“Fuck,” I cursed, wondering how long we had until more gars would show up.

How had the idyllic evening turned into such a shit-show in a heartbeat?

And with Ben’s leg injured, we’d have trouble getting around the gar to make it back to Lake Placid. Unless I struck out by myself… But no. I wasn’t ready to give up the company of this group just yet. They seemed nice people and had been quite welcoming overall, Sue’s ribbing notwithstanding, so I just felt it wasn’t right to leave them to die. And I was almost positive that that is what would happen if I left them.

It wasn’t that I assumed that I was so much better than them at surviving, at beating the odds, even though I did have a history of doing just that…

No, more importantly, Sue, Betsy, and Jimmy didn’t look like the type that would abandon Ben, and that would inevitably lead to them being run down by the gars. The only one I wasn’t as sure about was Tom. A rather taciturn dude, with a perpetual frown on his face. Nice enough so far, but there hadn’t been as many visible signs of affection or loyalty from him as from the others. So he might take off if things got too hot.

If I wanted to save them… then the first thing was probably to see how bad the injury of Ben was and then figure out if I could, perhaps, use amber mana to heal the wound. I had never used it on anyone else, but I figured that it should be possible. After all, Annie had done so on her very first try.

Without wasting time, I approached Ben and kneeled down next to him. “How are you doing, Ben?”

“I’ve been better,” Ben responded through clenched teeth. “I have never really experienced pain like that.”

“Well, this is just a clean cut,” I chuckled. “It shouldn’t be too bad, no?

“What the fuck, dude? Not funny!” Ben cursed. Groaning, he continued: “Damn gar. Shit. One fucking second. Had to get me like that. Damn, damn, damn. I’m… I’m really not feeling so well.”

And indeed, Ben was getting chalk white in the face, which I frankly found somewhat humorous. If something like that had knocked me out, I would have never escaped the dungeon alive.

Sue was standing on the other side of Ben, wringing her hands in distress. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, c’mon Ben. We need you.”

As she was talking, her voice got shriller and shriller. “Look at all that blood! We need to… what do you do with that? A tourniquet? Fuck, I am gonna get some belt or something.”

She rushed off, searching frantically for something suitable, which was my chance to see what I could actually do about that wound, without the distraction of her blabbing almost incoherently. The cut was bleeding profusely, so I had to hurry up if the threat of an army of gars descending on us wasn’t motivation enough.

Sue’s idea about a tourniquet wasn’t a bad one… but I didn't intend to just stop the bleeding and then leave it at that. I had amber mana after all. What I really needed was some type of cover that allowed me to work some healing without it being super obvious.

Quickly, I pulled a shirt from my backpack and cut it into a couple of makeshift bandages. “Alright, Ben, I’m going to try and bandage this thing and hopefully that will make you feel better, alright?”

As I wrapped the strips of fabric around his leg, I surreptitiously pulled amber mana from my core and pushed it into Ben’s wounds, willing the muscles, veins, and arteries to reconnect but leaving a superficial cut on the deeper skin level. I wanted Ben to be able to walk just fine, but not grow too suspicious when his wounds suddenly disappeared.

Was I too paranoid? Perhaps. But my experience had told me that it is usually better to be underestimated, and I certainly wasn’t ready to share all my aces, especially my healing skills, with a group of mostly strangers, even though I liked them so far.

It was easy enough to pull out the mana, but when it came to pushing it into Ben, it was as if I had to fight against a barrier, some layer of protection that prevented me from interfering with his body. Obviously, this was not something that I had ever encountered, but I supposed that it made sense to some degree. There had to be some natural resistance, a sacrosanct area inviolate or at least better protected against foreign influence. Otherwise, I could just put red mana insight the body of another human and fry their brains with minimal effort.

