Waiting, that was the hardest part. So far, at least.

Danger was rushing towards him, in the hands of people eager to see him dead. He wasn’t thrilled to face it again, but it wouldn’t be the first time and he knew he wouldn’t panic in the moment.

The problem was knowing danger was coming yet having the time to worry about what might be different about it this time, what could go wrong. Would Aaron be too slow? Unable to utilize his strength effectively? Or worse, would his protectors get hurt or killed trying to keep him alive?

Before Aaron could get too worked up worrying over how the universe might pull the rug out from under him, he heard Griffin’s voice come through the door. He sounded close but not right on top of them, so he was probably still near the stairwell.

“Move your asses,” the big man called out. “They’re right behind us! Find some cover!”

Aaron heard the distinctive sound of shoes slapping against concrete rapidly approach, then pass, the maintenance closet. A few seconds later, he heard several more pairs of feet passing, as well.

Things were moving quick, now. His thoughts didn’t run together so much as evaporate, leaving a hollowness where his mind was supposed to be.

Remember, Aaron — you are not crazy, he told himself. You’re not imagining this; the danger is real and it’s okay to defend yourself.

Kiara slowly put her hand on the door knob but didn’t open it.

“Why are you mooks riding my ass?” Griffin called. “What the hell do you want?”

A few seconds of silence met the big man’s question.

“Seriously, if you’re going to drag me and my delving crew into a bunch of intrigue, at least have the courtesy to do some god damned monologuing,” he complained. “What kind of lazy-ass evil shitheads are you?”

Again, silence.

“If you don’t want to chat,” the big man said with a sigh, “I guess we’ll just have to have us a little fight.”

As soon as Griffin said the word ‘fight,’ a voice cried out in shock or pain. Maybe both. Aaron didn’t know if it was Griffin or one of the pursuers. His guts writhed with uncertainty, concern, and anger.

Well no, not anger. Aaron didn’t get angry.

Still, he might have burst out of the tiny maintenance closet if Kiara weren’t already opening the door and dashing through, a wand in hand. Aaron followed behind her, squeezing his own wand tightly to make sure it was actually there, in his hand.

The parking garage was a scene of chaos. Griffin stood with his back against two SUVs, practically wedged into the few inches of space between them. A thick stripe of crimson light formed an upright semicircle in front of him that emanated a shield of energy to either side. Three people were trying to attack the big man, but his shield was proving effective at fending them off. None of his assailants were entirely human.

One had the talons of a bird instead of hands and what looked like a lion’s tail protruding from under their coat. Another was a woman with the head and tail of a cat, dark fur covering every visible part of her, wielding a smallsword — a rapier-style weapon with a shorter blade — and buckler. The last person facing Griffin was twice as broad as the big man, nearly as tall as the ceiling, and had thick leathery skin a light shade of gray. An ogre, or maybe a troll? Aaron wasn’t sure.

Albert was nowhere to be seen, but two people were on the ground of the lane between the parked cars. One, a woman, wore a shimmer breastplate and was laying on the ground. Deep gashes had been carved into either side of her neck and a pool of blood was rapidly spreading on the floor beneath her.

The other, a man in a cowboy hat and duster, knelt beside her holding what looked like a human femur. He poured a red liquid from a small bottle over her wounds. The liquid flowed smoothly from the bottle despite being thick and viscous, like a semi-transparent gel. It seeped over her grievous wounds. Even in the brief glance Aaron got coming out of the maintenance closet, he saw the wounds were already starting to close, though the woman still looked deathly pale.

Kiara fired a bolt of blue energy from her wand into the backs of the trio attacking Griffin’s shield. It hit the ogre without effect. The cowboy looked up and saw her and Aaron coming towards them from the maintenance room.

“Behind!” he shouted.

The birdman, catgirl, and ogre each spared a glance over their shoulders at the cowboy’s warning. With an ease that could only have come from many hours of practice or experience, two of them wordlessly stepped back from Griffin and turned towards Aaron and Kiara.

