scatter and break a small cluster of rats as it hurriedly jumped backwards.

And now it was basically stuck, because the human was right behind it. It moved too far back.

It could retreat. It could run away, and let the human get eaten, just to buy itself some time. But the thought, for better or worse, didn’t even cross its mind in the heat of the moment.

To its right, a rat scurried with surprising speed to snap at its right foreleg, which it curled up to its collarbone before leaning its body forward and slamming its paw into the middle of its back with its entire strength and body weight behind the blow. The smaller rodent’s spine snapped with a small, albeit satisfying crack.

It turned to see four rodents scurry towards it side by side. It quickly battered the leftmost one with its right paw, where it tumbled away into shifting garbage, extended its paw towards the second to bait it into snapping its teeth and pulled its paw back at the last moment, then jumped forward to snap its jaws shut and stab it through the upper spine with its canines, using its right leg to sweep the other two rodents away in the same motion.

Although that worked remarkably well, that’s when it made the same mistake, twice in a row.

It moved its hind legs forward to kick its body backwards, but one of its paws slipped off some wet, metallic surface as soon as it extended, continuing with its momentum to almost smack into its own ribs, making it overcompensate to keep itself stable by using its left paw to catch its body weight.

Whatever its foot landed on, it folded inwards before tearing apart, further destroying its sense of balance and making it slam shoulder-first into a sharp-edged piece of stone.

It only barely managed to unlatch its jaws from its latest victim to let out a barking snarl as a rodent jumped onto its right shoulder, and another bounded up towards its head. It thrashed its body wildly to buck off the vermin on top of it, and with the savagery of instinct, chomped down on the rat in front of it, its canines phasing through its sides and stabbing into its organs and legs.

But its head was untouched, and beside its mouth. The rodent twisted in its grip and bit into its jowls, and as the wolf wrenched its head to the side to throw the vermin into the horde, it felt the rodent’s teeth take their cut of flesh, finally managing to right itself with a snarl, its back fur bristling so harshly that it resembled a mound of spikes atop its spine.

It was, for some reason, genuinely furious.

The rodent it had bucked off recouped and bit into its hind leg, its teeth only barely managing to pierce through its fur and skin before the wolf twisted its hip and kicked it away like a pebble, hearing its squeak cut abruptly with a wet thud.

Fury, its new tendons, the [Devourer]’s hunger, and [Bloodrush] all combined to boost its strength to lengths it was unprepared for. But as the rodent horde neared, it wasn't sure if that was going to be enough to overcome sheer numbers.

In the darkness, only the brief flashes of orange light illuminated the pit, the human panicking and squirming closer to the wolf with every step as she blasted away stray rodents from her side.

They just had to stand their ground until the pipe was revealed.

And that was easier said than done.