While there was no particular reason why that shouldn’t be possible, I would have thought that mana users, including monsters, would have figured that out long ago, making fights pretty pointless. I mean, even with water magic, you could otherwise just flood the brain or the lungs with water and white mana could put a bubble of air in one of the main arteries and kill the person very quickly like that. This wasn’t proof of anything, obviously, but it nonetheless was a reasonable working hypothesis.

In the end, it came back to intention. As I struggled to push my mana past the boundary into his flesh, I tried to harmonize it with the ebb and flow of energy in Ben’s body. And then I provided the intent to help, to heal, to make things better. And that somehow flipped a switch, allowing my mana to freely enter Ben’s body and flood his deep wound with a healthy dose or amber mana.

I took my time with adjusting the bandages and making it look neat and tidy so that I could work my healing mojo… neither too much nor too little, which turned out surprisingly tricky. But in the end, I thought I had achieved exactly what I wanted – a long cut that was still bleeding freely, turning the bandages rust-red, but no significant damage to the muscle tissue underneath.

When I raised my head, I realized with a start that Jimmy and the girls were standing around me, curiously, and with a fair degree of apprehension, watching what I was doing. I gave a brief nod to them as I got up from my knees. “I think he should be fine to go in a few minutes. It looked worse than it actually is.”

“How do you know that much about wounds,” asked Betsy curiously. “I thought you were a physics student…”

Before I had to come up with a reasonable explanation, the howling started.

“Reaver dogs,” Jimmy cursed, lips pressed tightly together. “We need to go. Now!”

Ben scrambled to his feet, wincing in anticipation of the agony, only to look completely baffled when his wound didn’t give him nearly as much trouble as he had expected. Meanwhile, the others milled around the campsite, trying to stuff their gear into their huge backpacks. At least Tom had used the time that I had spent on healing productively to retrieve his arrows and pilfer a couple of weapons from the dead gars.

“Move, move, move,” I cursed, trying to will everyone to get their act together and get out. “We don’t have time for your gear. Grab some water, a few snacks, and your weapons and let’s go!”

“Shit, this tent cost me almost two grand, just a few weeks ago…,” Betsy complained but seemed to realize that however expensive her tent had been, it wasn’t worth her life.

Good thing too, because I had enough. “I am leaving,” I said, before resolutely turning around and stepping into the meandering canyon. When Sue and I had hiked toward the camp, I had noticed a couple of spots where I thought it might be possible to scale the steep walls and get out.

Which pretty much was my grand plan at this point.

The canyon had become a death trap that we needed to escape. Granted, the reaver dogs were a huge headache, able to pick up our scent and track us… but at least in the open country, we could move around, perhaps find a creek to mask our scent, or reach Lake Placid before they caught us.

Anything was better than getting boxed in.

After a few steps, I heard the noise of the others hurriedly catching up to me.

Good for them.

I had been afraid that they’d let themselves be distracted by their material concerns or that they’d fail to realize the urgency of the situation. Quietly, we rushed through the narrow gorge as fast as we could. In the moonlight, the canyon looked very different from just a few hours earlier, the diffuse light creating long deep shadows along the narrow passage, turning the warm colors of the day into a cold and distant dreamland during the night. In a different setting, I might have enjoyed the beauty of it, the wild, untamed nature… but now every twist, every turn made me scowl, because it cost additional time, a resource we did not have.

And then we finally came upon the first area I had remembered on our way in – a place where the cliff had tumbled down some long time ago, changing the near-vertical walls of the canyon into a steep ramp, filled with loose rubble, tenuously stabilized by a few plants that had etched out their living on the bare rock over the years.

One by one we arduously made our way up the steep incline. For every two steps forward, we slid back one, making the climb take a lot longer than I would have liked.

And it was difficult, especially for me. Even Ben managed much better, grunting in pain occasionally, when he put too much pressure on his injured leg, but managing the climb just fine. For me… it was a close call. The fight and subsequent rush through the canyon had taken a lot out of me, and the healing effort hadn’t helped either. Even though it was just ‘magic,’ it did require intense focus and concentration, which had left me feeling somewhat drained afterward.