The cowboy set the vial to rest in the hollow of the downed woman’s throat. The thick goop continued to flow onto her neck, forming two distinct rivulets heading to each of her wounds.

As the cowboy rose, eyes set on Aaron, a silver mist began to emanate from the bone in his hand. Then, the cowboy’s hat fell to the floor. It was quickly followed by his head.

Albert’s upper body had appeared, hanging upside down from the ceiling, and he held a smoky black machete in each hand. In one swift motion, he’d swung his blades into and through the cowboy’s neck. Aaron jerked back, too stunned to even shout. He was expecting a massive spray of blood from the decapitated cowboy, but it never came — the wounds had been cauterized by the blades.

The catwoman leapt onto the roof of a car, positioning herself to flank Aaron and Kiara. The man with the lion’s tail leapt at them, as well, his long coat transforming into the wings of an eagle as they unfurled, carrying him across the distance to them.

“Your wand!” Kiara shouted.

Aaron had forgotten all about the thing.

He took aim at the eagle-lion-person — a gryphon? — and willed it to fry the sucker with some sweet, sweet Force lightning.

Nothing happened. So much for unlimited power…

The birdman was getting awfully close awfully quick. Hands covered in the scale-like leather of a bird’s legs and ending in wicked talons thrust forward to rend Aaron’s flesh.

Aaron stood his ground and tried to fire the wand again. He thrust the long rod forward, as if to encourage it to fire with movement.

Electricitum! Aaron thought frantically. Fry-his-ass-icus! Whatever! Shoot, dammit!

“Fuck! My eye!” the gryphon-person swore as he landed a couple feet from Aaron, one scaled talon pressed against his face.

In his exuberance to get the wand to blast the bird-person with some kind of magic before he was shredded by those talons, Aaron had poked the man in the face.

“Damn, that smarts,” the gryphon complained.

“Sorry!” Aaron replied, still wiggling his wand around in hopes it might do some awesome magic attack and save the day.

Although he had a very general sense of everything going on around him, Aaron used the gryphon’s momentary distraction to assess the situations of his comrades.

Griffin was still occupied with the ogre. His shield was holding against powerful blows from the huge creature, but he didn’t seem able or willing to attack through his own barrier. He was, however, preparing some kind of warhammer, so the shield might not be staying up much longer.

His other two companions also had their hands full. The catwoman was holding her own against Albert and Kiara, using her shield to deflect and absorb blasts from Kiara’s wands while her smallsword flashed dangerously as it parried and threatened Albert. It was a matchup that should have favored the two drakus, but it wasn’t working out that way.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Neither Albert nor Kiara were brawlers — Albert fought like a mongoose, darting in and out to leverage his speed and exploit openings, while Kiara was using her wands to corral her target and create opportunities for Albert.

The cat-lady, unsurprisingly, moved like a cat. Albert could cover a fair amount of ground in quick leaps, but the cat could, too, and she was better at readjusting and redirecting her movement.

She and Albert were maneuvering wildly, using the parked cars for height and cover. So far, neither side seemed to have the edge, but they were at least keeping the cat from going after Aaron.

Leaving Aaron to deal with the gryphon… person. Gryphon-American?

The gryphon could cover a lot more ground than Aaron thanks to his wings, which meant running was out of the question. Plus, he didn’t want to get far from his protectors.

You don’t split the party, Aaron reminded himself.

The difference in mobility was already a disadvantage, but Aaron’s performance issues with his wand meant he had no useful weapons. He only had his body, but that meant doing exactly what Kiara had told him not to do — brawling with a trained killer, soldier, mercenary, or whatever the hell these people were.

If Aaron was going to be forced to fight unarmed, he wanted his dominant hand free, so he switched the wand to his left hand. It turned out to be a happy accident that he’d poked the gryphon in the eye. While his opponent had recovered from the shock and pain, that eye was still closed and starting to swell. That would make it harder for him to see blows coming from that side.

