I moved, running back towards Dawes and Malstein, hoping I could make it.

Two steps and the ground beneath me shifted as the low rumble of the earth elemental grew. My hoof stepped on a section as it cracked, and it sent me to the ground.

The shaking didn’t stop, sending me from one side to another as rocks fell from the ceiling above. I scrambled forward, only for something to land on my shoulder blade. I couldn’t hear my scream over the rumbling as I collapsed.

More rocks fell, and I curled up, hands over my head and the back of my neck as I waited for the storm to be over.

The rumbling continued, and the shaking of the earth. I couldn’t hear anything over either as more stones piled up around me. Something smashed down on my tail and I grit my teeth as my entire spine hurt. I whipped it over next to me, every movement agony. I closed my eyes, just hoping the rock fall would keep anyone else away from me. And not hit me.

I waited. I waited till the rumbling stopped, till the earth stopped shaking. I counted seconds after that, settling on three minutes. Enough time for the rampaging earth spirit to have moved on after destroying the tunnel, short enough that any surviving shape-changers hadn’t dug their way to me yet.

I opened my eyes, only to be met with inky blackness. Okay, I didn’t care if maintaining it used up even more reagents than on my ears. I was making these able to see in the dark.

I coughed and then tried moving. I could move, albeit every slightest movement sent pain shooting up one part of me or another. My tail ached the most besides my already injured leg, the usually fluid movements stiff and trying to move the last third of it resulted in my entire limb seizing up. Groaning, I reached inside my pockets. One of the first rules of the tunnels, always make sure you had alternate light sources.

Luckily I hadn’t lost my matches in the chaos, and after a few tries a small flame lit. Piled-up rocks and rubble greeted me on close to all sides. The earth elemental’s rampage had collapsed the roof down, but I’d gotten lucky. Nothing had landed directly on me, just glancing blows and slight hits.

Enough that I felt terrible, and parts of me ached, but I could move. If I could fight was an entirely different question, but I didn’t feel helpless.

I didn’t think everyone else had been as lucky. I had heard nothing since the roof had collapsed. Either the entire tunnel to where they’d been was filled with rocks, or no one over there was making noise. Both possibilities were pretty awful, and there were still the shape-changers to consider.

I doubted any of them were dead. Which meant getting out of here as quickly as I could. There was space enough to stand up, albeit only in one spot. A few other places where I might crouch.

I turned around, looking over all the surrounding rubble. Edges of stone pressed against me, scraping against my skin as I forced myself to turn. I had maybe a foot of space to move, less than that in most directions.

One of the larger rocks seemed precariously balanced atop a pile of smaller stones. I could probably move it if I pushed hard enough, but that had its risks. Namely, disturbing any part of this could bring even more of the ceiling down on my head.

Of course, the alternative was waiting in here for someone to dig me out. Assuming anyone was alive. I couldn’t hear any fighting still, no real sounds at all except my own movements.

Then something. But not from the direction the rest of my group had been. The other way. A liquid noise that sounded like a mixture of a bog and plumbing and a low growl mixed with a groan.

A tendril poked through one hole in the rubble. I eyed it as it felt around. Then the end of it split, an eyeball forcing its way to the end.

I jabbed my finger against it, willing the rot to transfer into the limb. The eye shriveled, grey liquid pouring around it as the tentacle withered. It turned sickly in an instant, gone from a thick rope of a limb to a shriveled whip. It fell to pieces while a shape-changer shrieked in pain on the other side.

I was already pushing against my small exit. Limited resources, confined space, I was dead if I tried to fight inside there.

The rock continued to shift while every crack on the other side oozed flesh. It poured through, slowly encroaching. Seemingly harmless. I would not wait to see how it could harm me.

My shoulder hit the rock once, twice, each time pain rocking through me as thin fabric and skin collided with the stone. On the third hit, it finally shifted, and my hands shoved against it, trying to keep the momentum going. It tilted and rolled, and I forced my way out. Ahead was a part of the tunnel still intact, ten feet wide and thrice that long.

