A trio of beasts loitered in the middle of a wide, flat meadow. They seemed almost drunk. It was hard to reconcile these uncannily erratic things with the bloodthirsty monsters that had charged miles across the countryside just to get to their party a few weeks ago. These ones were barely two hundred metres away in broad daylight, and they showed no sign of acknowledging Lucas and the others’ presence where they were peeking over a swell in the landscape.

The largest one—about the size of a pony—stood rigid in one spot, but seemed to lose its balance every now and then for no apparent reason. It was constantly forced to steady itself with a hoofed leg that swayed above it, attached to the middle of its skeletal torso like a scorpion’s tale. Its terribly emaciated body was the colour of mould with thick black veins criss-crossing its underside, while its head was bulbous like an inflated puffer fish at the end of a long neck that seemed to hinge twice at right angles. Its four stiff, straight legs ended in too many black claws.

The second largest beast raced around it in a circle like a dog with too much energy. No larger than a great dane, its worm-like body rippled like it thought it was an eel swimming, keeping remarkably consistent rhythm even though its dozen or so insectoid legs were clawing wildly all over the place. Black-red ichor bubbled from dozens of mouths that yawned open and closed on the top side of its body where a creature’s spine was meant to be. It had no visible eyes.

The last was smallest by far, but perhaps the most alarming. A shadowy gasbag jellyfish creature with eight translucent wings and smaller wings constantly growing out of them in progressively smaller fractals, it would inflate like a balloon and rise a few metres into the air in random directions, then at some indeterminate point it would pop and go crashing to the ground with a wet splat. Then it would rise up once more and repeat the process all over again.

They’d been watching the three beasts from the other side of the field for a few minutes now, having spotted them from a greater distance half an hour before and approached cautiously, and the mad creatures had shown no sign of deviating from their barmy behaviour. It could have almost been comical. Slapstick, even. He would have laughed, maybe even chastised himself for being afraid of these pathetic things.

If not for the unmoving human bodies strewn around them. There was no laughing about that.

Nine in total. Nine people with lives and desires and dreams who’d met their end by pure chance, through no fault of their own. Even from a distance, he could see the corpses were mauled and mangled. Limbs amputated, body parts crushed, entrails torn out.

Lucas felt cold and oddly distant. At a moment like this, he was sure he was supposed to be feeling a burning kind of rage, a fire inside him that yearned to consume the perpetrators of this horrendous misdeed and through his righteous indignation right the balance in the world.

But he was numb. His brain was getting jammed like a clockwork machine, cogs catching. He couldn’t move past the shock stage of his emotional reaction, the sight of those bodies turning in his mind over and over.

The aftermath of Rena’s death hadn’t affected him like this. Neither had Jyn’s, and he’d seen the whole thing beginning to end in all its gruesome detail. The perpetrator of that deed was still living in Lucas’ chest, coming out only occasionally to trot along beside them in their travels, mostly still satisfied with its meal. One could argue he was responsible for Jyn’s death, in a way.

But that didn’t disturb him nearly so badly. When he looked back on Jyn’s death, he felt a muted kind of horror, almost disappointment.

Apparently, there was something about finding corpses that distressed him so much more than actually witnessing the process of death. It was in the unknown, he realised. Seeing a death with his own eyes cemented it, shutting out speculation. Here, he didn’t know how they’d gone, whether they’d screamed for their loved ones, whether they’d cried and begged and prayed for salvation that never came.

It wasn’t just about the circumstances of their death, either, but the details of their life. Rena and Jyn, much as he regretted their untimely ends, had been his enemies. They’d tried to kill him. There was no way around that fact. And it evidently lessened his empathy for them, knowing they were, at least in part, people capable of bad things themselves.

Here, there was no such surety. For all he knew, these nine people could have been saints in life. They could have been truly kind with every bone in their body, generous and forgiving and charitable and every other virtue under the sun. No one deserved to die like this, but he couldn’t help imagining that these people could have potentially deserved it even less than others. He couldn’t know for sure, and that gnawed at him.

Am I weird? Lucas thought.

It took great effort to turn his gaze away. He closed his eyes and lowered himself to the ground, rolling onto his back with the grass tickling his exposed neck. It didn’t quell the nausea. The image of the carnage in that field had already burned itself into his mind. It would be a big shame to puke now, having had one of the best meals he’d had on Aerth since that first time he’d tried Jyn and Rena’s stew. The alber had indeed tasted like pork, seasoned with some unknown herbs Aly had gathered in the forest. Considering how she lived, she was an incredible cook.

There had been no conversation among their group since they came upon the scene, the four of them observing the situation with grim countenances all around. Lucas’ movement drew Aly’s attention, as if she’d been snapped out of a trance. Her eyes burned with fury.

It had taken some time for the Bowmaiden to explain her commission to them. She was something of a lone wolf, unused to briefing other people on her missions, but Valerie had managed to coax it out of her.

