Will found his calm, mostly out of sheer spite for whatever was trying to unsettle him.

Still nothing from Bee. He’d worry about her later.

He was beginning to see the shape of the charm, a billowing swell of erroneous sensory input that washed over and around him, a shifting pattern that was difficult to get a handle on. However, because of its fluid nature, it wasn’t perfectly uniform—sometimes stronger in one spot, sometimes weaker in another. When he focused only on these weaknesses, he was able to get a vague picture of his surroundings through the aggregate.

Pulsing Detect Life once more, he caught something this time. A vague flicker at the edge of his awareness, far in the distance—almost faint enough for him to dismiss it as nothing.

But it was just how faint it was that caught his attention even more. It was even more subdued than the blurry impressions of the trees around him. Something that was actively being concealed.

Almost certainly the monster responsible for all this.

Will would only be too happy to put a few bullets through it.

But he quickly became aware of a more pressing concern.

There was something closing in on him—a lot of somethings—hiding under the blanket of illusion. Little creatures, low to the ground, approaching from every side. At a quick count, at least two dozen of them.

Will got to his feet and drew his pistol. He could have Identified one of the creatures via Detect Life to see what exactly he was up against, but preferred to keep as much AP back as possible.

In any case, it didn’t take him long to realize what they were.

Grumplets.

Nasty things, barbarous and sadistic. Due to their small stature, one of the little ankle biters wasn’t much of a threat. But with this many of them coming to make his insides his outsides, it was looking like a bad matchup for him.

He could hardly see or hear anything through the illusory veil, relying largely on Detect Life to have any hope of tracking their movements. Only a decent shot at the best of times, he didn’t have much faith that he could pull off the sharpshooting feat of his life and take them all down with just his pistol. Being honest with himself, he’d probably get three or four—maybe half a dozen if he got lucky—before they swarmed him.

An amped-up Spark would probably shred through a heap of them, but he could only send it out in a cone. Whichever direction he targeted, he would be giving the ones behind him a great big opportunity to come up and shank him, especially with the recoil from the amped-up version of the skill.

An amped-up Construct bubble shield would maybe keep him safe for a little while, but either the grumplets would wear it down until it shattered, or the skill would eventually expire. Maybe it would buy him enough time for someone to arrive and back him up, but given the trouble he’d been having, he couldn’t count on anyone else having more luck breaking the illusion.

He didn’t have any exceedingly useful potions on his person, either. In his satchel, he had three greater healing potions, three noxious ignition phials, two potions of night vision, two potions of cure disease, and one featherlight potion. He also had one standard healing potion on his belt.

He’d wasted too much time thinking. They were almost on top of him now. The lack of any decent options left him paralyzed, until he finally was forced to just do something.

He knew it was stupid as he holstered the pistol and withdrew two NI-phials. But maybe, if he was lucky, he wouldn’t blow himself up.

Will tossed the phials underhand, one to his left and one to his right, while at the same time chanting: “Amp: Four. Construct.”

The semisphere of shimmering glass snapped into place around him just before the phials shattered against the ground outside it, releasing billowing clouds of gas into the air that quickly connected into one as they washed over the dome. Even through the illusion’s smothering influence, he could make out the grumplets hacking and coughing and swearing in some infernal language of their own devising.

He walked up and placed his hand against the dome’s hardlight surface.

Five, four, three, two, one…

I would really appreciate it if you’d all just die real quick.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

He cast Spark through the barrier.

With a dull boom, a great swathe of the illusion was blown away as a retreating wave of fog, revealing a whole host of screaming critters being juggled by a roaring conflagration. The barrier shattered like it was nothing, and shards of it cut into Will all over, front and back, as he was thrown to the ground. The fire closed in around him, licked at him, made his skin flare up strangely cold like chunks of ice were being put to it.

Then the gas burned itself out, leaving a blinding mass of dirty smoke in the air that only slowly dispersed. Will kept low, shirt over his mouth to avoid breathing in too many fumes, and simply lay panting, trying to think of anything but the pain. He found his prosthetic boot sitting next to his head, having come off in the blast, and he pulled it back on.

His satchel had gotten away from him with all the chaos. It lay upended on the ground, several shattered pots strewn about it. A cloud of gas slowly leaked from the bag, and Will rolled over on his stomach and crawled away from it to avoid being hit with any of its asphyxiating effects.

