Mid-afternoon sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees as we carefully walked further into the forest, rifles in hand, extra magazines on our belts. Kian moved beside me on my left, rifle aimed downwards, eyes fixed on the trees. Carmen was on my right, moving easily with her rifle butt held to her shoulder, the muzzle slightly raised as she scanned the forest ahead. She’d taken the [Improved Sight] like Professor Dawn had suggested. Charlotte walked on Kian’s other side, hand on his shoulder, her rifle hanging by her side. Kaelyn was on Carmen’s right, knife in hand, walking among the trees like a shadow.

  A soft breeze passed through the woods, fluttering the loose foliage on the densely packed trees. Brambles and weeds tugged at our feet as we walked across the spongy forest floor. It was quiet. We’d barely seen an animal in the undergrowth or the rustle of branches. No squirrels or mice or hedgehogs. The small types of critters typical of woods. We hadn’t found any of the bigger kinds either. Bears, or foxes, or wolves. It was as if even the animals knew to steer clear of this place.

  I glanced over to the left of Charlotte, where Captain Davies and his team were twenty or so metres away, sweeping the forest floor, brushing past overgrown weeds. More soldiers, over a hundred of them, flanked beyond on either side of us, all walking slow and steady through the undergrowth.

  There were more soldiers almost two miles behind us, outside the edge of the forest in the armoured vehicles and two tanks we’d brought, but they held their positions, as the rest of us had entered on foot. The trees were too big and too close together to let any vehicles through. Davies would communicate with them on the radio from time to time to let them know we’re good.

  “Hold,” Charlotte whispered into the silence. We stopped immediately. Kaelyn raised a closed fist and I watched as the squad twenty metres to our right stopped as well, the soldier furthest away raising their fist. The signal passed the whole way down the line, fist up, heads turned, stop, as the line came to a halt as one.

  Captain Davies started walking towards us. “One of the teams towards the end found something. You want to come along?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  The others stayed behind as I followed Captain Davies across several of the five-man squads, each twenty metres away from the others, until we came to one squad close to the end of the line. Its members were huddled around something on the floor.

  The soldiers stepped back as we approached, their faces grim and concerned. A military backpack lay half-buried under fallen leaves, its straps torn and bloodied. Nearby, an arm severed at the shoulder gripped a rifle, finger still pressed against the trigger, blood spattered across the green undergrowth. There was no body, however. Just a trail of blood that led further into the forest.

  Davies ran a hand through his trimmed beard as he knelt down by the arm, studying the cut at the shoulder.

  “Maybe a bear. Or a wolf. It looks torn off.” He turned his eyes to the trail of blood, following it until it disappeared into the undergrowth and trees ahead. “Maybe dragged the body off for a meal?”

  He turned to one of the soldiers. “Go down the line and get the others to come tighter in. We’ll move in rows of twenty, five metres between rows.”

  The soldier did as he was told and a few minutes later, all the teams were in position as requested. Two soldiers had been tasked with taking the arm and the backpack back to the vehicles, whilst the rest of us followed the blood trail further in. Captain Davies’ squad and my team were at the front, six rows of soldiers behind us.

  I channelled mana into a new construct I had been working on – a variation of my [Time Circle]. I called it [Time Barrier]. It worked in much the same way, a circle of anchors designed to slow anything down that were trapped by it, but instead of needing to place it elsewhere, the [Time Barrier] was anchored to my position. A half-circle flared out ahead of me, roughly fifty metres across. Should anything approach, it would trigger the effect, and I’d know where it was.

  We stalked through the forest slowly, watching the trail of blood as it wound its way beside the trees. Some of those trees had slash marks on their barks, the odd branch or two snapped as if something large had forced its way through. We pushed on, walking deeper into the forest, the undergrowth crunching softly beneath our precise steps.

  After we had been walking for ten minutes or so, still following that trail of blood, Carmen whispered at my side. “We’re coming to a clearing.” She said it loud enough that Davies could also hear.

  We walked on some more until we emerged between a gap in the trees into a small clearing. We’d made it far enough in that we’d come to the abandoned military barracks. It stood opposite us, a wide two-storey building with glassless windows, covered in creeping vines with small saplings poking through cracks in the concrete walls. Moss covered the roof, clung to its walls in-between the ivy winding its way along the corners of the structure.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  And there, halfway between us and the barracks was the rest of what remained of the soldier we had come to find. Alongside his armless torso were the mangled remains of others, though it was hard to tell how many of the missing troops were here.

  I dismissed my [Time Barrier]. The clearing was roughly fifty metres across so we’d be able to see anything coming for us and it would only get in the way of the soldiers. Carmen was scanning through the treeline as well.

  “Can you see into the woods?” I asked, curious at the range of the improved sight.

  “A little further than you could,” she answered, “and the image is sharper.”