The gryphon adopted a fighting stance and sized Aaron up with his good eye. The cold knot in Aaron’s stomach surged and his muscles started trembling.

It wasn’t fear, exactly, although Aaron was scared; this was literally do or die, after all. The feeling was something else, something he couldn’t identify or verbalize. He only knew it was pushing him to act.

His instincts were telling him to be aggressive, but he didn’t think that was the right move. He needed to wait. Wait and gain the full measure of his opponent. Knowing that and feeling it were two different things; he felt like he had to do something or he might just vomit on the floor.

His eyes stung, his upper body was taut, and his legs were tensed so hard they were vibrating. He had to do something.

Wait for him, he chastised himself.

To vent some of his nervous energy, Aaron struck his fists against each other, knuckle to knuckle. A meaty thunk echoed in the tight confines of the concrete garage. The gryphon lunged.

One of the gryphon’s broad wings swept towards Aaron. Rather than backing away — like a sane person would — Aaron stepped into the swipe. He raised his arms into a middle guard, hands at shoulder level, to ward against a hidden strike.

Sure enough, his forearm made contact with the gryphon’s wrist, intercepting a swipe following the wing’s feathery wake. Aaron tried wrapping his hand around the gryphon’s wrist to get a hold started, but he hadn’t accounted for the wand still in his hand.

The gryphon pulled back, raking Aaron’s arms with vicious talons. Aaron lashed out with a jab, turning at the hips to put some power into it, and struck the gryphon in the chest. The gryphon was thrown back several steps by the force of the blow, arms and wings windmilling downward to deflect any further strikes.

Aaron used the space to check his arm. It stung a bit, but no more than that. The gryphon’s talons had only left a row of white scratch marks, little more than a cat might do.

It would be the height of stupidity to assume that was the worst injury the gryphon could cause. The beastman could have magic that empowered his strikes or a far deadlier weapon ready to be drawn at a moment’s notice. Still, it was a confidence boost helping to keep Aaron’s fear, and thus, aggression, in check.

The two of them squared off again, each taking the time to try getting the measure of the other. Although they didn’t circle one another, there was a roundness to the movement of their heads and bodies as they conducted a battle of evaluation. Each motion was preparation and a provocation.

Aaron didn’t want to play that game; he didn’t want to wait. He wanted to attack, to thrust and push and grasp and crush the threat in front of him as swiftly and completely as possible. But he held himself back and kept his poise. It wasn’t time for that yet. Hopefully, it never would be. He needed to maintain control, because the alternative… he didn’t want to consider the alternative, not after all the work he had done.

The gryphon was hesitant to rush in, as well, so Aaron’s eyes darted around the garage, once more getting a sense of how his companions were doing.

Albert and Kiara were still engaged with the cat-lady. Albert had gained a thin cut near his chin and the catgirl’s clothes had been singed in several places.

Griffin’s shield of magic finally disappeared in a flash of sparks and then he was fighting the ogre with his hammer. The ogre might have expected to overpower the drakus, because Aaron saw him bum rush Griffin only to be thrown into a wall a dozen feet away.

The other gryphon took advantage of Aaron’s momentary distraction and launched himself forwards like a missile, almost parallel with the floor. His talons were held in front of him so that they nearly scraped the ground. When his swoop carried him close to Aaron, he used his wings and feet to redirect himself upwards. His claws rose in a slash, attempting to rake Aaron from pelvis to throat.

Unfortunately for the chimera, Aaron was well-practiced at monitoring his environment — one of the few benefits of being an anxious person constantly on the lookout for threats. Seeing the winged pounce, Aaron avoided the gryphon’s talons by taking a step back. When the fearsome claws had passed, he lunged back in, an elbow rising up into the chimera’s solar plexus. He tried to get the wand to fire, too, but the damn thing still didn’t want to cooperate.

