A large cluster of vermin neared and the wolf engaged them instantly, each swipe of its paws sending multiple rodents flying, despite the awkward motion.
The hunger in its innards flared, and every passing moment felt like its stomach was turning into a furnace, a roiling, restrained heat in its gut.
It snapped its neck forward like a snake to bite the head off a rat, then smashed another with its paw, its abdomen bursting open with a wet squelch on a sharp piece of metal, its pathetic squirming as it succumbed to its injury only furthering the thrumming bloodlust in the wolf’s heart.
A rodent larger than the human’s head let out a squeak so shrill that it cut through the chaos to scrape against the wolf’s eardrums, its beady eyes glowing a faint, dark red as it barreled through its own kin with speed that was unnatural, breaking their charge to continue its own. But it was still far, so the wolf continued with what was in front of its snout.
Another swipe that threw away a couple rodents, another rat bite on its legs, another three swift disembowelments as the wolf braced itself and used its relatively stable footing to snap its head in and out of the quickly thickening wall of vermin, breaking their charges, throwing their bodies away.
As long as it kept moving, using its body like a battering ram to knock the rodents away before putting its head into the mess, it would only suffer some minor cuts and bites, and so far, that strategy was working.
The bumpy expanse of trash swelled, the ‘ground’ turning more unstable as the gears started bulging out the mounds of trash.
The human behind the wolf screamed, the scent of charred rodent and blood cloying the air, another burst of light illuminating the massive rodent as it clambered onto a metal pipe that jutted upwards in a diagonal, towering over the wolf.
Then it jumped forward, a rather clumsy move from a body not made for leaping, powered by frenzied bloodlust and little else.
The wolf didn’t hesitate.
With the rodent in the air, belly down, it was nothing but a bag of meat.
It extended its hind legs, curling its forelegs to its chest as it opened its jaws, tilting its head to align its canines. Then it snapped them shut around the rodent’s neck and head. Using both its own and the rodent’s momentum, it curled its waist to the left, lowering its torso and using the large rat like a sweeping broom to send half a dozen rats flying.
Its eyes flicked to the human in between swings of the rodent, each strike sending mangy fur flying away, even as its battering tool tore and crunched. It saw her hyperventilating form desperately pouring her mana into bursts of searing sparks that had far more stopping power than any fire should have, blowing any stray vermin away and buying the wolf precious time to maneuver around.
Something the wolf doubted she could keep up for long. They weren’t gaining ground nor respite, only buying time.
With a continuous, thunderous rumble, the trash slowly rose higher and higher, slowly pushing towards them, the rotation of the gears trapping them in an improvised trench as the terrain beneath their feet swelled, snapped, and tilted at random.
The sound was deafening, the air was choked with the miasma of poison and burnt fur.
They had even less room to move, the human’s blasts only growing less accurate and less powerful as she struggled not to be sucked under with three useless limbs.
The tide of rodents was stemmed for a moment by the deteriorating ground beneath their feet, many of them losing their footing or falling over in clumps of wriggling filth. The wolf continued moving its head from side to side in wide swings, even as its neck muscles grew sore, its breaths heavy around the corpse in its jaws.
But the horde of pushed back rodents also had the high ground now, burrowing out of moving and crunching garbage.
And at that precise moment, the human’s spell ran out.
The vermin were so much faster, its body so much more sluggish. Its balance was off, the constant shifts and snaps making its paws slip and overextend. Then its legs buckled when the terrain underneath it surged upwards with force it wasn’t expecting, its extended limbs unable to muster the strength to prevent its chest from smacking into the metal refuse underneath.
From above on both flanks, and in the groove before it, the horde stepped on each other just as much as they stepped on trash, the first coherent rush in the fight so far.
A tide of black-gray fur washed over the wolf as it flailed under a mass of writhing vermin. It let out a sharp, guttural bark as it used its strength to buck wildly, then hastily plant its feet and slammed its shoulder into the risen garbage on the left, then the right, feeling the sharp crunch and squelch of viscera wash over its sides. It continued its wild motions, using its limbs and body like a battering ram to physically squash or throw the rodents away, eyes clenched shut as black squirming clumps scattered and flew away into the darkness.
