We are about halfway done with the outer ring. Hunting groups regularly go out an cull monsters, bringing back trophies and Sigils. It feels weird to be eating steak and complaining about a lack of corn and potatoes. We had our first encounter with what we’re now calling boss monsters at the construction sight.

  It was sphinx, but unlike the jaguar sized ones, this one was as big as a pick up. The thing could speak and made everyone sleepy. Honestly things would have been bad if one of the forklift operators hadn’t pinned it to the wall with his vehicle. Even still, ten adventurers had to beat the thing for five minutes to put it down. We were lucky today, a juiced up sphinx wandering around is kinda scary.

  Day 45, Owen Landers

  Silas jumped forward, now very much awake. He couldn’t hold her body weight while stretched out nearly parallel to the ground. Bella didn’t stop screaming, she scrabbled at him like a feral cat. She was both injured and hadn’t eaten in nearly a week, making her struggles ineffective.

  It took a moment, but the panicked expression dimmed to a simple pained one when she saw Samantha. The girl ran over and nearly tackle hugged her mother. Thankfully she realized that Bella was in a fragile state at the moment and slid to a kneeling stop.

  “Mom! Are you alright?” Samantha cried.

  Obviously, Bella was not. Her black hair was a sweaty mess and her green eyes looked dull with exhaustion, despite her having rested for the last few days. Still, Bella did her best to reassure Samantha.

  Silas let the pair get their emotions out while he gathered some food and water. Tough dried meat with no seasoning and bitter water in a rough bone cup wasn’t the best of meals, but it was still sustenance. Unfortunately, they had no idea what parts of the monsters contained the correct vitamins and minerals. A meat only diet required the consumption of certain organs to get enough A, B, D, E vitamins, magnesium, zinc, and many other important minerals. This forced them to try an assortment of organs, as most animals here had strange biology.

  He took a nibble of the meat to make sure it was still safe. When no notice popped up, Silas brought the food to Bella. She took it and started eating as quickly as she could chew it. Silas waited patiently, his father had once said that full stomachs were the battery life of productive conversations. A saying that he found to be true when he first had to deal with a hangry Abby after work.

  “How do you feel?” Silas asked after Bella had finished eating.

  She looked terrible, but looks could be deceiving. Silas looked pale as a ghost after nearly two months without any sunlight, but he quite literally had never been healthier.

  “I feel sore,” Bella touched her face and picked at the peeling skin. Like a sunburn, the greasy top layer peeled of in a large chunk that covered most of her cheek, “Eww, I feel surprisingly good for having full body burns… Um. Where are my clothes?”

  “You’ll have to start wearing rawhide like me,” Silas gave a helpless shrug. It was unfortunate, but denim and cotton weren’t the most fireproof of materials.

  It was fascinating and somewhat unsettling to watch Bella peel large sheets of skin off like she was some kind of snake. The flesh beneath was healthy and smooth. Silas frowned, Bella didn’t get any sigils that automatically enhanced vitality, so why was she healing so fast? A week may seem slow, but for burns like this, it was quite fast.

  As if reading his mind Bella sighed and started speaking, “I got two different notifications before passing out. Both gave me an increase to vitality. That affects healing, right?”

  Silas nodded, that coupled with how her sigils aided her body’s resistance to fevers would be enough to keep her alive. He glanced down at her blackened hand. No lines of infection were following her veins up her arms, which Silas assumed was a good sign. He could render first aid, but this was far outside anything he had experienced.

  Bone was visible through the cracks in the blackened skin. The three points of vitality seemed to be doing little to heal the arm. Silas believed it was possible to get limbs back, there had to be a sigil that accomplished it out there somewhere. Unfortunately, they already had all six available sigil slots between them full.

  “We’ll find a way to fix it,” Silas said.

  Samantha nodded, she hadn’t said much, simply snuggling up to her mother. Bella shook her head, “I want power. That monster almost killed us. I need to be stronger. I need to be able to fight back.”

  Silas thought for a moment, “You will need to participate in making yourself into that person. I can make armor and weapons for you, but I can’t lift weights for you, I can’t practice for you, and I can’t motivate you. Can you promise to do those things?”

  Bella nodded. There was something different in her eyes. Something unsettling. If Silas were to put words to it, he felt like he was looking at the first sparks of insanity.

