"God fucking damnit!" Kurt screamed as he turned back on his seat, and suddenly grew aware of the shadow that had been cast on the car's front seats. There was something blocking the windshield, and Kurt couldn't tell what, as the details were covered by the sudden darkness. More on instinct than anything else, he brough his foot down on the brake, and the screeching of tires immediately filled his ears.

  The car slid forward about a dozen feet before it stopped, only for the thing that was covering the windshield to slid off the hood and fall to the ground. And then, after those few seconds of chaos, there was silence.

  "What was that?" Kurt asked, his voice unnervingly calm. He turned to his copilot. "Conrad, what the hell was that?"

  "Animal," Conrad said, still looking forward. "Something big and red and furry. It just... holy shit, man. It appeared out of nowhere! It literally fell upon us! I didn't see it until the last second, man!"

  "Okay," Kurt said, returning his attention to the car's windshield which, Kurt just realized, was cracked all over. Not enough to impair visibility, but it was still clearly one blow away from collapsing. "Here's what's gonna happen: I'm going to pull the car back, we are gonna get a good look at that thing, and then, and only then, we are going to decide what we do. And whatever it is that we do, we are doing it as a group, no more splitting like last time, okay?"

  "Yeah," said Conrad, nodding slightly.

  "Fine by me," Mila murmured.

  Letting out a sigh, Kurt reached for the gear lever, quickly switching it to R. "Okay then, here we go."

  And with that, he brought his foot down on the gas pedal. The car's engine roared back to life, and the vehicle began its slow, careful way backwards.

  They made it three feet before the crimson light came.

  It was as if someone had taken the color of fresh blood and turned it into a hue, and it was emanating from somewhere below the line of the hood. When the growls came, it became even more obvious what its source was.

  "Fuck!" Kurt sharply muttered, before he pressed down on the pedal with all his strength, causing the engine to roar even louder than before. It made no difference. Suddenly, the light shifted, and both the feeling of an impact and the sound of metal being torn apart reached Kurt.

  The light began shinning brighter, and the agonizing sounds coming from the car's bumper intensified, and it was then that Kurt noticed something; the view through the windshield was changing. The car's ceiling was devouring more and more of the blue horizon, and more and more of the grey, sun-bleached road was being revealed, until it was all that was visible through the windshield.

  Suddenly, Kurt grew extremely aware of the pressure his safety belt was putting on his chest.

  There was no time for words or plans, so Kurt simply conjured his wand, which immediately exploded with green hues, and casted the biggest Air Cushion he could in the meager instants he had. He felt more than saw his aether being depleted, a full fifth of it gone in mere moments. As his happened though, Kurt also felt the ever growing mass of semisolid air fill the entirety of the car, covering both himself and his friends in what was essentially ballistic gel. Just in time for the fall too.

  Another burst of motion, a mutted cacophony of rent metal, and then the car was back on the ground, flipped over its head like an overturned turtle. Kurt didn't feel the impact of the fall though, the solid air covering him having done an excellent job absorbing and disspersing it.

  Kurt waved his wand once, and the cushion dissipated, letting the sounds of the world through once again. He took in a deep breath, and heard as both Mila and Conrad did the same, their steadyig breath coming with more than a few coughs, no doubt due to trying to breath in the air they hadn't know was now anything but gaseous.

  Kurt's eyes went to the (somehow still intact) rearview mirror, and saw Mila through it. Her eyes were pressed shut, and her face was scrunched in pain. Her hands were covering everything below her nose, and when she pulled one of them aside, Kurt could see that its palm was covered in red.

  Kurt took a couple seconds to process the image before and besides him, and once he had done so, a terrible heat rose to his face. It was an anger unlike anything he had ever felt, greater and more terrible than anything Melalo or that sorceress had managed to elicit, and it had come with frightening quickness.

  Not again, he thought to himself. It wasn't a plead or a prayer though. It was a promise to himself.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  This shit isn't going to be like what happened in that godforsaken forest.

  Kurt conjured his wand in an instant and, before his companions could react, he cast four spells: One Air Cushion beneath Conrad and other for Mila, and two quick Wind Blades that severed both their seatbelts, causing them to fall on the cushions. Then, he brough a hand covered in od-flares to his own seatbelt, and ripped the thing like wet tissue paper.

  He fell himself fall for an instant before he brough that same hand down on the car's ceiling, halting his descent. His other hand went for his inventory, and procured his sword from it, sheath and all.

  "Stay here. I'll deal with it," Kurt said, letting the od-flares extend throughout his entire body. A flick of the wrist then sent him in a sideways flip right through the car's door, and onto the world outside. He unsheathed his sword, and threw the scabbard back in his inventory, and then his eyes went to the car's front.

  A thick colum of smoke was emanating from within it, and there was no sign of that crimson light. But Kurt knew that the thing that had done it was still there. Rolling to his side again, away from the car, Kurt got a better perspective of the thing that had done this.