The elders of a nearby town she often sold pelts to had tasked her with determining the number of beasts in the area, a job she was well versed in as a Bowmaiden with some skill in stealth. Apparently, things were looking bad in Harwyckshire, and concerns of a large force of beasts having slipped past the frontlines were growing. Aly had told them she was starting to believe it: she had been running into far too many beast tracks, and not enough beasts. They were moving with purpose they didn’t usually, she’d said.

The scene before them was the first time since she’d set out weeks ago that she’d actually managed to track some beasts down. After sharing the alber meat and her campfire with them the night before, they’d forged out in the morning with the intention of parting ways at the end of the forest. Valerie had no longer wanted to distract the young Bowmaiden from her task.

But there had been south-leading fresh tracks at the eastern edge of the woods, and Valerie was a Skycloak. She couldn’t ignore nearby beasts.

Or so she’d said. Lucas wondered if her intention from the start had been to accompany Aly on her scouting.

It had taken them the better part of a day to locate the monsters they’d been hunting, and Lucas had picked up some tracking tricks of a different variety. Apparently, the chaos inherent of beasts made tracks behave differently than they should. One footprint in the mud could look days old while the very next would look minutes or even seconds fresh. They could change in size or depth. You could even find them full of material that didn’t fit with the local environs, like when they saw a print shaped like a multi-pointed star—which they now could attribute to the skeletal mould-coloured abomination—filled with dry red sand.

But mana had a memory, and it didn’t lie. Beasts left metaphysical traces of chaos; it didn’t linger for long, but if you reached out with your senses and felt a mild sensation reminiscent of the mana-twisting horror that assaulted one’s soul at the sound of a beast’s screech, the tracks were recent.

And so, as the afternoon started to transition to evening, the sun plunging its way towards the zagging mountains on the western horizon, they’d found their quarry.

“You’re sure you can take them?” Aly asked, her voice tight.

“These beasts shouldn’t cause us any difficulty,” Valerie said. “But I’m wondering how we should approach this.”

“What do you mean?” Lucas asked. He cracked an eye open to regard her. Her hand was resting against her breastplate, her fingers drumming a rhythm on the white metal. She looked thoughtful.

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“I’m thinking it may be best for you to take these kills,” she said.

“Is this really the time for training?” Frankly, now that he’d snapped out of his horror-induced stupefaction, he wanted these monsters dead as fast as possible.

Valerie gave him a significant look, her eyes flicking down to his heart. “It could benefit you.”

Lucas opened his mouth, then closed it. “Oh.”

She wanted him to deal the final blow so he could devour their souls. Even if it was nothing to do with the Gift, Valerie saw it as something that had to be taken advantage of, providing it wasn’t dangerous. Apparently they were about to put that to the test.

Okay.

He had to admit that idea brought him a morbid kind of satisfaction. The pleasure of promised vengeance, perhaps.

“I think I can do that,” he said. “So, what, you soften them up first?”

Valerie nodded.

Aly was looking between them, eyes narrowed behind the fangs of her animal pelt hood. (It was made from a direbear, apparently. Basically just a grey-furred bear that could use basic wind magic to fly around. Killing one was quite the achievement by her culture’s standards, she’d claimed with a puffed out chest.)

“Don’t get cocky with beasts,” the young Bowmaiden said. “That’s when they get you.”

“Believe me, Ser Aly,” Valerie said, “I’m taking this situation more seriously than you can imagine.”

They spent only a few minutes planning before it was time for battle, and they rose from their prone position at the edge of the field, striding forth to face a group of monsters. Despite knowing he wouldn’t be in the thick of the action and two comrades would stand between him and the beasts, dread pooled in Lucas stomach as the four approached their enemies.

The beasts were something out of a surrealist nightmare. The skeletal mould-thing with the multi-hinged neck; the rippling worm creature with ichor bubbling from blubbering mouths; the eldritch winged jellyfish that constantly rose and dove with no care for itself. They were comically strange, and somehow all the more unnerving for it, especially with the brutality they’d inflicted on the corpses scattered around them.

And then came their screams. They only reacted when Valerie was within striking distance of them, and their wails reverberated in Lucas’ very soul. But he was ready this time. He needed no speech on the methods of resisting chaos. Not now he’d done it before and knew his winning formula.

Rage filled him, burning in his veins. He grabbed his mana system in an indignant hand and spiritually roared his defiance at the frenzied darkness trying to warp him. His mana system was his; it was him.

The power of only three beasts was paltry compared to his previous experience, but it was no trifling matter in and of itself. His mana system still shuddered. Jamie still howled in his chest, furious at the creatures disrupting his sleep.

Me too, buddy, Lucas thought. Let’s punish them.

Jamie arched his back and hissed, and fire mana blazed through Lucas’ pathways. Heat suffused him, and his pyromantic vision came to life. He started to build up mana in his firehand, readying an attack. He wouldn’t be able to control the battlefield like Jyn had done, but he could still play a part.

Aly was the first to attack, pulling back the string on her massive bow like it was nothing, her muscular arms bulging and her arrow tattoos glowing. She drew without an arrow, but one appeared in a flash of silver light when she was in position, and she loosed it immediately. The arrow was barely past the bow’s limb before she was drawing back the string for another shot.