When I teetered near the top of the ramp, Sue unceremoniously grabbed me and heaved me up, grunting a bit with the effort, but handling the weight just fine.

Which was seriously impressive. How fucking strong was she? I mean, I was all skin and bones right now, but still. Together with my backpack, I had to weigh something like 150 pounds, maybe? That wasn’t nothing.

Initially, I had thought that she was all about speed since she had a white core. And speed could generate some serious kinetic energy, which explained, I thought, the smashed baseball bat and the lightning-fast speed of her ax. But apparently, it wasn’t just that… how many points had she invested in strength?

She didn’t look that strong, but apparently, spending points did not change the outward experience by quite as much… according to what Ben had said, they mostly changed the composition rather than the size – muscles grew denser, fast-twitch muscles improved, the number of neuron connections increased, and so forth.

Which made an evaluation of the physical prowess of other people tricky business. Something I had to keep in mind moving forward.

And while my fighting skills and camouflage ability were clearly superior to whatever the rest possessed, all of them were in way better physical shape than me; embarrassingly, that even included the injured Ben.

I was already breathing heavily, arms and legs burning from the exhaustion, while the others had barely broken a sweat. So I should probably get off my high horse when thinking about survival. This was going to be a group effort.

While I was still catching my breath, Tom pulled out a map that showed the area. After a moment, he pointed at a spot right between two hills about a couple of miles off the next road. “We are right here. The gars are about here,” he continued while pointing at an area one and a half miles to the North from our current location. “I propose to circle around Heart Lake, follow Indian Pass Brook and then take Lost Bridge Way back to Lake Placid. That should give us enough of a distance from the gars to sneak past them and get us to safety by the end of the day tomorrow.”

“What about Heart Lake Road?” Ben asked, staring with some consternation at the map. “Your proposed route is going to take a lot longer.”

“That is true, but Heart Lake Road passes the gars too close for comfort,” Tom responded.

Ben didn’t look too convinced, but the next howl of the gars decided it, as it came from straight North. And not nearly from as far as I would have wished.

We quickly made our way up the hill, heading West on the route proposed by Tom. And what followed was a nightmarish race through the darkness, sticking to asphalt roads where we could to speed up our movement, and then wading for hours through the cold water, following Indian Pass Brook, to mask our scent from the reaver dogs, for the off chance that this wasn’t just another movie trope.

The bright silvery moonlight cast spooky shadows over the wooded terrain, making me flinch from countless strange-looking shapes. This was made even worse by the rustling noise of the leaves caused by the light breeze, and the background noise of howling reaver dogs. Never before had I felt hunted for so long, felt paranoid about the slightest movement from the corner of my eyes.

Just as we were about to enter a clearing, I noticed an odd insect sitting on one of the branches across the creek we were wading through.

“What the fuck is that?” I asked, partially because I was curious, but partly also because I really needed a break. I was winded. And the bug was huge, about four inches long, with silvery wings tilted forward, flush with its blue-silvery shimmering carapace. The rear-end looked a bit like a scorpion tail, with a stinger, only that it was not a smooth needle, but something with a spiral of grooves instead. It was beautiful in an alien way, but also looked… dangerous.

“What did you spot, Daniel?” Jimmy whispered.

“I don’t know,” I responded while staring at the insect. “I just have never seen an insect just like it.”

“An insect?” Sue muttered incredulously. “The gars are getting closer, and you are talking about a damn insect? I can’t f-”

“Hush,” Jimmy whispered urgently. “It is a weyr… back off. Slowly. Don’t startle it.”

Jimmy’s voice was tight with worry as he ever so carefully walked backward, not taking his eyes off the bug.

“It’s just a big bug,” I said slowly. “I could just squash it with my foot… why are you so worried?”

“Just a big bug he is saying,” Sue muttered, backing off slowly while shaking her head in disbelief. “Trust me, Daniel, you don’t wanna mess with these… and where there is one, there are usually another few hundred around.”

