Electricity arced from one wire to the next, never stopping even for a moment. Somehow, Dat managed to tiptoe through them, his feet never touching a single wire as he made his way to the console. Meanwhile, Sadie fended off the veritable horde of spiders that had descended upon her when she’d used Call of the Crusader.

“Hurry up, Dat!” she shouted, kicking one of the spiders. She struck it so hard that it actually stung her foot, but the tactic proved successful when the creature was launched across the room and into one of the concrete walls. Behind her, she could hear Benedict mumbling nonsense, and every couple of seconds, she felt a surge of ethera that announced he’d cast another one of his damage-over-time spells.

Nearby, Kurik had scattered a host of parts across the floor, and he was busy building some sort of contraption. And finally, Ron had everything he could handle, keeping Sadie upright. Every couple of seconds, one of the spiders would latch onto whatever exposed piece of skin it could find and sink its fangs into her flesh. She didn’t know what sort of venom they injected with each bite, but she knew it was one of the most painful things she’d ever experienced. It felt like she was melting from the inside out, though when she looked down at her leg, it looked no different than before.

Except for the giant mechanical spider steadily trying to gnaw through her limb. Up close, she could see that each spider’s abdomen was slightly translucent, and she could see some sort of green liquid sloshing around inside.

She hammered the hilt of her sword against what looked like cloudy glass, and she was rewarded with a loud crack. A second later, she screamed as the thing burst open, burying a hundred shards of glass-like material into her leg and bathing her in that green liquid.

It turned out to be acid.

Thankfully, it didn’t immediately melt her skin. She was capable of resisting that much, but that did nothing for the pain. Thankfully, Ron was on top of things and quickly used his most powerful healing spell to mend the damage.

But Sadie had no time to relax, because a dozen more spiders were already bearing down on her. She whipped her sword out, severing a few legs and knocking one of the spiders aside. That attack fouled her guard, and another spider leaped onto her chest. It reared back, its metal fangs glistening with green liquid as it prepared to savage her face.

And then something hit the thing, smashing it away from her and sending it skipping across the electrified room. Sadie looked over to see that Benedict had used one of the other spiders as a many-legged club.

Just then, Dat stepped in the wrong spot, and he let out a scream of agony as untold number of volts of electricity cascaded through his body. Ron cocked his arm and threw it forward like he was throwing a football. However, instead of an oblong pigskin, he only had a sparkly, star-tipped wand in his hand. Still, a huge ball of light – at least the size of a beachball – sailed across the room and hit the convulsing Dat in the chest. It broke apart, splashing light in all directions.

Miraculously, Dat’s screams immediately disappeared, and his seizure ceased.

“Be careful!” Sadie shouted. She couldn’t lose Dat. Not after everything else.

“Great idea, bro! I didn’t even think of that!” he screamed back, uncharacteristically sarcastic after having recovered from his misstep. “I got this!”

Sadie didn’t have anymore time for conversation, because the rest of the spiders had finally reached her. As they leaped upon her, she had to fight off the urge to panic; she’d never liked arachnids, and her experiences since coming to the Citadel of Innovation hadn’t changed any of her opinions.

What followed was not pretty. In fact, if Sadie’s childhood instructors had seen what she’d done with all their training, they would have shaken their heads in disappointment. But there was a time for tournament-ready tactics, and there was a time for survival via pure savagery. This was one of the latter.

She kicked, she screamed, she wielded the priceless Sword of Morning like a bludgeoning weapon. The sound of screeching metal filled the air accompanied the constant buzz of electricity, and Sadie fought on with a ferocity that would have impressed even the wild Druid.

Along the way, she picked up dozens of wounds. The spiders’ sharp fangs had no difficulty punching through her armor, and her Constitution couldn’t keep her safe from the wicked acid they injected with every bite. Nor was it possible to keep Bulwark of the Faithful active at all times. The only good thing was that, because she used it as often as possible, she spent much of the fight with the inflated attributes that came every time it shattered.

She grabbed a spider by its legs and flexed, yanking it apart like it was made of paper. Then, she used the two halves as a weapons, hammering them into their companions and sending them skidding away. At some point, she’d dropped her sword, and she hadn’t had the chance to retrieve it. So, she’d used what she had available.

Like two halves of a mechanical spider.

Sadie knew she hadn’t grown any stronger. Instead, the only reason she’d been able to rip the thing apart was because of Benedict’s spells, which had weakened the creatures enough that she could do what she needed to do. When everything was over, she’d have to thank him.

Stolen novel; please report.

But for now, the spiders just kept coming, and Sadie responded the only way she knew how. There was no retreat. No surrender. She could only fight until the bitter end.

She was just gearing up for a last stand when, suddenly, the spiders went limp and fell to the floor. It was only then that she realized that the electrified wires had gone eerily silent.

