Thumbs were weird.

Even after tugging them around during its sleep to establish the brain-to-muscle connections, new limbs and appendages still felt odd.

Feeding the human while stuck like this was another challenge, but one that it rather enjoyed figuring out a creative solution to. It made the skin sac full of modified blood on its shoulder, created an exposed arterial vein on it to act like a straw, then used the [Logotexnia] Skill to growl out a clumsy imitation of the word ‘food’, and after a while of prodding at her lips with it, she begrudgingly opened her mouth.

Then it just used manual change mode to tighten the skin sac until it was empty before setting it to be cannibalized by [Devourer] and going back to sleep.

And now, here it was, its left ‘hand’ still glued onto the wall, opening and closing its right one as the wolf scrutinized it. The tendons were twice as thick compared to before, standing out like cables against the back of its hand, and the beefy muscles it had added would hopefully last a while when climbing.

It detached its left paw from the wall, and got to clumsily walking forward, immediately developing an intense dislike of this design. Every step, its palms and fingers slapped the ground, and they wouldn’t bend back the other way, so it had to awkwardly tilt its wrists to the side with every step or walk on its knuckles, making its nails harmlessly, but annoyingly, dig into its palm.

After only a few steps, it decided that it was going to get rid of these as soon as possible.

It punched the metal below, feeling the vibrations snake down the connected rods and onto the platform, a mere four foot drop from their vantage point. It was mildly concerned about the stability of said platform, but it doubted their tiny contribution to its immense weight would change anything, so with a little bit of awkwardness, it moved to the wedge on the opposite end of the support rod, to the most stable-feeling connection the platform had, and awkwardly shuffled sideways, before tilting its body to the right and jumping off.

The human let out a sudden cry of what it assumed was surprise, her fingers clamping down on its fur, but before they’d even hit the ground, she’d cut herself off, transitioning it into a muffled yelp.

The wolf landed well, despite its back legs momentarily buckling from the human’s weight, the dull thud providing the wolf with a great feeling for what was ahead of, and around them. Its tail thankfully managed to keep her legs from hitting the iron.

“Maybe warn me next time!?” She whisper-hissed into its neck, flicking its left ear with a finger.

It grumbled, and jerked its head to the side, twitching said ear at the same time for a masterful counter strike, slapping her hand with it.

The human just sighed and slumped back down, grumbling something under her breath before idly starting to pet along its chest fur as it turned its attention to the bars innocently sitting right beside them.

Without much preamble, it closed a couple feet of distance, hopped up on its hind legs, and grasped the bars, then removed its hindlegs from the platform to awkwardly brace them up against an iron bar, ignoring the human’s little exclamation of surprise.

Both actions were thankfully effortless.

Well, not effortless, but it could probably climb sixty or so feet before taking a short rest, just for safety’s sake. If anything, its legs were the problem, unused to this almost bipedal position of movement and with too small a paw to comfortably rest on any bar.

Still, it got to work, keeping close to the corner, grasping one bar, then pushing up with its other hand and reaching up to grab another, rinse and repeat.

Despite its mindset being oriented towards ‘slow and steady’, it still made progress very quickly, counting feet by increments of the ‘x’ shapes on the side of the platform, each being just about thirty feet. By the time it started feeling rather winded, it had gone up three segments, about ninety feet, so it carefully shuffled its way back onto the support pipes, the three feet deep wedge just wide enough for the wolf to comfortably rest.

A short nap, and it repeated the process. The ceiling of the room below eventually reached them, but thankfully, the bars remained, even though its fingers were always squished between the bars and the metal wall behind them.

Beyond that change, its routine continued, climbing, resting, back to climbing.

Again.

And again.

By the fourth time it had repeated this process, it was beginning to wonder if this was a good idea as it lay panting, listening to the human’s words and replying with random, tired grumbles.

They must have gone up almost three hundred feet by now, and it didn’t feel any exit within its sensory range.

So, it went to sleep again.

And it got up again, crawled to the bars.

Started climbing again.

