The alpha was decidedly the worse for wear after its confrontation with the bear. It was covered in small wounds, and it was lifting its left forepaw at an odd angle as it hobble-sprinted towards him.

  Jon was frightened, but he could not help feeling a little miffed at this ridiculous situation. A crippled bunny could catch him on three legs and still pose a threat. He had to find ways to get stronger if he wanted to survive this world.

  As the rabbit approached, Jon felt calm wash over him, a cool place of objective detachment he usually reached before the shit really hit the fan. Breath out. Face towards the flame. Jon had no real plan, but he briefly informed Oregano of his next moves. The rat eagerly agreed to his role.

  Oregano seemed happy to finally have something he could contribute. Weirdly, the rat kept sending an image of a skeleton stuck in the gullet of a massive dead snake, flies collecting on the giant reptile and thousands of bids feasting on the meat. The image had a lot of subtext Jon couldn’t process right now, it was some sort of parable from his culture, but it was clear Oregano was planning for death and glory.

  Jon sent back an irritated message,

  “Stick to the outside you crazy little bastard!”

  He received an image of rat droppings in reply. Jon let out a heavy breath.

  The alpha had stopped, and was staring at Jon. It seemed to expect him to flee again. After a few seconds, it broke the standoff, sprinting towards him, ignoring its injury as it barreled forward, mouth agape, ears laying back against its head.

  Jon recognized the posture, and attempted to distract the rabbit with his mental magic, making his dragline let off the same noise as the bear from earlier. The alpha either did not hear the noise or didn’t care, because it let loose its sonic attack without hesitation.

  Jon saw the wave as it emerged for a fraction of a second. He braced for his imminent death. He would be stunned, and then he would die. But before Jon could consciously react, he felt the psionic rafts in his pulse generator shifting.

  He had saved his most dense psionic energy reserves, and felt he had two strong attacks left in him after the three from earlier. As the wave approached, he reflexively reacted with a psionic attack. It was like being a kid diving into an ocean wave. The wave might have awesome power, but he was focused in one spot, parting the energy. He speared his way through and impacted the alpha’s mind like a gong.

  The alpha flinched and stumbled, its head turning slightly to the left side. Jon took that moment to strike, and whipped the sac of webbing containing Oregano at the alpha.

  Oregano and the sac impacted the side of the alpha’s head, sticking fast. The rat was fastened to the angle of the alpha’s jaw by his container, where Jon had placed some sticky webbing as the alpha approached.

  The rat rushed out from his travel carrier to attack his foe, biting the bunny’s right ear. The alpha screeched, not a sonic attack but a cry of pain, and tried to knock Oregano off as it twirled in a circle. The alpha whipped its head up as it reared on its hind legs, which proved a fatal mistake.

  Jon pounced. He struck the rabbit’s throat with his pincers before it finished straightening. Jon slashed with the claws from his first legs and clung to its body with the others.

  The alpha frantically tried to slam Jon into the earth, using its weight against him. Jon momentarily saw stars as he landed on the ground with the over-sized bunny. Somehow he managed to hold on, and his venom continued to pump into the alpha’s neck.

  As it began rising up again onto its hind legs, he struck the bunny mentally, and felt its resistance give way. Jon pushed off as he felt the movements of the bunny lose their coordination, landing a few paces away. It lay there, twitching on the ground.

  Jon jumped back into the fray. He landed on the seizing bunny’s head, scrabbling forward and turning, latching on with his claws as he positioned himself.

  Oregano had never stopped savaging the creatures ear, and was gleefully tearing it off by the root as Jon sank his fangs into the nape of the alpha’s neck, delivering another full dose of his toxin. The shorter quills near the bunny’s neck and shoulders scraped against his carapace but did not pierce him as he bit again and again, tearing with his claws until a spray of blood pulsing out several meters told him he had struck a major artery.

  The hunger surged again, and Jon began devouring the still living alpha, tunneling into the flesh and gorging himself on the thick muscle and hide along its shoulder blades. He barely noticed as the blood flow stopped, and increasingly urgent messages from Oregano kept pressing in on him. The rat repeatedly sent him pictures of a deep river, the currents pulling and of Jon drifting, but he took little notice. Jon did shift his attention when he felt a new mental presence approaching from the bank.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Jon raged as he looked up, raising his palps and opening wide his chelicera in challenge as he confronted the giant salamander making its way up from the river. He felt a nuisance of a mind send him one more image: a nest, impossibly far away, now missing a core member. Jon shook himself loose from the mental fog, and focused hard on his goal. He was not here to feed, he was here to survive, to make his way home.