A bit more worried now, I looked past the branch into the clearing, trying to make out movement in the moon-touched open. At first, I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, just a wide-open, peaceful clearing, perhaps a couple of acres overall. But even with my enhanced night vision, I had trouble making out details - the usual crisp outline of the grass stalks and of the wildflowers so common in these areas was unusually fuzzy somehow and instead of standing tall, or swaying gently in the slight breeze, everything seemed deflated, pressed to the ground.

And then I realized what I was seeing - thousands, no millions of bugs were covering the ground, unmoving as of yet, but ready to descend on any threat like a lethal swarm of locusts. A shudder ran down my spine, and I could almost feel the stare of millions of cold, emotionless insect eyes on me.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I mumbled while carefully retreating. “Those aren’t just a few hundred bugs…”

“What did you see,” Jimmy asked quietly, keeping a worried eye onto the clearing.

“There are fucking millions of them!”

Just then, Tom, who had scouted the area while we were stumbling along the creek, appeared out of the shadows between the trees. “We need to get away quickly. A large group of gars with reaver dogs is coming this way. It seems like they might have found our trail. Move!“

“We can’t go this way,” Ben said before Tom could rush ahead. “There is a huge weyr swarm. We need to go back.”

“No time,” Tom cursed, scanning the area for a way out. “Can we get around it? How big is it?”

“Too risky,” Ben immediately responded. “Daniel thinks there are millions of them… we need to get out of this valley.”

“Shit! Let’s move then. If we are fast enough,” he glanced at me with a worried look, “we might just make it before the gars get too close.”

Just then, a reaver dog was howling, and it sounded a lot too close for comfort. With the snail-like speed at which I was moving, we were never going to make it.

Swallowing hard, I raised my head. “You guys run ahead. I am just slowing you down.”

“Hell no,” Sue growled. “We are not leaving anyone behind. In the worst case, we fight those gars. We have done it once and we can do it again.”

Tom shook his head. “Not this time, Sue. There are at least twenty of them and reaver dogs. They will slaughter us.”

“There has to be a different solution,” Ben said, wringing his hands. “We c-“

“It is alright, guys,” I interrupted. “I can hide pretty well. I think my chances are a lot better that way.”

I wasn’t convinced that was entirely true since the reaver dogs could just smell me. But I didn’t gain anything from having the others get killed and being alone gave me at least some flexibility. And just perhaps, the gars would follow the bigger group… either way, it was the choice between certain death of being hunted down or a chance to survive, however slim it was.

I just wish I had a few of those mushrooms from the dungeon with me. But if not that, could I perhaps…?

“Get moving!” I urged the others. I needed them all to be gone as fast as possible.

“Shit, Daniel, I… if you make it out of this, come and see us in Lake Placid!” Ben briefly clasped my hand before turning away with an unhappy frown.

Before I could come up with a good response, Tom slapped me on my back and murmured: “Good luck!” and then moved quietly into the woods ahead. Sue, Betsy, and Jimmy mumbled similar words of encouragement, and with a few last pitying looks took off at a run.

Clearly, they thought I was a dead man standing. That I was doomed, stuck between an anvil and a hammer. But I had other ideas.

I crept closer to the clearing and then waited in the shadows for the gars to appear. Despite the imminent danger, the real possibility of dying a messy, horrible death just in a few moments, I felt the excitement bubble in my veins.

This was life.

Running away wasn’t it, of that I was certain. I much preferred being the hunter than the hunted, the predator rather than the prey. I wanted to become the apex predator, powerful enough that even the monsters of this new world were going to be cowed.

Until I achieved that, I was going to use my wits.

When the first gars appeared from out of the darkness, holding the leashes of furiously growling reaver dogs in their massive fists, I made my move.

With a shout, I tossed a fist-sized rock at the first gar, turned around, and dashed toward the clearing with the weyr swarm. For a moment, I thought that I had miscalculated, that somehow those bugs were not what the others had thought.

