33

Chaos.

That was the only word that came to Hunter’s mind later, when he tried to make heads or tails of what had gone down.

Six or seven low-dwellers appeared out of the dark and went straight for Fawkes, their feral instinct driving them to flank and swarm her. She gave the low-ogre one last wicked slash with her blade, severing tendons and crippling it, and ducked out of the fray and into a side-passage. Blood-crazed and intent on tearing her apart, the low-dwellers followed.

Injured, ham-strung, and viciously held in place by the wild-eyed tempest of fur and fury that was Fyodor, the low-ogre was now little more than target practice for the Brethren, who pumped it full of arrows. Biggs and Wedge had done their part, too. They had drained every last drop of their mana to pepper the hulk with their curse abilities, and were now simply fluttering about and cawing like mad, risking to catch a stray arrow but still too excited to land.

Hunter, on the other hand, was barely standing. Well, not even that, technically–he was sprawled on the cold stone floor like the world’s saddest sack of potatoes, broken and bleeding. As the fight’s surge of adrenaline was beginning to fade, pain began to settle in every single one of his bones. This was getting old, he thought. Still, he had the presence of mind to realize he couldn’t just lie there. One throng of low-dwellers had found them; another could be well on its way to barge in and eat his face–possibly more. He had to pull himself up by the bootstraps, agonizing pain be damned.

A few feet away, the low-ogre finally fell. One of the Brethren’s arrows found its way through one of the hulk’s tiny eyes and lodged itself deep in its skull, putting an instant end to all the thrashing and fighting. The low-ogre left one final bloodcurdling growl, then fell on its side with a big thump, dead. Beyond it, Hunter saw Fawkes and the low-dwellers. She had lured them away and was now dancing her bloody waltz, weaving in and out of reach, slashing and stabbing at their blotched flesh with every chance she got. They were too many, however, even for her. A single misstep would be enough for them to grab her and gang up on her, and then even her deadly spirals wouldn’t be enough to keep her in one piece.

This was an all-or-nothing kind of situation, Hunter realized; the mother of all go-big-or-go-home moments. The choice was obvious. He bit the proverbial bullet, screamed through the blood and the pain, and got back up on his feet. His glaive was still stuck in the now-dead low-ogre’s chest. He grabbed the shaft with both hands, put a foot on the hulk’s torso to give himself some leverage, and pulled. It took almost all he had left, but the weapon finally came free.

“Come on, boy,” he told Fyodor, who was still clinging to the low-ogre leg for good measure. “Let’s go give the old bat a hand.”

He screamed at the top of his lungs and charged at the low-dwellers, and the direwolf followed. They struck at the things from behind, and not a moment too soon; Fawkes was still fighting like a she-devil, but all the exertion from trying to stay one step ahead of half a dozen of uglies at the same time was beginning to take its toll. Fyodor crashed on one of the low-dwellers, catching it by surprise and dropping it on its back. Hunter followed up, plunging the blade of his glaive down the thing’s throat.

Coup-de-grace! You attack the Low-Dweller for 63 piercing damage.

Another solid hit, Hunter thought with grim satisfaction as he felt his glaive quiver with the low-dweller’s death throes. Yeah, these big damage numbers were something he could definitely get used to. Why whittle away at an enemy’s health when you can turn them into a goddamn dead meat kabob with a single strike in the mid-high double digits?

Fyodor moved on to the next low-dwellers, grabbing it by the ankle as it was about to leap and causing it to fall on its ugly face. Hunter moved in to deliver another coup-de-grace, but was cut short and had to dodge to the side instead when one of the other low-dwellers turned around and pounced on him. Hunter didn’t mind that one bit; drawing the monsters’ attention to himself meant it also drew it away from Fawkes.

Fawkes, of course, being Fawkes, wasn’t about to miss any opportunity. She did a pirouette to dodge a snarling low-dweller, then stabbed the ugly that had turned away from through the back of its head. For a moment, Hunter thought he saw the tip of her blade stick out of its mouth, drenched in dark blood. Then she kicked the now-dead-as-a-doornail low-dweller in the back, pulled her blade out of its skull, and resumed her deadly dance, looking for another to put out of its misery.

