Tunnels collapse slower than you’d think, but also differently. They don’t do it one section at a time, there’s no creeping cave-ins as one bit of ceiling after another crumbles down at a time. It all happens more or less at once. I didn’t know this, didn’t know anything right then. I just heard the sound and pictured the result, then ran.

  That was about the smartest thing I could’ve done, and Cedwin thought of it too. Of course he did. Inside a tunnel and you hear that creaking? A rat would think of it. And so we ran.

  We ran fast. We ran as fast as two men who were fleeing the embrace of a falling mountain, forgetting all about fatigue and aches, battle-wounds, the works. There wasn’t anything in the world that could’ve stopped me from tearing down that tunnel. The fear in my veins would’ve seen me sprinting through a fucking brick wall if it’d gotten in my way.

  Fortunately, no such obstacles emerged. Only the softer barrier that was several hundred paces of open air leading me to freedom. I stared down that tunnel and saw the glint of daylight growing slowly larger as I continued down it.

  Even as the collapse grew louder.

  We didn’t escape by the skin of our teeth and find the stone falling in just yards behind us. That sort of narrow luck is rare in real life. We had a good ten, maybe twenty seconds of leeway between leaping out of the mountain and hearing the crashing rock behind us.

  For my part, I didn’t get to enjoy this leeway very much. In my haste to avoid being buried I’d forgotten that I was running out onto a mountain, didn’t slow down my sprint at all and, upon finding myself suddenly on a ledge, accidentally hurled myself off a cliff.

  Steel is good for many things, but gripping sheer rock isn’t among them. I scrambled for purchase as I tumbled and rolled the last few feet over the edge, fell, snagged protruding stones right at the top and held on for, literally, dear life.

  Suddenly, being big wasn’t such an advantage anymore. Call it two hundred pounds of Kyvaine, another fifty of armour, another forty for my gear. The sudden deceleration jarred my shoulders and left me grunting in pain as I dangled, swinging precipitously.

  I risked a look down. Regretted it. There had to be a thousand yards separating me from the stony ground below. If I fell, my corpse wouldn’t even look human anymore. I’d be squeezed out of my helmet’s eyeholes.

  Then I fell.

  Apparently, people see their lives flash before their eyes when they’re dying. I didn’t. Maybe it’s because I didn’t actually end up biting it, but all I saw was the sky above me, the stony outcropping getting farther away, the wind currents dancing high overhead. Then I was screaming, flailing around as if I might somehow grip the air and drag myself back up. I must’ve only done this for a second or two, but it felt like far longer as my body tipped backwards. My shoulders hit the stone first.

  Hit it a few thousand feet early, by my reckoning. I was still alive. That was the first thing I noticed. I was still alive and, I found a moment later, in quite a bit of pain. My lungs were aching, the wind knocked out of them. My armour had soaked a bit of the impact, but plate can actually make a fall worse. So much more weight added onto the collision…

  The collision in question had been with a shelf of stone maybe fifty feet below the ridge I’d gone and hurled myself over, and a quick glance down its edge told me that I’d gotten ridiculously lucky in hitting the only one close enough to the top that I could have hoped to survive landing on it.

  “KYVAINE!” I looked up and around before I found the source of the voice. Vara, staring down at me and looking halfway between tears and…well, more tears, just for fear instead of relief.

  “I’m alive,” I grunted, then started coughing. That fall really had knocked the wind out of me. I examined the cliff face and tried to think how I’d make my way up it in a pinch. Fortunately, I wasn’t forced to find any handholds. A rope was tossed down and my allies hauled me up with their own strength. Good thing, too. Climbing in steel gauntlets? What the fuck was I thinking?

  When I was finally hauled back onto the relative safety of a ledge that was at least marginally wider than I was tall, I just lay on the ground for a bit and stared out at nothing. It was only Vara who ruined my moment of sulking by sitting down beside me.

  “That was amazing, what you did back there,” she told me.

  “What?” I said, intelligently.

  “When you held back the wretchlings,” she pressed.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  I will be honest: I had legitimately forgotten I did that at the time. Something about the desperate flight had just sort of scrambled my memory, so I just stared at her in confusion. It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realised what had happened over the last quarter-hour. By then, it seemed Vara had gotten pissed off with me and left.

  ++”I wasn’t pissed off, I just had vanity issues at the time and felt uncomfortable thanking him all over again. My fault. I was young.”++

  Believe it or not, I was one of the ones in our little group who’d ended up in better condition.

  Morlo, of course, was the worst off. He’d apparently lost consciousness shortly after leaving the tunnel, and had yet to regain it. Shortly behind him was Gruin, who scarcely seemed to be breathing.

