Soren winced as Drew swayed from side to side. When he had finally found a comfortable spot on the former lizard, his ankle would remind him that it was turning green. The smell coming off it was putrid, and the infection was climbing from around the wound; it was almost up to his knee.

  "Hey, buddy, I think we need to stop for water," Soren said to his mount.

  The beast huffed from its snout in recognition.

  Drew grabbed Soren by the collar like the scruff on the back of a baby animal's neck. But the monster held him there for just a moment too long, and Soren could have sworn it sniffed him before placing him gingerly on the ground.

  Soren cupped his hands in the stream where he was dropped off, moving them slightly to funnel the water more easily into his mouth. When he tried to place weight on his leg, the pain was too great. He grabbed a nearby tree limb that was slightly too long to use as a crutch. Angling it across his body, he moved in a way that was more akin to rowing a paddle than walking.

  This earned him a pitying look from Drew.

  "Yeah, yeah," Soren muttered. "I don't think my leg is gonna make it."

  The fever was starting to settle in, and Soren contemplated how his entire world had changed in a single night. Back home, he knew exactly what they did with injuries like this. They would make a clean cut, cauterize the wound, and replace the limb with a peg leg. He had seen it done once to a ranch hand who hadn't made it. They cut out the infection, but the fever had still burned him out.

  Drew grabbed him by his worn-out collar again, and the fabric tore.

  Soren came down hard, and pain lit up his ankle like the fires he could see burning from the city to the North. The dragon, with no better place to grab him, and latched onto his shoulder. Teeth tore into Soren's flesh, and he screamed in pain. The monster let go quickly enough, but there was a look in its eye.

  Soren had seen it before in feral animals.

  "What the fuck was that!" he yelled.

  There was no remorse in the beast's eyes.

  When he landed, he came down on his feet but instantly fell onto his back, trying not to put as much pressure on his wound.

  "Be more careful," Soren said, clutching his shoulder. He didn't notice when the look in Drew's eye shifted from that of a wild animal to something hungrier.

  He tried to stand again when he heard rustling from the woods at the edge of the clearing.

  Drew's head snapped toward the sound, and the dragon lunged for something Soren could barely make out.

  The thing that burst from the brush was no ordinary grazer.

  It came crashing through the undergrowth in a storm of snapping branches and torn ferns. For a moment, the forest showed only fragments: first the sweep of an antler, the color of old iron, then a flank that caught the faint light beneath the canopy and gleamed like dull metal.

  Then the whole beast broke into view.

  It might once have been a stag, though whatever gentle shape the animal had possessed before had long since been devoured by the Ambient mana. Its body had swollen into something massive and brutal, the muscles beneath its hide knotted thick and heavy like the roots of ancient trees. The skin itself was gone in places, replaced by plates of dark armor that had grown directly from the flesh. Those plates overlapped along their shoulders and ribs like the shell of some monstrous beetle, each one ridged and scarred, catching the light with a cold metallic sheen.

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  Between those plates, veins of crystalline growth had erupted through the hide.

  They glimmered faintly with trapped mana, pale and sickly, like frost creeping through the beast's body. Some jutted outward in jagged shards along its spine; others had fused into the bone of its antlers, turning what had once been elegant branches into a brutal crown of crooked crystal and iron-hard bone.

  The fight barely lasted ten seconds.

  Drew was a true predator, and while the stag did try to charge, his old pet shifted to the side with terrifying grace. Smoke curled from its snout, and with a violent roar, fire engulfed the Ironhide Grazer. The dragon ripped and tore into the smoking carcass, scattering chunks of charred sinew and flesh across the clearing.

  Something about the sight unsettled Soren.

  He picked up his tree limb and limped toward a tree with a large hollow at the base. Drew made a noise somewhere between a hiss and a growl, and Soren instinctively picked up the pace. The branch snapped under his weight, but he began to crawl on his three good limbs.

  Then he felt it.

  Vibrations in the ground, running up through his hands from behind him.

  The vibrations didn't come from Drew.

  Something moved through the forest with a rhythm that didn't belong to hooves or paws. It came in a steady, deliberate scurry, many points striking the earth in perfect coordination, each impact too soft to be heard but strong enough that Soren could feel it through the ground beneath his palms.

  Drew lifted his head from the carcass.

  Blood steamed from the dragon's jaws as he slowly turned toward the treeline. The low growl that rolled from his chest was not the satisfied rumble from moments before.

  This one was a warning.

  The forest went still.

  Then something stepped between the trees.

  At first, Soren couldn't understand what he was looking at. His fevered mind tried to force the shape into something familiar, another lizard, maybe some twisted cousin of Drew, but the longer he stared, the more wrong the creature became.

  It moved low to the ground on too many legs.

  Each limb ended in a hooked black point that sank into the soil as the creature advanced. Its body was long and segmented, armored in overlapping plates that gleamed like polished obsidian beneath the thin light filtering through the canopy. The plates flexed against one another with every step, sliding with a dry clicking sound that reminded Soren of knives being drawn from a sheath.

  Two massive forelimbs unfolded slowly from the front of its body.

  They curved outward like scythes.

  The edges were serrated, and dark fluid clung to them in thick streaks that glistened in the firelight from the burning Grazer behind Drew.

  The creature's head lowered slightly.

  Its mandibles spread apart with a wet clicking noise.

  Rows of small, glittering eyes shifted across the clearing until they settled on the carcass of the Ironhide Grazer.

  Then they moved to Drew.

  For a long moment, neither creature advanced. The Chitin Stalker shifted its weight slightly.

  Drew lowered his head over the carcass.

  A low rumble rolled through the dragon's chest, deeper this time. Smoke leaked slowly from his nostrils as he spread his stance across the body of the Ironhide Grazer, claws digging into the earth as though he meant to claim every scrap of it.

  The Stalker's eyes glittered.

  Its forelimbs lifted slightly, those scything blades angling forward as if testing the distance between them.

  Soren didn't wait to see which predator decided the carcass was worth dying over.

  He dragged himself the last few feet toward the hollow, his hands slipping against the damp earth as the fever burned through his skull. His vision pulsed in and out with each heartbeat, the clearing swimming in and out of focus as he hauled himself across the ground.

  Behind him, Drew roared.

  The sound shook through Soren's bones.

  There was the sudden rush of movement, the dry snap of rock slapping leather, and the violent tearing sound of something massive colliding with something equally terrible.

  Soren didn't look back.

  He reached the hollow and collapsed against the base of the tree, pulling himself inside just enough that the thick roots and earth might hide him from whatever remained standing when the fight ended.

  The world outside erupted into violence.

  Metallic screeches tore through the clearing as the Stalker struck, the sound of its scything limbs carving through the air, followed by the thunderous impact of Drew's body slamming into the forest floor. Flames burst somewhere behind him, lighting the inside of the hollow with flickering orange light that danced across the dirt and roots around him.

  Soren pressed his head against the cool soil. Before he passed out, the air in front of him shimmered.

  A pale blue panel flickered into existence.