  He waited for a few moments to give her time to explain herself, maybe place some qualifiers on her participation. She said nothing, Bella simply stared at him with an uncomfortable intensity.

  “Uh, good,” Silas started a bit lamely, “Well, Samantha can run you through some of the exercises I had her do. I will adjust my armor designs to fit your limitations. Then we start hunting.”

  Silas had a rather risky plan to get the dragonkin looking elsewhere for them. Help would be nice, but he didn’t want to drag along vulnerabilities. Silas was no longer at the very bottom of the food chain, but one step above that was not enough to keep Bella and Samantha out of danger.

  It took a bit for Bella to get going, but once she had donned the crude rawhide clothing, she got to work. Silas got to work as well. Bella’s armor would be lopsided. Normally a person would have to consider weight and strain as limiting factors. With theoretically infinite strength growth as an option, it was less of a constraint.

  It was with this in mind that Silas thickened the plates on her injured forearm. His goal was not to protect the appendage but to use it as a shield. Why risk healthy body parts when an already damaged one could take the injury? Rows of stone razor blades ran from the end of the mitten like gauntlet to the elbow. A second set coated a flared pauldron that allowed Bella to duck behind. If fire was used on her a second time, it would be dramatically less effective.

  Unlike Samantha’s set, Bella’s was dramatically less embellished. Which was a good thing, because Silas was at the end of his rope. He felt himself nearly falling asleep on several occasions. When that happened he would rise and start working out, tempering his body, anything that would push sleep until he got his desired notification.

  Halfway through day nine, as he was finishing Bella’s weapon, he got it.

  Notice: You have exceeded the ability of Flesh Lord to keep you alert by staying awake for two hundred and twenty-eight hours.

  Silas sagged when the support of Flesh Lord faded. This was why staying awake wasn’t sustainable, the exhaustion would hit him and he wouldn’t be able to push it away. He barely had time to shove the bladed club off his lap before he collapsed where the sharp edge had been.

  He opened his eyes a few moments later. At least it felt like a few moments. When he was younger, he had believed that sleep and time travel were related. This was the kind of sleep that facilitated those theories. No one had bothered moving him, he was still slumped over with his cheek against the wall while sitting with a war club lying on one knee.

  “Sorry, you were too heavy to move,” Samantha said.

  “It's no problem, how long was I out?” Silas said with a lilt. His lower jaw had somehow gotten its blood flow cut off and now he needed to get the pins and needles feeling out.

  “About eight hours,” Samantha said, “I told mom it would be longer because you have stayed up for so long.”

  Silas was surprised, he had assumed it would be longer as well. It felt odd to think that he could now get away with less than four nights of sleep a month. He had basically extended his life by a third by getting his sleeping hours back. He paused waiting for something to happen. A smile broke out when he saw the expected notice.

  Notice: You have pushed Flesh Lord to its limits by working to exhaustion. Flesh Lord has advanced to the new baseline you have demonstrated. Your vitality has increased to reflect this.

  That upped his vitality to six. If his body was a remote controlled car, he had more battery power than he knew what to do with. His smile froze when another notification appeared.

  Warning: You have hit ten capacity without achieving the greater variant of all sigils. Manifesting a personal sigil and unlocking spirit will preclude you from the greater variant of the following sigils: Flesh Lord. Would you like to proceed with activation.

  Silas quickly opened and scanned his full interface, looking for what exactly happened.

  His Greater Bone Crafter was at four while Flesh Lord was at six. It added up to ten, which was so straightforward that Silas was a bit offended that his interface couldn’t say what he needed in plain language. If the president of Commune Inc. was still alive, Silas intended to punch the man in the face for making his tech so difficult to understand.

  Silas desperately wanted to say yes. The ability to immediately interact with a portal was kind of a big deal. However, he had been here a few months, so the extra week to track down and kill another beholder shouldn’t be too problematic. Especially, as he had a new suspicion that spirit allowed the greater aspects of sigils to function.

  Still, if he randomly came across a portal, he could simply step through and make his way home. He had come across a handful of them in his time here. Would he be willing to sacrifice personal power to make it home even a moment sooner? Yes, however when he reread the warning, he found no time limit for acceptance. He should feasibly be able to go about his life, hunting down tentacle monsters and if he came across a portal, accept and jump through.