He sat up as the smoke began to clear away and inspected the carnage around him. There were many dead or dying grumplets, their pitiful jammering grating on his ears.

As far as he could tell, none of the monsters were in any condition to come after him anymore. He kicked one that was trying to crawl away, flipping it onto its back, and placed his foot on its torso to pin it down. He thrust his knife through its singed flesh, poking a hole in its throat, and staggered away while it choked on blood.

He worked his jaw to release a persistent ringing in his ears, but it didn’t help much. Once the gas of the final NI-phial had dispersed enough that he dared approach, he turned the satchel right side up to inspect what was left, digging pieces of broken pottery out of the padded compartments.

Aside from the NI-phial, one greater healing potion and one potion of night vision had broken—the rest were still intact. He considered that a good outcome.

“Well, that could have gone a lot worse,” he mused to himself.

Another pulse of Detect Life brought him down to 5 AP.

His relief immediately soured.

There were more grumplets coming in a second wave. He counted eighteen.

Fuck everything.

*****

Bee met a leaping critter with a steel-coated fist and sent it flying back the way it came, slamming into one of its friends and knocking them both to the ground.

They were trying to flank her, coming from multiple sides at once. On her right, one springboarded off the head of another. It came at her with a gurgling scream and a stone dagger raised high. She caught the thing by its ankle and pivoted, swinging it into one coming from the left. Dropping the first one to the ground, she compacted its skull under her boot.

One slashed at her ankle, and she made it pay by booting it into the air over the heads of the others. One caught her in the stomach with a club, and the weapon bounced away from her belly, the jolt of impact causing more discomfort to its wielder. She grabbed it by the fur atop its big head and hit it with a few crushing uppercuts until its jaw ran at a nice 45 degree angle, then let it fall away.

They kept coming. Biting, slashing, clawing, hammering. She didn’t even try to dodge them all. It was easier to just let them hit her and retaliate against whichever one was closest and slowest. Whittling down their numbers left her bruised and bleeding, but after fighting the monsters a while she realized that they couldn’t do much to really challenge her. Their blades sometimes pierced her skin, but the flint snapped against her long before it could reach anything vital. Their blunt weapons fared little better, and she had several snapped-off teeth embedded in her flesh.

It was a fight that held all the excitement of folding laundry—a rote, mechanical activity she could complete without thinking.

Eventually, after Bee had smashed a good dozen of them into bloody pulp, the monsters finally realized that they were a little outgunned. A few cut and ran, and the others soon followed, the whole swarm scrambling away from her with the same enthusiasm they had mustered to meet her. They crawled back inside their holes, and Bee was left standing amid a sizable harvest of their broken kin.

“If you’re gonna murder someone, you could at least try not to be bad at it,” she admonished one of the weeping creatures as it feebly clutched at its knee, which was bent the wrong way.

Looking around, she found that the mirage had completely lifted from the clearing, leaving her surrounded by just regular old forest.

Reaching out for Will, she turned in the direction where she sensed his presence. He was a fair distance away from her, so she started jogging towards him straight away, not bothering to waste time granting mercy to the monsters that still clung to life. Their people could do that much themselves, at the very least.

Will? she prodded while she ran, hoping for any kind of acknowledgement. But just as before, there was nothing.

She swore when she stepped on a wire run taut between a pair of trees, snapping it in the process. Two spiked logs swung into her legs, wooden stakes breaking against her shins. It caused only superficial damage, but left long splinters in her skin that stung like hell. It made her angry more than it actually hurt.

“Weaselly little fucks,” she muttered, not slowing.

There was no need to worry about keeping her bearings or determining her direction when her goal was always right there, mapped out in her head. She just ran and switched off everything else.

Until something else crossed her path and forced her to a halt.

A bear—grizzly, maybe—lumbered through the underbrush just a few meters ahead of her. It was big, up to her neck at the withers. It was covered in long scars, some fresh and others new. They criss-crossed its body, lengths of dark, puckered skin showing through its matted fur.

It did not spot her at first, just going about its bear business. But before she could figure out what to do, the animal turned its great ponderous head. Its black eyes were glazed over, vacant somehow, but blinked away its sleepy confusion the moment it saw her.

“Right,” Bee said. “Guess this is what we’re doing now.”