The Forest of the Grey Wolves, its understory resonating with the growls, howls, and panicked screams.

The ambush had begun.

Every now and then, the forest dark would be illuminated by the flash of a spell, revealing, moments before the foolish caster was brought down, a swarm of wolves as dense and numerous as the leaves matting the forest floor.

At the monsters' first strike, the high-level players carrying torches had been swarmed, plunging the humans into the darkness where the wolves' keener senses of smell and hearing reigned. Within the seconds, the commander was dead, swallowed in one bite by The Wolf Emperor. Decapitated, the battalion broke. It scattered in all directions, every man, woman, and child for themselves, the packs making no discrimination as they hunted and devoured all.

Amongst the less-doomed humans, with the foresight or fortuity to flee towards the fortress, there was a somewhat wacky sight of a wolf gliding along with its feet never touching the ground. At times, the wolf would howl for help from its kin. At others, it would try to twist around and snap at something lifting it up by the scruff of its neck.

At that moment, the hand holding the struggling beast phased into view, along with the rest of the person transporting the wolf.

"Shit!" Syphiliticbuttercup—one of someone's hired Cutthroats—swore when the invisibility spell wore off.

Luckily, ahead of her, the forest was beginning to brighten, moonlight from a clearing making more visible the silhouettes of trees and wolves and other runners. She’d almost arrived at the fortress. She was almost out of danger.

As though hearing her thoughts and determined to prove her wrong, all the wolves nearby suddenly dropped their targets to focus their attacks on her.

Paying them no heed, she fixed her gaze on a Qi Master about to break out into the clearing. Her hands curled into a spell gesture.

is on cooldown for 8.7 more seconds.

“Oh, fuck me right in the arse!”

The wolf she'd taken hostage, hearing her frustration, howled with joy.

The Cutthroat's hand formed another shape, and, at once, dozens of red laser beams seemed to sprout from her body, each one leading back to the nose of a wolf converging her.

These didn’t do any damage. The beams were merely visual aids provided by the Cutthroat ability, , which allowed one to see the trajectory of nearby attacks.

With the sheer number focused on her now, dodging as she was would be impossible. For this predicament, though, there was a solution.

Her eyes began to glow the shade of yellow of the flower in her username.

Around Syphilliticbuttercup, the sound of the growls deepened and distorted. As the wolves leapt at her and stretched open their slobbering maws, their actions suddenly slowed, decelerating to the pace of a morphine-addicted tortoise.

She'd activated bullet-time!

This was one application of , a basic ability learned by all players at the end of the tutorial, which consumed a unique resource of the same name and governed by the Tech stat. Its general purpose was to enhance one’s perception and allow one to achieve inhuman feats of dexterity. Like , its usage was flexible, ranging from slowing time to aim correction. As long as existed, all the soft, uncoordinated people of 2050, be they paper-pushing salarymen or pram-pushing housewives, could fulfil their greatest inner dream of being an anime protagonist with lightning-fast reflexes slicing arrows in half and doing backflips. At least, for a couple of seconds.

With the wolves moving in slow-mo, Syphiliticbuttercup had no trouble evading their attacks. Two pups flying through the air, unable to halt their momentum, butted heads and kissed teeth. Another was pushed aside by its nose with her fingertip.

As the Cutthroat slipped forward, the attack projection beams swivelled to follow her movements, which to the wolves were like a blur.

Maintaining a sort of mambo, she continued to monitor the Qi Master running ahead. When the cooldown of refreshed, she formed the corresponding hand gesture.

The world returning to its regular pace, five wolves snapped at the spot where she’d been standing, only to fill their mouths with smoke.

Instantly, her body reformed, unnoticed, behind the Qi Master, and she was out of the forest dark and into the moonlight.

Surprisingly, in the brief time since she'd left the fortress, the clearing around it had been extended at least a hundred metres from the fort. Additionally, a wall had been built around the fort, made of stacked trees.

In the tree wall, there was a single opening, which was being guarded by a platoon of Villagers from her Kingdom that’d arrived before her, Syphiliticbuttercup having taken an indirect route to evade the Wolf Emperor’s tracking.

The platoon were firing at any wolves that dared approach, turning the clearing into a safe zone for the runners.

In the open, the Cutthroat felt herself relaxing, the primal terror of being hounded in the dark fading.

Saana was far too immersive at times...

A member of the platoon, a friend of hers, stared at the wolf struggling in her hand with bewilderment.

Right then, a voice rang in her ears.

-Bob From San Francisco: Toss it forward, now!

Syphiliticbuttercup, a trained member of the Crimson Lions, responded fast and without thought. Leaping, she pushed the wolf forward, sending it flying.

As her mind followed up to question the odd command, she heard a rapid, heavy thumping behind her.

Very close behind.

Too close.

Her friend in the platoon pointed behind her. “Buttercup, watch out!”

The Cutthroat turned, and her vision was filled with royal-blue of the wolf's fur, with the white of its spreading teeth, with the pink of its approaching mouth, with the blackness of its throat.

SNAP!