The ferocity might have worked to keep them from latching on, but not all of them.
A rodent bit into its hip, another latched onto the tip of its tail, its teeth hooking into the space between the bony segments, almost severing it, one managed to bite onto its testes, while another held onto its neck and bit onto the base of its ear. Five others had held onto its fur, biting its sides, trying to dig deeper. Another quickly bit its leg as the wolf prepared to slam its chest into the trash below to squash a rodent that was dangling off its rib, its teeth uselessly scraping against the bone, too tough to snap.
Before it could do so, before the pain could even properly register, a blood curdling shriek sounded out from the human, and the world was suddenly washed away in a wild spew of sparks, a million tiny explosions burning into its retinas, the wild spew sporadically swinging side to side and bouncing off the walls of trash on either side before impacting the wolf itself, throwing away some of the rats, and momentarily making the wolf stumble away.
It snapped its feet out just in time to prevent another fall as chunks of its flesh were torn off by the removed rodents.
It barely stayed on its feet, then roared out a bark that hurt its throat, thrashing and bucking its body. Another couple of rodents detached, and it raised its head, before swinging it downwards, the rodent chewing off its ear moving with the momentum to detach with a spray of blood, leaving only a thin film of cartilage to keep its ear connected, blood quickly pooling into the eardrum.
It swung its hips for added momentum to slam the rodent attached to its tail into its dazed brethren, uncaring of the tip going with it. Its legs were used to batter, make space, gut the rodent hanging off its privates with a lucky scrape of its nail.
It used the last few seconds of [Bloodrush] to get onto the hysterical human, its stomach over her head, battering away rats with all four legs in rotation, bucking to throw them off, just buying time, eyes wide and teeth bared in a furious snarl.
Something in its soul thrashed against its chains, and the wolf felt [Mental Resistance] strain for a moment.
By some miracle, the human had enough mana to slap her palm onto its stomach as it rotated in place above her, giving it a weaker boost than before, but a very well-timed one, as [Bloodrush]’s Strength, Speed and Endurance bled out, leaving its limbs feeling lethargic and slow, uncooperative, the communication between brain and limb feeling slow and sluggish.
The human’s Skill helped, but not enough to continue as it had been, the loss in Endurance being felt especially hard as its muscles burned with exertion.
Its blood had more adrenaline than water in it, and despite the danger, the wolf couldn’t help but break from its protective movements, snapping forward with its jaws, whipping its head to the side in a jerky, small motion to throw a rodent away, and in the same movement, clamp onto another. It continued, snapping its teeth shut, flicking rodents away and instantly grabbing onto another in a frenzied mess of blood and viscera, only pausing to use vermin as a sack of meat to batter their brethren away.
Despite only two of its limbs ever being used to support its body, the other two kicking and rending shallow cuts in the squirming mounds of fur scrambling for them, it managed to keep itself relatively grounded, its center of balance only wobbling slightly during the fight.
Some instinctual part of itself remembered how to keep its balance, only ever keeping the upper parts of its limbs stiff and letting the lower parts move with the bob of the terrain. Its movements grew less restrained, more confident.
It swiped two rats away, one of its toe pads paying the price in blood when one of them quickly turned and bit down before the wolf’s paw smashed its teeth out of its mouth, and behind them was another monstrously large rodent, almost half the size of the wolf itself, twice as large as the previous biggest it had seen.
The heat in its stomach felt like liquid magma eating away at its insides, a blast furnace contained in far too small a vessel. It was the only thing its body felt but a strange, scared sort of excitement, a savage satisfaction in a fight to the death.
And it hurt.
The rodent lunged for the head, its stubby legs only barely managing to lift its upper body off the ground, its teeth just barely high enough to reach the wolf’s neck.
In a moment of pure instinct, the wolf turned its upper body to the right, lowered it as much as it could, and the moment the rodent’s teeth latched onto its neck fur, exploded to the left, pushing with its shoulder, neck and legs, uncaring of the two thin cuts on its neck as teeth dragged through its fur.
