“What the heck is going on?” Marcus demanded, staying on his feet by steadying himself against a tree.

“Earthquake,” Gurten said. He had been knocked off his feet but slowly regained them by pulling himself up on a large root.

“On an island?” Marcus asked.

“Maybe. We don’t know anything about this region,” Malysseus said, “but it doesn’t seem likely. Too convenient.” He brushed himself off, trying to free loose dirt that had accumulated on his coat jacket and pants. When that didn’t work, he blasted the dirt free with wind magic. Such magic was the fastest dry cleaning service available, after all.

“I think we need to keep moving,” he continued, but at that precise moment, he got the distinct feeling he was being watched. “Quickly. There could be wolves in these woods. I have a weird feeling on the back of my neck.”

As the crew gathered to go, the fire in Malysseus’s hand, acting as a torch, started to flicker. Holding the flame away from him, he could feel hot breath on his skin. Hotter than the fire. Malysseus wasn’t afraid of much, but he was scared of giant man-eating wolves, which was the image stuck in his head.

“Close your eyes, men,” Malysseus said. “On three. One, two…” He expanded the fire spell he held aloft as he finished his count. The extra power surged light to extreme levels, illuminating hundreds of feet in every direction. He sent the flame floating into the air, trying to soften the light.

The creature screamed. The source of the hot breath came into view. The monster made Gurten look like a small baby, standing at four or five times his height. Its head was too small for its body, which was gigantic and rippled with musculature. In the center of the head was a single, large eye. The monster covered the eye, bellowing another shriek at the source of the pain. It was a cyclops.

The cyclops’ face twisted with grotesque anger. Letting forth a roar neither the crew nor Malysseus could understand, it swung its tree log-sized arms in a semi-circle. Trees were knocked to the side as if the cyclops were swatting flowers. The trees flew, barely hanging on by their roots, or being uprooted entirely.

“Run, you fools,” Malysseus demanded as the cyclops started to recover its bearings. The surprised shriek of pain morphed into a battle roar. The creature started forward, continuing to swat anything in its path. It was moving cautiously, but the single eyelid blinked slowly, trying to recover sight. The crew ran.

Malysseus, on the other hand, was compelled to defend his crew. He first tried summoning an ice wall. With all the magic he could command, the wall barely reached half the creature’s height. To his credit, it took the creature two blows to crush the ice wall into tiny shards. The ice wall survived better than the trees, which, unfortunately, didn’t mean a whole lot.

As the crew took off behind him, Malysseus sent the ball of firelight soaring after them. If people fell down and broke a leg, they’d become sitting ducks in haste to escape. In the end, that would bring death as much as getting caught. Continuing to fight against the creature, he tried a second ice wall, which held up no better than the first.

The ice walls slowed the creature down, but they cost too much magic. A cyclops wasn’t a giant man-eating wolf, but Malysseus was still afraid. Maybe even more so than of the wolf. He suppressed that fear, standing for his crew, but the fear still whispered from the back of his head. “You’re not a real wizard,” it said softly. He gritted his teeth and tried a stream of fire magic as he slowly backed away.

Fire pooled in his hand, blasting forth like a focused flamethrower into the cyclops’ chest. The skin on its chest simply washed off the fire, causing the fire to slip to the sides of it. The cyclops was immune to fire magic. Remembering the effectiveness of his crystal threads, Malysseus attempted a different strategy.

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Anchoring them to the earth, he whipped up several gemstone ropes. The ropes soared into the air, wrapping around the cyclops at every limb. One even caught the enraged monster around the neck. The strings made from ruby gemstones didn’t even strain to hold it. The cyclops simply trudged forward, ripping the ropes into pieces effortlessly.

The single eyeball blinked once more, and sight obviously returned to the monster. The eye fixated on Malysseus; he realized the first feeling wasn’t genuine fear—this was.

Malysseus could intuitively feel his Mana reservoir sat at around forty percent. He knew that wasn’t a lot of Mana, but it was plenty for a Wizard with some ingenuity. He was running low on that. In the end, survival was a fine motivator. On the other hand, the cyclops was insanely fast for its bulk.

The creature lunged forward, grabbing a surprised Malysseus around the middle of his body. His arms were pinned to his sides, preventing him from casting his typical spells. The cyclops pulled him to its giant face and stared down at him. It grumbled something in the language Malysseus couldn’t understand, though he recognized it as the same language from before.

It tilted him to the side, left, right, and even upside down. The creature shook Malysseus, causing a wave of dizziness but leaving him unharmed. He couldn’t fathom what the creature was looking for, but it inspected him like he would inspect a salt shaker with discolored salt.

Malysseus let this process pass in silence. His brain rattled around his head from all the shaking, leaving him foggy of mind. When his mind cleared slightly, he knew it was time to act, but the cyclops began to raise him toward its mouth like Malysseus might taste salt from a discolored salt shaker.

The memory closest to the surface was his experience sending lightning surging from all parts of his body in battle with the squidlings. It wasn’t typical spellcasting behavior, but it could be helpful now. Calling on half his remaining magic, Malysseus sent lightning from all parts of his body. The jolts of electricity slammed into the hand of the cyclops, rebounding against his own body. He was somewhat protected from the spell as the originating caster. However, his body still took damage from the lightning backfiring on him.

The cyclops dropped him. It did not grunt in pain, but the creature was clearly surprised. As Malysseus fell, it looked at him with curiosity. He slammed into the ground, all breath leaving his body.

There wasn’t much he could do lying on his back. He saw the hand reaching down at him. Involuntarily, Malysseus screamed out in fear, but his voice was only a croak. Reaching up his hand, he tried to call on the Arcane magic, hoping the desperate situation would focus his mind once again. It didn’t.

The magic sputtered and died, not even spontaneously forming another kind of spell from residual essence. His Mana was low, leaving him few options for how to proceed. He grimaced, reaching down into dregs of his magic power and casting an earth-based spell.

The dirt of the earth below him shot past him. The earth magic pushed him deeper and deeper underground. When Malysseus finally stopped, he couldn’t even predict how deep beneath the dirt he was. He could only hope it was far enough. Croaking out an air magic spell, he opened funnels to the world above, allowing him to breathe.

Slowly, steadily, Malysseus regained his breath. Footsteps thundered in the distance from above. As the seconds ticked by, his body started to calm. His mind began to clear. He knew there was no way for the cyclops to get to him, or it already would have. He had tried to create an opening for his crew to get away, but he was little good to anyone.

Closing his eyes, Malysseus began to meditate, focusing on drawing the energy back to him. The Mana seeped from the ground, the air above, and even the tiny plant life found underground. He could sense a small cavern of mushrooms nearby that provided him minuscule amounts of magic power.

The seconds turned into minutes, and the thundering footsteps of the creature finally disappeared. With several minutes, the crew should have been able to get away. Malysseus smiled involuntarily within his meditations. His Mana reservoir slowly refilled as the minutes turned into an hour. At the end of the hour, his reserves were sitting at about eighty percent. That was plenty to try and make it back to base camp.

He pushed himself to the surface and emotionally steeled himself for whatever might be waiting for him at base camp. He didn’t even need to wait long. On his way back to base camp, he ran into an extensive clearing among the trees. Gurten, Kewari, and all the others were regrouping within the clearing. They all turned at his approach, saluting politely, despite the destroyed appearance of their Captain.

“Captain,” Kewari said, nodding respectfully. She continued, less respectfully, “Where in the name of all that is holy have you been?”

It was funny, coming from a Healer.