I’ve never felt souls that fill me with such abject dread as the creatures from Hiverock.

I’ve felt souls that I know are dangerous plenty of times. Large souls, painful souls, deadly souls, ugly souls. I’ve looked at the core of a person and felt disgust, revulsion, or outright hate… but not dread. Not fear. Yet at the core of whatever I am, some instinct knows I should fear these monsters.

Their souls are like a void. Many of them are just a void: a blackness so dense and so hungry that there is nothing else to their being at all. The void consumes, the void grows. Nothing but mindless automatons of hunger, with a core so dense and so dark that I’m terrified even looking too deeply into it could get me sucked inside, never to return.

The monster known as Lark is also a void, horrible and starving. Yet orbiting around the inexorable pull of that perfectly dark sphere are other shards, bits of souls deformed and broken that act like a rotating shield between the creature’s mind and its all-consuming hunger. Like leaves caught up in a whirlwind, they spin around and around, moving too fast for gravity to take them and pull them in. I recognize some of the bits and pieces from the parts Fulvia’s soul is missing, jagged fragments of personhood malshapen and distorted by their transfer from human to monster. Now part of the beast’s soul, I feel them slowly growing on their own, though into what I have no way of knowing and no desire to find out. This thing was born, what, a couple months ago? Yet it’s already powerful enough to put me on edge.

I bet Penta would have been all for Seong’s little offer. It’s a monster that’s a person, same as us. I get the idea behind it, too: if we can capture Lark alive, we can learn how these Hiverock monsters tick and how best to kill them. Skyhope needs that advantage if these things aren’t going to slow down their growth.

Penta’s not here though, and I want this soul-mutilator dead. Every part of my being screams to kill it or run.

I’m going to kill it.

The tiny freak dodges four different weapon swings before tearing into Bently’s hamstring, pulling out a small fragment of soul alongside the flesh and swallowing them together. In the same motion webs shoot out from its fingers, latching between us and restricting our limbs. Orville of all people nails a bowshot in one of the monster’s arms as Seong draws a liquid-coated knife and cuts the rest of us free, webs hissing with every stroke of their blade.

“Fucking focus!” Seong snaps at us, tossing a dart with their free hand to force the monster back.

Damn it, they’re not wrong. I swallow my revulsion, shifting to position myself behind Norah to help her cover Penelope while she heals Bently. We’re already on the back foot after letting this thing draw first blood. We need to take the momentum.

Thankfully, we luck out and the monster makes a dive towards Norah, trying to bite right through the armor around her knee. A loud clang rings out as its horrible maw collides with her talent, the monster recoiling in pain and surprise as the teeth fail to penetrate. Norah and I each jab from a different side while I also reach a couple tentacles out to grab its horrifying soul.

It twists its head with startling speed, teeth snapping around my tentacle and biting it off. I scream, pain flaring through my soul.

“Vita!” Penelope fumes. “Don’t you dare get hurt yet, I’m not done with Bently!”

“I’m fine!” I snarl back, watching as the monster tries to swallow part of my being. Without flesh or a soul core to stabilize it, however, the tendril-tip just phases through the beast’s mouth, quickly disintegrating into nothing. How did it even bite me in the first place?

Lark is already jumping back, dodging another arrow from Orville while pulling the first out of its shoulder. Black blood splatters out of the wound, and as it twists to fire webs again Seong catches it in the rib with a dart. The horrible little thing snarls in pain, immediately twisting and fleeing into the brush, out of sight. It’s way faster than all of us, except possibly for Seong, but they decline to chase it down alone.

“It’s in full retreat,” I report between clenched teeth.

“What the fuck was that?” Seong snaps, turning on us. “I thought you were a team of hunters, but you got caught like kids with your pants down! What happened to teamwork? Where was your formation? Your strategy? Bently, you didn’t even fucking swing at it!”

“B-but… she’s a little girl!” Bently protests, still on one knee as Penelope finishes healing his leg. “We hunt monsters, right? That was a person! We talked to her!”