With more-or-less half of the low-dwellers down, the rest of the fight was short and brutal. Hunter and Fyodor pulled their one-two coup-de-grace combo a couple times more, Fawkes slit some more throats, and they were the only ones left standing, panting and struggling to catch their breath among a small, stinky sea of dead low-dweller flesh and blood.

“You okay?” asked Fawkes.

“Who, me?” said Hunter, and spat another mouthful of blood. “Fuckin’ A.”

And then, quite predictably, proceeded to collapse.

***

The first thing Hunter felt was hot direwolf breath on his face, and the first thing he thought was how lucky he was his nose was too busted to smell it. Then he opened his eyes, and the first think he saw–not counting Fyodor’s wet, furry snout uncomfortably close to his face–was six Kannewik mummies dancing around what looked like a needlessly ornate coat rack, illuminated by torchlight.

“What…?” he began to say, but the words never got past his dry and sore throat.

“Oh, look who’s finally coming to it,” he heard Fawkes say. “About time, too.”

Hunter pushed Fyodor’s all-too-happy-to-see-him-face away and tried to sit up, but half a dozen of his ribs weren’t exactly feeling up to the task. Someone had removed his poncho and tunic, had rubbed his chest with reddish paste–Trollblood Salve, probably–bandaged him up, and finger-painted a series of mystical-looking geometric shapes and symbols. They also had plugged his nostrils and set back the bone and cartilage of his broken nose back to its proper position–or, at least, something reasonably close to it, he hoped. The bleeding had stopped, but the center of his face still felt like a massive hot mess of volcanic rock.

“Do not move,” Sister Peregrine told him and gave him a sip of a strangely metallic-tasting liquid from a waterskin. “You’re still very hurt.”

“Ughh… Where are we?”

“Sister Peregrine graciously opened a vault for us to safely hide and rest for a bit, after you went and got beaten halfway to death,” said Fawkes. “Which, may I add, wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t ignored you own plan.”

“What was I supposed to do, let the low-ogre beat the mutt into a pulp?”

“You shouldn’t have brought the mutt in here in the first place. Never mind that now, though. Low-ogre–is that what you called that thing?”

“Yes, that’s what the combat log said.”

“The what?” Fawkes asked, puzzled.

“Nothing, just Transient mag-,” Hunter started to say, but realized that the Brethren were there too, listening.

“Do not worry,” Sister Peregrine butted in. “We know. Your friend told us.”

“She did?”

“Yes,” said Fawkes. “In the spirit of mutual trust and camaraderie. The Brethren here were explaining to me the true nature of the low-dwellers–or the Misbegotten, as they call them. As it turns out, they’re no simple monsters. They were the creations of some ancient flesh-witch from beyond the sea, made to be her soldiers and servants. An enemy of the Kor.”

“And what about the ones in the Weald?”

“Some of them must have escaped,” Fawkes shrugged, “And then they became part of the–what do they call it? Ah, yes. The fauna.”

“Fascinating,” Hunter groaned and absentmindedly scratched Fyodor’s massive head behind the ears. “So, what now?”

“We rest and recover,” said Sister Peregrine. “Even at night, we shall remain safe in here. Come morrow, we continue.”

Even bandaged up and basted with Fawkes’s Trollblood Salve, Hunter still found the pain barely manageable. Judging from the aftermath of the fight with the giant spider–which had occurred just the previous day, he realized–the salve’s regenerating power worked fast, and continued to work even while he was offline. And if there ever was a time to go offline, it was now.

“Hey, Fawkes” he said, grimacing from the pain of a dozen injuries. “Since the cat is out of the bag and all, mind if I go back to my side of things for the night?”

Fawkes gave it some thought, then nodded.

“If you have to. Don’t be too late to return, though. The sooner we’re out of here, the better.” She looked at the direwolf, who was looking at Hunter with pure adoration. “Plus, the mutt gets restless when you’re away.”