Back in my little burial chamber, the poking-through flesh formed into a wall that rippled and then pulled back, ripping the fallen rubble away.

To my dismay, more did not fall down to replace it

The changer was a lump of flesh, tendrils spitting out of the greyish loaf of flesh and pulling it across the floor. More limbs formed now, poking out and forming into limbs resembling a frog as its body split in half.

A tongue lashed out at me from the new mouth, grey slimy flesh wrapping around my forearm. My skin burned where the oozing flesh touched and I grabbed it with my other hand, channeling rot once more. I pulled and the tongue split apart a few feet down, sending me reeling as I tried to get it unwrapped from me. I pried it off part of my skin, and underneath had turned red.

I wasn’t doing this fast enough. Already a second tongue spat out, lashing around my leg. I reached out, but it pulled me off my feet.

I cried out as the back of my head hit the stone with a resounding crack that made my vision swim.

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My hand reflexively pulled off the rotted tongue. The other one pulled me across the floor as I tried to focus, the back of my head hurting even more than it bumped along the stones.

I got my head up as I was dragged, seeing…four, no two shape-changers as my vision focused a little.

Disappointing, the Imp said in my head. And there were hopes for you.

The second shape-changer was coming in behind the first, resembling a squat, featherless bird with hooked claws extending from chicken-wing arms. Shrieking, it raised both and sank them into the back of the first changer.

I…huh.

The first changer turned around, the tongue releasing my leg and wrapping around one of the second’s hands even as the bone blades plunged deeper through the flesh.

Giggling, a fox-woman appeared next to me in a puff of what smelled like a bouquet and looked like some fireworks local kids would ask me to make come summer.

Mostly to distract warehouse guards while they tried to rob the place. But some had actually been used as fireworks.

So Tagashin hadn’t run after all. That was nice.

The two shape-changers were still cutting and slashing at each other. Roaring, one unleashed half a dozen spears of bone into the other, which shrieked and responded with a hook claw that sent globules of flesh flying. White pus-like liquid sprayed out of the newly cut wounds.

“The illusions won’t last forever,” Tagashin whispered in my ear. “I can keep them going, but they’ll start wondering where the other is or why sensations of touch don’t match the rest. Can you do something?”

I stood on unsteady hooves, thinking about it. Rot. I had rot. The rot had been effective on Hawkins. A beat-up, already injured, once before near reduced to nothing by me, Hawkins. But it had worked. And then Gregory hadn’t let me dance, and I’d met Tagashin the first time, and if she wasn’t such an ass all the time, that would have been nice.

One of the shape-changers was currently using its claws to nearly rip the other in half. That sparked a thought. Inside every shape-changer…was what Hawkins had tried escaping as a last-ditch effort, or a true form?

I ran forward, unsteady hooves almost sending me to the floor twice, but I crossed the distance before the wound closed and shoved my hand in.

When I’d done this with Hawkins, he’d been gigantic, impossible to reach far enough inside. This one was much smaller, and I could feel something inside, something with a firmer, harder consistency than the other internals. Skin?

A tendril wrapped around me, but I still sent a touch of rot into it, just a little. Then I was hurtling across the tunnel as it bellowed, back smashing into the wall.

I groaned, puked, and got on my hands and knees. My spine felt like it had been hit with a sledge. My tail…I couldn’t feel my tail. I moved forward, uncertain where anything was, only a blurry uncertain mess.

I felt someone grab my throat, and I almost bit their arm till I realized it was Tagashin as the world became defined again.

The shape-changer I’d touched was melting, but as it was, it had driven a massive blade of bone in the other, splitting it in half.

“Get me closer,” I whispered, and I was floating, moving across the tunnel till we were near them. The split shape-changer was ripping into the melting form of the other, sending goopy flesh splattering across the tunnel walls.

A touch of my hand was deep enough and they joined their comrade. As the two melted, Tagashin set me down on the tunnel floor.

I coughed, pulling myself to a tunnel wall and at least sit up. “What was that spell you cast on me?”

