“Damn it, Dero!” the merchant grumbled. “I knew we shouldn’t have taken that shortcut…”

  “It couldn’t be helped, and you know it, Carlos,” the dark elf replied, not looking away from the falcon whose feathers she was stroking. “We needed to move faster after- ” Her stomach growled uncomfortably and emphasized her point.

  The pair shared an uneasy laugh, and Dero finally turned to look at Carlos. The merchant had stepped away from her to gaze out the back of their covered cart. The violet-skinned woman didn’t need to walk over and look to know what the merchant saw. Giant deathstalkers.

  “We should have followed the maps,” Carlos said, pulling at his mustache. “I know we were running low on food after the rats got into our supplies, but…”

  “Come on, are you seriously worried about those things?” Dero asked. She gestured vaguely in the direction of the back of the cart, where hundreds of massive, monstrous scorpions had been visibly chasing them for the last hour- after spending probably the whole day slowly sneaking up on the caravan.

  As Carlos turned to look at the elf, she rose to her feet. She knew she didn’t cut an intimidating figure. At just under five feet tall, she could get lost in any crowd. But Dero was far deadlier than she looked, and after several years traveling together, Carlos knew it as well as anyone.

  The short, athletic woman cracked her neck, rolled her shoulders, and waited for his answer.

  “I’m a little worried, yes,” Carlos said after a moment. “If you would stop playing with that bird you found and… Dero, you know how much I invested- ”

  “Yeah, I know. How much you invest in each expedition, even the ones that take us to the armpit of the world. Even the ones that you don’t expect to make you any money. And you paid for the covered carts with special wheels that don’t get fucked up by the sand, I remember. My skin thanks you for keeping the harsh desert sun off of it. But just remind yourself: have I ever failed to keep you and your precious cargo safe?”

  The gray-haired man let out a little sigh, but there was a trace of mirth in his eyes as he replied. “We won’t speak of that incident in the Discontented Lands. Since this is to be your final journey with us, I would hate to mar the occasion by reference to your sole failure.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Carlos.”

  Of course you would remember that now. Fucking magic-resistant crocodiles infesting the stupid river…

  “Fuck you, too, Dero.”

  They exchanged a familiar look, and the atmosphere lightened for a moment. Then the dark elf noticed his fingers go to the pendant on his neck, an emblem of the God of Travel, and she frowned.

  So he actually is a little bit worried. Well, he did say he sank a small fortune into those alchemically treated wheels. He got too excited about having a new form of transportation for the desert… Carlos is a good guy. I know it’s not really about the money for him, even if I tease him about that.

  Dero didn’t bother asking what Carlos’s other hired mercenaries were doing. She had seen and heard them firing arrows at the monsters earlier. She had also observed how the arrowheads mostly pinged off the exoskeletons… and that was more or less the end of her expecting the caravan guards to be useful. She had known she was the real muscle here all along, even if some of those men were more than twice her size.

  She quickly scanned the area ahead of them. They were getting close to some mountains now. Enough that if the caravan kept going, they might reach the mountain range instead of getting torn apart by a gang of scorpions angry that the merchant’s carts had driven over their nest. Especially if a certain elf distracted the monsters.

  Yep. Time for me to go earn my keep.

  “Just remember, you promised me some interesting sights before I escort you home, Carlos,” Dero said as she walked toward the edge of the cart. “I collect what I’m owed!”

  “You already told me you wanted to see what became of the other worshipers of your Death God,” the merchant replied. “Don’t think I forgot you were interested in that. They live in this Waste. And in those mountains up ahead. It’s a whole other, fascinating culture- ”

  “If I get sand in my clothes, you owe me more than that!” the elf replied.

  She threw down her long, black coat and leaped out of the back of the cart, cutting off any further opportunity for argument. Carlos could haggle his way out of anything if she let him talk.

  While she was in midair, the falcon that she’d had on her shoulder took flight, and as she took on a fighting stance, the bird began to circle overhead. She had the strange impression that the beautiful creature was used to witnessing combat. It might be a clue to the bird’s origins. It acted as if it was expecting some people to see it and rush to the scene. Like it was the pet of some hunter or tracker.

  That would be nice, little fellow, but hardly necessary, the elf thought.

  All the giant deathstalkers’ eyes- each of them had eight, so all six hundred or so pairs- landed on her at once.

