|| ACTIVE SKILL : Lycanthropy || [ Deactivate Y/N? ]

  Nico pulled ear protection from his inventory and snapped them into place. The shrieks dulled, dropping to something bearable.

  Earth manipulation required contact. They had to be on the causeway too.

  Fuck it.

  Nico tightened the air pocket and broke into a sprint toward the point he remembered they’d jumped from earlier. A few strides in, the stone rumbled beneath his feet.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED || [ ? Gale Step | “wind jump” ]

  Pillars of earth snapped upward where he’d been as Nico launched diagonally into the air. The sudden clearance gave him a second to frantically take stock of the landings—roughly where he remembered them. He overshot the closest and tucked, rolling into the mud of the next one down. A stray spark of gold mana flared through his legs and made him wince—he was running low. Not enough left to effectively gale step.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED || [ Foxfire Wisps (A) | 1/7 Active | "up to 7 lil guys" ]

  The single wisp swelled as he fed it mana and directed it beneath the mud platform above. It flared violently, flash-boiling the mud from below, sending a saturated plume of steam straight upward.

  The moment the steam reached the haze, it was pulled inward and forced back into liquid, driven into a tight orbit. The moving water stripped silt from the air as it passed, a makeshift filtration that briefly cleared the space, revealing a wolf mid-leap near the causeway’s edge, bounding along intact stone.

  Before the water could choke with sediment, Kai hurled it back down to the platform it had risen from. The surface hissed as it cooled, the earth within the mud drying almost instantly.

  Kai followed, collecting the steam again as he dropped to the platform below. He kept going, descending as far as the space allowed to pull water out of mud and air.

  Nico leapt up to the higher platform, still warm from the boil. His foxfire followed, smaller now, but hovering close.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED || [ 火 Flame Lance | "fire throws" ]

  He drew a breath and fed heat into his palm, narrowing it until it held, then threw it forward into the haze. The fire vanished into the dust without igniting.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED || [ ? Lycanthropy ]

  Nico jumped back onto the causeway, side stepping the wave of compacted mud and rock that slammed into his trajectory, snapping around his paws as he ran into the haze. Each step felt heavier than the last as he dodged rising panels and got clipped by half-formed spikes, but he made it far enough.

  He concentrated what mana he had left and threw his ears back, flicking the noise protection off of them.

  || SKILL ACTIVATED || [ ??? Thunderburst | “lightning aoe” ]

  Electricity surged outward, ripping through the terrain. The shrieking spiked brutally as sparks burst from the noise devices embedded in the floor. Nico winced and dropped low against the surge of sound, but in the brief gap he heard stone grinding to his right. Most likely earth pulling into a shield against the discharge. He sent the foxfire in that direction, but pain lanced up behind his eyes—mana depletion bursting white across his vision.

  The wisp kept bright enough for its trajectory to be seen through the haze before earth flipped up and crushed it. One of the panels caught the fox across the side as he tried to clear it, driving the air out of his lungs, folding him into a hard impact against the ground.

  Blue flame tore past him as he fought to stay upright.

  A black form cut through the haze in the foxfire’s wake, every stride flaring with azure mana as water surged alongside. An unfamiliar snarl ripped through the dust, low and furious.

  Another wave of exhaustion flared behind his eyes, sparking gold mana from his paws erratically against his will, but he could at least brace against a still ground now.

  Water slammed into something. Something shattered. And again with more snarls sounding out.

  Frozen stone tumbled into his view, the ice melting off it almost immediately and drawing back into the haze to collect and slam into something again. Nico lifted his head. Through the thinning haze, Caleb hung suspended a few feet off the ground in a column of water. It flash-froze, crystallizing upward until ice completely locked him midair.

  The growling faded, replaced by the sound of breathing settling back into rhythm as a final sweep of water dragged the suspended silt down into mud across the stone.

  Kai reached him mid-deactivation, azure mana breaking around him in sharp snaps, his hand settling immediately on Nico’s back. Nico was used to Kai doing it to steady him, but it was an unusual sensation—feeling its tremble.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  ***

  They stared at the Familiar, now somewhat tied into a tree, and he stared right back. A failed assassination attempt, with the hitman still here, was extremely awkward.

  Farther down the floating stretch of road, vegetation began to sprout, thickening into a canopy that arched over the causeway and turned it into a tunnel. They hadn’t slid his ice cube down there with much dignity, but it beat giving him frostbite. Actually, the fox was lying on a shelf of the ice vehicle to help with the swelling, so really Kai had slid both of them down.

  Nico picked a nice banyan tree near the start of the tunnel. Kai more or less splashed the Familiar onto its branches, where he couldn’t reach any earth, then refroze him while they scrambled together a hodgepodge of rope-adjacent items from their inventories.

  They both technically had high quality climbing ropes, but neither was willing to sacrifice theirs just to tie up some guy. The festival ribbons were exquisitely embroidered linen they wanted to keep as souvenirs. What they ended up using was an ungainly mix of bungee cords, zip ties, and one extension cord.

