Before the echoes had fully died out, I was crouched at the opening of our little makeshift shelter, my sole dagger lifted to face level. Behind me, Fallon had her crystal in hand, ready and wary. We had both heard that roar before, and we knew what it meant. Already, we could hear the susurrus approach of the shadows driven into flight.

  I was tired, unarmored and barely armed. But I still knew that there was a fight coming. Fortunately, the crude little shelter we had found for ourselves would offer some protection, as the shadows seemed rightfully reluctant to approach the natural crystals.

  They soon came into view, a handful, then a dozen, then a score, then an uncounted mass of shadows. They ran at us–and passed us by. The tidal wave of aggressive shadows didn’t even seem to flick a fell eye in our direction, set as they were on fleeing down the tunnel.

  “They’re… terrified,” Fallon breathed.

  Only then did I put it together. The fleeing shadows, the obvious fear in their movements. I had thought them weak. They were numerous throughout the complex, but were unorganized and mostly solitary, bunching together only when-

  Another roar echoed through the tunnel, closer this time, enough to make the crystals we were hiding under shake and chime against each other.

  My action log had called them prey shadows. And whatever they were running from, whatever was making its tumultuous, cacophonic way down the tunnel in our direction, could only be their predator.

  “We need to run,” I told Fallon, easing out of the gap between the two crystals.

  “What?” Fallon hissed. “What if there’s another group of them like that? They’ll bury us alive!”

  “They’re not the problem, Fal!” I whirled around, and knew that my eyes were too wide, my breath too fast. This was no flutter of insecurity, no tinge of worry. For the first time since I had gained the rogue class, I felt utterly, completely, panicked. “We need to go!”

  Eyes wide, Fallon started to follow after me, but she was moving too slowly. She hadn’t figured it out yet, I’d need to explain it to make her understand, to-

  There was a deep, resounding scrape, and I knew suddenly that I had taken too long.

  I spun, facing down the tunnel, in the general direction we had been heading all day, and I saw it.

  If the prey shadows had been lizards, their natural predator was closer to a badger. Like them, it had a broad, low-slung body, a wide head, and stout legs, as suited to moving on four legs as standing on two. But it was different. Rather than vague shadow-stuff, limned by sullen red, it was real, and physical. An immense wolverine, tall enough that its head scraped the top of the tunnel, larger than an elephant, its fur pitch-black. Worse, it didn’t have the vague, shadowed suggestions of claws or fangs. It had very solid, very real, natural weapons, visible even in the stygian tunnel.

  Of course they glowed, as if lit from within. Its claws and fangs alike were made of slender crystal, as if shaped by a careful artisan. That made a sense, in some distant corner of my mind, the tiny fraction of me that wasn’t ready to howl in terror. It was a predator that hunted shadows. Why wouldn’t it have crystal claws?

  Unlike the prey shadows, whose features had been defined with dim red light, the badger’s matte obsidian body was limned by brilliant, flaring yellow, a color reflected in its crystal claws and its beady, intent eyes.

  I was frozen, rooted in place, as that immense hunter stared me down.

  “Dani,” Fallon whispered, her voice a trembling candle flame on the verge of being snuffed out, “what do we do?”

  The predator tilted its head, as if considering us. I could hear it sniffing at us, a snuffling on the same scale as a band tapping a microphone to test their speakers. Instinctively, I knew that we were something new to it, something it hadn’t been prepared for. But some little screaming rodent in my hindbrain also told me, quite confidently, that its surprise wouldn’t last wrong.

  My vocal cords finally untangled themselves enough for me to manage a harsh whisper. “I told you! We. Need. To. Run!”

  On my mark, we both turned, our laughably impotent weapons still clenched in white-knuckled hands, and we ran back the way we had come, just as the prey shadows had.

  We made it, perhaps, seven steps. Fallon might have managed eight, since she was ahead of me. Then there was a sudden exhalation through the tunnel, a gust of wind formed by the displacement of the predator’s sheer mass moving at impossible speeds, and then I was on the ground. Fallon gave a shrill grunt as she fell too, and her crystal dimmed as it spun out of her hands.

  The predator crushed the gem to inert powder with one foot, then it spun to face me, baring its glowing fangs, its upper lip lifted in a snarl.

  I staggered to my feet, conscious of my dismissed armor. Even if I could conjure it again without rest, which I wasn’t at all sure I could, I’d never manage it before the massive monster charged me.

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  I met its leperous yellow gaze nonetheless, and I fell into an awkward crouch, my sole dagger, smaller than the least of the shadow-wolverine’s fangs, held close to my body, ready to strike. At the very least, I was going to cut this thing once before it took me down.

  The wolverine made a coughing snarl of a noise, and then it flung itself at me, as fast and unstoppable as a speeding bus. And this time, at the very least, I managed to stare my death in the face.

  So I saw when the arrow shot out from behind me, slammed into that snarling, bestial face, right between the eyes–and then exploded.

