“I don’t love this.”

  “None of us do. It’s unnatural.”

  The entry to the far places had been shockingly dull, outside of the disappearance of every trace of their former world. This hit some people harder than others. For Clayton, every day was about as weird and magical as any other. This was another in a long line of impossible mornings he had experienced since leaving Earth, no more or less bizarre than magical cooking fires that sprang from stones or his newfound ability to peer into the future.

  For the Cinna and the Merkie, the differences were much more pronounced. They had grown up in a world that, however magical, still had rules. Everything that Clayton found odd, they found normal. For them, any small difference this place presented was as unsettling as finding out he had migrated to a magical world had been for him.

  He wasn’t immune to extra weird things, though. And this place was definitely that.

  “Clayton, are you sensing any danger from any of this?” Grace gently touched some of the tall grass and watched as they bent by the waist. “Anything we should look out for?”

  “The only sense I’ve had at all is when I diverted us an hour ago. This doesn’t seem to be something that could hurt us. It’s just… odd, I guess.”

  “There’s wind. This is grass. It’s not particularly strong.” Alvin was bent down, looking as closely as he could at the stalks. “It’s just like it’s frozen. Like we can effect it, but nothing else can.”

  “I don’t think we should stop.” Tom the Merkie took his shield from his back. “I have a bad feeling about all of this. Let’s keep moving.”

  The unnatural stillness was present in every object they saw, from the smallest blade of grass to the largest tree. The trees didn’t last long as examples, though. With every step they made on their journey, the larger plants gave way to more and more grass until, finally, it was all they could see.

  “It’s like an ocean.” Tom pinched off the top of a grass with his fingers. “This is grain, you know. You can eat this.”

  “I’ll pass.” Alvin shook his head. “We can take some with us, but we have no way of knowing if this is poisonous. There’s no reason to take risks until we start to run out of food we know is safe.”

  “I really can’t see any end to it.” Clayton put his hand to his brow to shield his eyes from the sun and squinted his eyes, but still couldn’t see anything but more grain in the distance, all the way to the horizon. “And it doesn’t move. It doesn’t even spring back when we move it. Why?”

  Behind them, there was a long furrow cut in the waist-high grass where they had stomped down the grass but it had declined to rebound in the slightest, laying down or staying bent to the side where they had swept it out of their way. If something wanted to follow them, they wouldn’t be hard to track at all.

  Yet, the threat didn’t come from behind them.

  “Look out, everyone. Something’s happening.” Clayton’s danger sense pinged. “Something’s coming.”

  It didn’t take long to see where it was coming from. To their left, the grass started to shift just at the limits of their vision. Several unseen entities were cutting their own paths through the grass, drawing lines of bent wheat stalks that were quickly approaching the group.

  “How dangerous does it feel?” Grace asked.

  “Given how far off it is? Moderately, at least.” Clayton leveled his spear. “There’s no place to run to. I say we hold our ground.”

  Nobody disagreed. With his spear pointed forward, Clayton tensed as the furrows got closer and closer, his nerves barely in check as something finally sprang from the grass towards him.

  Clayton let the information register as he moved the spearhead to track the incoming beast. Midair, the beast defied his attempts to map it onto any Earth animal he had known. It was almost rodent-like, with a long, round face that suggested fatness in a way that its own body defied. Below the neck, it was a slender, powerful-looking thing.

  Like a capybara built for speed?

  With the speed and commitment they were displaying, Clayton could sacrifice some of his own power to make sure he had full control of his weapon and rely on the monsters to make up for the lost force with their own momentum. Or at least he thought he could. As the Chronale got further and further past the point of no return and its death seemed sure, it glowed with blue energy and somehow reversed. It didn’t kick off anything or arrest its own movement in any way. It just rewound itself, somehow, moving backwards on the same trajectory it had used to move in.

  No, you don’t.

  Clayton was still in a striking stance, courtesy of his own caution. He spared no attention to the others as he thrust the spear forward and stepped his own weight after it. The Chronale was fast, but it wasn’t fast enough to get completely out of Clayton’s spear range before the head of the spear caught up with him.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “You weren’t kidding about those reflexes.” Grace’s shout crossed the battlefield. “Fast.”

  “I’m busy!”

  As Clayton pinned the first Chronale to the dirt, another two were approaching. He jerked his spearhead free and set his foot in the dirt, ready to kick backwards and give himself some space. The Chronales had other ideas. They sprung, then glowed a slightly different color, a more reddish hue rather than the blue from before. Whatever timing Clayton had expected was ruined as their speed doubled, moving them forward in time faster than he could deal with.

  It wasn’t his reaction time that held him back. He could certainly see what they were doing, and he knew what he should do to counter. It was his body that held him back. He could have dodged one, but two was out of the question. He changed tacks to swat one out of the air while dodging the other, which he could have just about handled if it wasn’t for a third rodent-like horror emerging from the grass almost at his feet.

  “Help!” Clayton yelped. He managed to lean out of the way of the first swipe, but the Chronales gathered back into fighting form again quickly. “Quick!”

  “I’ve got you!”

  Like an angry boulder, Tom was suddenly occupying the space the first Chronale had been. His shield rung like a gong as the animal was sent flying a few feet away, senseless from the impact. The second of the two attackers was rebuffed by Alvin, who missed hitting it with his hammerhead but was able to thwack it with the handle. It didn’t do any damage that Clayton could see, but it did knock the monster off course, its arms and legs grasping at the air for any way to regain control of its body.