As they’d agreed, the arrows struck the jellyfish thing as it tried to rise into the air, knocking it off course before it could dive bomb them. They had no special effects, but they pierced the beast’s hide and sent it spinning to the ground like a popped balloon.

The skeletal creature charged to meet Valerie at an unbalanced gallop, its head swinging back and forth like a flail on its multi-hinged neck.

The Skycloak stopped just short of it and raised her white blade as if to use one of her crescent projectile slashes, but instead the light of the blade mirrored. Four identical lights in the shape of her blade appeared in the air at off angles between her and the advancing beast, and they reflected her movement as she brought her sword down in an overhead stroke. They tore through the beast’s legs and torso, and it went tumbling to the floor in a gory, screaming mess.

The worm creature came slithering behind it, its body moving unnaturally smooth even as its legs pounded at the ground with reckless, jerking haste. Lucas saw his opportunity. He pointed his firehand, and gave the command to let the built up mana free. A second later, fire erupted forth.

Much the same as he’d been practising with one finger, he let his entire hand extend, turning into a long lance of contained flame. There was a fraction of a second where it roared an inch over the beast’s head entirely, but correcting that was as easy as repositioning his hand a fraction.

The beast had been aiming for Valerie who was in front and to the right of him, so his pyromantic attack slammed into it from an off angle, striking as fast as a bullet and with the force of an artillery shell. A boom split the air, and the beast was sent hurtling back. Silver arrows pierced into its drooling mouths as it spun over and over. Its dark slobber splattered everywhere. Some would have hit Lucas if Wick hadn’t been there with his shining shields.

The jellyfish beast started to rise into the air once more, its wings buzzing as its gas bag body ballooned. Arrows flew for it again, but it wrapped its wings around itself, using them to slow the arrows from striking its body.

Its wings weren’t strong enough to block the white light that lanced through its lower half. Its body crumpled like a tin can and it tumbled back to the ground with a shrill wheeze. It hit the earth with a splat, then shuddered in place.

The battlefield fell quiet. None of the beasts were dead, just beaten back for a moment. Now was Lucas’ chance.

He charged forward, Wick ahead of him, Valerie falling in on one side with the light of her blade building once more. He heard Aly pursuing them behind, staying at range. They went first to the skeletal thing as it was the largest, writhing on the ground with its legs amputated. Lucas took a moment to feel some schadenfreude over that.

Serves you right, you bastard, he thought as he hefted a thick wooden stick like a club. Fire didn’t seem able to pierce their hides even with Jyn’s greater expertise, so beating it to death was the only option. The creature screamed louder than it ever had as his stick smashed down on its skeletal body again and again, and Lucas revelled in the mind-flaying sound. He almost felt disappointed when the beast went still and a translucent white figure rose up from its corpse.

The spectre twisted into a lance that aimed straight for his heart, and Lucas braced himself. It didn’t help much. He didn’t think there was anything that could brace him for the feeling of having an entire being’s worth of extra mana shoved into his system. It was like being force fed liquid electricity to the point his stomach distended to thrice its size, but throughout his entire body. Keeping his concentration was all but impossible. If Wick and Valerie weren’t there to protect him, he would’ve been in deep shit.

But they were, and he came back to himself to the sight of Valerie stabbing her white blade right through the winged jellyfish monster, pinning it to the ground. At the same time, Wick was standing strong against the repeated charges of the skittering worm. Most of the beast’s mouths were leaking ichor from puncture wounds; Aly’s arrows, presumably. The Bowmaiden herself was a distance away from the battle, launching an endless stream of arrows that struck with unerring accuracy.

Wasting no more time, Lucas went for the jellyfish. Valerie had it so injured he didn’t have to hit it more than a few times before its own spectre floated up, swaying around like it was swimming in the wind. It went slowly for his heart, and this time was worse than the last. Much worse.

There wasn’t enough space inside him for all the mana, even with Jamie eating a significant amount of the burden. It felt like he was tearing apart from the inside, like his pathways were cracking. They were warping under the density of the mana, and he could see his system twisting in his mind’s eye. He couldn’t hold it in. He was going to burst.

Panicked at the sudden rush of soul-deep pain, Lucas started venting out his mana in every direction, desperate to alleviate his system. The air around him shimmered with heat, building and building; his mana was still fire attuned. He breathed out a cloud of steam, scalding the inside of his mouth. His firehand blazed.

It felt like an hour before the feeling passed and he regained awareness of his surroundings. Valerie was close, peering into his eyes.

“Are you alright?” she asked softly.

“No more,” Lucas gasped out. “Kill the other one.”

“We already have,” she said. “Was two at once too much?”

Lucas nodded. “Don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to be some super badass slaying entire armies of demons on my own if eating two beasts’ worth of mana does that to me.”

Valerie’s expression shuttered, her eyes trailing off to one side. Lucas followed her gaze.

Aly was there with her bear pelt hood down, her narrow eyes watchful.

"She's a sensor," Valerie murmured.

Lucas groaned.