“Told you I had it covered, bro,” said Dat, looking back at her from the console. A few destroyed spiders lay all around him, and his body was smoking from electrocution. Yet, he couldn’t hide the wide grin that had spread across his round face.

So, he never saw the thing coming from the other side of the room.

“Dat, look out!” she cried.

But it was too late. A hulking monstrosity and already speared him through the chest. Sadie screamed and raced forward, but another sharpened shaft of metal shot out of the ground and impaled her through the leg.

“How dare you come into my shop and destroy all of my work? Do you know how long it took me to build those?” asked the Engineer. From the waist up, he looked just like any other ta’alaki, but that was where the resemblance stopped. Instead of a tail or a pair of legs, like the other two species native to the excised planet, he had a set of four metallic legs. He sighed dramatically. “No matter. I am not familiar with your species, so you will make for quite interesting test subjects.”

* * *

The cold rain of Elijah’s spell was soothing, though he couldn’t escape the chill that came from the wind blowing on his wet body. Or maybe that was just the natural result of having his skin burned off. Mostly. There’d still been a few bits left, though even that had sloughed off during the healing process. Miraculously, his Armor of the Boar King had survived, though the clothes he’d worn beneath the set of leather equipment had been burned to ash.

Along with all his hair.

Again.

If he was honest, his state took him back to some of his earliest days after the world’s transformation, like when he’d been digested inside the monstrous orca’s stomach or when he’d stripped down to avoid having his clothes burned away by fire ogres.

“Those were the days,” he said nostalgically. He didn’t worry that the mechanical wasp could hear him. He wasn’t proud of it, but he’d spent quite a while screaming in agony as his healing spells mended his burned flesh. So, if the wasp hadn’t responded to that, then it wouldn’t notice a sarcastic comment. “Waspy, you’re a perfect companion. You don’t say much, but you’re a great listener. And I might be a little delirious from the pain, so you’ll have to forgive me for…wait, what am I doing? You’re a robotic wasp. Even if you could hear me –”

Just then, Elijah’s stomach jumped into his throat as his ride plummeted toward the ground. He barely had time to shift into Shape of the Sky and throw himself free before the thing smashed into the side of a trash mountain. He circled for a moment, then landed. The thing hadn’t even slowed before colliding with the ground, and it certainly wasn’t moving now.

“Was it something I said?” he muttered, having landed and transformed back into his human form. He ran his hand over the wasp’s fuselage, but it lacked the constant hum of machinery that had become so familiar to him. It had been deactivated – that much was certain – but Elijah had no idea how or why that would be the case.

More importantly, the crash landing had jerked him back to reality. After being burned alive, he’d been a little out of it, and he’d let his mind wander to all sorts of odd places. Yet, now that he was back on the ground, he recognized two critical details he’d so far ignored.

First, his companions were likely still in that compound, and they needed his help. The solution to that was simple, and he ran toward the facility at a light jog. He’d only taken a few steps before he saw a few dormant cockroaches that had tumbled free of the closest trash mountain. It didn’t take him long to put two and two together, and he quickly surmised that all the robots in the area had been deactivated. That was too much of a coincidence for him to dismiss, and he reasoned that his friends were responsible. That spurred him on even more quickly.

As he ran, he addressed the second thing he’d missed during his brief convalescence. He had reached level ninety-five, and it had resulted in an unexpected choice:

Congratulations! You have achieved the requirements for the evolution of the spell Shape of the Predator. Please choose a path:

Shape of Venom

Shape of Pursuit

Shape of the Hunter

Evolve your Predator form by incorporating powerful venom into your attacks.

Evolve your Predator form by focusing on overwhelming physicality.

Evolve your Predator form without focus, improving in all facets.

The choices were not difficult to understand. The first, Shape of Venom, would likely enhance Contagion to a significant degree. And as someone who’d made copious use of Swarm’s afflictions, he knew just how powerful that could be. By comparison, Shape of Pursuit would enhance his draconid form by augmenting his physical attributes. And finally, Shape of the Hunter seemed like the balance between the two, with less focused improvement.

As he ran, he considered the problem. Between the first two, it was like comparing a cobra to a crocodile. They were both very effective hunters, but in very different ways. The third would just be more of the same, which Elijah very much did not want. Aside from how attractive novelty could be, he knew the value of specialization, and if he ever wanted to be more than just the guy who could do a little bit of everything, he needed focus in his forms. That meant ruling out the generic, jack-of-all-trades option.

But of the remaining two, Elijah was absolutely uncertain.

Not that it mattered, of course. If it was anything like his other spell evolutions, there would be additional requirements associated with each choice. So, it wasn’t something that could help him in the immediate future.

As he reached the facility – and saw that the few robots that had returned were now dormant – Elijah pushed the choice out of mind and focused on the task at hand. Because he could feel, via One with Nature, that his companions were in trouble. With that driving him forward, he shifted into the unevolved Shape of the Predator and stalked into the facility under the Guise of the Unseen.