A string of pain shot through Quinn’s head as one of her protective shieldings collapsed, evaporating. She gasped out loud.

“What’s wrong, Quinn?” Hal asked.

“It’s… it’s not right. Something’s wrong. One of them is coming back. I can’t…” There was too much disturbance around the sensations she was experiencing, and she couldn’t quite tell who it was that was returning. She’d have to learn to differentiate sensations better or else her ability to perceive so much at once would be completely useless.

“Are we being ambushed?” Hal asked, but the amount of senses flooding Quinn at that point in time didn’t allow her to give him an exact answer.

“I would assume so,” she said, because one of her shields had winked out of existence. “It wasn’t gently let go or punctured. It’s gone. I think… I think,” she said, but she didn’t need to think anymore, because Eric fluttered into view.

Calling it fluttered was very generous. The little imp and his blood-red hair dripped actual blood this time, as he half-stumbled, half-fluttered into the group, before biting the dirt pretty hard. And given the nature of the ground, Quinn could practically feel the fall.

“Eric,” Hal said as he moved to the imp.

Quinn noted that there was definitely a hint of concern in the word. Not that she’d ever thought Hal was simply heartless.

“The other…” Eric stuttered, not sounding like the cocksure little imp that she was used to conversing with. “He’s been… He’s gone.”

Hal didn’t dignify that with a, Oh, no, what do you mean, he’s gone? Instead, he took it at face value and nodded, directing the others to be on alert. Nishpa and her Firionas companion began casting protective shielding around the group’s location. Malakai switched his stances, pulling out his bow and cocking it, while Ikeshal drew his weapon and began to patrol the perimeter.

Nishpa left her spot and hovered over to Eric, who was still bleeding from a tear under his arm. It looked nasty, as if something had punctured him with a sharp implement and raked it down as far as it could. It appeared like where it left off, he’d barely avoided being disemboweled. Not a way Quinn would choose to go. She grimaced. The smell of blood made her slightly nauseous. She looked away as Nishpa hovered down to the imp.

Quinn surveyed everything around her, reaching her senses out, trying to find what or who it was that had attacked them. She still couldn’t sense people. They weren’t any closer than they had been. Of course, it was always possible that they were also camouflaging themselves, just like she and Hal had protected their group. Which would be less than ideal.

“Stop it,” she heard Nishpa say, and had to suppress a smile considering the situation.

“I’m fine,” she heard Eric snap.

“You’re not fine,” Nishpa said. “Stop acting like a child and let me treat your wounds so that you can at least be partially useful if we’re about to be ambushed.”

“Look, we’re not about to be ambushed. That’s not exactly…” but he was cut off by a massive roar that sounded from underneath their feet. It made the ground tremble, shudder, like an earthquake of a 5.0 magnitude was hitting them.

Quinn fell to one knee. She knew that was going to bruise later. Not that that was currently foremost in her mind. Malakai switched immediately from his bow to his sword.

“Watch out,” he said. “That’s a torghud.”

A torghud. The centipede-like creature that Malachi had warned her about, that Escadrille had said, was probably hanging around.

“Fantastic,” she heard Hal mutter. Not meaning a word of it. “Everybody spread out. Get ready to engage. You could have told us it was a pack of torghud. I thought we were expecting people.” Hal snapped at Eric.

“You didn’t give me a chance,” Eric said, a little more emboldened now that he’d been partially healed.

“That’s going to have to do, Eric,” Nishpa said, as she brushed her hands off on each other. “I need to conserve my energy and your physiology and mine just don’t mix. We’ll need to get you an actual healer for your species.”

“I know,” he said. “Thanks for patching it up.”

“Stay in the back,” Nishpa warned him. “You need to make sure that you don’t get close to this thing.”

“Wasn’t gonna,” he said, backing away. Hovering a little better now.

And then the torghud was upon them, bursting out of the ground in a shower of rock and debris.

