Leveraging himself against the other poles that surrounded him, Will managed to tilt himself enough that his weight snapped the stake impaling him, leaving one splintered half still protruding from him. He fell to the musty dirt floor of the pit, shaking on his side. He lay there sobbing while the grumplings above worked furiously to excavate his hardlight barrier.

Will compelled himself to move. He yanked out the stake all in one go. When blood came rushing out, he tried to ignore the fact that he felt like a water balloon with a hole poked through it. Then he began the laborious, insurmountable task of standing up.

He was on his hands and knees when a furry body collided with the side of his face and knocked him back down. A grumpling had followed him through. It clawed at his face with bare hands and snapped its jaws at him while he struggled with one hand to keep it at arm’s length.

He had no idea where his gun was. He drove the broken stake into the grumpling’s body with a sideways thrust. It arched its back with a shrill scream, giving Will enough time to throw it off. He crawled over to the wall and scrabbled at the dirt to drag himself back to his feet. The grumpling on the ground wasn’t dead yet, but was too busy wailing in agony to be getting up anytime soon.

The ones above were almost through his barrier, its surface marred by a web of growing cracks.

Fuck it. Only have one choice.

Won’t be fun.

No other options.

Steadying himself, Will placed his palm against the hardlight surface.

At least they’re all bunched up. Might be able to get them all in one go.

With an exertion of will, he forced his tapped-out AP to give a little bit more.

“Amp: Seven. Spark.”

Fire roared. Bodies flew. Hardlight shattered. Will was shoved flat on his back, all numb aside from the blistering heat.

Dead, burning grumplings rained back down, some getting speared on the pit spikes. The air was heavy with the acrid stench of dirty, singed fur. According to Detect Life, there were none left. None with enough bodily integrity to do more than writhe in futile panic, anyway.

Will lay in the carnage, shaking his head in mute disbelief at it all.

Eight of his AP crystals pulsed an angry red.

Exhausted.

He couldn’t afford to wait. He had to act fast before the recoil hit. Dragging himself on his belly, getting dirt up his tunic, he tracked down his satchel. One corner of it was smoldering, and he patted it out. He withdrew a greater healing potion from it, rolled onto his back, and unstoppered it with his teeth. He drained the potion in one go.

The monster responsible for this mess was still out there. But he was done. There wasn’t anything else he could do. He felt around the hole in his stomach with a heavy hand, but was too numb and too knocked stupid to glean anything useful from his fumbling examination.

I don’t know if I’m dying or not.

The recoil hit him like an iron sledgehammer and shattered his consciousness into pieces.

*****

Bee picked up the pace when she felt Will’s pain spike. She didn’t really have it in her, but she did it anyway. He was hurt bad. Eventually she was sprinting. She snagged a root, fell hard, and rolled back on her feet without stopping for a second.

The illusion got thicker again the closer she got to him, until it began interfering with their bond and she lost track of him. She kept going in the same direction, stumbling into a thicket of blasted-down, blackened trees. There were dead creatures everywhere.

But she didn’t see Will.

She called out to him. He didn’t respond. She wandered around the area, shredded arms hanging limp by her sides. She flipped over larger pieces of debris with her feet, hoping she wouldn’t find him dead under one of them.

She spotted a hole in the earth and forced her leaden feet to carry her there. Looking over the edge into a pit of wooden spikes, there she found him. Lying at the bottom, hand pressed to his stomach. Face and arms mottled black with soot and red with blistering burns.

He wasn’t moving.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

She dragged him out of there onto flat ground and ran her hands across his body, unsure what she could even do. He had a nasty hole in his stomach that went all the way through him, and the dirt was quickly becoming suffused with his blood.

But he had a pulse.

He’s alive, thank fucking Christ.

At least for the moment. She was no doctor, but it wasn’t looking good. Despite the darkened burns, his face had gone a terrible, sheet-white pale.

Then something shifted. Her vision distorted, twisted in on itself like rumpled fabric. Then she was looking down at nothing. Only fog drifted about her legs. She stood up, looked around, but there was no sign of Will. The trees shifted, distances warping, everything seeming to grow closer, then further away. She swayed like she was on a ship. She needed to be sick.

“Will!” she yelled, hunched forward with her elbows propped against her thighs. Barely upright herself.

She knew he couldn’t hear her, but she kept calling out to him anyway. She stumbled around aimlessly in the fog, sometimes catching a glimpse of the burnt-out patch of woods before the dream landscape reasserted itself. She didn’t have any strength left to go around punching holes in the illusion, so she eventually just… gave up. Fell against a tree and slid to the ground.

“Will…” she groaned. “Where the fuck are you?”

The fog washed over her, cold and unforgiving, swallowing her up until all she could see was a uniform gray. She swatted at it to no effect.

What do I do?