I could hear the gars and reaver dogs closing in, breaking through the bushes in their pursuit of me. It was a matter of seconds before they would be on me.

And then, finally, the weyr swarm began to move. At first, it was a sound like the humming of a massive bumblebee. But quickly, it turned into a deafening cacophony of humming and buzzing, that drowned out all other noise. All around me, gigantic bugs began to rise into the air and I frantically slashed my arms around to keep them away from my face.

It felt like a nightmare, even worse than with the giant spider – bugs were flying all around me highly agitated, with hard, chitinous bodies bumping into me from all sides.

And then the first weyrs began to attack.

I could see one bug shoot toward the closest reaver dog. In the last split second, it folded in its wings, turned around, and began to rotate at high speeds. And then it hit the scaled hound in the snout and its sharp rear began to drill into the flesh of the whimpering dog. A strike of the reaver dog's clawed paw tore the insect apart, but already a dozen more were buzzing toward the suddenly scared creature.

Not eager to share in its fate, I activated Midnight Skin to hide from the bugs. That was the plan anyway. Granted, not the best plan ever, but I gave it decent odds of succeeding.

Heart hammering in my chest, I stood still, hoping that the insects would just ignore me, would just go after the prey they could clearly see. And indeed, a vast cloud of insects was swirling around, aggressively attacking the gars and reaver dogs on the clearing and in the trees beyond. And none was attacking me.

Until the queen showed up.

Or perhaps it was just a freaking giant mutation. Whatever it was, it looked the same as the other bugs, only that it wasn’t. There was something about it, an aura, that none of the other bugs seemed to have. Looking at it made my legs tremble slightly, despite my best attempt to stay calm. Even just the sound of its wings was of a different quality. It was deep, like a powerful bass, reverberating through the air, almost shaking me physically.

And it went unerringly toward me, multifaceted eyes glinting in the silver moonlight. It clearly was able to see me. And as it got closer, the behavior of the bugs around me changed - whereas before they were flying through the space I was occupying as if they didn’t notice me at all, bumping into me like bugs would sometimes fly against windows, they suddenly… stopped. Or rather, it was as if they were assessing.

A sudden change in intelligence brought about by the queen? Or was it perception? Either way, it spelled trouble.

Not ready to wait for the bugs to attack, I began to construct the same cloud of life drain as I had done once previously in the fight with Du’Andrazzil and the goblins. If I couldn’t hide, I’d fight.

It was hard to hold on to midnight skin, move away from the queen and build the spell simultaneously. But it had to be done. I could not stand still when the queen clearly was aware of me. And the life-draining cloud would take a while to construct.

I wasn’t fast, but at least I moved, and for a few moments, I was hopeful that I’d have enough time. But then the queen suddenly shot toward me, and I desperately slashed at its body with my sword. The bug was fast, but my sword was faster.

But it felt like I was hitting a rock, as my sword simply bounced off the massive layer of chitin of the three-foot-long body of the bug, not even chipping its carapace. At least, it slightly altered the trajectory of the huge weyr, so I was able to dodge the attack.

And then, finally, my spell was online. A dome of black began to surround me, shot through with streaks of amber. The spell was an absolute mana hog, so I wasn’t gonna be able to hold it for long. I figured I had about a minute, perhaps a bit more, before I’d be out of mana. So I had to make that count.

Immediately, the dark dome showed its power. In a two-yard radius around me, it started raining bugs. It didn’t take long for them, only about a second a pop, to be drained of their life. Which was a good thing, because they began to attack me in earnest. Bugs shot toward me, drill turning at high speeds, and some managed to hit me, causing bloody wounds, before they would inevitably expire. Soon, there was a layer of insect bodies all around me, growing higher by the second. Hundreds of bugs died each second, but there were always more.