The rodent was thrown off balance, head to the sky, and the wolf plunged its canines through its neck and eyes, and used its momentum to continue the motion, using the rodent as a sweep once more, battering away dozens of rodents before they could get to the human, from both the left, right, and sometimes above.
Even the new tendons woven around its neck and curled around its spine started to feel the strain by now, but it held its ground, protecting the human and itself with all it had, even as the rapid swinging started making it feel a tad dizzy.
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The blood loss was probably as responsible for that as its motions were.
The trench deepened, tightened, the trash momentarily burying the human’s legs, and the wolf barely caught it out of the corner of its eyes, instantly letting its canines phase through the rodent as it kicked with its hindlegs to pivot on its forelegs and dash forward.
Curiously, even as the human spent every ounce of energy and mana she had blowing or throwing rodents off, she didn’t attack the wolf when its jaws tore through her charred pant leg and scraped against her skin, nor as the wolf hauled her broken limbs out the trash.
Instead she let out a guttural groan of pain and blew a wide burst of sparks around her in an awkward semi-circle, her injured arm curled around her head protectively
It kicked away a couple rodents — with much more difficulty than before — as it did the same with her other leg, the fabric tearing from the strain. The human’s voice quickly grew hoarse, but it pulled her leg free after two seconds of struggling, and it quickly dashed over her torso to bite into a rodent that was about to bite into her scalp, tossing it away.
Then, with a thunderous rumble, the trash went too high, got too unstable, and a tide of uncountable bits, big and small, toppled on top of them like the lid off a coffin, mashing them together, the rodents completely buried all around them.
The human had lost her voice at this point, and clumsily threw her hands around the wolf, whose brow was split open by the sharp corner of a metal box, its left eye blinded by its own blood, dizzy and confused.
The sudden lack of rodents, the pressure on its upper back, mashing its chest into the human’s face, as well as a rather sudden perception of its injuries, made it quickly snap out of its confusion with a growl, flaring its antennae for more information.
It was only the Speed and Perception boost that made the wolf realize what was to come just a split second before it did, and it hurriedly dug its hindleg’s nails into the human’s garment, despite feeling a piece of rebar trying to pry its ribcage open.
Even if they were in the middle, it quickly became hard to breathe as their sides were squeezed, harder and harder, the wolf’s bones creaking under its flesh, slowly getting bruised by a wall of sharp corners and rusted waste as dust hung thick in the air, like trying to breathe in slime.
It might have been just ten or so seconds, but in its entrapped state, it felt like a hundred times longer.
Then the world dropped out from under them.
With the coffin of discard no longer suspended between the gears’ crushing pressure, they simply dropped, falling like a conjoined pair of stones in a shower of dust, metal, glass, plastic, and a million other less savory things.
The impact might have been lesser had the human not accidentally used it as a cushion for their spinning fall.
It was only six or seven feet, but the added weight of the human was enough to make the wolf let out a shrill, sharp yowl as it felt one of its ribs land onto an iron pipe, the snap reverberating through its bones.
The human’s injuries forgotten, it curled its feet inwards and kicked her off, scrambling to its unsteady feet as it panted, blood foreign and familiar dripping from its mouth.
And in the scattered, seemingly nonsensical pattern of holes in the walls, it found the pipe it had been looking towards this entire time, half-hidden under a piece of debris, slowly inching upwards.
It only wasted a moment to grab onto the human by her collar, its teeth lodged into the tough fabric, and on unsteady, trembling legs, it pulled her along, step by step, getting closer to salvation, feeling a slow, insidious chill slowly move into its body, adrenaline slowly starting to fade and pain slowly creeping back into its body.
If the wolf was tired, the human was exhausted, barely conscious, her head limply hanging down as she muttered gibberish. The wolf’s blood dripped down its teeth to slowly coat her neck.
Its tendons strained like frayed ropes as the wolf dragged her closer to the pipe foot by foot, the scent of the poison slowly filling the air as bits and pieces of trash continued to rain down from above, caught or squished into the gears, occasionally impacting its numb backside.
The rodents trapped in the pipe, eight of them, spotted them just ten feet away, and quickly jumped off. The wolf felt their squeaks tickle its antennae, the ringing in its ears drowning out most sounds.