What am I supposed to do? He’s the one who’s good at—

A single gunshot rang out, and its thunderous crack pierced the killing apathy. In an instant, the illusion vanished. The fog was pulled from her eyes, normal forest left in its wake. A flock of birds scattered above the trees to get away from the sudden noise.

Will stood some ten meters off, teetering on his feet. One hand pressed to his stomach. His pistol slipped from the other and clattered off a rock.

“Nettlegeist,” he muttered, staring off somewhere in the distance.

Then he stumbled, rolled his ankle when he tried to catch himself, and fell gracelessly.

*****

Will clung to life, if only barely. That was the good news.

Mongrel and Oatmeal showed up while Bee was working on stabilizing Will.

They brought the bad news. Gug was dead.

Bee managed to track down the thing Will had shot just before he passed out. A nettlegeist, he had called it. The thing was still alive, weakly convulsing. An emaciated humanoid covered in patches of moss and scaly fungus, with a soft, tube-shaped head like a giant leech.

Bee stomped its head flat and pinned the creature to the earth with her sword. That seemed to do the trick, but she didn’t want to leave anything to chance, so she handed the boys the responsibility of tearing the thing to pieces.

Will’s gut injury did not look good. Even after they bandaged it, there was internal bleeding, and Mongrel theorized that it must have gone through something important, with how central the placement was.

There was nothing they could do to help him here. They could only feed him potions and hope that he would mend on his own, but that seemed exceedingly unlikely. They wouldn’t be able to move him while he was in this kind of critical condition, either. Mongrel said that Talltop would probably have someone who could heal him, but they were still days out.

They let Will be where he lay and assembled a camp around him while they tried to figure out what to do. Not that there were many options to consider.

“I’ve only got one idea,” Mongrel said, face aglow with firelight in the encroaching night. “It’s not a good one, but it’s all I’ve got.”

“Well, the rest of us aren’t exactly bursting with ideas, so go ahead,” Bee said. She was by Will’s side, his head resting in her lap.

Mongrel nodded. “All right, here goes. You stay here with Will and keep him safe. Me and Oatmeal go track down Nix. She should have the power to heal him through a contract.”

“Do you even think she would help? She did almost kill you.”

“She’ll help.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because she’s a good person.”

Bee and Oatmeal shared an incredulous glance. Shaking her head, Bee said: “You’re… very forgiving. Can’t say I’d feel the same in your shoes.”

Mongrel was right. It was a bad plan.

But at least it had a chance of working. All the other ones they had thought of would likely only involve watching him die a slow, painful death. Assuming he made it through the night.

“How far away is she?” Bee asked.

“I still haven’t gotten a good handle on the skill yet,” Oatmeal admitted. “But she’s pretty far. We’d be walking for hours, days. I dunno exactly.” He looked from Bee to Mongrel and back again, pleading with his eyes. “Can’t we think of something else? I really don’t want to do this. She’s gone further into rough country. We’re gonna get fucking killed out there. Cut up or torn apart, just like the troll.”

“You’re going,” Mongrel said firmly. There was a darkness about him, an impatient set to his bearded jaw. “I’ll tell you why, too. If you’re going to survive in this world, you’re going to need friends. Know what you don’t need? Enemies. And if you let my brother die because you’re a pussy, I won’t come up with some fancy, convoluted way to make you pay. I’ll just fucking kill you.”

Suddenly, Oatmeal was all for the idea.

And so it was settled. The two men were to head out at first light.

Bee motioned to the angry red AP crystals flashing on Will's arm. "What does this mean? Is it something bad?"

"It's from an advanced technique," Mongrel explained, scratching at his beard. "I never bothered learning it, but Will picked it up for emergencies and the like. I guess he needed it in the end.

"It's called exhausting. If you're stubborn enough, you can force your AP crystals to give out an another charge. That fucks with your body, though. You get hit with recoil, and that's usually enough to knock you flat out. Exhausting eight crystals at once, that's... pretty drastic."

"But he'll recover from it, right?"

Mongrel shrugged. "It sure as shit isn't helping with the other stuff, that's all I know."

Bee hardly slept that night, despite her exhaustion and her injuries and her body screaming at her to lie down. But she couldn’t settle, couldn’t take her eyes off of him. Not until she knew that he would be safe.

Will survived the night, but his condition was even worse in the morning. He had broken out in a fever, his tense countenance beaded with cold sweat. Three of the red crystals had faded to black, but that was the only improvement.

Mongrel and Oatmeal took all the familiars with them except Number Three, who stayed behind to help guard Will. With any luck there weren’t any more of those nettlegeists in the area, but it was obviously crawling with those ugly little bastards that Mongrel called ‘grumplings’.

When Bee wished the men luck as she saw them off, she meant it with every ounce of her being.