“Yes, Bently,” Seong sighs. “You’re right. We hunt monsters, and that was a person. But it’s a monster, too. You can be both, and eating other people alive is a damn sure way of accomplishing it. If you think you’re never going to have to cut something that walks on two legs and can say hello, then quit. The rest of you! Penelope, why the fuck did we not have support spells on us before that thing ever moved? You had more than enough time to get your ass casting.”

“I was trying to kill it,” Penelope growls. “It seems to be resistant to just about every disease I can conceive, however.”

“Well then you give up ten minutes ago and you start casting goddamn support magic because that is your job. We’re not here so you can get off on your power trip fetish. Norah, you are too fucking slow. Good block on its second pass, but you need to be blocking everything. We’re only fighting one target, you have no excuse. Vita, don’t scream like a little girl in combat, it’s a waste of breath and you’ll distract your allies. I shouldn’t even have to tell you that. Orville...”

They glance up at our archer.

“...Good shot.”

Orville nods back, stoic on the outside but with pride and smugness radiating out of his soul.

“Are you done throwing out insults in the middle of the mission?” Penelope snaps.

“No,” Seong hisses. “But experience tells me it’s better to not give idiots more than one thing to try and learn at a time. Vita, did my poison finish it off?”

I shake my head, swallowing anger and shame. Seong is making me feel like the girl that just walked into the guild hall again. It’s… easy to see why they and Remus are friends.

“Doesn’t feel like it. I think it was hurting for a while there, but it stopped for a moment to eat something and now it’s fine.”

“Shit,” Seong curses. “The report said fast healing, but that’s real fucking fast if it shrugged off a poison like that. Do you think the healing is tied to eating?”

“Definitely is,” I confirm. “I’m sure of it.”

“Okay then,” Seong nods. “That’s bad. So what’s our plan?”

“Don’t you already have one, oh great and wise leader?” Penelope mocks.

“Yes, I do. But if you want to live to be half my age you need to start thinking all by yourself. Quit relying on your talents and rely on your head. The forest isn’t going to keep rolling over and letting you kill it.”

“We’re not trainees, Seong,” Penelope seethes, standing up after finishing with Bently’s leg. “We’re not verbal punching bags for you to stroke your ego on. Vita and I have saved your life and you haven’t done the reverse. Do not act like you’ve earned the right to insult us.”

The short, venomous hunter shakes their head.

“I don’t need your permission, third lady. I will do anything I have to in order to keep you and your team alive. If that includes hurting your feelings, then too fucking bad. Now plan.”

We all do as they say, shutting up to think for a moment. Bently is actually the first person to speak up.

“I… I think we should just find that person we’re supposed to save and get out of here. She’s our primary objective anyway, right?”

“No,” I protest immediately. “We can’t let that thing live or it’ll be even harder to deal with the next time. It grows way too fast.”

“Pot calling the kettle black,” Orville murmurs. I shoot him a glare and he shrugs.

“Bently may actually have a point, even if it’s entirely unintentional on his part,” Penelope comments. “I agree we need to kill or capture that little creature, but we should secure Claretta first. The prior team noted that the monster grabbed her and ran once it thought it could no longer win, and that’s our worst-case scenario. With Claretta secured, it’s either forced to fight us or flee without her, both of which are preferable to what happened last time.”

“Do we know where Claretta is?” Seong asks.

“I’m not sensing anybody right now, but I’d bet she’s that way,” I say, pointing. “There are a ton of captured monsters around that are alive but stuck in webs. They’re thickest in a sort of semi-circle shape, which I’m going to guess extends into a full circle outside my range. The closer to the center of the circle, the more the captured monsters thin out. I say we start by checking the middle. Plus, if we kill everything between here and there, the little horror won’t have as much to heal off of.”

“I think that’s a good plan,” Orville agrees, “but we need to just admit we have no reliable way to put that thing down for good. We should aim for the head and kill it before it can heal if we can, but if it decides to run away, can any of us stop it?”

“Not safely,” Seong concurs, nodding.

“But it needs to die,” I insist.

“Then aim to skewer it through the skull and don’t miss,” Orville answers, shrugging. “First priority is rescue, though. Right? I say we grab our captured hunter and flee through the area we clear on the way there. If that Lark thing moves to stop us, we kill it or fight it off. If it doesn’t, whatever. We’re just not equipped to go out of our way to chase after it, especially not on its own turf.”