  The blast threw the predator and I alike backwards. At a better time, my new body, with its improved muscles and balance and reflexes and all that wonderful stuff might’ve been enough for me to catch myself, to turn my tumble into something more graceful, but my entire Dani felt like it had stopped responding, my mind unable to believe in my continued survival.

  Then I fetched up against something as soft and plush as a mattress, if a bit more… sticky.

  I blinked blearily, trying to focus eyes that felt a little too loose in my skull. At first, I took the light in front of me for the crystals we had tried to sleep between, but then the bright violent blob moved, which I was, like, eighty percent sure the other hadn’t.

  “Heal,” a soft alto of a voice said. That same prickling chill from before soaked over me–but it was much more comprehensive than Fallon’s effort. In a moment, I felt consumed by the sensation from the top of my skull to the tips of my toes, then, in another moment, it was gone, and my body felt ready to respond to my brain again.

  My brain wasn’t up to telling my body to actually do anything, but still, it was a big step in the right direction.

  My eyes finally focused, and I was able to see the heavily-armored mythic hero of a person standing in front of me.

  At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. They weren’t just tall, and weren’t just muscular, they were built like a statue of an ancient soldier–one that was unfathomably old and yet had held up with barely a mark. Their face was too angular, their ears were shaped oddly, their too-large eyes a pale lavender that was washed out to a bright gray that, admittedly, matched the similar hue of their choppy, short cut hair very well.

  They winked at me, and their voice was the smooth, confident alto I had heard earlier, as androgynous as their face. “Feeling better?”

  I replied with all of my considerable wit and intelligence. It sounded something like, “Blugh.”

  That dimmed their face with worry, but then a booming warhorn of a voice called out, “Char! Inbound!”

  “Right. Stay here, alright? Watch her, Eni.”

  The last was directed above my head, and I couldn’t quite muster the energy to look up to see who they were addressing.

  The knight–what else could I call them?–stood up, confirming their height. They were clad in metal armor of a matte gray, but scattered over it was a variety of bright violet crystals, the light I had made out even while I was dazed. Unlike those we had encountered, or the foci Fallon conjured, these weren’t pretty or polished or geometric. They looked more like the knight had welded natural lumps of glittering amethyst to their armor.

  Continuing this trend, the massive shield they hefted was like a reversed geode, a concave oblong with a face coated in the same purple gems, while their warhammer, or mace, or whatever the weapon they held ready in their right hand was, looked like a single uneven chunk of translucent purple stone welded to the end of a metal stick.

  The predator, a ton of murderous beast, barrelled down on the person who had saved my life, and they stood in its path without a trace of fear. The moment before it hit them, they lifted their shield, and a massive echo of purple crystal lit up the air in a vertical dome between them and it. Violet energy flared on contact with ochre claws, but whoever they were, the stranger was more than a match for the predator.

  With it held at bay a critical moment, they exploded into motion, that oversized bludgeon of amethyst twirled as lightly as a baton as they shattered through their own barrier and slammed their weapon into the predator’s massive midsection. The monster didn’t so much double over as literally bow in the middle–and the knight wasn’t done. Light built up in their hammer before exploding, a blast of energy passing straight from the weapon’s head into the monster and sending it flying.

  I had half an instant to worry about Fallon who, last I saw, had been sprawled in the direct path of the flying monster, but then another shape slammed into the predator's back from above, sending the massive predator crashing into the floor.

  “Don’t worry,” another voice said. I turned to see a woman now standing next to me, leaning casually against what looked to be a sponge of soft moss, the mass that had arrested my tumble. With her hood up, I couldn’t make out much in the way of details, but she was similarly tall, if more willowy, and in her hands was a long, graceful longbow. “Your friend is fine. I already shaped some stone around her.”

  Meanwhile, the fight continued, the shining knight now joined by his companion, the source of the warning shout from earlier, a brute of a man who seemed to disdain both weapon and armor, yet still left long furrows of sickly-yellow light in the predator’s flanks with every strike of his clawed hands.

  “Alright, I should probably help,” the archer decided after a few moments, pushing herself off the moss with a small breath. She didn’t raise her bow, though, rather pointing her spread fingers at the ceiling above the ongoing fight–which seemed to begin to move at the motion. It was like watching a timelapse of a stalactite forming, a spike of stone rapidly emerging from the ceiling at the precise point where she had pointed her hands.

  “About time!” the man roared. As if it was all choreographed, he leapt at the knight, who tilted their shield, giving the man a platform to bounce off of like a pinball. He slammed a fist into the newly-formed stalactite like a cannonball, and with a (literally) earth-shattering crack, the earthen spike fell, ponderous and graceful, to skewer through the predator.

  The archer–the mage?–smiled with satisfaction, dusting her hands off like it was a job well done. She turned to me, and the smile froze on her face. Her eyes, bright green under her hood, widened as she studied me. “Facet’s gleam,” she breathed, in the same tone as a muttered swear, “that’s impossible. You’re a human.”

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