The zone moved.

  Slowly — the same pace as before, steady and directionless. He tracked it through the stone the way he tracked moisture through the floor: not by seeing, by feeling the displacement of what surrounded it. The zone claimed space that was not his and moved it as it shifted.

  Toward the pool.

  He stood.

  He pressed his awareness against the zone's boundary again — the same result. His mana arrived at its edge and scattered. Whatever was inside it, the stone immediately around it was outside his reach. A moving hole in his perception, cutting through the eastern wall in a slow, continuous line.

  He moved to the corridor and stopped at the eastern wall, roughly where the zone's trajectory would intersect the surface.

  He placed his palm flat against the stone.

  Nothing yet. Vibration, faint — something working through dense material. Still some distance away.

  He sat down against the wall. Crossed his legs.

  And waited.

  The vibration grew. Not loud — he felt it more through his palm and the floor beneath him than through the air. Closer now. He could feel where it would break through a section of wall where the stone was thinner.

  He moved his hand to that section.

  The zone was right there. Just behind the surface. He pressed his mana against it — reflex, the same way he had pressed his awareness into every part of the dungeon — and felt it scatter again at the boundary. The stone inside that radius was simply gone from him, as though it didn't exist.

  But behind it — the path the zone had already traveled, the stone it had already passed through — that had returned. His again, seamlessly, as though nothing had moved through it at all.

  Then the wall gave.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The creature came through the gap in a shower of loose material and damp earth, hit the corridor floor with its full compact weight, and lay still for a moment.

  He looked at it.

  Low. Dense. Covered in short fur the color of wet earth, still dusted white with limestone powder from the breach. Wide flat forepaws with thick curved points built for moving earth. No visible eyes.

  The zone moved with it. He could feel the boundary shifting as the creature reoriented — a rough sphere of interference, radius of perhaps two body-lengths, everything inside it outside his control. He pressed his awareness against the floor beneath the creature and felt nothing. Pressed against the wall beside it. Nothing. Then the creature shifted — a few inches, no more — and the stone it had just left returned to him. Seamlessly. As though nothing had passed through it.

  He pressed his awareness forward again, into the zone. Nothing.

  The control didn't disappear. It followed the creature, stayed with it, moved when it moved. Whatever the zone was, it wasn't damage — it was presence. The creature carried it with it and took it away when it left.

  The creature found its direction.

  He wasn't certain how he knew — something in the way the snout stilled after its sweeping, the body's axis shifting, the forepaws making their first tentative contact with the floor in a specific orientation. It had found what it was looking for. It began to move.

  He came down over it before it completed the first step.

  Both hands, full weight — one across the shoulders, one over the hindquarters. The creature screamed. A high, purely reflexive sound. He did not adjust his grip. He held it flat against the floor and waited for the thrashing to lose its coherence.

  It took several seconds.

  Then he simply looked at it.

  The rhythm reached him through his palms first — rapid, hammering against the stone, the individual beats barely distinguishable from each other at this rate. He pressed his fingers into the fur along its flank and felt the heat there. Warm. Constant. Radiating through the dense coat in a way the stone never did.

  The zone pulsed with it. He could feel the interference field shifting in sync with the creature's internal rhythm, intensifying with each spike of movement, thinning slightly when the body stilled. It wasn't static. It tracked something inside the creature — broadcasting it outward, filling the space around it with the noise of its own processes.

  The creature had stopped screaming. It trembled now — a fine continuous vibration in his palms, the body spending itself on responses that weren't working. The snout still moved. Still reading the air. Still oriented, despite everything, in the same direction it had been moving when he stopped it.

  He looked down the corridor toward the pool chamber.

  The seedling's light was steady on the water.

  He looked back at the creature in his hands.

  [MANA absorbed: +0]

  [EXP acquired: +0]

  [Status: Engaging | LVL: 1 | EXP: 4/10 | MANA: 3/10]