“Just a purging,” Tagashin said, watching the two melting shape-changers continue to shriek and stab at each other. “Cleansed the acid, and it wasn’t a fast-acting kind, as well as helped clear your head for a bit. These things probably can’t make anything more powerful. They also seem to die, and rather quickly at that. Figured out a trick?”

“Hawkins,” I rasped. “He had a human-sized core for lack of a better term. There’s a part of them that forms that core. It’s probably resistant to most forms of magic, but it must be unstable life energy of some kind. Diabolic rot is anathema. So would a necromancer. No idea how they shrink but-”

“Yes would have sufficed,” Tagashin said. “Sorry they smacked you around, I can create illusions for most sense, but touch is hard to replace.”

She sounded genuinely sorry as well, which was nice?

I vomited on the floor.

“Don’t move,” Tagashin told me as she drifted closer to the dead shape-changers. “Even if you had no other injuries, I’ll wager that the back of your head hitting the floor addled your brains some. Rest.”

I looked at the smug Kitsuné floating in the air next to me, smirking as she idly poked the decaying shape-changer with her claw.

“They’re kind of gooey, aren’t they?” she said as she pulled a claw back, a glob of white flesh stuck on it with a string leading back to the dead shape-changer. “Was this what they were made of, or just something that’s comfortable to be?”

“Where have you been?” I asked tiredly as I got up, wincing as I put my weight on my hooves. No more strenuous activity until this leg is fully healed. Preferably after several straight days of warm baths, tea, and maybe being held by- no, no thinking about that right now.

My legs buckled, and I hit the ground. Groaning, I tried crawling instead.

“Scouting,” Tagashin replied. “I said to rest. Being your secret hidden weapon for when things went wrong. The basilisk would be beyond me, so I saw what else might be lurking out there, and behold, shape-changers!”

“You just didn’t want to get petrified,” I muttered as I crawled over to the still roiling pile of flesh. Please let it be dead and not trying to reform itself.

“People rarely want to be petrified Malvia,” Tagashin snarked. “And besides, in that confined of a space, illusion can only do so much. Doing much more would have meant prying back that magic-resistant hide on the basilisk’s letting the magic work on its brain. But, by the time you’d arranged that, you were already busy rotting out the rest of it.”

“So best just to pretend you ran away?” I said as I poked the puddle of flesh with my knife. It didn’t react, continuing to writhe.

“Well, it’s not my reputation being hurt,” Tagashin said. “Besides, showing back up would lead to an immediately messy confrontation with the Captain. And also being away gave you a secret weapon the Changers didn’t know about. And it turned out you needed one.”

“The elemental that showed up, was that you're doing as well?” I was prying some of the flesh free of the pool with my knife. Two knives? Sometimes it was one and sometimes two, same with that strip of flesh I was cutting out. Its writhing ceased the moment it fully separated. We probably would need to torch this before we left, or something to ensure everything in here was dead.

“No,” Tagashin said, vulpine grin turned to a frown. “No, I did not arrange that. Stop playing with that flesh. We have a living one to take strips out to study if we need to. No, the elemental being here wasn’t my doing. And counting on it as coincidence is a fool’s choice in this kind of game.”

“Life is chaos,” I countered. “Not everything that happens is directly connected. And besides I…”

I frowned. I’d had a point on the tip of my tongue, but that thought had drifted off. Instead, I felt my stomach heave, and I was sick all over the dead remains of the shape-changers.

“That purge is wearing off,” Tagashin noted. “You need to lie down and sit still.”

“Last changer,” I muttered.

“Is dead, killed them, or was chased off by that elemental? But you’re right, someone should go check. Stay here, sleep. I’ll leave an illusion over you, keep you safe till I come back. Just sleep.”

The Kitsuné touched my shoulder and, with a shuddering breath, it felt like all the tension in my body departed. And with it went my ability to fight, to stay conscious. By all rights, I should be distrustful, being put to sleep by this fae creature in a tunnel by myself.

Instead, all I felt was relief as I drifted off to slumber.