  But the violet-skinned elf was easy to dismiss as a threat. She was slim as well as being short, and with the tiny white top and matching short skirt she wore, she didn’t even have a place where she could be hiding a weapon.

  Most of the monsters quickly refocused their eyes on the caravan that continued to outrun them.

  Carrying relatively light cargo as they were- spices and textiles, mostly- the carts rapidly sped away from Dero.

  Almost as soon as she landed, she conjured a half-dozen daggers made of void mana and hurled them at everything rushing toward her. At that range, and with so many monsters approaching her, she didn’t need to aim.

  The blades pierced through the armor wherever they touched, and they sent whatever non-gaseous matter they made contact with directly to the void. From the perspective of the creatures of this world, the matter vanished into nothingness.

  Four giant scorpions skidded into the sand, dead, as they lost vital pieces of themselves. Another two scorpions kept going while bleeding, having lost a pair of legs and a tail respectively.

  Not enough to make them wary.

  Dero created more daggers and threw them at the closest monsters. She could do this all day. Literally. Her problem wasn’t that she would have any real trouble killing the giant deathstalkers. It was how long it would take for her to do it, given their numbers. She could slaughter them all and still fail to protect the caravan.

  Behind her, she heard the burst of explosions in midair. That was Carlos’s way of signaling for help. The little alchemic flares would get the attention of whatever allies he had in the area. But they would also draw the scorpions’ eyes toward the caravan again, just when she was trying to get them to pay attention to her.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  The elf wrinkled her nose and sighed.

  She decided to try something new. In the middle of the pack of monsters, there was a particularly large monster. So she hurled a trio of daggers at that one in particular.

  From its tail stinger, the- boss?- deathstalker sprayed forth venom, or possibly acid, and the spray struck the daggers. The liquid didn’t do any damage, but the void daggers vanished on contact.

  Smart.

  On the bright side, most of the monsters’ attention was focused on her again.

  Dero performed a flip as a dozen monsters tried their spray attack in her direction at the same time.

  She hurled another handful of void daggers into the crawling mass of chitinous flesh, killed a half dozen scorpions, and quietly resigned herself to a long, dull fight.

  Ten repetitive minutes passed.

  Ten minutes in which the dark elf danced acrobatically through the air, teleported around the pack of deathstalkers, and conjured countless void daggers to use. She was steadily chipping away at the monsters’ numbers, and her mana was barely affected. To their credit, they were getting smarter and smarter about how they tried to fight her, using dead members of their species as shields and shooting bursts of their spray at her from a distance. She suspected that the big scorpion could silently order the others around, since they seemed to be copying its tactics.

  It didn’t matter. Strategy only bought them time, slowed their deaths down slightly. Dero wasn’t the most efficient killer in the world. But she would reliably get the job done, no matter how long it took.

  She didn’t hear it or see it when another presence entered the scene.

  Her Perfect Spatial Awareness detected a new figure into the space around the fighting.

  Dero twisted her body when she had a little breathing room. She looked, and she saw that a thick shroud of mist surrounded the entity she had sensed. And, now that she focused, she realized there was more than one figure in the mist.

  That’s not natural mist. She could see there was mana infused into the vapor, giving it a slight silvery glow. It didn’t make her uneasy, exactly, but the shroud meant the other presences were an almost complete unknown. Shit, do I have something else to deal with now? I’ll be here for hours. Strange that I missed that there was more than one presence at first…

  The elf could sense exactly where the entities behind the mist were hiding, but she hesitated about striking without knowing who or what it was.

  “You there with the purple skin!” a voice called from within the shroud.

  So, humans.

  “Who, me?” Dero asked, looking from side to side. As if there was any other violet-skinned elf flipping around and fighting giant monsters.

  “Please don’t destroy their heads,” the speaker called. “We’ll fight alongside you. The bodies are valuable to us, especially if they’re close to intact.”

  The elf shrugged and bounced off of a creature’s chitinous back. Lots of adventurers sold monsters for parts. She had lived that life before. “Whatever gets this done quicker!”

  Dero kept throwing void blades at the scorpions, and she tried to not aim for the heads. It wasn’t hard. She could be very precise with the blades when she wanted to be, since they were her preferred weapon.