I grit my teeth, wishing he wasn’t so right. He is, though. My soul aches, wounded in a way nothing else I’ve ever encountered has managed. My tendrils extrude from my core, but thankfully aren’t part of the core itself. I don’t think I keep any vital parts of the soul in them. They’re still me, though, and losing a part of myself has me both furious and terrified. The damn thing didn’t even have the decency to swallow it! My tendril-tip just dissolved into dusty soul-stuff that I couldn’t pick back up. Slowly but surely the injured tentacle heals, drawing power from my body and core to replenish itself. I don’t want to get anywhere near that thing’s mouth again, though, and I’d be an idiot to try and grab at its soul another time. I’m back to being a subpar spearwoman for my team, even if one that’s significantly stronger and faster than the last time I was limited in this way.

I wish I could just sic an army of Revenants on the damn thing. ...Although I wonder how its bite would affect them.

We move out, systematically killing (and thereby letting me eat) every monster from here to the center of Lark’s territory. The little fucker doesn’t seem to like it, making prodding attacks at us but never fully committing. What little non-soul damage it does is healed up by Penelope, and while the soul damage will stack up eventually the little monster only breaks off tiny bits of core with each bite. My team should be okay for a while. Unfortunately, we have just as much trouble. What little damage we do it heals by running well outside our range and snacking on one of the meals we simply don’t have the time or stamina to get to first. The damn thing is just built for speed, and even Seong struggles to get a killing blow without their poisons working fast enough. It’s looking like a solid stalemate, though that means we should be able to at least rescue Claretta and get out of here.

It’s not enough, though. I do not like having an intelligent, soul-damaging monster running around. That just sounds like exactly the sort of thing that will bite me in the ass down the line. Perhaps literally. Our progress is slow, with endless webs, rock traps, log traps, pit traps, and countless other annoyances in our way that are certainly dangerous but not difficult to spot when we’re looking for them. This ‘Lark’ is clearly used to fighting animals, not people as smart as it is.

Or ‘she’ is, as the case may be. My senses don’t get an impression one way or the other about it, which is something I’ve started to notice I do pick up on sometimes. Not always, though. I’m not sure why. Still, with the horrible little gremlin running around naked everywhere, the biology of the matter is clearly on display. A hungry little girl, huh? I’d definitely sympathize if it wasn’t trying to kill me. ...Or if it didn’t have an uncomfortably high chance of succeeding. Eventually, however, I feel our goal on my senses and things quickly start to get more exciting.

“Primary target in range,” I announce quietly. Lark seems to have scary good hearing, and we don’t want it to know any more than it has to.

The team nods in acknowledgement, tensing up. They’re still a long way away, and the closer we get to this thing’s home the more likely it is to get aggressive. We walk in a tight clump, Norah standing between the direction I point and the rest of us at all times. I keep my finger pointed at Lark, of course, a constant real-time update of the monster’s position that also happens to make my hand and the rotating set of tentacles supporting it really damn tired.

The pain pays off, though. It takes a risky rush at Orville to try and remove a limb so Penelope can’t quickly heal it, and pays for the attempt. Seong shoves a knife clear through the little bastard’s throat, and it runs off absolutely gushing blood.

“That one’s coated in an anticoagulant,” Seong hisses. “Should fuck with its crazy healing rate, and I’m pretty sure I nailed a goddamn artery. If that doesn’t finish it off it’s decapitation or nothing.”

“Still moving,” I report. “...Just ate something. Now it’s running to eat something else. I dunno, I think it’s going to live. It looks like it’s clearing out a bunch of its food at once, at least?”

“Watcher fucking damn it!” Seong seethes. “Does it not need blood or something?”

“She certainly has a lot of it, if not,” Penelope comments wryly.

“All of the Hiverock egg monsters are this durable,” Orville realizes. “We just don’t notice because they fight to the death when injured instead of running off to heal up. But what if there are other intelligent ones? Or what if any of the ones that eat humans and survive end up intelligent?”

