Sometimes, these creatures formed from living mana seem so peaceful. The monster, a six-legged, furred thing covered with sharp needles, rocks back and forth as it waddles through the underbrush. While it might only stand five feet tall at its shoulder, the quills sprouting from it add another four feet, just a mess of glowing blue attached to a squat, brown frame. It sniffs at the forest floor, issuing a strange screech whenever it bumps into a new stone or the trunk of a tree. The monster has no eyes.

  It bumbles around for long enough that the other beasts of the forest relax around its meandering. Birds in the trees chirp and look down at the strange beast. A deer stands still and watches as it waddles past. Even a two-tailed monkey pauses in the middle of its journey across the forest to watch the strange creature. The monster continues on, screeching as it knocks into a rock, kicks it ahead of itself, and knocks into it again. Then, one of the birds chirps, perhaps commenting on the idiocy of the creature to its friend.

  The monster doesn’t pause in its wandering as it continues to waddle forward, but that doesn’t mean it fails to react. All at once, the six hundred and seventeen needles covering its back shoot away into the forest around it. There is no intelligence to the attack, no aiming or targeting. The monster merely hits everything around it all at once.

  The small alcove in the middle of the forest becomes a field of death in an instant. Blue, glowing spines stick from the wood of the trees, from the ground, and even from holes they have driven into the few boulders in the space. The monster croaks another screech, and the spines return, traveling back along their projected lines toward the monster and fitting back into place. The back of the waddling monster is a graveyard of bleeding animal life: the deer, the monkey, and three birds are now added to its skeletal collection. A cardinal, the sole survivor of the past three seconds, flaps away into the sky.

  The beat of its wings is softer than it has ever attempted in its life. It makes it through the canopy, but it doesn’t stop climbing. I watch it go, soaring up into the blue sky, hurrying away. I wonder if it had been friends with the birds that didn’t get away, maybe they had even been its family. I can’t see the waddling monster through the trees when I look down, but I can feel it with my soul presence. It continues to waddle away, crimson dripping onto the detritus behind it as it goes.

  There isn’t much in this world that these things don’t affect, that they don’t turn sour with their mere passing. Balls of fire erupt in the air around me, housed inside of orbs made of black sand. The other animals in the area scatter with the mere suggestion of my soul presence's power, leaving me alone with the thing. I identify it with my eye, but it is just a monster, much the same as many others, and not worth comment.

  The spined monster cries out as six orbs of dragonfire slam into it from behind. The patch of the forest combusts from the heat of the stacked explosions. Trees tumble away, their trunks snapped by the raw cacophony of the explosive force. Others ignite from the heat, their leaves flashing with fire for an instant before evaporating into vanishing char.

  Despite the explosion and the mess of dirt that sprays into the air, I never lose sight of the monster. It shrieks, one of its back legs blown off by the sudden attack, and a good third of its spines broken to pieces. Its red blood starts to push past burned skin to reach the barren dirt. Blindly, its head whips about, trying to find its attacker, but I hover far above its head, far out of what I suspect its range to be.

  “Rayrayraya…” it cries as it flops sideways, some of its remaining spikes scoring long grooves through the dirt.

  I don’t give the thing time to recover. Before it can rise, I focus my aura onto it, pressing it down into the dirt while a wave of black sand sails through the air toward it. The sand sinks in, pushing past the feeble resistance that its magical nature offers. As far as I have found, the soul presences of others are the only thing capable of stopping the sand when I want to direct it. For rank two monsters like this creature, there is no defense.

  The sand sinks in, bonding with the atoms that constitute the spined monster, forming invisible and uninteractive links to the very essence of the creature. That doesn’t mean there is no strain. With every thrash of the monster, I have to concentrate to maintain control. I haven’t tested it yet, but I suspect that if the monster’s strength was higher than my magic attribute, this wouldn’t work. But this monster is a defensive creature, relying on the array of weapons attached to its back to keep it safe. It isn’t a strong monster.

  The struggling continues for a few minutes before it tires itself out. Three times it attempts to eject the spines on its back and strike out at the world at random. Three times, I force the spines to remain still.

  When, at last, it stops struggling, I make my descent. Slowly falling toward the ground, I keep it still and don’t think that it even detects me. There is something in the helpless way it lies on the ground, bleeding, breathing raggedly, that makes me pause. I should be feeling bad for this monster, some distant part of my mind complains. Only unfeeling bastards would look at the creature in front of me and feel nothing.

  I do feel something as I gaze down at the monster, but it isn’t pity. I am furious at this thing. All that I need to do is look past its blind rodent face to see the skeletons of numerous creatures pinned to its spines to know it for what it really is. Even with that, even with its pointless and indiscriminate killing laid bare for any passerby to see, it still dares to look so pathetic. Every time one of these things tries to make me feel sorry for it, I have to kill another part of my heart. They don’t deserve pity. They don’t even deserve to live.

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  The black sand inside its body begins to move, to revolve in the orbitals they have taken up in the floating clouds around the monster’s matter. The monster gasps as the fur and spikes of its body slowly seep to a deep obsidian, all color turned black across the monster. There are structures inside the creature, channels of magic similar to the ones that run through me, and I send the black dust running through them like blood in a vein. The monster convulses as every iota of mana running through it begins to bond with the dust, begins to be siphoned away straight into my soul to join a growing collection of power adhered to the surface of my soul index. The monster continues to shake and sputter as I bleed it of magic. For a being made from magic itself, the process is not an easy one.