It felt like a macabre dance, in which the bugs tried to get to me with single-minded determination, tried to drill into me and tear me apart, and even succeeded, as the rivers of blood streaming down my body gave testament to, only to fuel my regeneration with their very life. Or perhaps it wasn’t a dance, but more of a yoyo effect, where the constant swarm of bugs brought down my life perilously, only to be denied their victory by the freakish rate of regeneration that fixed my skin and restored by blood just as quickly as they could harm it.

I would have laughed if not for the pain.

And there was still the queen, lurking at the outside of the range of my spell.

She was waiting.

Those glittering multi-faceted eyes seemed to be studying me, to analyze, all the while throwing away the lives of thousands of her children in that mindless and ultimately futile assault.

We were at an impasse.

At least as long as the queen didn’t attack herself. But, frankly, I’d almost rather that she did. Because if she just waited, I would eventually run out of mana, and then she could send her bugs in to tear me apart.

The problem was that I wasn’t powerful enough to pierce the queen’s chitin armor. Just another indication that I needed to up my strength get some more ‘oomph’. Which left me woefully short of viable options right now.

About fifteen seconds had already passed, which seemed just a moment in some sense, but also had felt like an eternity. I was losing a mana a second of both, amber and black mana, and silver at a slightly lower rate… which meant that I needed to do something.

I could run, but the weyrs were all too willing to branch out and follow their victims, as evident by the ongoing massacre of the gars and reaver dogs in the surrounding woods. Perhaps there was a limit to how far they were going to range… but I couldn’t rely on that. No, something needed to be done about the queen because if I took her out, I might be able to hide with my Midnight Skin...

Which meant that I had to take the initiative.

I grabbed my sword tightly and dashed toward the weyr queen, hoping to catch her by surprise. The bodies of countless bugs crunched under my feet as I made my way closer, waiting for the queen to make a move.

But she didn’t.

She was just sitting there, staring at me. Or perhaps staring at the gars dying around us. I wasn’t entirely sure. Bug eyes are not that obvious. Fucking creepy really.

I didn’t question my luck and smashed my sword right at her body. At the last moment, she suddenly moved backward, neatly evading my stroke. All I got for my effort was a blade covered in mud, as my sword hit the ground with a dull thud right where the queen had just been.

The way the queen had backed away in the last second, seemingly knowing exactly when and where I was going to strike, reminded me of trying to catch a fly with my bare hand. But there is a strategy there… one can predict the movement because flies will always do the same thing. And I bet the queen was doing the same.

So I needed to hit not where she was, but where she was going to be.

And I needed to make that hit count.

Thirty-five seconds left.

I drew red mana into the blade, pushing as hard as I could to speed things up. The red mana felt viscous, slow, pondering as it made its way into the sword.

Why did this fucking take so long?

All the while, dead weyrs were raining around me, pelting me with their stingers or hard bodies, doing their darnedest to distract me.

But I blended it all out.

The constant barrage of attacks, bleeding wounds, dead bugs became part of the background, white noise, something that I clearly noticed, but that ceased to be relevant. All my focus was on drawing red mana into the blade and catching the queen with the one shot I was going to have, while simultaneously keeping the dome of life-drain going.

And then the blade began to glow in a deep red, the heat quite noticeable, even as I held the scorching hot weapon away from my body. I could feel a splitting headache setting in from pushing too hard, but what counted was that it was done. I wasn’t sure it was going to be enough, but it was my only shot. If I couldn’t hack through the creature’s body, maybe I could melt the wings, or fuse some limbs with the heat emitted by the sword.

A desperate measure for sure, but I didn’t have much in terms of choice. Now I regretted that I hadn’t tried to make a run for it. Maybe I would have had a better chance? Too late to worry about it.

About ten seconds left. I needed to make my move.

The weyr queen had edged back out of reach of my life drain and just stood there, almost like she was mocking me.

She knew I was coming for her.

And she fucking didn’t care. Convinced in her invulnerability probably.