Went to sleep, bars, climbing, rest on support rods, repeat, with very little in terms of variety.

From rough estimation, it assumed about one and a half to two days had passed. From rough feeling, it felt like it’d been climbing for a month. The fear of falling wasn’t even enough to get its heart rate to spike anymore. It was just frustrated, hungry to the point where not even thinking of the sparks was enough to fully take its mind off the gnawing emptiness in its soul and stomach, and its only reprieve were the moments after sleep where the human would poke and nudge its snout for a small bout of tired play-fighting, her trying to poke the insides of its mouth and the wolf letting out half-hearted growls, trying to fake-bite her fingers while she tried to dodge its jaws and poke its gums.

And occasionally scratching at the support rods for some nice sparks to look at.

Those two activities were fun, and distracting.

Which was even more appreciated, considering that the wolf could feel the distant thuds slowly getting closer. They made it nervous.

Unwinding its tail from around the human’s knees almost felt weird by now with how used to it the wolf had gotten, so it didn’t bother letting go of her legs at all anymore. It felt rather comforting.

It let out a low, long exhale, and forced itself up again, before resuming its bi-hourly ritual, shuffling across the thick metal corner of the framework to grasp the bars and start climbing.

Again.

As she continued being carried around like a toddler in a backpack, her mind, inevitably, wandered, despite the permanent anxiety of being connected to life by nothing more than slime and the wolf’s now humanoid hands.

Living in the Dungeon for two years had taught her many things about its structure, both above, below, and in between, and a surprising amount of small details about each. And in the silence, broken only by their breathing and the light wobbling rattle of metal bars, she couldn’t help but run her mind through some of them.

The Dungeon was separated into four floors, the underground bits of those floors, and the active floors just underneath, which were referred to as ‘The Factory’ just to delineate them from the “habitable” parts of the Dungeon. Each floor had its own sewer system, and with a mixture of science and magic, handled their trash, either through vaporizing them into gasses and smog and pumping them down into the fourth floor, or through a winding network of pipes that ran down the sides of the dungeon’s walls for the things they couldn’t deal with, usually factory waste, and send it through some specific spots to flow down into some processing facilities that would destroy the discard, also on the fourth floor.

So if they went into the sewers, no matter what direction they went, they should run into some form of civilization eventually. Down would lead them into the ‘cauldrons’ where they burned the trash or sent it through the pipes down into the fourth floor, and hopefully into some worker that could help her, and going up would lead them to the surface.

The problem was distance. The Dungeon was colossal. Ergos was a monstrously gigantic planet, but even so, she didn’t doubt that the bottom of The Factory was probably well below the planet’s crust. One could fit several small countries’ worth of people down here and have space for more if they used both the above and underground parts of the dungeon.

But from what little she knew of the public’s perception of the underground sections of each floor, the first floor was basically clean, while for the other two habitable floors, anything deeper than a couple hundred feet underneath the topmost levels of the sewers and under-pipes was considered as little more than a metal catacomb for the dead and those that fed on them. There was a reason besides the somewhat vertical nature of the Dungeon for the only modes of transportation being the Great Tower, platforms, cable lifts, and portals.

So everyone knew that for the second and third floor, the underground sewers were dangerous for some reason.

The problem was that she didn’t really know what that reason was. She knew that the deeper one went into the underground, the more dangerous things became, but nobody could ever give a concrete answer as to why and how exactly things became more dangerous, only speaking in vague, almost mystical tones about the dangers below, as if they were trying to speak of some stupid fairy tale.

Was it environmental hazards? Monsters? She could only assume so, because her imagination couldn’t really come up with other possibilities.

It was the reason that low Level Adventurers and mercenaries would delve into the sewers and abandoned depths to raise their Level rather than jumping into the supposed meat-grinder that was the Factory, so she knew this danger was true to some extent. Coincidentally, that was also why nobody had truly cleared out the underground.

When the entry level to The Factory was at least Level fifteen or twenty, people who’d just gained their paths needed some way to Level up, so the authorities, royal and local, tended to only ‘trim’ the upper parts to reduce dangers to their citizens but keep whatever bizarre ecosystems existed below relatively intact while having an ample source of experience.