  “Change of plans,” Silas said to Bella and Samantha. Both of them looked over quizzically. He explained what his interface had just revealed, “We need to get greater sigils then unlock our spirit stat and get ourselves our third sigil.”

  Bella’s eyes gleamed at the mention of more power, that or she was just happy to kill off more bears and dragonkin. Silas could understand why she had some negative feelings towards the two types of creatures. Samantha simply seemed happy that everyone around her was happy.

  It took him a few more hours to finish up the war club. Silas had modeled it off of a picture he had seen of Aztec weaponry. He had no idea how good it was, but the fact that an ancient American superpower had used it gave him confidence in its utility. Black stone teeth lined the rim giving it a savage appearance, that made Silas think of chain swords. It would be cool if he could make the edges spin and also gory.

  He made Samantha and Bella take a rest before setting out. While he could go without rest for the better part of two weeks, he wouldn’t take the same risk with them. The next morning they suited up and set out.

  “Alright, the plan for today is to cause issues for the dragonkin in a location quite some distance from our camp,” Silas said as he marched through the ravines, “If they keep track of the dead, I want them looking elsewhere.”

  They passed the roach mound as they circled around to a different side of the dragonkin camp. It only took them an hour to come across their first monster. Silas hadn’t seen this variant before, and he kind of wished he still hadn’t.

  It was a bipedal creature covered in dappled pink and orange fuzz. Long arms with tentacle like, boneless fingers nearly touched the ground. Knobby legs supported an oval shaped body, but the head was the most bizarre. Big round eyes and a mouth filled with perfectly square teeth extended to the left and right of its face barely contained in puffy cheeks.

  “It’s like someone tried to make a live action of a Dr. Seuss creature,” Silas muttered. He could tell why those shows nearly always failed, this was nightmare fuel.

  “Kill it?” Bella asked.

  Silas was hesitant to attack a creature he had no knowledge of. Unfortunately, the monster didn’t give them the choice. Upon hearing their voices, its head rotated to face them, followed by its shoulders, torso, hips, and finally legs.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Yeah, let's kill it,” Silas agreed after witnessing the thoroughly unsettling movements.

  It didn’t run, staying within the bounds of what Silas would call speed walking. He didn’t wait for it to close in.

  “Bella, use your damaged hand as a shield and aim for the body. Samantha, superheat your spearhead and aim for the body. I’ll draw fire,” Silas drew his blade and advanced.

  There was no recognition of danger in the creature’s eyes, though its already large smile grew. Silas stepped in and swung his weapon like a bat, strait at the creature’s torso. It dodged by elongating one leg to dive over the swing while swinging the other over so it never lacked a foot in contact with the ground. The motion was fluid and the head remained level, like a chicken’s would, never breaking eye contact.

  The mantis blade was heavy and Silas couldn’t help but overswing. A tentacle hand wrapped around Silas’s forearm and jerked him into the wall. The monster was stronger than Silas, but not by so much that he was incapable of resisting. Not that he had to.

  He dropped his sword and grabbed the hand holding him at the wrist. Then jerked his forearm, dragging the fuzz covered flesh across the blades embedded in his bracer. The creature didn’t react to the pain, it simply grabbed Silas’s helmet with its other hand and threw him at Samantha.

  The girl yelped in surprise as Silas crashed into her, followed by the monster which he had yet to release. It landed on top of them scrabbling and beating at Silas like an angry chimp. Could he have won? Probably, but it would not have been easy. Fortunately, he wasn’t alone.

  Blood splattered Silas and Samantha as Bella brought the war club down on the monster’s back. Its flexible flesh likely gave it a bit of resistance to blunt force trauma. However, the scalpel sharp stone blades had no problem chopping halfway through its torso.

  The creepy smile froze as the beast processed what just happened. Silas drew his trusty skinning knife and slashed both of its bulging eyes before it could react. It jerked back, attempting to escape Silas’s grip. Blood lubricated its fur, allowing it to escape Silas, but without its eyes, the beast completely missed Bella’s swing at its neck.

  As it turned out ancient American empires turned out to have a good grasp on Stone Age weapons. Samantha stifled a scream as the body continued its odd run for a half dozen steps while the head bounced across the ground like a rubber ball. Silas could sympathize, it was a thoroughly unsettling situation.

  “Good job,” Silas nodded to Bella as he made his way to the head.