Quinn blinked. She’d been expecting something more like the centipede. Kind of little mandibles up in the head and lots of little grasshopper legs. This thing was positively out of her nightmares. Instead of tiny legs, it has those big jumping grasshopper shears, and it landed right in front of her.

She dodged to the right and rolled to the side, feeling the ground prickle beneath her armor as she brought up a sheath of ice directly between one of the legs and its carapace. The creature screeched and blood spurted everywhere. Gross, dark brown, stinky blood.

Quinn gagged and then sealed off her ability to smell because it wasn’t about to do her any favors.

“Good one, Quinn,” Malakai said as the leg fell to the ground, twitching. The bad thing was that the creature had about 40 more of them.

“Yeah, one down, eighty-seven to go,” she said. Everybody began attacking the Torghud. Hal ripped at it, literally pulling limbs from its carapace, which was hard as a rock. Quinn dodged attacks as best she could. Because, by the way, the torghud could move its legs independently of one another. They had those serrated edges, except they were more like steel than those of an actual grasshopper.

Malakai sliced at the joints because his arrows were useless. It became more of a hack and slash for him to actually separate one from the body.

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“You should enhance the blade with something else,” Quinn offered helpfully, as she gasped in air to keep up with the amount of running she had to do.

He sent her a glare and continued to fight.

Ikeshal dual wielded two burning blades, making quick work of several of the legs. Nishpa healed any wounds that were received and exacerbated from what Quinn could see the bleeding of the creature.

“Are you doing that?” she asked as blood welled and spurted out of openings when it should have been ebbing.

“Yes, it’s reverse healing, not to complicate it too much.” Nispha managed a tight smile as she flitted around the battle scene, using her skills to support, heal, and attack.

Quinn had so many questions about the reverse healing, but wisely saved them for later.

The rest of the group, the two other remaining imps and the Firionas Quinn didn’t know, went to work as well. Slowly, the torghud lost its limbs. They’d lopped about half of them off and Quinn actually heaved a sigh of relief.

They could do this.

Or so she thought before two more roars echoed from nearby.

Which was precisely not what Quinn wanted to hear.

Hal yelled, “Quinn, Malakai, finish that one off! Ikeshal, tank this one. Brady to Ikeshal, Garon to me. Eric, don’t come near them.”

The commands were crisp, direct, and helped Quinn push down the fear threatening to creep up her spine. They didn’t have time to waste.

Out of the corner of her eye, Quinn could see the others intercept the two new approaching torghuds. She checked her energy, still in the 2000s, and extended the shield ever so slightly, reinforcing it that bit more so that hopefully nobody else received a fatal injury.

The torghud Quinn and Malakai were fighting seemed emboldened by its brethren. They fought it valiantly, but it was much more difficult now that the torghud didn’t have other people to distract it from Quinn and Malakai.

Ice was very effective. Sharpened and pointed, it severed limbs spectacularly well, probably because it also froze the joint completely and it was therefore easy to snap off. With each freezing, the creature let out an uncomfortable yelp. It rung through Quinn’s ears. And every time, just for an instant, she felt sort of sorry for it.

“Hey,” Malakai said, rescuing her inadvertently from her pity, “share it around. Freeze the joints and I’ll lop them off.”

Quinn blinked. She didn’t know why she hadn’t come up with that method herself, because it sounded like the simplest solution ever. So, she nodded once and complied.

Methodically, they worked through the remaining limbs.

Their torghud was frantic now - flailing with multiple legs at once, with no proper direction. One of them caught Quinn with a glancing blow, and she could feel the scratches from the serrated edges of the legs bite deep into her armor.

Luckily, however, the armor they’d been outfitted with absorbed most of the damage, winding around it and making the marks disappear. It still bruised her ribs, and she knew she’d be sore the next day. But she was alive, and thus promptly froze three more limbs.

Her energy was getting low, approaching the thousand mark. She willed an energy ball out of her inventory and popped it in her mouth, chewing away. They were a new and improved recipe Cook sent with her. It was enough for a good few freezing throws.