  It was, indeed, big and red and furry, all in a wolf shaped package. The thing was huge, as tall at the shoulder as Kurt's lower chest. If the thing was supposed to be a mexican wolf, the only wolf species native to Arizona, and the smallest in the USA, that size was doubly mind-blowing. The beast was looking away from Kurt, with its snout scratching the asphalt.

  As silently as he could, and still in a deep crouch, Kurt approached it, half-eyeing the screen above its head as he did so.

  Alfa Direwolf

  LV: 40

  And once again, for the third time in a fucking row, their current predicament could be traced back to the fuckers that they were tasked with locating. Feeling at the end of his rope, and desperate to just carve this oversized mutt those Red Horn cultist had created and most likely sent up, Kurt rose to his full height, and used his sword to pierce one of the car's wheels, drawing both a hissing sound and the thing's attention.

  The wolf turned slowly, and not in a measured way either, but rather in a weak, sickly manner reminiscent of a very old dog. When Kurt took a good look at the thing's face, he realized just how apt the comparasion really was. It was the whimpers that reached him first. They were weak, out of breath huffs of air, of the gut wrenching kind only a very injured, very scared dog could make. The next thing he saw was the blood that covered the left half of the wolf's face, red and brilliant even when contrasted with his fur.

  And the final thing he took notice of? The black, almost varicose looking veins that stretched across the poor thing's face like cobwebs, which seemed to emanate from its neck.

  The wolf tried to growl at him, tried to look intimidating, but it failed on both regards, for what came out its jaw was a pained, out of breath whimper that did nothing but purge all rage from Kurt's heart, replacing it with a deep sense of sorrow and empathy for the creature before him.

  "Oh my god," he said, lowering his sword until the tip was pressed against the road. He then approached the animal, dragging his sword behind while showing the palm of his free hand in a reasuring manner. "What did this to you?"

  The wolf obviously didn't answer in any verbal manner. Its response came in the form of yet another failed attemp at a growl, which managed to be even more gut wrenching that the last, and a limping approach. Every step the creature gave was uneven, and came accompanied by random bouts of trembling that were almost seizure-like, and which spoke of the pain it was feeling better than any word of any language could have.

  "Hey, it's okay," Kurt said hurriedly at the display. He the tossed his sword away, and dropped on one knee so that both the wolf and him were on the same eye level, keeping one hand outstretched. He was aware, in a detached way, of the recklessnes of his actions. Pitiful or not, this was a creature with the raw might required to flip a car over-something that Kurt was rather sure even he could not do in his current state- and that was quite agitated and frightened, a perfect state of mind to start chomping on anything that got close to him. Just like the hand Kurt was more or less offering it.

  And yet... he could not bring himself to do anything else. The idea of showing any further hostility at this wounded creature, at this pitiful animal that had so clearly been through a hellish experience already... he could not bear to do it. He would rather be a one handed fool than the kind of person capable of such cruelty.

  The wolf reached for Kurt's hand with his snout, craning his neck to reach it even as the trembling began spreading throughout its body. Its poked at Kurt's palm once, and then the trembling became too much, and the creature fell limply on the grey asphalt.

  "Shit," Kurt said, feeling a cold dread spread through his body. Before his brain could so much a issue the order, his body moved, and he found himself knelt right besides the creature's body, and holding his head up with both arms, cradling it as if it were a newborn.

  He brought his hand to the wolf's coal black snout. After a few terrible seconds, Kurt felt a warm, wet breath pull out his nostrils, followed by a weak intake of air that he found himself matching with a relieved sigh.

  The rapid transitions between shock, rage, sorrow, dread and relief had drained him emotionally, and so he let himself fall into a state where all that existed were the feeling of breathing, both his and the wolf's, and the sensation of the creature's soft fur.

  It was the sound of a door being opened that pulled him out of his trance.

  "Holy shit, man," came Conrad's voice. Kurt turned to it and found both him and Mila standing besides the car's wrecage, looking at him with concern.

  "Kurt?" Mila calleed. She was still covering her nose with one hand, and the blood had begun to peek from the spaces between her fingers. "What happened?"

  "Something hurt it," he said, his attention going back and forth between the creature and his friends. "Something attacked it, and... oh god, it must have been running away when we hit him."

  " 'We hit him?' " Conrad asked incredulously. "Dude, it jumped right into our car's hood! And then it rammed its fucking head through the bumper and into the engine, and flipped the whole thing over!"

  "I know!" Kurt seezed. His hand had gone to pet the creature all on its own. "Look... I know all that, okay? I do, but... the poor thing must have been panicking, acting on instinct. Just look at this." With that, Kurt leaned away from the wolf, letting the wound on its neck to show. As soon as they saw it, both Mila and Conrad gasped in horror. "Something did this to him, and I don't know..."

  Something moved to their left. The sound of a rock rolling down the hill suddenly became all that the trio could hear, and the implication of it was clar on their minds. They turned towards it, and saw a figure standing atop the hill, watching them impassively.

  The rising sun was shinning on its back, macking a silhouette all they could make out of it, but even that was enough to see what was before them, as clear as if they were but a foot apart from it.