That was, after all, exactly what her old ‘team’ was doing before her companion rid the world of their existence. They’d never stepped foot into The Factory.

And this climbing reminded her of just how deep they’d gone into the third floor’s underground.

So this prolonged period of tedious peace, this desolate silence? With every hour that passed, it only made her nervous anticipation rise, every minute only adding to the sense that something would threaten them, any minute now, a sort of constant, stretching tension that had no release.

Because nothing happened.

There were no flying monsters, no giant spiders, nothing. It was just pure silence, with slowly approaching, groaning thuds, their breaths, the brain-numbing scent of rotted fuel, and the wobbling of metal as the wolf kept climbing.

Still, her imagination ran wild, boredom and nerves combining into a self-sabotaging mixture that only made her more unnerved.

Turns out, one’s imagination becomes quite active when they no longer have eyes to see things. She turned her attention to the wolf she was attached to after a particularly sickening mental image of a humanoid slug.

Her fingers rubbed at the light cuts and bruises on her palm and the sides of her digits, idly remembering how some prissy, sneering noble girl complained about how their family dog kept biting her playmates too hard while playing, something about ‘lack of socialization’.

Maybe she shouldn’t be hiding how hard the wolf was biting her during their little play sessions?

What did ‘lack of socialization’ even mean?

Was it only biting her so hard because it didn’t learn boundaries and control? That made sense in her head, but she’d never owned a dog, and this was a wild wolf for gods’ sake. For all she knew, wolves might play by ripping limbs off each other because by tomorrow they’d have them all back.

She sighed and started petting its neck, being awarded with a pleased, low grumble for her efforts.

At least she no longer felt sick from being dangled and jangled around as the wolf kept climbing. Not that she could complain, she was literally being carried.

A bit after the wolf lost count of what number of ‘x’ segments they’d gone past, it clambered up to the nearest wedge, squeezed them both into the three foot surface, and the moment its paws touched down on the rod with a weighty slap, now unhindered by slime, it paused, its ears shooting up straight as its head jerked upwards by sheer reflex.

One of the walls above, the one opposite to the bars, was hollow.

It could only feel the very edge of it, but there was some kind of empty space behind one of the walls, just on the edge of its senses. And the wall itself had no support rods on it, just a single, grate-like plate of metal thrown on top of the topmost support rod of the segment below it.

The wall was also… wavy, and thin.

Easy to cut through.

It tampered down on its excitement, and settled down for another quick nap.

An hour later, it woke itself up with a little shot of adrenaline, shook off the sleepiness, and returned to its familiar routine of climbing.

One segment passed, two, and at the third, the wolf paused, tightened its grip on a metal bar, then used its left hand to punch the vertical support rod by its side, holding its fist against the metal for a bit to get a good picture.

And a good picture it did get.

It wasn’t exactly a wall, it was more like a series of connected, wavy plates, that would be sucked into the top of the door by some spinning mechanism, connected to two covered operating switches. Just beyond the door was a short but massive corridor, sixty feet wide and thirty feet tall, entirely made of stone, before it cut off into a more open area full of pipework.

The corridor itself was covered with some kind of rail systems on both left and right for about twenty feet each, with some rusty carts still sitting inert on some of them, while in the middle was a twenty foot section that was relatively clear.

The middle section of the corridor transitioned into a metal bridge with a grated bottom full of holes and rickety railings on the side, a bridge that extended over a canal-shaped depression full of pipeworks and complex machinations below. It traveled over that section for about a hundred feet before the wolf lost feeling.

And below…

Below gave it a headache.

Besides the metal supports of the grated bridge and the rail systems, there wasn’t a single simple or flat thing down there. Not one. It was a mind-twisting mess of dozens of feet of pipes, attached to other pipes, covered in rivets, nails, metallic boxes, a set of circular fan-like designs laid on top of one another, nestled into a thicket of fabric and metal and cables, surrounded by coiled rings, covered in spongy stuff, and… It was just a mind-twisting headache.

