Another high-pitched screech tears through the cavern. This one is different. It is not a battle cry. It is a high, thin sound of tearing.
Ryden’s claws rake across the side of her face and down her shoulder before she scrambles out of reach against the far back wall of the cage.
And then, he freezes.
I can tell when her scent hits him.
Even across the cavern, over the overwhelming stench of lifeblood and shadowmaw, the shift in the atmosphere isinstantaneous. Ryden’s shoulders hitch. His glow blasts in the dim light.
Pure, profound confusion explodes in his mind, bleeding out into the mindspace. He scrambles backward from the bone cage, staring down at his claws. The scent of her lifeblood is entirely wrong. It is alien. It is softer than anything that belongs in the deep rock.
But before he has the chance to process exactly what he just struck, the mindspace explodes.
The scent of her spilled lifeblood hits the mindspace. Time stills. I feel all my warriors pause a moment before horror erupts through all of us simultaneously. The psychic roar hits my brain so hard the cavern actually tilts around me.
My vision edges with absolute, blinding black.
I drive the nearest rival back against the stone wall, my claws hammering down into his skull.
Ryden doesn’t even have time to raise his blade. Two of my warriors hit him simultaneously, driving his back into the rock wall with enough force to crack his ribs. He drops into the dust, motionless.
Without a fraction of hesitation, both warriors throw themselves in front of the bone cage. The same calloused hands that tore enemies apart moments ago now grip the thick bars, shielding Tre-sha from the battle with their bulk.
“The wound is survivable,” one reports. “The damage can be healed.”
But the scream in the mindspace repeats and repeats and repeats...
I knock a shadowmaw back, my chest heaving, the starfield burning so hot I can smell my own scorching skin.
I take another down, but then one comes through the narrow offshoot by the bathing chamber.
I smell it before I see it. The blood-wet reek of it, low and fast, black plating vanishing against the cave floor. It is not hunting with strategy. It is hunting with the pure, mindless confusion of an animal that has been driven from its territory and is striking at anything that has a pulse.
It takes one of Lucek’s men down at the knee. He hits the stone face-first. He does not get up.
It is a fraction of a second before the same creature pivots and hits one of mine.
In the mindspace, the whole clan registers it simultaneously. Lucek did not bring them here to fight for him. He drove them here to make the ground uncertain. To make us spend attention downward, to our flanks, everywhere at once.
Lucek is a tactician. And he is ruthless.
I find him at the far edge of the chaos where I knew he would be. He has not spent a single fighting cycle in the thick of it. He is watching. Counting.
I come through his outer line like a wall collapsing. The two warriors between us go down fast. Lucek turns, and his expression does not change.
He does not run. He does not signal to his men. He simply sets his weight, rolls the bone blade to a reverse grip, and comes at me.
He is fast. Faster than a male this depleted has any right to be. The blade finds the gap under my left arm and opens a line across my ribs before I can rotate. I get a handful of his shoulder and hurl him sideways. He uses the momentum, catching himself off the cave wall and rebounding into me from an angle I don’t have time to track.
His elbow drives into the side of my throat. Dark sparks across my vision.
I grab him by his mane and slam his face into the rock. Once.
He spits lifeblood and drives his knee up. I twist enough that it finds my thigh instead of my gut. It still feels like a boulder.
I drive him backward into the stone so hard the cave wall vibrates. His feet leave the ground. My hand closes around his throat.
In the mindspace, he is silent. There is no panic. Only certainty.
