A howl woke me up.

  We weren’t going to make it to Jyscor until almost 2am, so about 9, Ether and I crawled into our bunk and closed the privacy screen. The bunks were intended for a single person, but Ether slept on her side against the wall with her head on my chest. There wasn’t a lot of extra room, but it was enough that we could snuggle comfortably through the night. I had a feeling that if either of us moved around in our sleep, it would have been impossible, but Ether slept like she was dead and so far, I’d woken up in the same position I’d laid down in.

  Another howl told me that I hadn’t dreamed it, so I hit the button to open the screen and slid out from under the sleeping ivory woman. I pulled a shirt out of my CB, which was short for Crystal Band. The watch-like object connected to our Mantles, the magical imbuement that allowed us to gain levels and have skills and spells. It also served as a way for us to store items as well as send messages to other people and store data about Dungeons, like monster stats or maps of floors.

  I slipped the shirt on and straightened my pants that I’d been wearing. They weren’t the most comfortable thing to sleep in, but I’d been tired and while there was a bathroom at the back of the RV that I could’ve changed in, they weren’t so uncomfortable that I couldn’t sleep in them.

  The RV swerved as I closed the privacy panel. There was enough padding inside for Ether to not get too banged up as she rolled around. Honestly, the woman could sleep through a tornado, so I wasn’t too worried about her waking up, but if Aelin was driving this erratically, then there had to be something dangerous outside.

  “What’s going on?” I staggered to the front of the RV and clutched onto the back of her seat.

  The short blonde didn’t take her eyes off the road for once. “Monster pack found us. Trent and Miel are taking care of it; I’m just…” She bit her lip as the RV got rammed in the side.

  I clung to the back of her seat as we all bounced up and down.

  My heart jumped into my throat as I looked out the window. We hadn’t run into any monsters out in the wild so far, but I knew they existed. When a dungeon break happened, monsters would sometimes get free of the confines of the city and then occasionally mix with the wildlife. What had resulted were hybrids that gained strength and abilities similar to dungeon monsters but that didn’t give any experience when killed. Since there wasn’t much of a point in fighting the hybrids since most people lived in the walled cities that were protected by Gods, very few Adventurers hunted the hybrids.

  Stolen story; please report.

  It was also very dangerous. Most hybrids seemed to be able to mirror the level of something that they were fighting, which meant that only the Gods had an advantage against the creatures. The hybrids also could gather in huge groups, so their numbers were always unknown. In the Dungeon, spawn rates and group size were well documented, which gave Adventuring parties a safe gauge of what to expect, but outside the city walls, you could run into literally anything and in groups way too large for one person to handle.

  Which was why travel between cities was limited. Speed was usually the answer instead of fighting, so I wasn’t sure why Trent and Miel had left the RV.

  Justia must have seen the confusion on my face. “The RV is Tier Five and we’re only level four.” She pointed at the bull that was about to ram us again. “It can’t hurt us if they’re not in here.”

  I swallowed as Aelin wrestled with the wheel as the bovine monster hit us again. “It might not be able to hurt us, but what’ll happen if it makes us wreck?” I glanced back at the hall where the beds were. Two of the six screens were down, which meant Fray was still asleep. Which I thought was a good thing, since the usually timid woman displayed courage when it came time to fight.

  “It’s not going to crash us!” Aelin checked her side mirror as she turned the steering wheel into the bull. “I just have to make sure that I don’t get too far away from the others!”

  I didn’t have to ask why. The Primus were aware of what Rix and Pixie were and while my cover as Trent’s son should have classified me as not one of the godsired, that didn’t mean that one of the godkillers wasn’t going to show up to try to stop Trent from reaching them.

  I looked at the time on my CB. 1:01am. We were still almost an hour away from the city walls. While Jyscor didn’t have a God to protect it, the walls were strong enough that the monsters shouldn’t be able to harm us in the city.

  The RV bumped again as Aelin pulled off the grass and back onto the road.

  Justia let out a gasp as the RV slowed.

  A pack of plains cats prowled in the high beams a few car lengths ahead of us.

  The tan felines were smaller than the bull that had been harassing us, but their presence was enough for the bovine monster to turn around and run the other way.

  “Can we go through them?” Justia looked over at Aelin.

  “I don’t think so.” I pulled up my CB and tried to scan them.

  ??? - Level ???

  “Um, those are actually monsters.” I counted five of them. The good news was that they could be level 11 and I wouldn’t have been able to get a read on them. The bad news was that if there were actual monsters out here, then that meant they were from a dungeon break or someone had summoned them.

  A Minotaur stepped into our headlights and pointed a sword down the road at us.

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