It shook its head and pressed its antennae back into its fur, trying to get rid of that image, lest it become dizzy.

It put its hand back onto the metal bars to climb up a few feet, until it was just across the thin wall, then it used the slime to shimmy across the edge onto the bottom right leg of the ‘x’ shaped support rods, and made its way over to the left leg. With only a couple feet from… some notion of safety, it couldn’t help but grow excited. It had grown absolutely sick of climbing.

It stuck itself onto the thick corner of the support segment, carefully testing its weight and making sure it could reach.

With a bit of trepidation, it detached a paw… hand? Was it a paw or a hand?

Didn’t matter, it decided. It retracted the slime, reared its left hand back and slapped it onto the wavy wall, with as much strength as it could spare without straining its slimy support.

It wasn’t expecting much in terms of durability, considering the ridiculously thin nature of it, but the wolf hadn’t been expecting the wall to be so thoroughly chewed through by rust, that a foot wide circle of it shattered into a mess of thin, tumorous flakes, shooting rust powder into its face and filling the shaft with the cacophony of every single rusted plate rattling against one another.

It dug its hand out of the hole, turned around, and started coughing and sneezing for a few long seconds, very thankful that it had been keeping its eyes closed for a while now, lest it damage its new, precious eyes.

After snorting out remnants of wet rust powder for another minute, it turned back to the odd wall.

It curled its hand close to its chest, then swung it outwards, backhanding its forearm through the wall, its thick, coarse fur shielding against chips and shards of rusty metal as they flew in every which direction, feeling through its other three limbs what size a hole it was trying to make.

A second of visualization, and it resumed, punching through the corner of the wall bit by bit, occasionally stopping to scoot upwards on the support rod it was hanging from for a better reach.

Almost a minute of uninterrupted ear-grating banging and rattling later, it put a hand through the hole, cupping its hand, and then dragged out a small mountain of rust powder and bits of thin metal, carelessly throwing them down into the abyss.

It could feel just how ridiculously humid everything beyond the door was by the exposed skin on its palms.

Great, wet fur.

It never liked wet fur.

It rather awkwardly waited a couple seconds for its left paw-hand to stick to the floor, before carefully repositioning its body one step at a time, eventually dragging itself and the human through with a bit of readjustment.

Finally on flat, solid ground once more, it stretched out its tired limbs with a small groan of satisfaction, then took a deep, calming breath.

The air was so humid it felt like it was inhaling thin water more than air, but it didn’t particularly care, moving away from the hole just for a couple feet, before plopping down to rest with a sigh, starting to very slowly detach the human from its back.

In fact, the air down here was… the cleanest it had ever smelled. It didn’t even know air could be this clean. It was almost cleansing to its lungs.

Then, a faint sound echoed down the corridor from the other end of the bridge. A shuffle, the scrape of metal on metal, a small series of clicks. A faint vibration traveled through the stone below, come and gone before the wolf could even react.

A tense silence filled the room as its eyes instinctively snapped open, and the wolf froze as its eyes were met with the sight of a softly glowing room, a hundred thousand tiny bits of moss splattered through the walls and floor glowing a soft green-yellow before a background of gray-black metal.

It was so beautiful it could almost cry. It might have let itself have that moment of peace, if it wasn’t for the two metallic legs standing in place on the other end of the bridge, only illuminated up to the ankles by the moss below.

For a few seconds, nothing happened, a stare-off between two figures obscured in darkness. The wolf was simply too stunned and confused to consider attempting speech with its… adversary?

The figure suddenly started moving forward in a steady, unhurried pace, each thundering step making the bridge’s railing rattle, like the clicking of teeth in a shivering jaw. The wolf’s slimy fur rose in a bristle, yet it remained silent, focusing on its senses as it hurriedly retracted the veins, lowered its chest to the ground, and tilted to the side, dropping the human on the ground. To her credit, she didn’t let out a peep, simply raising a hand and tapping its shoulder before rolling away, a little awkwardly.