“Shit, man, that sounds like a High Templar problem,” Norah groans. “Let’s just get this done and live happily ever after, please?”

“You picked the wrong fucking job for that, little lady,” Seong hisses.

“Little lady? You barely kiss my belly button, you old fart.”

“Can we focus?” I snap.

Normally I’m fine with banter, but we could seriously die this time. My team shuts up and I continue leading them towards the human on my radar, not being attacked by the monster even a single time the rest of the way. I feel it off at the periphery of my senses, devouring endless hordes of trapped monsters. At least Seong seems to have hurt it pretty badly.

Finally, we break through some bushes and spot our target. A young woman, probably somewhere in her twenties. She’s blonde, freckled, and was probably at some point fairly tall back when she had all her limbs. The poor woman is webbed to the ground by a lake that makes up a majority of the clearing, flowers planted in colorful rows around where she rests.

“Are you Claretta?” Seong asks, stepping forward. “We’re here to save—”

“Stop!” the woman wheezes out. “Webs here. Can’t see…”

“We’ve got fifteen seconds until—” I start to report, quickly cutting myself off. My attention is stolen by the monster suddenly accelerating way beyond the speed it had shown previously.

“Scratch that, contact!” I bark, everyone peeling their eyes away from Claretta barely in time to see Lark blitz out of the brush, aiming right for Bently’s throat. Norah is there in a flash, putting her shield up only for Lark to grab the air and fly right past her and towards our healer.

Webs. It has to be. My senses are crazy good now (I mean, my soul literally hatched into an eye, that has to count for something, right?) but I can’t see them at all. There’s no time to think about it. I make a jab towards Lark a moment too late.

Penelope puts up an arm to block and Lark just bites the hand clean off, clawing through her throat anyway. It happens in an instant. There’s no time to process, panic, or scream.

I ready a tentacle to catch Penelope’s soul as I stab at the monster again, though it jumps away with a gleeful swallow. Our healer’s remaining hand moves to stop the blood, but she’s casting half as fast with half her fingers. I will my mouth to produce saliva, blowing spit in an arc around us, the drops beading on a few of the wire-like webs. There they are. The webs themselves seem invisible. How thin did she get them?

“I win,” the tiny monster gloats, leaping around and laying out yet more of those damn threads. “That one is the only one that heals. You’ll all tire before I run out of food. I win! More humans for me! Claretta! Make sure the rest of them don’t die!”

Claretta takes a deep breath, and starts to sing.

“...No, Claretta,” Lark growls. “Not now. The one that’s bleeding can die.”

The blood gushing from Penelope’s neck starts to slow as her song continues regardless. Seong pulls down their collar and starts spitting as well, cutting through any revealed wire-webs with their acidic knife.

“Claretta, I said not now!” Lark snaps. “Claretta!”

We book it her way, Bently scooping up Penelope as Claretta buys her the time to complete her own spell, fighting back against the multiple open arteries. How Penelope remained conscious with multiple gushing arteries, help or no, I’ll have to ask later. For now we follow Seong, forming a wedge through the traps to grab the brave hunter that’s rescuing her own fucking rescuers.

“Claretta!” Lark shrieks, almost desperately. “Claretta, what are you doing? Stop! Stop! They’re here to take you away!”

The monster dashes forward to intercept us, panic filling its features. It’s so fucking fast! I whip a tentacle out to try and distract it, jabbing with my spear as the rest of my team turns to cut it. We land a few blows, bleeding the child horror. It leaps backwards.

“Claretta! Don’t go with them! Claretta!”

Confusion and terror spread across the monster’s face, and it hesitates. We waste no time capitalizing on that, landing more cuts.

“Stop stealing her!” it begs us. “Stop it! Claretta!”

Sing, sing, and sing some more. It’s all the broken hunter does in response. Bently scoops her up as well, one biomancer in each arm as we turn and make a fighting retreat from the area. Element of surprise lost, the battle falls out of Lark’s favor and into ours, wounds on her small body stacking up with very few nearby creatures to eat and heal from.

Wailing and begging, her voice screaming raw, a monster cries as something she loves is taken away.