  “Get the one at your feet.” Grace’s voice sounded out. “Then the one Alvin hit. I’ll make it easy.”

  Clayton didn’t need to be told twice. With everything described happening in a split second, he still had just enough time to pivot his spear’s point between him and the last threat, which immediately tried to reverse course and rewind itself out of danger. It wasn’t fast enough. His spear skewered it midair, then sent it flying as he wrenched himself into a spin to face the uninjured Chronale that Alvin had hit.

  It looked like the Chronale was going to get an attack in first, but a sudden blast of light changed the timing as Grace’s distraction attack robbed it of its eyesight. According to her, the blinding flare attack wouldn’t last more than a heartbeat or two. That was plenty. The Chronales were magical, but they weren’t smart, trained fighters. When the animal was able to see again, it looked not for the spear approaching but instead the source of the light. Its mistake was quickly fatal.

  With all four attackers now focused on the Chronale that Tom had been able to pin down with his shield, the rest of the attack was neutralized quickly. Grace managed to blind the remaining enemy just as she had the last, and Alvin’s sledgehammer came down hard to hold the animal in place while Clayton ended it once and for all.

  “That was good,” Grace said, once everyone had regained their bearings. “Better than I thought. Alvin, thank you for keeping your word.”

  Alvin bent his head. It had still been an open question for everyone whether or not he’d be helpful in the way he had claimed he would. Clayton thought that was probably true even for him. It was proven now.

  “Good job to you too, Tom. Was it hard to keep it at bay?” Clayton asked.

  “No. Just one of those isn’t a problem at all. I could have kept it busy all day if I needed to. I can do more, but my level just isn’t high enough yet.”

  “Three, right?”

  “Yes. Hopefully that will change soon. There’s no reason we wouldn’t get experience from these, right?”

  “No. Not unless something weird happens. Which… oh. Yes. That is the kind of thing that can happen here, I guess.”

  “That’s not good.” Grace dismissed the message with a scowl. “I was counting on us getting stronger.”

  “It gets worse. We’re in danger,” Clayton said, his skill once again pinging him.

  “From there.” Alvin said, turning. He pointed his gaze at what Clayton saw were around ten furrows, approaching quickly. “We can’t take ten, right? We could barely take four.”

  “No, we can’t,” Tom said. “Run.”

  They all took off as one, sprinting through the tall grass and thankful for the unnaturally flat terrain. Clayton craned his neck to look behind them as they ran, seeing occasional flashes of red as the Chronale pack closed the distance.

  “We can’t keep this up. They’re gaining on us,” Clayton said.

  “We need to. But there’s hope. Look ahead.” Grace nodded forward. “The terrain’s changing. We need to get into that crack.”

  Ahead of them, much to close to have made any sense, a cliff was now looming. It was a badly weathered thing, dotted here and there with massive cracks in the face of it. This far off, it was hard to tell if they led anywhere at all.

  “Won’t we be trapped?” Clayton asked.

  “It’s our best shot,” Grace shot back. “Otherwise, someone needs to carry me and we keep running.”

  “I’ll do it.” Alvin volunteered. “I’m the least useful. And the strongest, I think.”

  The Chronales continued to close the gap as the cracks came closer and closer. By the time the four of them broke out of the grass into the clear, rocky ground ahead of the wall itself, they were literally nipping at their heels. Grace shouted again as they got close.

  “Into the crack. The narrow one. I have to be last.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Grace tried and failed to sound confident. “Just make sure and pull me out of the way if it doesn’t work.”

  They dove into the crack one by one, with Tom leading the way and Clayton just behind. Alvin stuck close to Grace, who made it several steps in before the first of the Chronales made it across the threshold.

  “Do it,” Clayton yelled.

  “Not yet.” A Chronale was steadily moving towards Grace, snarling and cautious. It reached forward with its jaws to grab at her foot, which she barely pulled out of the way. She still didn’t fire. “A few more seconds.”

  “Grace, dammit, I don’t want you to die. Just do it.”

  “Not yet. Soon… now!”

  Grace’s arm shot forward as a massive beam of light issued forth, so strong that Clayton was only able to see for a moment before the glare forced him to turn away. The Chronales in its way, by contrast, had no way to escape the pain. There was a short yelp, then a few howls that cut off abruptly a second or two later, then silence.

  “She’s… wow. That’s incredible.” Alvin caught Grace as she fell. There were no Chronales, now, although a few bits of fur and burned flesh here and there indicated where they had probably gone. “Really amazing. She’s out, though.”

  “Yeah, I see that. I didn’t expect it to knock her completely out.” Clayton looked behind him further into the crack, where shadows obscured most of what he could have seen. “We could have used the light, too.”

  “We need to get deeper,” Tom said. “I can hear more of them coming. We need to be hidden.”

  “There could be worse back there.”

  “There could. But it’s death out here. Let's go.”

  Clayton didn’t have any response for that except to stand up. His danger senses weren’t telling him anything just yet. They put Alvin between them as Tom covered their retreat and Clayton put his danger sense to work scouting out in front of them. He could only hope they survived until Grace came back to turn the lights on for them.