  That wasn’t entirely uncommon though, Grynkori bodies were weird and seemed inconsistent in how they processed even something as fundamental as air. He was still alive, that much everyone had been able to verify. Il’vanja herself was primarily responsible flr confirming it in fact. That would’ve pissed him off, if he’d been conscious.

  Cedwin had managed to hit his head sprinting out with me, and he was roughed up by that. I seemed to have developed a lack of appreciation for the mundane limits of other people because I found myself shocked that he’d been laid low by so small an impact. Not as shocked as I was at Vonti’s condition, however.

  Out of us all, he’d probably gotten hurt in the stupidest way. He’d fallen over. And Gruin had landed on him.

  It sounds funny, but thinking about it you’ll realise that’s quite the impact to take. Lots of weight in a Grynkori, and lots more in that stupidly thick armour they favour. Vonti had actually gotten off lucky.

  Beyond that, most of the injuries were shallow. Vara had turned her ankle, which we all made fun of her for after she had the poor sense to complain about it. Il’vanja alone appeared to have gotten out without a scratch. Sprinting the fastest, she’d exited the tunnels first and managed to avoid so much as bumping into a wall as she did it.

  Aelfs. I can sometimes see why the Grynkori hate them.

  With Morlo unconscious the group found itself lacking leadership, for all of two seconds. Then Il’vanja spoke up.

  “The wretchlings will pursue us as soon as they can, we must hurry. Follow me, I know the way.” She didn’t wait for anyone to question her, just started walking and trusted in social instinct to drag us all after.

  It worked.

  All of us started down the mountain, enjoying the aid of gravity rather than its existence, but making a terrible pace as fatigue and injury robbed us of whatever speed we’d had upon first reaching the Foggy Peaks. It took hours before the sounds of pursuit reached us. Another stroke of luck, I know now.

  The wretchlings started by pelting us with arrows, tiny little things that might’ve killed a house cat but weren’t any threat to us. Individually. Except they were slinging them by the dozen, and however shit their accuracy was in the howling winds, sheer volume was compensating enough that we were taking hits. Those of us with the most coverage in our protective wear took the front and back of our group to weather the hits best. This was something I was very reluctant to do, of course, but wasn’t able to convincingly argue against once it was suggested.

  Necessity breeds innovation though, as they say. I started playing with the air as I had during the Demon fight. My mastery over force was still far from the meagre heights I’d reached with heat and fire, and even that didn’t measure up to any one of Morlo’s Thaumaturgical skills, but it seemed to have sharpened in my recent hardships.

  I wasn’t matching the peaks I’d reached in those panicked moments of Demonic threat, but I was able to thicken the air, if not harden it. Cover myself in what was essentially a wall of syrupy protection that would’ve done little to stop a musket or halberd, but worked wonders on the light arrows striking it now.

  We weren’t invulnerable by any means, but Vara matching my shield over the rest of our associates, while everyone else hurled stones at the wretchlings where we could, kept the enemy from closing enough that their projectiles could escape the barriers with any significant velocity. People were hit, some badly. Dubin took an arrow right to the throat, had his skin broken, panicked and screamed as he saw blood and shrieked about arterial wounds. There wasn’t one. The arrow’s point had simply lacked the force to penetrate his neck deep enough to score such a fatality, and the closest he came to dying from it was almost toppling himself over the ledge in his fearful convulsions.

  Still, we didn’t have an easy time of it scaling down those mountains. The wretchlings were reluctant to engage us in melee for whatever reason—

  ++”Hmm maybe because you fucking vivisected dozens of them with a sword you idiot.”++

  —but they were happy to keep harassing us as we moved.

  By night fall, fortunately, they seemed to have slowed down. Though we didn’t have Morlo available to create us such a convenient barricade as we enjoyed last time, we were able to rest in a cave Il’vanja scouted out. Our backs to the interior, it was as much security as we could hope for.

  Which wasn’t much. If any significant fraction of the wretchlings we’d seen down in the caves came for us, we’d all die before morning. Keeping watch was unnecessary because none of us could sleep, except for Il’vanja who wasted no time in napping with only a request that she be woken up should anything attack us.

  But nothing did. No swarm, no horde, no other properly aristocratic word for a large army of people we don’t like. There were no wretchlings at all attacking us that night.

  Which did not, mind, mean that we got a wink of sleep, the not-so-paranoid worry they’d ambush us kept everyone who hadn’t lost consciousness from injury wide awake. It did mean we weren’t killed though.

  Day broke and so did our camp, we hurried down the mountains as fast as people laden with two unconscious comrades could hope to move. The effort of doing so was great enough that I was almost tempted to remove my armour. I of course did not.

  By the time we finally reached the end of those fucking mountains, Morlo was starting to stir and awaken. It was just in time, too, because a great booming sound shook the skies as we marched, drawing all eyes to the very tops of the peaks.

  There, twenty times its previous height, we saw the Demon.

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