“The link is broken!” Almir shouted. “It’s up to us to finish them off.”

  "Right!" Heron yelled back, his body full of adrenaline.

  He didn't wait for the beast to recover. Gripping his sword with intensity, Heron charged the nearest Ulv. The creature, still shaking its head from the psychic backlash, barely had time to snarl before Heron drove his blade through its ribs. There was a wet crunch, a sharp cry, and the ulv slumped dead against the mud.

  Nearby, Almir was a whirlwind of violence, keeping two snapping ulvs at bay with wide, sweeping arcs of his sledgehammer.

  Above them, on the slick surface of the boulder, Alessia stood her ground against the Alpha. The massive beast was hideous now. Half its face was scorched, and some of its fur was smoking, but it was still moving. With a guttural roar, it charged her.

  Alessia swung Richard’s sword in a desperate, horizontal arc. The blade grazed the Alpha’s flank, drawing a line of black blood, but the sheer mass of the creature carried it past her. She wasn’t its target. The creature perceived the fighters below as more problematic.

  It leaped from the rock, extending its claws, aiming directly for Almir’s exposed back.

  Almir had just brought his hammer down, crushing the skull of one of his attackers with a sickening thud.

  "Almir, look out!" Heron yelled. His body was already moving to intercept the beast. He threw himself into the path of the falling monster. He planted his feet in the grime and thrust his sword upward just as the Alpha descended.

  He stabbed in mid-air. The blade pierced the beast’s chest, burying itself to the hilt. But the Alpha’s momentum was too great. The massive weight slammed into Heron like a falling tree, driving the air from his lungs and pinning him violently into the mud beneath the crushing bulk of the corpse.

  The weight on his chest was starting to crush him, and he was running out of breath. Heron gasped, his lungs fought to expand against the dead mass of the Alpha. He shoved at the beast's flank, his boots slipping in the mud, but the creature wouldn't budge.

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  Desperate, his hand scrabbled for purchase and found the cold, spiraled surface of the horn. It was thick enough to act as a pulley to roll the carcass over.

  "Just... move," he gritted out, clenching his fingers around the bone.

  The forest vanished. There was no sound, no pain, no weight. Even the sensation of his own body seemed to dissolve into static. Heron blinked, or thought he did, but his eyelids didn't seem to exist anymore. The sky, the trees, the mud, all of it was gone, replaced by an absolute, suffocating void of pitch black.

  Then the world reconstructed itself, but it was wrong. Glowing lines erupted from the darkness, tracing the ground's topography in white waves. The trees became wireframes, their trunks defined by concentric rings of pale luminescence that floated in the void. It looked like a topographical map drawn in light, stripped of all texture and color, leaving only the raw geometry of the terrain. Heron tried to look at his hands, but he couldn't find them. He was just a point of consciousness suspended in the dark. He could still tell there was a similarity in the shapes in this place and where he had lain just moments ago.

  Then he saw a figure standing a few meters away. It wasn't Almir, not exactly. It was a silhouette defined by the distortion of its lines. Where the sledgehammer had struck the ground, the mathematical precision of the contours shattered into a chaotic, swirling haze. A miasma of energy clung to the figure, glowing with a radiant intensity that pulsed in time with a heartbeat Heron couldn't hear.

  What is this? Heron thought, though the words didn't echo. Where am I?

  He tried to pull his mind back from the abyss, but he had no muscles to flex. He could only watch the glowing shape of Almir standing amidst the decaying miasma of the crystal blast.

  Then the shape drifted closer. Another shape joined it soon. This one was a different color: a sharp, violent red that bled into the monochrome void. It was the first real color he had seen.

  Time lost its meaning. What might have been seconds stretched into days. Then, a third color bloomed. It was a pink radiance that overwhelmed the darkness, drowning out the stark lines.

  “Heron, do you see me?” A murmur echoed.

  “I can see movement of his pupils.” Murmur continued. “But he is not out of it yet.”

  Gasp.

  Heron jumped out, hitting his head into the wooden slat of the bunk above him. Before he realized what was going on, arms wrapped tight around him.

  “Thank the creators, you are awake,” Lucia breathed with relief.