The trash continued to scrape down the walls inch by inch, and the wolf let go of the human just as her Skill faded away, its limbs feeling like they were made of lead. A mass of rodents as large as itself rushed at it, and it could only glare at them with a defiant anger.
It didn’t have the time nor energy to fight the rodents and drag itself and the human to the pipe before it would be too high for them to jump into. It also knew the other pipes were stuffed full of rodents, even if they weren’t near the entrance.
In its hazy-eyed state, with one ear and one eye made useless by blood, feeling like a clawing, tearing void was ripping its stomach apart, it gathered all it had, all its fury, all its mana, its breaths ramping up into snarls, one eye glowing red under the veil of its lifeblood and the other gleaming gold as mana flooded its lungs.
It needed more.
And so it reached deep into the recesses of its mind.
Hazy recollections of its old weakness, of running from rodents until it could barely breathe. Of a gnawing, empty pit in its stomach, of shivering as its insides chilled to ice despite the sweltering heat of whatever machine it was nestled against. Of vomiting until it could barely breathe, poison and blood mixing with whatever scraps it had found to eat, pooling around its snout.
Of hatred, buried deep, from necessity. Hatred of its kin, biting and chasing it away. Hatred of the machines that burned its eyes, its nose, its lungs. Hatred of the structures that speared into the sky, as if their existence was there simply to remind it of how small, insignificant it was. Hatred of the human’s nest.
Hatred of itself, when it was too weak to survive.
Too weak to find food, too weak to take it from others.
So the wolf grasped tight around the lid of the coffin it had trapped its hatred within, and dragged it out, fanned its flames and plastered it to the forefront of its mind.
They used to be memories unimportant and fading, emotions fleeting and unnecessary, but for this moment, the wolf gripped onto them with bloody teeth as its lungs burned and swelled with more than simple air.
And it waited, one, two, three seconds, until the rodents were just a foot away. [Bloodrush] activated.
The mana coiled around the air in its lungs, latched onto it like a rabid passenger. Mana turned to sound, and the passenger roared with a hundred different shades of fear, fury, hatred and desperation as it rode upon the air that screamed out of its lungs. The pressure felt like a fist being driven through its throat.
Its vocal cords snapped like strings almost instantly, trampled underfoot as the mana vein of its throat reinforced the sound waves, propelling the air forward. The tight ball of emotion, sound, and mana, finally left the entrance to its mouth.
And without the confines of the wolf’s circuits, the proximity of its control, it promptly exploded.
Blood spewed out of its throat and mouth in a fine mist as a sharp crack of sound drowned out all else, the sphere in its mouth expanding in less than the blink of an eye.
Its jaw broke and detached from its joints to dangle lifelessly, the muscles tearing open as one of its canines ripped out of its mouth, and in the last millisecond, whether by luck or instinct, it wrenched its head to the side just enough so the air wouldn’t go back down its gullet and rupture its lungs.
That didn’t stop its neck from being violently wrenched to the side before it could even see the effects of the explosion as it was blasted back by its own Skill.
Its body spun and flipped in the air chaotically for a few feet before its hind legs smashed into the trash again, promptly crumpling and leaving it to tumble awkwardly on its side.
If nothing else, the agony helped it stay awake.
With shrill wheezes, it forced itself upright, tilting its blood-filled ear to the side for the crimson liquid to drip out, simply to regain some sense of hearing, as the other one could only hear a high pitched whine.
The pain was… not something it had never felt before, but definitely equal to its worst experiences. Yet, the way forward was open, few if any still-moving rodents in sight.
Step by stumbling step as its sense of balance returned, it managed to drag itself back to the gibbering human, and with some fiddling, managed to hook its top canines into her garment.
Through blurred eyes it managed to see what its Skill managed to do, from the splattered corpses of the rats that had popped open against the stone wall, from the eight foot long cone of destruction that formed a convenient ramp of trash, straight into the drifting pipe.
The rest was a blur, of awkwardly adjusting its top canines to properly drag the human, of being thankful for its hanging jaw allowing it to easily spin its canines and cut through the grate, of one long, final stretch of agony as it dragged itself and the grunting human into the city’s underbelly.
And finally, rest.
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