  A giant arrow, more like a javelin than an arrow in its size, burst through the center of one of the scorpions, and Dero didn’t even bother to look back. Another fighter had joined the fray at roughly the same time as whoever was in the mist.

  At the same time, the mysterious magical mist extended to cover some of the area where the scorpions were. She sensed multiple shapes within the mist as they began silently dispatching the scorpions around them, and then she felt something much stranger.

  Her Perfect Spatial Awareness could theoretically be fooled, and she could not help but wonder if this was one of those instances.

  Because the bodies of the defeated scorpions within the mist seemed to Dero’s to simply vanish from her range of perception a second or two after they died. Obviously, that shouldn’t be possible unless they had been sent to another dimension. Such as with void magic. But she ought to be the only person left in the world who could use that.

  Just like how I somehow missed more than one presence being there in the mist… Maybe this trip will be more interesting than I thought.

  The dark elf occasionally looked back to see what was going on with the mist, but her eyes revealed little. In her peripheral vision, she did see the catgirl archer continuing to shoot arrow after arrow, doing as much damage to the scorpions’ ranks as Dero herself, but that wasn’t exactly the mysterious happening that the elf was curious about.

  At one point, a foxgirl appeared at the edge of the mist shroud as it moved forward to continue covering the other figures. A few of the giant scorpions turned to look in her direction.

  Before any of the monsters could do anything, though, an arm popped out of the mist and yanked the foxgirl back into it.

  This is weird. This is the weirdest fight I’ve been in since that thing with the crocodiles.

  Dero slowed down, and though she continued killing monsters, she kept an eye continuously on the conjured mist. It glowed faintly with the mana that was clearly present inside it, but otherwise, she couldn’t see anything. It was slightly frustrating. She could sense the figures moving, and she even knew their positions well enough to hurl daggers at them if she wanted to indiscriminately attack.

  But even the sound was at a minimum. They were killing almost completely silently. No grunts of effort, no cries of pain, only the efficient sound of chitinous flesh being broken in key places.

  The monsters seemed to be as paralyzed by the inability to pierce the mist as Dero had been. None of them fired their bursts of spray at anyone but the elf, probably afraid of hitting their own kind rather than whatever enemy was assailing them.

  As the mist progressed, deathstalkers simply disappeared in its wake.

  Dero’s share of the monsters dwindled as the human, catgirl, foxgirl, and whatever other entities were helping them killed the rest of them off rapidly. The dark elf wasn’t sure whether to be pleased that this wouldn’t take hours or annoyed at the other party for showing off and stealing her kills.

  In the end, when the monsters were all dead and the mist had dissipated, revealing only one human and one foxgirl, Dero had to shake her head and quietly give up. For now.

  “Thanks for the assist,” she said quietly, walking up to the tall human and giving him a hard look.

  “Our pleasure,” he said, smiling. “Tybalt of Greentear.” He extended his hand.

  “Dero Autumn,” she replied. She accepted his hand and lightly shook it.

  She silently refused to ask what had happened to the other figures who had been helping him in the mist. If he was keeping his abilities so well hidden, she could do the same. He didn’t need to know that she knew he’d had help.

  “I’m Victoria Twinleaf,” said the foxgirl quietly, giving Dero a little nod.

  Oh, a serious type.

  “Thank the gods!” Carlos’s voice rang out from nearby, and both Tybalt and Dero turned to face him. The merchant approached in a state of high emotion- apparently positive, but as intense as if he had witnessed something terrible. He looked at Dero and then extended his hand, holding her coat. She took it. “I know how tough you are, but every time I see you in a situation like that, I- ”

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “You do know how tough I am. So don’t doubt it. Death will have to catch me sleeping.”

  The tall, skinny human seemed to find something funny in that. His face took on a little grin.

  “Something funny to you, human?” Dero asked, giving him a sour look.

  The smile sort of shriveled on his lips.

  “Not much,” Tybalt said. “But I wouldn’t have believed you were tough if I hadn’t just seen you fighting. Just a reminder for me. That’s the way of the world. Big things come in small packages.”

  A quiet descended over the group for a moment. Carlos looked anxiously back and forth between Dero and Tybalt, and Victoria responded to his reaction by focusing nervously on Dero.

  The dark elf gazed up at Tybalt coolly before she spoke.