  It was weird having to figure out how to secure him to a tangle of thick, sprawling branches without touching him because of the Ashmark, which at least wasn’t very effective against wood that petrified before reducing to ash. He also jangled every time they splashed him around, all manasteel accessories and whatnot, adding another layer to the weirdness. Nico sat nearby proposing different configurations to Kai, who tied all the restraints himself, because the fox wanted to stay in lycanthropic form. It made lying down really easy.

  But yeah. They had a guy kind of tied in a tree.

  It wasn’t as if they were really detaining him, even though he had tried to kill them. Thinking about it that way… they probably should have done a better job. At what point does a person decide, yes, this is enough rope to guarantee this guy cannot get out?

  Caleb’s blatant staring didn’t help. Nico would’ve appreciated even a sliver of embarrassment from him, maybe a lowered gaze or literally anything other than the direct eye contact he kept holding. At least he wasn’t talking. That was honestly the best part of all this: Caleb had immediately chosen to keep his mouth shut—probably for legal reasons, but Nico would accept any reason. Still, Nico had to admit the guy’s eyes were beautiful, all opal iridescence, and with Caleb watching them so intently, Nico got a very good look.

  Was this why people got blindfolded?

  Blindfolding someone was kind of intimate, though. And this guy was a huge asshole twice over. First, he tried to kill them; second, they now had to figure out what to do about it.

  Not killing a person ranked surprisingly high on his list of life priorities, Nico emotionally found out right now. Knocking him out also wasn’t an option; not giving someone a traumatic brain injury landed just as high. Forcing an injured person to take enough sleepy-time cough syrup until they conked out seemed irresponsible, and he really didn’t want to forcefeed Caleb… ever. The fox was learning a lot about himself today.

  Nico’s sigh stretched into a yawn as he thought about the paperwork this mess would generate. What workplace protocol even covered this? They had a lot of work injury related documentation since rift work was dangerous, sure, but getting mauled by a lion after wandering into its den wasn’t an assassination. For the first time in his life someone tried to ambush and kill him!

  It wasn’t something he sat around preparing for… he did ambient mana surveys. At most he received shitty internet death threats, which were completely different from this situation despite how that sounded. Nico genuinely believed he would go his entire life without being targeted at work for assassination.

  That thought made him glance toward Kai.

  The son of Lumere’s founding Sage? Was it weirder that Kai walked around largely unguarded? He usually had a few aides with him on admin-heavy assignments, but it wasn’t as if aides were supposed to take a hit for a guy just because they handled his presentations. Unless that was a clause in their employment contract—which wouldn’t even break the top ten list of the craziest things Nico factually knew, not even speculated, the Vuongs did. Now he wanted to see the contract himself; he’d ask an aide next time he was in-office.

  Nico rolled the thought around again. Wait. Did Kai have fewer security personnel around him when they were together, because they were together? Was that in the fine print of their friendship contract?

  Kai, meanwhile, was furiously tapping on his phone with both thumbs. Even though they had no cell service. Because they were in a rift.

  After several minutes of typing, he locked the screen with a click and tossed it into his inventory. He walked over to Caleb and gave the restraints a few firm yanks—hopefully to check their durability and not just to harass the guy—then sighed and returned to Nico.

  “Let’s go.”

  So, guess that was the protocol.

  Nico hobbled alongside Kai toward what was most likely the rift’s core. They were low on mana, so Nico opted out of being slid down the tunnel, despite Kai being willing. He also insisted he would cry if Kai left him alone with Caleb in that state, waiting to be ejected from a rift.

  At least the tunnel was quite beautiful. Wrapped branches arched overhead, acting as a trellis for flowering vines that helped mask the ozone with a sweet floral, something that reminded him of—

  The fox sliced the thought off and wobbled into Kai’s leg. Kai steadied him, resting a hand between Nico’s ears until he found his balance again.

  “It’s up ahead,” Kai said.

  Looking up, Nico could see the vegetation clearing up in the distance, opening up like it did the other end.

  “If it’s been maintained like we think, I’ll handle it. Stay here.”

  He froze a patch of ice beside the wall. Nico nodded and laid down, letting his eyes rest on the blossoms overhead.

  As he walked away, Kai’s footsteps sounded much faster than the pace they were going at. The tunnel was much longer than they’d thought it’d be.

  Nico tracked one petal drifting loose and sticking to the ice near his shoulder. Another followed. He counted them without meaning to, then lost track and started over a few times, getting confused between the shades of lilacs.

  “…”

  It’d be nice if Zhou could heal him again, though he felt guilty for even thinking it—

  His ears perked as he heard a fast stride coming from the direction of the core. A path of ice extended to him and when he got into a sit, a block behind him pushed him along.

  To their relief, the core was just sitting at the end of the tunnel, idly maintained in a familiar root-cage configuration. The core reacted hungrily toward a pulse of Kai’s mana, as rift entry/exit points often did; probably how Caleb got in. Where they’d end up on exit, and whether reentry would be as easy, were both unclear, so Kai was eager to unravel the core rather than overthink it.

  Ice accumulated beneath the fox again, sliding him into the back of Kai’s legs as the core flared in threads of white. Nico closed his eyes; it was giving him a headache.