The massive armadon seemed entirely unfazed by the burning grease covering its thick hide, its full attention on Rylan’s triumphant former friend, who had just used its head as a springboard.

  “SOREN, RUN!” Rylan yelled.

  Soren didn’t run. He glanced back, froze for an instant, then started moving towards them sideways in a pattern Rylan vaguely recognised as a quickstep, which seemed somehow faster.

  More importantly, he was heading straight for them.

  The oversized armadon behind him snorted out twin jets of yellowish vapour, one of which caught fire from the flames clinging to the side of its head and burned a bright blue. Then it charged.

  As one, Tamina and Rylan turned and ran, with Soren hot on their heels. Rylan’s first step was a little awkward as he braced himself for the pain in his ankle, but to his surprise, it didn’t come. It seemed Ethereon’s recovery acceleration had done an excellent job while he’d been preoccupied with digging into the side of a whale.

  That’s not to say he could move comfortably. His britches squelched with every step, soaked as they were with highly flammable whale-grease.

  Why’d it have to be a fire-breathing Malequint of all things?!

  Rylan had heard of people who’d died in the cloudsea in a variety of ways, from falling into a hole and getting stuck, to eating the wrong thing, to being eaten themselves. He’d never heard of anyone being burned alive within the dense fog, and he was not keen to be the first.

  Soren actually overtook them with his strange sideways quickstepping, twisting his head this way and that as he did, clutching the backpack to his chest as he illuminated their surroundings with his glowband. “This way!” he suddenly called out, veering off sharply towards the cloudwhale’s large fin where it lay propped up on some rocks nearby.

  He flew down to his knees mid-stride, leaned his upper body back, and—holding the backpack to the side like a dance partner—somehow slid underneath through the sand. Tamina hesitated only a fraction of a second before she followed on all fours.

  Behind him, Rylan heard an ominous sound, like a bellow inflating.

  Swearing, he practically dove underneath the fin. There was just enough room next to Tamina that they could both pass through side-by-side and it was a good thing too, as right then, a gout of blue flames washed over the sand behind them.

  Thankfully, only some of it managed to spill underneath the fin, and while Rylan did not appreciate flames licking his heels as he crawled away, it wasn’t enough to set the grease that covered him on fire.

  The fin sloped up away from the armadon, so they were quickly able to get up into a crouch and start running after Soren again, who was jogging ahead while occasionally glancing back.

  Suddenly, the fin was lifted up behind them, giving them space enough to stand upright. The heavy thuds of the armadon’s feet behind them told Rylan all he needed to know.

  He hunched his shoulders in anticipation of another blast of blue flames, and kept running. However, it didn’t come, and they managed to make their way out of the enclosed space unburnt.

  “Why didn’t it spew flames just now?” Rylan panted at Tamina as they chased Soren. “It could’ve easily gotten all three of us!”

  “It couldn’t! Has to build up more of that vapour first!”

  Wait, has she fought one of these before?!

  Rylan didn’t have time to think more about it, as they continued their mad dash over the uneven terrain, jumping over grey boulders and colourful corrals, weaving between startled crabs and undulating anemones.

  No flames came washing over them, but the armadon didn’t give up either, seemingly utterly enraged at having been used as a footbridge.

  “Did you have to use its head as a springboard, Soren?” Rylan complained between breaths.

  Soren just lifted the backpack over his head in reply.

  He seemed to be leading them roughly in the direction he and Rylan had come from earlier, a suspicion that seemed confirmed when they hit a sandy downward slope. They barrelled down it at excessive speed. Rylan found himself struggling to move his legs fast enough to keep up, until he noticed Tamina taking short leaps, more or less bouncing down the hill in the floaty fog rather than running as he was trying, so he quickly copied her.

  However, the armadon had its own technique for moving down the hill.

  A disconcerting rumbling had Rylan craning his head back for a moment, only to see the massive creature curled up into a ball which was now rolling down at increasing speed.

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  Somehow, even this didn’t seem enough to douse the flames clinging to its armoured hide.

  If it wasn’t for the lightening effect of the fog, Rylan had no doubt the beast would have overtaken them in seconds. Under the circumstances, it was still gaining on them at a frightening pace.

  Despite the burning in his legs, Rylan pushed off harder, throwing caution to the haze as he took larger and larger leaps down the hill, the thick fog whistling past his ears as he flew. Cursing, Tamina followed his example.

  At long last, they caught up to Soren, who looked surprised at their sudden appearance, before the soles of his boots lit up again and he sped up into a quickstep.

  Then the bottom of the slope came into view, and just beyond it, strange round shapes loomed in the fog, barely visible in the orange glow of the burning beast rolling after them.

  “Look!” Tamina called out, pointing at the closest shape. “We gotta jump!”

  Rylan still wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but he decided to trust her judgment. After two more hops, he sank deep through his knees, and despite the leaden feeling in his legs, pushed off as hard as he could.

  His two companions had more or less jumped simultaneously, so they ended up arcing through the floaty fog side by side. As the round shapes came closer, Rylan suddenly realised what he was looking at.

  They were the caps of truly giant mushrooms, large enough to drive a cart under. In fact, there appeared to be an entire forest of pale fungi stretched out before them.