  Davies started making hand motions and as the last of the soldiers entered the clearing, they took sitting positions around the perimeter of the clearing, rifles ready and aimed into the woods surrounding us. Evening was creeping in as my team followed Davies to the remains. It said a lot about me that I barely reacted to the missing arms and legs and the deep slashes across the bodies.

  Davies crouched beside the bodies, turning them over, studying the wounds. I could see in his blue eyes that something was off, the way he was tilting his head and frowning. I looked closer at the gashes myself. At first glance, they looked like bear attacks. Three wide, brutal gashes spaced equally apart tore across one torso. A similar set of slashes had sliced into one soldier’s legs. But on some of the dead, there were shallower, more narrow slashes. Almost knife-like. Or smaller claws, maybe from a wolf. But wolves were like dogs. They didn’t hunt with their paws. Maybe it was some sort of big cat, but we hadn’t encountered any so far.

  And there was something more concerning with that theory anyway. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched one of those wildlife shows but I was pretty sure that big cats and bears didn’t hunt together like a couple of pals on the weekend.

  “You see the problem?” Davies said, drawing my attention. I nodded at him.

  “Two different predators working together?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Maybe they see us as more of a threat,” I said.

  “Maybe.” Davies looked to the skies overhead, the trailing shades of blue melting into the black skies coming from the east. “I think it’s best to get back. This doesn’t look like all of them, but I don’t want to risk losing more soldiers with night coming.”

  He signalled some soldiers to join us in the middle. “Let’s get these boys back to the ATV’s so we can give them a proper burial.”

  Soldiers began lifting the dead. A gruesome business, especially when some of them had missing limbs scattered around the area. It was hard watching them place an arm or strapping a leg to a torso. It wasn’t the most dignified manner in which to transport them, but night was coming, we knew where the danger was, and we’d be back in the morning with a plan.

  In total, eight of the missing soldiers had been found, carried by sixteen of their comrades. The others formed a box around them, with Captain Davies’ team and the five of us bringing up the rear, all wearing night vision goggles. We left the clearing and headed back towards the vehicles. I applied the [Time Barrier] again, this time behind me.

  We were barely a couple of minutes into the walk, in the darkness beneath the canopy when we heard a scream from the front.

  A moment later, gunfire erupted at the front, muzzle flashes lighting up the trees. Then more gunfire to the left of the box.

  “What the hell is happening?” Davies bellowed.

  “There’s something out there,” a soldier shouted back in the darkness. “It got Green.”

  “What do you mean, it got Green?”

  “He’s dead, Sir.”

  “What the fuck?” Davies muttered.

  My head snapped around, the green image in the goggles showing me the outlines of the trees, the foliage, the undergrowth. Something had triggered my barrier, but as much as I scanned, I saw nothing.

  “Something’s behind us,” I whispered, so only Kian and Carmen beside me could hear. They relayed the message to the other two and Davies’ team.

  I applied another [Time Barrier], thirty metre range this time, as I turned to face whatever was coming.

  “What is it?” Carmen whispered.

  “I have no idea,” I replied. “I can’t see anything but it’s definitely there.”

  Then the second barrier was triggered. My eyes snapped to where I felt the barrier was passed but I couldn’t see anything. I placed a [Time Circle], [Gravity Circle], and [Frost Circle] directly in front of the path that I felt the creature was coming, whatever it was.

  “When I tell you to, apply [Hunter’s Mark] where I point,” I whispered to Carmen.

  Davies whispered orders to the soldiers behind us to keep still.

  I felt the [Gravity Circle] trigger, pointed at it and whispered. “There.”

  “It won’t apply,” Carmen whispered back. I applied another [Time Barrier], with a ten-metre range.

  “Why would it not apply?”

  “The creature is too strong.”

  Her statement sent shivers down my spine. The scorpion back in the caves had been a higher level, but she had still been able to apply the [Hunter’s Mark]. That would suggest what was coming towards us was even stronger.

  “Kaelyn,” I whispered across to her. “This may be stronger than the scorpion.”

  Before she could answer, the final [Time Barrier] triggered. I fixed my eyes on the point where I felt my mana thread being touched and saw a large, black cat slowly materialised out of thin air. First, its head and ears, then its powerful front shoulders and legs, its body, its hind quarters and finally the tail swishing behind it. Someone gasped nearby. Its movements were sluggish, not quite as slow as would be expected, but that only confirmed it was stronger than our Common, Rank B.

  I tagged it, setting up a [Time Loop] and applied another [Time Barrier] a few metres in front of my face. Even as I did so, I watched the panther’s body begin to ripple and expand. Muscles bulged beneath its frame as its fur stretched, and bones cracked. The panther grew larger before our eyes, but also began to change form – its fur changing to a dark brown, its narrow face growing shorter and rounder as it reared up on its hind legs. Its upper arms swelled, the sleek, narrow claws replaced with the wicked claws of a bear.

  Gunfire roared in my ears.