Just on a hunch, I activated mana vision.

Immediately, I could see a prodigious amount of yellow mana course through her body, a particularly large quantity accumulating at her antennae.

That fucking bitch was just baiting me… if I had earlier only suspected that the weyr queen was intelligent, I now was absolutely convinced. All that waiting was just a little trap, a fun ploy for a bored sapient insect. The moment I was gonna get close this time, she was going to electrocute me like a giant bug zapper in reverse.

With no time left to reconsider, I decided to spring the trap and make things work somehow. In fact, it might just give me an out, where my situation had seemed hopeless…

As I got closer, little sparks began to fly between the antennae, and I could see the build-up of the deadly power. Any moment, she was going to let go and fry me to death.

I needed to time this perfectly.

The moment the mana began to rise out of the antennae, I lunged forward, sword stretched out as far as I could while drawing all my remaining silver mana down into my arm. I knew that it meant that my life-drain was going to stop, but I needed something to stop the lightning. And I had learned earlier, in the dungeon, that silver mana could neutralize magical power.

So I was putting everything on this one bet.

I coated my hand with the silver mana and touched the weyr queen right before the giant lightning exploded out of her antennae. And instead of racing into my body, rendering me a spasmodic, smoking ruin, the lightning hit the sword and coursed into everything that touched the metal.

The force was such that it overpowered my silver mana barrier, causing my arm to cramp, and my body to shake. But the bulk of it, an amount of energy like from a high-voltage power line, went the path of least resistance… which was along the glowing blade and straight into the body of the giant bug.

The effect was spectacular.

Lightning danced all over its carapace, shooting down its legs into the ground. Its eyes literally exploded into hundreds of little fragments, and smoke began to curl up from its fried chitin body.

For a moment, there was quiet. The buzzing had completely died down.

But then, it was as if a hurricane of noise slammed into my ears. Millions of bugs fell into a frenzy, attacking everything around them, including each other.

And I was in the fucking middle of it.

Immediately, I dropped myself to the ground, next to the burned body of the queen, and covered myself in Midnight Skin.

I just had to survive somehow until the bugs calmed down. Maybe, I could then make my way out of this.

Mostly, the weyrs ignored me, clearly unable to see me, and not smart enough to figure out that I had to be there. But some bounced into me by accident, and others seemed to somehow become aware of me through different senses, perhaps smell, or maybe they perceived my breathing, through the noise, or the moisture...

But I was able to hack them to pieces or stomp on them before they could seriously wound me. Quasi-invisibility was a massive boon for that.

And then, finally, the hubbub died down. The weyrs settled onto the ground, all around me, blanketing the area in a solid layer of bugs. Despite having killed maybe forty or fifty thousand of them, and another hundred thousand had died in the brief frenzy that had hit them after the death of the queen, it felt like that had been a drop in the bucket.

Most of the weyrs were standing still, resting, or just doing whatever it is that bug might do if they don’t move. But not too far from me, a few hundred of them were milling around, climbing on top of each other, burrowing down, or just wiggling their bodies in an ever-faster frequency. And more joined - soon it was a thousand or more weyrs.

And then, somehow, they began to fuse. Instead of hundreds, no thousands of separate bodies, it became… one.

Shit!

I had a bad feeling about this.

Slowly, I pushed my way through the bugs, careful to not disturb them overly much and draw attention to myself. It was inevitable that I smushed a few under my foot, but since the other bugs couldn’t see me, it didn’t cause more than a stir.

A good thing, too, because I seriously needed to get away. I had no idea what those bugs were doing there, but it surely wasn’t anything good. My hunch was that this is how they formed their queens. And I sure as hell, didn’t want to face another one.

Plus, I was slowly running out of mana. I had already completely drained my silver, red, and amber mana reserves and was getting low on black mana as well. And once that happened, I was truly fucked.

At least, I was able to make my way direction Lake Placid, not back to where the gars had come from.

Small blessings.