The Wolf Emperor—large as a house, its head adorned with a crown of royal canines—raised its gigantic face, a muffled scream quaking in its jaw, and swallowed the girl whole.

BOOM!

Simultaneous with the Cutthroat's demise, the hostage wolf she'd tossed, before it'd even landed, was vaporised by a bolt of lightning descending from above.

14 wolves out of 15.

The Wolf Emperor, with the Cutthroat’s soul motes scattering from its mouth, studied the walls of the fort, which were lined by shirtless humans wielding wooden spears. A pair of round monkey ears ducked below a parapet, escaping his imperial gaze.

Henry, after nuking the hostage wolf, ducked, closed an eye, and brought up his Mental Library interface to continue reviewing a flowchart of his game plan.

With that Cutthroat having fallen, only one remained out there on delivery duty for the final wolf. The rest of the dozen had been hunted down one by one by the over-sized wolf and its minions. Henry had no confidence that the last would make it back alive.

But this possibility of the Cutthroats failing had been accounted for in his plans. Branching from this eventuality were two main options: one, give up and leave; two, delay his departure until the wolf army started to siege the fort and use the disorder of the attack to collect the last. A third option existed to help the Villagers slay the over-sized wolf, but he felt that this would be tantamount to falling in-line with the Imbahalaala’s nefarious schemes.

In the end, he chose the second option of delaying a bit. Its major weakness was that when the wolves attacked, escaping undetected would become considerably more challenging. However, previously, after he’d noticed the Wolf Emperor singling out the Cutthroats, he’d modified the fort to make this option more viable - like the tree wall he'd built by tearing up the nearby forest.

-Syphiliticbuttercup (Dead): Oh. My. God. Why didn’t you warn me?

-Bob From San Franciso: You lacked the cooldowns to escape either way.

-Icetornadodeath (Dead): HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

-Liam The Insomniac (Dead): Another one…

-32Darkzealot32 (Dead): Who’s left?

-Elephant Skylight: Me. I’m pretty—fuck! Fuck! Fucking fuck!

-Icetornadodeath (Dead): ???

-Elephant Skylight: Ran into a tree, broke stealth, been found.

Henry, his last Cutthroat spotted, their death imminent, sighed.

What awful 'timing'...

He peeked back over the parapet. In the clearing, the over-sized, royal-blue monster was dodging projectiles as it fled to escape.

What Henry was watching out for was any sign that the Wolf Emperor had learned of the Cutthroat’s location as well, such as a shift towards their direction.

While Henry’d been orchestrating the movements of the Cutthroats, he’d noticed them being tracked down far too easily. From this, he'd deduced that the Wolf Emperor had a method to communicate with its underlings over vast distances, perhaps by a crude howling relay, or perhaps by group telepathy, akin to what players used.

It was important to discover the exact method, as each imposed unique constraints on Henry’s range of responses. Based on the efficiency of the Wolf Emperor’s hunting, the latter method, telepathy, seemed most probable. This would also fall in line with the game’s lore, if one viewed the telepathy as an evolution of the Grey Wolves’ basic ability, . However, if this were the case, Syphiliticbuttercup should not have been able to arrive here without her hostage betraying her location.

Something was missing.

In the clearing, the Wolf Emperor came to a stop as it moved out of the defenders' attack range. Towards the fort, it then flicked its nose and emitted a smug click.

"Tut, tut, Tyrant.

'Follow the trail of puppy thieves,

To find Wisguh the coward king,

Guarded by soldiers, shrub, and soil,

With vain plans to stay unspoilt.'

"O timid mouse, thou hast been found as easily as thy delicious servants, whose enshadowed steps have not once eluded the collective awareness of the wolves. Awaitest my return anon. The belly demandeth the last of thy stealthy snacks!"

Henry, hearing the wolf’s verbose taunt and explicit mention of his main nickname, frowned.

Well, there was the missing piece: terrible, unfair quest design, where a prophetic shadow demon just showed one side the other's every single move in advance.

And The Wolf Emperor had group telepathy…maybe…

The revelation aligning perfectly with his suspicions was a bit too convenient. Most likely, the situation was being engineered to make him discover this fact and adjust his behaviour accordingly. Perhaps it was a false lead created by The Great Black One, distracting him from the Wolf Emperor’s true method. The phrase, ‘collective awareness’, was somewhat ambiguous. It could mean a mental connection with the trees owned by the wolves, this being The Forest of The Grey Wolves. Should Henry ignore this new information, then? But maybe making him ignore it was the real trap?

Sigh.

Dealing with an enemy that could read the future created too many layers.

Maybe, it was time to finally throw in the towel.

But maybe the Imbahalaala wanted him to throw in the towel, to succumb to defeatism? Maybe it needed him to forfeit the shreds of control that he did have?

One could infer, at least, that The Great Black One's powers were not limitless. For example, it couldn’t open warp-portals willy-nilly; otherwise, he and the big bad wolf would have been teleported into an arena to duke it out somewhere right off the bat. Or maybe, it did have this ability and had merely refrained from using it as part of its deeper strategy.

What a headache…

Should he just start flipping coins?