  Twenty-three seconds is all the time I need to extract what I can from the creature. The black dust coating its body slips away, rolling back into orbs that float around me. The drained monster falls to the forest floor, unmoving, dead.

  Over the last hour or so, I have tried this a handful of times, but this monster is the first one that I managed to get it right with. All of the mana inside the creature pulses on the magical construct inside my soul. The mana isn’t enough to fuse a new affix to my soul, but it is substantial. With this new hunting technique, I can likely start collecting affixes at an accelerated rate. Probing the carcass of the monster with my presence, I find that my disenchanting ability doesn’t react to the body at all. Perhaps that is an unfortunate side effect of hunting in this way. I will need to wait until I am back in the city before I can determine if this method is…

  I move sideways, but I’m still not fast enough. My left wing is blown apart at the first knuckle, the stretched scales and membrane ripping apart as a spear of the deepest black strikes through. Forty feet away, a shadowy hole in the ground stands out from a rock, a long and dark serpent striking at me from its depths.

  What remains of my wings evaporates into magical motes as I turn and run. Branches and leaves whip at me as I sprint in any direction. My soul presence spreads out, feeding information directly into my mind as I flee the shadowy hole in the ground that chases after me. The hole moves like a snake across the ground, slithering around obstacles, moving against the leaves like they were solid. The trees grow dense, the canopy overhead blocking out almost all light. The forest presses in around me. There isn’t any room to take to the air even if I had my wings.

  Two snake heads launch from the shadow of a tree directly at me. They move so fast that it is a miracle I manage to throw myself down. The striking heads continue past me, smashing through rocks and trees like they were made of paper for two hundred feet before they begin to recoil back into the shadowy hole.

  I don’t waste time. The improvements that I have made to my mana channels are pushed to their limits as I force a quarter of my total mana reserves into the orbs hovering above me in less than a second. Six miniature suns burn with dragonfire, and I send them screaming toward the shadowy hole alongside the retracting snakeheads. The striking heads of the snakes sink back into the shadow, but my orbs of fire don’t.

  The blast of fire as the six orbs detonate against the entrance of the shadow is enough to knock me off my feet. A bloom of fire more than a hundred feet high towers into the sky before turning and twisting into a burning tornado as wind begins to rush in from all sides to fill the vacuum the blast created. Trees for more than a thousand feet are knocked to the ground, stripped of both their leaves and bark. Those closest to the blast are little more than burnt logs, while those a bit further away smolder and burn.

  I sense it all through my presence, though it takes a moment for the damage to my brain to fix itself enough that I can digest the information. Despite having my eyes closed, the blast still struck me blind. I had just been too close.

  The world starts to come back as the white blur in front of me begins to take on color. Vague lines are made more distinct, hinting at forest shapes. I see myself through my presence, all the rest of my senses rendered useless for a moment. The girl lying on the forest floor, crumpled against a bent and broken tree, looks like a corpse, blood slowly dripping from her eyes, nose, and ears. She stares blankly up. Gods, my fire has never hurt me like this before. I didn’t know I could make an explosion like that.

  A shadowy snake head cuts through the air, looking entirely unharmed by the blast I just released. It cuts through the air toward me. I try to move, but my muscles barely respond, twitching only slightly when I direct my leg to roll me to the side.

  The snapping head of the snake soars at me, then over me, smacking into a tree twenty feet behind me. Another head joins it a second later, snapping through the air and digging a furrow through the earth. It can’t see me. That might only last a moment. I need to leave.

  Again, I try to move my body, and I am again met with unresponsive muscles. It takes only a second to find a solution. Since the battle in Danfalla, I have been turning this ability of mine over in my head again and again. I wasn’t sturdy enough to use it then, not to the fullest extent, but to flee, I don’t need to be.

  Black dust pours from my vault and seeps into my body. I’m not graceful with the intrusion, and I push the invasion of my own body to work as fast as possible despite the intense pain it causes. When I have myself bonded, I don’t put any grace into my flight from the shadowy monster either. My body is flung into the air, flailing loosely like a doll thrown by a giant. As soon as I move, more shadowy snake heads strike toward me, screaming through the air in an attempt to snatch me up. My jerky flight through the sky is barely enough to keep me away from them, and I don’t stop.

  Two hours later, I am still trying to catch my breath in the chamber at the bottom of Faeth. I’m intact again, my breathing calmed, but I can’t get the thought of what might have happened out of my head. That massive explosion did nothing to the monster. At least, I don’t think that it did. How would I even go about trying to fight something like that?

  Sander, the dwarven man with the Gravity Conflux, finds me in the chamber after a while. We talk shop, and my curiosity over the shadow monster gets the better of me. I’ll never forget his words.

  “Sounds like a shadow hydra to me,” Sander says. “Nasty creatures, those. Strong and persistent. I would wait for at least another month before you went back down below. If the thing catches your scent, it will hunt you down every time you venture out. Faeth is going to be over this land for the next two years. Wouldn’t want a thing like that stopping you from going down. As long as it doesn’t show up a second time, you should be fine. If it does catch your scent, best not to test it.”

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