  Notice: You have made contact with spirit manifestation Corpus Amplectaris. Would you like to purify the taint of Adikia?

  Oh great, another potential deity that he had to concern himself with. This one wasn’t even kind enough to have an easily identifiable name. He held his breath hoping this wasn’t some kind of lesser priest or fighter. After a few seconds with no notice he sighed in relief, it was just a creepy monster. The sigil left floating over the body was a blank crystalline background that emphasized the Cheshire smile that made a crescent moon of teeth across the sigil.

  “I don’t think anyone wants stretchy legs, or whatever this sigil offers,” Silas said.

  “It was gross,” Samantha answered.

  “I don’t know, I can see stretchy arms and legs helping get things off high shelves,” Bella shrugged.

  Silas smirked at that, Abby had often requested his help for that exact purpose. He sometimes wondered if she stored the cook books above the fridge simply because she wanted him to go grab them.

  The next group of monsters was far more manageable. It was a pair of what Silas could only call feathered serpents. They had bone tipping their snouts like a beak that hooked similarly to an eagle, but aside from that they looked nearly identical to Chinese Dragons. Fortunately, they were small, likely only weighing around three hundred pounds.

  Silas took their attention, while Samantha and Bella each struck from the sides. The plan worked surprisingly well. Any injuries he took would heal. That knowledge did wonders for his willingness to take risks. When the most a snake bit could do was poke a few holes in his arm, getting bit didn’t seem so bad. No infection, no poison, and the wound would be gone within two or three days.

  Bella crippled her feathered serpent in one swing, letting the weight of her weapon do most of the damage. Samantha on the other hand, cringed when the superheated spearhead lit the serpent’s feathers on fire. It yowled and thrashed around in an attempt to put the flames out to no avail. Silas finally put it out of its misery with a quick thrust to the chest.

  “Is this right?” Samantha asked a bit shakily, “We aren’t eating them, we are just killing them.”

  “They attacked first!” Bella said. Her voice was low and brusk. Samantha flinched at the sound.

  That was all the justification Silas needed to kill an animal as well. However he had a different reason, “Haven’t you noticed that everything here is a bit wrong? You can see it in the beast’s eyes, they are mad like they have been afflicted with something that makes them want to cause harm. None of them have left us alone unless they are physically incapable of hurting us.”

  “Like the squirrels and geckos?” Samantha asked.

  Silas nodded, nudging the feathered corpse with his boot, “These creatures had to know that there was no way to attack us and not get severely injured or worse. We’re the same size and outnumber them after all, but they didn’t care. They just attacked us in the most obvious path possible. The obvious explanation is whatever is tainting them is turning them savage, but I would much rather there be a more mundane explanation.”

  He purified the two snakes before standing. These two sigils, he did keep. He couldn’t be sure what they did, but he didn’t think anyone would feel too bad about getting a Quetzalcoatl sigil. When he got back to earth, he would be able to give most of the people in his hometown sigils.

  Looking between his companions, Silas asked, “So, should we continue, or do you two need a break?”

  Pre-apocalypse, civilians would normally need the rest. Now, Bella had three vitality, making most people’s stamina look like a joke. Samantha had also progressed a sigil at least once, though without an interface, they couldn’t be sure what increased. The lack of information was infuriating, even if it did give her a more innate understanding of how her abilities worked.

  They both looked at each other before shaking their heads. Silas nodded and pushed forward. They kept an eye out for any of the four monsters that they needed to find. It took the better part of five hours to find one. Unsurprisingly, it was a dragonkin, a single one.

  It was leaning against a stone formation and was absently holding its tail in one hand. The creature was using the spike on the end as a type of stylus to scratch away at a rock. Silas had to hold back a laugh, this was the very picture of boredom that all guards felt.

  He pulled Bella and Samantha back around the corner before the guard noticed them. Silas whispered, “He hasn’t noticed us, I’m going to check the top to see if there’s a fighter.”

  Both of them nodded solemnly. Silas had explained to them how dangerous the fighters were, but he knew it hadn’t truly sunk in. Their only experience with one was dumping lava in its eyes and then watching Silas beat it to death with a hammer. Not the most stellar of performances.

  Silas had them hide in the shadow of the formation, behind a boulder before searching for a way up. His experience with rock was easy, the stone here developed with plenty of handholds. It was not too risky to scale the sheer stone pillar and soon he poked his head over the top.