  Having said that, Jon wasn’t leaving the whole prize for this big blue fuck. He struck out with two claws and speared the alpha’s eyes, whipping them out of the sockets with a sucking sound as he leapt away from the corpse. Whirling, he dashed away as the salamander charged. It showed little interest in him as it grabbed the alpha’s remains and dragged them towards the water. Jon saw two more waves approaching, and wished the victor of the coming struggle a horrible bout of gastrointestinal distress.

  He handed the eyes to Oregano as he scurried up next to him, and the rat wrapped them in the alpha’s severed right ear.

  “Worst breakfast wrap ever,” Jon thought.

  He scooped oregano back up, then ran towards the pillar until he finally reached the base.

  The column was smaller here where it met the earth, and flared out to be much larger near the ceiling. Just where the center of the column met the earth, Jon’s I.O.U. card was shining a path forward that somehow outshone the column. He looked around frantically, but saw nowhere to go, and he had no idea what to do. The spot it was leading to was made from solid, glowing rock.

  Jon risked a glance back towards the waterfall, where he saw the cherubs circling in the air, periodically diving to engage with the bunnies. The bunnies were seemingly successful in their bid to drive the cherubs from the waterfall, and he saw waves of energy periodically surging upward from the sonic attacks. About a second after he saw the waves, he would hear the powerful deep shrieks of the alphas. The airborne cherubs seemed especially vulnerable to these attacks, and Jon watched in fascination as one of the cherub’s wings ripped off and it fell to the water below.

  However, he also noticed two more large bunnies splitting off from the group, beginning to run along the bank towards him. Jon felt his fear spike again, and began wondering what sin had pissed off the bunnies so much.

  “Probably killing and devouring nine of them,” Jon thought to himself. In his defense, all of those bunnies were dicks.

  Desperate, Jon turned back to the pillar and tried to enter. He first tried to claw at the area where the I.O.U. was shining, then tried to walk into it, and finally he did a little hop, slamming his head with a loud *CRACK*!

  Oregano gave him a strange look as Jon slowly crawled back to his claws, pretending to have done nothing unusual.

  “Got any better ideas?”

  The rat sent Jon an image of him pressing the card to the space where the light led.

  Jon raised himself up on his hind legs, and pressed into the column awkwardly. A bit of heat came as the column created an opening for him.

  He stumbled inside, and turned to usher in Oregano, but noted the rat was scrabbling at an invisible wall. Jon looked past the rat, and was surprised to see the two alphas had already crossed more than a quarter of the distance towards them. These ones were faster than the last one.

  Not knowing what else to do, Jon reached out and grabbed the rat, pulling him up to his side. As soon as Oregano was through and Jon was out of the doorway, the light from his I.O.U flared and the doorway sealed itself in moments.

  Jon’s head buzzed, and he knew how to open the door again if he wanted to. It was like he had been given key card access. They both turned, surveying their new surroundings.

  They were in an entry way. It ended in a spiral staircase which wrapped downward with a gentle slope. It was dark, but blue flames lit lamps hanging on silver chandeliers from above. The railing was a reflective metal, the color unable to be ascertained in the darkness. The stairs themselves were a white stone, with the walls made from similar material.

  Jon took a couple of deep breaths, wanting nothing more than to collapse shaking on the ground. That was not an option. They weren’t safe yet. He knew no one could get in the column without the I.O.U., but they needed to find an exit that didn’t have a small army inbound.

  Taking another breath, Jon began making his way down the staircase, seeing no clear alternatives. Oregano was still held to his side by a claw, the alpha’s ear clutched in Oregano’s tiny paws.

  Jon stopped as he realized the rat’s position of relative discomfort. He spun up a bit of webbing for a temporary travel case, though it was not quite as nice as the original he had thrown at the alpha. He affixed the new carrier to the front of his abdomen. Oregano hopped up and reclaimed his rightful place. As they walked down the stairs, Jon noticed the lamps ahead lighting as they approached with those behind dying down.

  “Kind of feels like I’m the idiot protagonist of a B horror movie,” Jon thought to himself as he descended.

  The feeling was not helped when they came to a stone doorway a few minutes later. It had an animal skull carved into the front, the last remnants of some giant predator. Its mouth was screaming with dagger-like teeth on full display. There were eight appendages radiating out in a circle from the skull. They looked like tentacles, and each appendage held a sword. The ivory handles of the door were embedded in the teeth.

  “Not exactly the best omen,” he said to Oregano.

  The rat looked at the doorway for a few seconds, and then sent back an image of two alpha bunnies backed by an army sitting outside the door. Not many good alternatives.

  “Yeah, I’m not saying we’re going back there, just pointing out this sucks too,” Jon said back.

  The rat sent him the mental equivalent of a shrug. Jon gave an internal sigh and reached towards the ominous door. The doors silently swung inward without his touch.