The boost was so strong that the wolf almost choked in surprise.

It felt the hallway on the other end of the bridge, it felt the massive circular staircase just beyond, the hundreds of feet of it submerged under water, the two winding tunnels to the side of the hallway, snaking upwards toward another floor. It felt the source of the thumping, an utterly colossal machine, like a beating heart futilely drafted into a corpse. And just beyond it, an open tunnel, with living things inside, hundreds of them, extending into an open, canal-like tunnel full of water.

A way out.

But it also felt the immeasurably complex machinations of the clockwork golem on the bridge, from the strange rock in its chest to the engine surrounding it, to its odd, tapering left arm, a split second before the humanoid machine stopped in place. A massive yellow eye flickered to life on the middle of its face, shining a spotlight straight into its unadjusted eyes, forcing them shut.

Blind once more, but now from light.

Its ears pointed forward, its lips curling into a snarl, its fur standing on end across its back like slimy spikes. Still, it held the sound into its throat.

The mechanical human, like one of those stone golems down by the waste rivers but infinitely more complex, didn’t move.

The light turned off, and the wolf opened its eyes just in time to see the golem’s eye turn red through the swimming mess of colors in its sight.

It was almost enough for the wolf to freeze again, to see what ‘red’ really looked like, but a well-honed survival instinct, sharpened through a dozen different brushes with death, crushed that excitement and awe and shoved it into the furthest corners of its mind to be considered later.

It didn’t speak. Instead, a deafening, horn-like alarm sounded out of the golem, and with a burst of steam from its back and the clicking of a hundred different mechanical parts, its right arm spouted blades. Then it lowered its torso, and began a frenzied sprint across the bridge.

It was unnerving, its movements… wrong in how simultaneously awkward yet purposeful they were. Its torso was tilted forward, but its two arms remained pointed at the ground, unmoving, and its red eye was still nailed to the wolf. But it was fast, even when the very vibrations of its movements felt like they were slogging through a world that was too slow for the wolf to live in.

Without the human, it felt like it would have never been able to match how quick this thing was. Even now, it was certain that it could not afford to feel its opponent out. It had to end this fast.

A part of it was scared. An unnatural abomination like the thing running straight at it with a mechanical, laser focus, backlit by nothing but its own red eye and the contradictingly peaceful lights of the glowing moss, thrice as tall and just as wide, made its animal brain instinctively want to turn tail and run for its life.

A bigger, entirely unreasonable part of it was excited. Its veins thrummed with the beginnings of adrenaline, its heart picked up pace, its entire body shivered as its eyes bulged open, half-blinded by the light but still hungry for use, its antennae writhed involuntarily in excitement, feeling the air, the vibrations of its heavy opponent.

It knew it would gain nothing by killing this thing. But it wanted to kill it. It craved action. It had felt what a real fight was like, tasted victory for the first time in ages, back then in that trash pit, and now it wanted more, after a lifetime of scraping by with less than nothing.

The golem’s feet broke the metal grating, but with unnatural, stumbling grace, it simply weaved them back up through the holes it made, overcompensating its next steps, and repeating the process.

A hundred and fifty feet turned to just fifty in the proverbial blink of an eye, and the wolf finally let out a throaty, rumbling snarl, its entire chest vibrating with the force of it. Its adrenaline sack was squeezed dry in preparation.

A mere second later was when the wolf learned that there was such a thing as too much adrenaline.

Its brain almost shut down, higher thought utterly vanished. Every thought process turned into nothing but an urge to move, to run, to fight and kill and shred and do anything but nothing. Every single fiber of its body screeched for action, and almost like a dream, the wolf didn’t question what it was even doing as it activated [Bloodrush] and exploded forward with a bark so loud it was almost like a roar, crossing thirty feet of distance in the blink of an eye, the world blurring around it.

The golem didn’t pause, lifting its left forearm, and from the tapering tip, a short explosion of blue flame came, far too short to hit the wolf. But the blast of wind that cracked through the air slammed into its shoulder before it could even get to the bridge.