  He remembered his first time looking over this cracked and dry landscape. Not much had changed, it was still level, however, Silas could see rain falling in the distance. It was too far away to have any impact on his camp, but it was a good sign. The figures scattered across the plain seemed to have different thoughts.

  Dozens of dragonkin, scattered over an area of a few square miles, all watched the dark cloud dump its water on the ground below. Silas was not surprised to see them here, he had seen figures on his first time above the ravines and it was likely these dragonkin were what he saw.

  The nearest one was quite a distance away, too far to hear anything going on in the ravine and too far to render aid in the event it did notice. After one more look around, Silas noticed a distinct lack of kaiju. He had assumed that the surface was the domain of those beasts, but none were visible.

  Climbing down, he nodded to Bella, “We’re good to go.”

  The woman gave an unsettling smile but only nodded. Not for the first time, Silas wondered just how broken she was. Thankfully she listened to what he said. It was a relationship that made Silas a bit uncomfortable, like an owner who was the only one who could handle an increasingly aggressive dog. For now, Bella’s increased aggression was a boon, so he wouldn’t attempt to restrain it.

  They walked around the corner making no move to hide themselves. The dragonkin perked up, dropping the stone and its tail to take up the femur beside it. Silas was interested to notice that the ball joint had been filed down to a rudimentary point. Had they picked up the femur he had left at the centi-snake fight? They could learn and do it quickly.

  Glancing behind itself, the dragonkin made a chirping growl. A bear lumbered around the corner, its muzzle was covered in blood. Silas had forgotten that they sometimes kept those as pets. He wondered if it was a Terra Ursa or some other variant. Hopefully, it would work with Bella’s sturdy gatherer.

  Silas kept moving forward, he did not fear these two. He was much weaker and exhausted the last time he fought a bear. Three points in vitality, one in body, and a good night's rest would make a world of difference. It took him a few moments to realize that both Samantha and Bella had frozen. He glanced over his shoulder to see them trembling in fear.

  “What’s wrong?” Silas asked. They didn’t answer, but they didn’t need to. As soon as Silas asked the question, he made the connection. This was the kind of bear that had mauled Connor to death.

  Their reaction was completely natural. Silas paused as well, wondering if advancing was still a good idea. He could fight, possibly even escape these two alone. Doing that, while protecting two shell shocked people was far outside his capabilities. While he was berating himself for not realizing the potential danger, the dragonkin took the choice out of his hands.

  The lone dragonkin spat on his weapon, igniting it on fire. If that was all it did, Silas would have been fine. Unfortunately, it also lit its body on fire. Everywhere not covered in bone carapace lit up in flickering flame. Both bear and dragon roared and charged.

  Silas grimaced, why did they get fire armor? He remembered a dragonkin who had flaming wings. Did they all get unique abilities as they developed? He hoped not, they had the only reliable portal.

  “Wake up!” Silas shouted.

  Bella flinched and Samantha staggered back, tripping over her feet and falling over. Silas growled, the dragonkin was now too close for him to run with them. Here goes nothing, Silas thought. He already had his weapon drawn, so he rushed in to meet them.

  Meeting the two monsters' strength for strength would be foolish. Silas’s main advantage was flesh lord and his high vitality, which gave him substantial staying power. Unfortunately, one sword meant he could only cut one target at a time. Which one would Samantha’s armor fail against? Silas didn’t know what could break the armor, but it had already resisted one dragonkin in the past.

  He spun out of the way of the thick horn aimed at his heart and swung his blade like a half club. Prior experience told him that the Achilles’ tendon was vulnerable and this time proved no different. The last bear hadn’t thought to reach out a claw the first time and this one acted similarly.

  It staggered, tripping over its paws as its pace was disrupted. Silas had little time to celebrate his victory, as in the moment after edge met tendon, a femur crashed into his neck. He staggered forward, nearly falling on his face. Only the raised collar of his armor stopped him from dying right then.

  Silas spun around, letting his weapon trace a large circular arc. It was effectively the sword variant of a haymaker, one of the most predictable and counterable strikes ever thrown. This dragonkin was not a novice who needed to be babysat by a stronger member of their tribe. It stepped into Silas’s swing, letting his bracer strike it harmlessly.