  The three of them crashed into the closest cap at high speed, causing it to buckle down slightly, then spring up again, which launched them back into the fog.

  Rylan flipped head over heels, flailing his arms and legs in an effort to stabilise his body, as below him, the armadon proceeded to crash into the stalk, causing it to topple over with a groan.

  Thankfully, Rylan landed on another fungus, bouncing once, then managing to get his feet under him. A quick glance told him Soren and Tamina had landed similarly, albeit on different mushrooms.

  A giddy laugh of relief threatened to bubble up inside of him, but before it could, the armadon’s head rose up beside the mushroom he was standing on. Its beady eyes immediately focused on him, and its maw shot forward.

  Rylan didn’t think, he just leapt in the direction he was facing, towards Tamina’s mushroom. It swayed ominously upon his landing, and Tamina swore and reached out with one hand to steady him, as his own fungus crumpled under the pressure of the armadon’s front paws.

  It roared angrily, then leapt.

  “Go go go!” Soren yelled, though Rylan didn’t need the encouragement, quickly separating from Tamina, and hopping from mushroom to mushroom as fast as he dared.

  “Maybe we should split up!” Soren continued over the mayhem of toppling fungi behind them, caused by the armadon’s rampage. “It’d be easier to lose the fogging clodpoll that way!”

  “No!” Rylan returned, his heart skipping a beat. “We can’t risk losing track of each other down here! We just need to find some hole or something it can’t enter, then we can wait it out!”

  “Unless it cooks us first!” Tamina snapped, leaping from one mushroom to another with a grace Rylan could only envy.

  In fact, she was pulling ahead of him, as was Soren, and soon he was dead last, with a fire-breathing Malequint breathing its yellow vapour practically in his neck.

  His breathing was ragged, his legs were leaden, and his heart was beating a mile a minute. Fog, I should’ve just thrown all of my points in Endurance when I had the chance!

  Tempted as he was, Rylan was pretty sure trying to do so mid-chase was a bad idea. Also, despite the circumstances, part of him balked at the idea of making such a permanent, life-altering choice based on a momentary need.

  As the edges of his vision started to turn black and he began to reconsider his position on making sudden, life-altering choices, Tamina once more pointed ahead and cried, “Look!”

  Rylan mustered himself on pure will and managed to focus his gaze ahead. Glowing orbs of pink light seemed to drift in the distance, illuminating more of the fungal forest, and what lay beyond it.

  A wall of rock loomed through the dark fog. Or two walls, actually, that seemed to converge. Rylan felt his heart sink.

  “It’s a dead end!” Soren cried.

  “No!” Tamina shouted back. “I think this leads into a gorge; if we can climb up, we might be able to lose it there!”

  “Or get trapped and fried!”

  “What choice do we have at this point?!”

  Rylan didn’t have the spare breath to contribute, so he didn’t try. He just followed after Tamina as she swerved to the right, heading straight for the juncture of the two walls of rock. Soren, with a curse, gave in and followed them.

  Another overgrown fungus toppled over behind him, but Rylan just kept pumping his legs, bouncing from mushroom to mushroom, each jump draining a little more of what energy his tired muscles had in reserve.

  The floating orbs of light became clearer as they approached, and Rylan realised it was actually a swarm of undulating, glowing jellyfloats. He’d found one’s corpse in the marina when he was little—and had naturally been stung by one of its tendrils, despite Helen’s repeated warnings—but he’d never known there were species that gave off light...

  The undulating swarm moving overhead bathed them all in a gentle pink, a surreal contrast to the desperate situation they were in.

  Rylan tore his gaze from the wondrous sight, focusing instead on the walls of rock up ahead that neared each other more and more, but didn’t actually appear to touch. As Tamina had predicted, the way forward indeed seemed to lead into a gorge that led upward and narrowed as it progressed.

  Hope sprung up in his heart, and he pumped his legs with renewed vigour.

  Finally, they reached the last of the mushrooms. Soren took the lead—having overtaken Tamina again—in bouncing off the final cap as hard as he could, spinning through the air again as he launched himself up to a small plateau leading into the gorge.

  Tamina followed suit—though without any extraneous spinning—and then it was Rylan’s turn. He took a deep breath, and leapt towards the final cap in a shallow arc. He hit it at full speed, and tried to convert all of his forward momentum upwards.

  His legs at last failed him.

  The angle at which he flew up wasn’t steep enough and a flash of white came from his belly as he smacked hard into the rock. Despite his Mana Shell softening the blow, he was gasping for breath as he scrambled for purchase with both hands and feet.

  The thumps of the approaching armadon’s footfalls accelerated. Rylan finally managed to hook his fingers into a crack, and with arms shaking with nerves, pulled himself up and over the ledge.

  He tried to get to his feet, then, only to stumble and fall back down onto his knees, truly spent.

  The sound of claws scratching on rock alerted him, and he glanced back, horrified, to find the armadon’s head right behind him, beady eyes glinting gleefully as it inhaled.

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  Want to read ahead? Check out my !

  Want even more of my writing? I've published a completed six-book LitRPG series!

  The Whispering Crystals is available on KU, Audible, and in print:

  : Unnatural Laws

  : Unusual Enemies

  : Unimagined Adventures

  : Unchained Potential

  : Untamed Spirit

  : Undivided Worlds

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