“Malakai, to your left!” Quinn suddenly yelled, just as one leg flailed out in that uncontrolled way. A split second after he dive rolled, the leg passed directly through where his torso would have been. He barely escaped it.

That leg seemed sharper than most, and Quinn wasn’t entirely sure the armor would have protected the elf. Her gut wrenched. She didn’t want him to get hurt — didn’t want any of them to get hurt.

She hated that Eric got injured.

Quinn focused, bringing herself into a numbing space to allow herself to work as methodically as possible. She couldn’t afford to focus on the anger at having lost someone, or the potential fear that they might lose someone else.

While she didn’t lock away her feelings, she tried to up her efficiency. It was a bit of a crapshoot, because she had no idea what she was doing, since she’d never put it into practice before. But the theory was there, and she knew that any theory she had, she could turn into a magical power with the skills she’d already learned.

A scream ripped through the sounds of combat off to the left. But Quinn refused to look. She couldn’t afford to. They couldn’t afford for them to lose concentration on their current target, who was now beginning to slide through its own blood smeared all over the ground. Now that three quarters of its appendages were gone, it appeared to be sluggish.

“It’s bleeding out, Quinn. We should be fine now. Can you just freeze the joints?” Malakai spoke, his breath coming in gasps.

Quinn promptly froze the joints, then finally glanced around to see the others, to see where that scream came from while Malakai made quick work of the rest of the dozen legs that were left. When Quinn finally turned to see the rest of the fight, she realized that the battle had tipped in the torghud’s favor.

Nishpa nursed what looked like a terrible gash on her arm, and was slowly healing it, while casting protections on Hal, who fought one of the torghuds single-handedly. Garon lay prone on the ground. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing and knew Nishpa would take care of him.

Ikeshal and Brady were less lucky. They bled from multiple wounds, gashes, and had already darkening bruises.

Eric cast fireballs alternatively on both of the torghuds being fought, and the precious second Quinn wasted taking everything in almost cost Hal his arm. He barely avoided the leg that thrust at him, taking the serrated edge of it directly against his forearm. It cut deep, but he shook it off as if it was nothing, and the armor closed back over it. Quinn realized the King of Halschius probably had his own ridiculous self-healing properties.

And then she went to work too.

She froze the limb, adjusted her position, and heard them crack off behind her as Malakai did his work. Rinse and repeat.

Freeze.

Adjust.

She dove out of the way of flailing limbs intermittently. Taking cuts to her armor here and there, landing awkwardly against the coarse ground, she gained more than one gravel rash, even through the protective gear.

She worked methodically with Malakai through both the front half of Hal and Ikeshal’s torghuds. Quinn freezing, Malakai following. Their momentum worked like a charm, and Hal was able to take a breath and heal properly.

Finally, when it felt like there was nothing left to do, Quinn looked up as Ikeshal and Hal took care of the rest of the two they’d been fighting. The massive creatures littered the area with brown and sticky blood, some of which sank into the ground.

Erik sat down, panting as he regained his strength, his bedraggled wings drooping behind him. He actually looked pale.

Brody and Ikeshal worked together as they completed their kill. But the other imp was dead, and the Esposian who’d come with Nishpa was badly wounded. Nishpa didn’t look too upset. She just seemed irritated, which Quinn hoped meant that she’d be able to heal her companion.

Quinn tossed a regeneration snack over to Eric who, for once, didn’t respond with a snarky comment.

As it was, however, the group’s numbers had dwindled. Escadril remained back at the entrance, but now, instead of eleven, they were down to nine people.

Quinn had to keep her emotions at arm’s length lest she mourn the people they’d lost. She might not have known them, but she’d spent the last few hours in their company and now they were gone before she could know more about them.

“Shh,” Hal said. “Everybody quiet. We can’t exactly camouflage with all this here,” he gestured at the blood caked ground.

“My, my, my,” a sibilant voice whispered out of the darkness beyond the third torghud. “I was right, after all. I did smell a rat.”

And out of the shadows, Kajaro slithered with a book under his arm.