Its right shoulder popped out of its socket with a meaty snapping sound, barely audible over the violent rattling of metal all around them and the blaring alarm.

The wolf didn’t even feel it. It simply forced itself into a diagonal roll to conserve momentum, purposefully smashing its right shoulder into the stone as it came out of it, shoving it back in place with another pop, simultaneously using its left arm to claw through the stone and launch itself forward.

With its right hand already reared back, it turned its fingers into a diagonal position, the claws touching and forming a rough, flat formation, and thrust forward.

The golem obliged it, doing the same with its own.

Neither dodged.

The golem’s bladed fingers slammed into its ribs in a sideways swing, and the blades that came out of its fingertips caught on the fur and flesh for a brief millisecond before a flare of mana filled the air, and they forced through as if cutting through water, stopping at its fingertips.

The wolf barely felt the blades shred its left lung. It didn’t feel pain, it didn’t even care. Its mind was full of nothing but frenzied violence.

Its right hand slammed into the side of the golem’s plated chest, its claws cutting through without resistance. But its claws were much thinner than its fingers.

It didn’t care. It forced its hand through regardless, feeling the joints snap, feeling its skin and flesh be scraped off by machinery and torn metal up to its knuckles, fur being cut and caught in the moving abomination’s innards.

The golem was moving too fast, was too heavy, and the wolf’s arm crumbled into its chest as its charge sent the wolf barreling back, their mutual grasp of each other destroying their balance. They tumbled over each other, the twisting snap of the wolf’s fingers breaking barely registering as a tingle, its focus directed on how the golem’s higher height sent it tumbling over the wolf as their legs tangled into each other’s.

Neither let go, but the wolf’s speed and the golem’s weight landed them just as the wolf wanted, with it on top, and the golem sprawled out on the stone beneath it.

Before the golem’s fingers could exit its chest for another thrust, it turned its left hand to a fist, and slammed it into the golem’s elbow in an uppercut, forcing the blades to be caught between its ribs as the golem’s arm was twisted. The wolf jerked its torso to the left, feeling the vibrations of metallic finger joints breaking reverberating through its ribcage, using the motion to simultaneously dig its right hand deeper into the golem’s chest.

It raked its hind legs’ claws through the golem’s hip and knee, feeling things snap and lose cohesion with immense satisfaction.

The elbow didn’t break, unfortunately, and in a flash, the golem reared its hand back, its elbow smashing into the stone, and thrust forward with misaligned blades once more, towards its head.

A tingle of caution entered its thoughtless mind, and its left hand moved to block. The blades pierced through its hand, one’s tip getting stuck into its bone, and the wolf’s fingers snapped down on the golem’s hand and wrist like a bear trap, hooking its claws into the metal then blunting them.

The fight, for a few seconds, turned into a mauling.

Its jaws clamped around the golem’s face, its right hand shoved itself deeper into its chest, its bones and tendons scraped against jagged metal, its legs alternated from raking through the golem’s hips and knees and vying for purchase in the stone as the golem bucked and twitched in stilted, jerky motions.

The wolf’s fangs cut through the eye, jagged bits of metal and glass entering its mouth as it bit down and jerked its head around, before cutting through and repeating, a whirlwind of motion and beastial fury in a world that felt like molasses around it, its vision filling with sparks and its ears with the screeching of metal and alarms.

The golem’s right arm scraped against stone, changed angles, tried anything to release itself, but the wolf’s claws held it in place, pushing away and not letting it stab, ignoring the golem’s left hand as it tried to push it away, its hits and pushes doing nothing more than bruising its flesh.

Then a click sounded, and the golem, despite the struggle, managed to put its left hand’s tip against the right side of the wolf’s ribs.

The wolf felt through vibrations the moving of gas, the clicking of machinery, a surge of mana, and even with the absurd speed it had, its mind didn’t make the connection until it was too late to react, too busy with trying to decapitate its opponent.

Just as it was about to attempt to minimize the damage, it felt a strong force fueled by mana suddenly burst into existence beside the golem’s arm, tossing the wolf’s entire torso up sideways, its fingers being ripped out of the golem’s chest, but also smashing the golem’s forearm against its own chest.