  A swift head but sent Silas staggering back. One of the forward curving horns dug into Silas’s cheek, cutting up his gums and notching the bone. He thought he understood pain, he was in the army, he had broken his leg on Jay’s farm and still driven himself to the hospital. There was just something different about having a bone spike scrape across the roots of his teeth.

  The pain in his face was followed up by a pain in his gut as the spike on the end of the dragonkin’s tail slipped under his armor. Silas started panicking, this was the first time a monster had so thoroughly outmatched him with simple skill. Their stats might be the same and it wouldn’t matter. He was not a trained fighter and he needed to stop trying to replicate one.

  Staying power was his only advantage. He grabbed the flaming scale on the tail in his gut. It burned, but Silas didn’t care, he would live through nearly anything. Going septic wasn’t a danger, getting crippled wasn’t either, so long as he gave more than he took, he would win.

  Still holding the tail, Silas spun, dragging the monster around behind him. The dragonkin was not expecting Silas to throw caution to the winds, but it took advantage. Flaming claws scraped across the back of Silas’s armor, carving troughs in the bone. Then it was off balance.

  In a single handed, barbaric swing, Silas chopped his mantis blade down on the tail. Just like the rounds of wood he chopped in winter, the scales split. The dragonkin screeched, pushed further off balance by the lack of a limb. Silas knew in his head that tails helped with stabilization, however his brain wasn’t in control. He just wanted to do damage.

  The dragonkin screeched in rage when Silas whacked it with its severed tail. Unfortunately, there was a reason the best fighters used their heads. When Silas brought his mantis blade up to cut into the dragonkin’s head, the bear crashed into him. It was big and he really should have heard it approaching.

  He was instantly displaced by the larger creature and slammed into the ravine wall. Before Silas could regain his bearings, the dragonkin slammed the club into his torso. His thick chest plate held, however, a crack ran nearly all the way across it. Silas once again attempted to regain control, but the bear batted him with a paw.

  Unfortunately, there was not enough power in the bear's strike to throw him out of the conflict. Instead, it staggered him long enough for the dragonkin to grab Silas’s pauldron and drag him into a pommel strike to the face. Stars flashed in Silas’s vision as his nose crunched.

  He was going to die. Not because he was weak, but because his companions were hesitant. It was likely a bit much to expect a housewife and a schoolgirl to fight monsters with Stone Age tools. As unrealistic as the expectation was, they had already shown themselves capable of doing so against other creatures.

  Silas knew that if he wanted to survive, he had to do it alone. The pommel struck his face again. It hurt, but Silas was still full of energy. His prodigious well of stamina had barely been tapped. If they wouldn’t let him rise, then he would take them to the ground.

  Before the third pommel strike could knock his teeth out, Silas grabbed the dragonkin’s own collar and dragged them together. The femur’s pommel bounced off the brow guard of his helmet. With ears ringing and vision blurred he placed a foot on the rock formation and pushed himself into the dragonkin.

  The dragonkin braced itself, realized it lacked the tail normally used to accomplish that task and fell. Silas didn’t have time to draw his knife, but he did have sharpened stone ridges set into his armor. He landed pauldron first on the monster's upper arm, its flaming armor did nothing to stop the blades from digging into the scales.

  Silas was a bit punch drunk, he barely felt the heat drying his rawhide clothes and burning his skin. The dragonkin hissed like a snake, in response, Silas spat blood in its eyes. He grabbed a horn in one hand and jerked its head to the side. Then he struck it in the temple with his spiked knuckles over and over again.

  He reared back for a third strike when the bear bit down on his upper arm. Shark like teeth sunk into his forearm. The bear’s head whipped back and forth like a dog. Silas cried out as he felt his arm break at the elbow. Unfortunately for the bear, it had let Silas get too close to its face.

  Using his broken arm, Silas pulled himself to the bear and shoved a thumb into its eye. Clenching his fist, he tore the organ out. The bear flinched back but did not release his arm. So Silas ripped out the other one. Something sharp pierced the flesh between his cuirass and the plate protecting his rear.

  Looking back, he saw the dragonkin shoving its claws into his side. Its fingers started curling inside him, cutting through his muscle and scraping his hip bone. Silas screamed and struck out at the dragonkin. It was ready this time, slapping his clumsy blow aside.

  It felt wrong, he couldn’t die. He had to get home. The heat around the two creatures intensified as they went in for the kill.