The gryphon’s momentum combined with the force of the elbow nearly carried him headfirst into the concrete ceiling. He managed a deft aerial maneuver to avoid a concussion and wound up doing a graceful backflip, ending on his feet close to where he’d started his lunge.

“Holy shit, that was wicked,” Aaron said. Since he was being complimentary, there was no harm in trying a bit of diplomacy. “We don’t have to do this. I’m just a numbers guy who wants to get away from a desk and try some delving. I don’t have to be your enemy!”

Instead of replying, the gryphon moved in for another attack. A feint from the left, coming in low, turned into a swipe at Aaron’s eyes, coming from the right. Aaron tried to adjust to avoid the talons but was a hair too slow.

He felt the long claws drag across his face and leapt back, swinging wildly to force the gryphon away. His eyes were clenched shut and his thoughts came in a torrent. He was half-certain he’d been blinded, leaving him vulnerable. Someone, Griffin maybe, had the healing potions on them. Could those potions repair damaged eyes?

“I guess we’re even, now,” a raspy male voice said from somewhere nearby.

It took almost a full second — a second that felt like an eternity — for Aaron to accurately process his own sensory input through the knee-jerk reaction of his simian brain. The immense pain he expected wasn’t there.

But it could have been.

Aaron could have been blinded. He very nearly had been. This fucking bird could have gouged out his eyes and Aaron would have never seen another thing. And the bird was here to kill him. That… that was offensive. It was an offense and it could not be allowed.

Aaron’s eyes opened. Everything in his field of view was framed in a smoky gray haze. There was no apparent damage to his vision, which was wonderful, but the fuzzing at the edge of his vision represented a far more serious problem.

When he was a kid, before high school, Aaron had sworn off fighting. He’d been in several up through middle school and eventually reached a decision — being seen as some kind of ‘tough guy’ wasn’t worth going to prison. And if he kept fighting, Aaron would go to prison. Or be killed, but he hadn’t feared that as much at the time.

His last few fights had shown him that he had a problem with control. He could get angry, a bit, and scream, shout, or bluster, but once he got hit hard enough, instinct took over and he became a prisoner to his own impulses. And when push came, Aaron’s instincts didn’t shove; he strangled.

Every athletic endeavor from his teens onward — martial arts, weight lifting, his ill-fated foray into playing sports, even dancing — had all been in service of a singular goal: feeling safe enough, capable enough, that if trouble came, he would not lose control.

He knew there would be times when he couldn’t talk his way out of a fight; he was just too awkward and, at times, abrasive. In those situations, he needed to stop the fight before things went too far.

The greater his strength and skill, he reasoned, the better chance he could control a fight before it escalated. It worked well through his teens and twenties. The few times he’d been unable to duck a fight, he had managed to avoid or deflect blows, even wrap people up in simple grapples and pin them down before the situation got out of hand.

Very few of the people he’d run into trouble with in those years, however, had been trained killers. Probably none of them, actually. There had been few chances for anyone to hurt him, to convince the thing lurking in his subconscious that he was in real danger.

Until now.

Now, Aaron was staring at some kind of freak-ass bird-man who had proven himself to be a serious threat to him. All the marvel and wonder Aaron would have felt under normal circumstances when encountering a gryphon-person were absent; all he felt was a frigid tingling emanating outwards from his gut and an urge to neutralize the threat.

The gryphon held up two of his talons, pointed at his own eyes — one still swollen shut — then turned them towards Aaron’s. He smirked.

Somewhere, seemingly very far away from his body and the parking garage, Aaron heard his own thoughts. They were tinny and distant, like a very old radio in a metal shed at the other side of the backyard.

However dissociated from his situation they were, at least his thoughts were brief and to the point.

What a dick.

That was Aaron’s thinking brain. His thinking brain wasn’t in charge anymore.