The device on its arm cracked once more, blue flame leaving the tip and scorching its fur, and the explosion of air, almost point blank, slammed into the wolf’s left forearm instead, whether by pure coincidence or the golem’s doing.

A loud crack like snapping wood accompanied the feeling of tearing bone tissue and bending muscles. Its hand lost its grip on the golem’s, its bladed fingers violently tearing out of its palms, mutilating both their hands.

The wolf was momentarily thrown to the side by the two explosive interruptions, its shoulder muscles straining and tearing from the sudden impact, so rather than fighting it, it went with the momentum to roll away from the golem, a clumsy motion not at all helped by its barely functioning hands.

It hurriedly righted itself and turned, lowering its chest almost to the floor, snarling through shards of glass, metal and frothing blood as the golem turned over and punched the floor to throw itself upright, a movement both calculated and clumsy as its left leg failed to move properly.

There was no pause.

The golem and the wolf rushed at each other again.

The golem swung with three mutilated fingers, wide and clumsy and off-target as it rushed forward with jerky, stumbling steps, and the wolf took advantage of its superior speed to duck its head under the swing while turning its snout up to latch onto its wrist. Both its arms wrapped around the golem’s right leg, the only functioning one, nestling its right shoulder into the gap between its robotic legs as its tail coiled around the golem’s left leg, and with its momentum, the wolf twisted, yanking the golem forward and up, lifting with all its strength as it pulled the golem’s arm down with its teeth.

And the golem’s head smashed into the stone with a loud crackling sound before its momentum once again brought them to a roll. The golem swung its functioning leg and arm with surprising strength and speed, swinging the wolf over itself, and before the wolf could react or understand what was happening, a muted click sounded as all three limbs it was holding onto detached, sending it flying four feet into the air and towards the human, who had been throwing mana over both of them the entire time.

The golem’s left arm snapped to the wolf in an instant, barely four feet of distance between them, and it only had time to realize what was about to happen before it did.

Another flare of weak mana burst near the golem’s arm, trying to redirect it, but all it managed to do was shift its aim from the chest down to its stomach. A sharp crack filled the air and slammed into its stomach, the inert bones within snapping like toothpicks, and the wolf was sent flying, spinning through the air, the golem’s limbs discarded as the wolf flailed for something to grab, soaring straight towards the rusted wall and towards its death.

The golem’s arm exploded immediately after, and the burst of air against its fur reminded it of the Skill it usually used when on the brink of death, cutting through the hazy frenzy in its mind.

It had Speed, and the Perception to match, so in the mere moments it took for the wolf to be aligned in a way that wouldn’t propel it forwards, but backwards, it had a [Sonic Blast] ready and roiling in its single working lung.

And so it fired it, tilting its head away at the last second. The explosion stopped its spinning and violently spun it the other way around, its momentum cut completely and utterly. Its right shoulder slammed into the floor, followed by its head, its legs hovering in the air for a moment before its body tilted to the side, and they limply fell to the ground alongside its tail.

Its ears filled with an incessant ringing, muffling both the human’s cries and the blaring alarm.

As quickly as adrenaline came, it also left quickly.

That moment of confusion and disorientation as the wolf lay sprawled out on the ground, trying not to choke on its own blood and somehow force the world to stop spinning, was enough for it to feel the first prickles of pain. And once it acknowledged that pain, a tidal wave followed, so much that even [Pain Resistance] could only do so much for the wolf, the beginning of shock creeping up on its mind, a sensation like frozen panic.

It had to sleep, or it would probably die.

It coughed, trying to clear its throat of the blood it was rapidly swallowing, a frothy mixture of air and slimy crimson, shards of glass and metal in its shredded jaws making even more pool up in its mouth.

It had to sleep.

As the boosts wore out, its limbs turning to lead and the world turning dull, it squeezed its melatonin sack. Its body complied easily, with the blind hope the golem wouldn’t find some way to kill it without limbs.

-

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