Kaphle sprinted through the massive tunnels, his lungs aching with each desperate breath despite his newly awakened physique. Blood dribbled into his open mouth from a cut on his forehead, the metallic tang a reminder of just how close he’d come to death. Behind him, the scraping sound of talons on stone echoed to his ears. The fiends were gaining on him.

  And he still needed to catch his breath.

  He ducked into a narrow crevice, pressing his back against the cold stone as he tried to quiet his ragged breathing. His hands trembled as he checked the condition of his blade. The cheap steel had chipped on impact when he’d tried to save Jarid, and a hairline fracture now ran halfway to the hilt. It wouldn’t survive another heavy impact.

  “Damned command,” he muttered, thinking of the smug-faced Vitrian who’d sent their unit down here. Eight of them, most freshly Awakened recruits like himself, who’d barely held a weapon before. Now he was the only one left.

  He couldn’t forget the screams. The sound of tearing flesh. The horrified expression on Garth’s face as the fiends dragged him into the darkness. The kid was barely in his teens. And all for what? They’d been told it would be a simple mission. They just had to hold one corridor for an hour. The specialist would take care of the actual boil.

  They hadn’t even survived twenty minutes. Even a handful of fiends would have torn through them like tissue paper, but there’d been more than a handful. More than Kaphle could count in those terrifying moments. Dozens? Perhaps more?

  They’d been bait. He was sure of it.

  A notification flashed at the edge of his vision. He’d leveled up during the battle. Kaphle almost laughed. As if another level in [Skulker] was going to make or break his survival. He had nearly a mile of tunnel between him and the surface, perilous little stamina and a pack of fiends hot on his heels.

  There was no point in running. They’d catch him.

  But he did it anyway.

  Kaphle fumbled with the bloodstained map as he ran, his hands shaking as he tried to make sense of the faded markings. He’d pulled it from Rellen’s body during the carnage, and the parchment was soggy and smeared with blood. The eerie blue glow from the crystal formations lining the tunnel walls cast just enough light for him to squint at the markings.

  “Surface exit... surface exit...” he muttered, tracing a finger along what looked like the main tunnel. The path beyond the unmarked fork ahead was soaked, making it illegible. Had they come from the left? Or the right?

  He let the map fall from his fingers and made a split-second decision to veer left, praying to the Mothers that he’d chosen correctly. His pursuit was too close to double back if he’d gotten it wrong.

  For a few minutes, it looked as though he’d made the right decision. The tunnel seemed familiar, as much as anything in the wide cylindrical caverns ever seemed familiar. If he could just keep ahead of his pursuers, then perhaps-

  A rumbling scrape of flesh along stone stopped him cold. He knew the tunnels played weird tricks with sound, sometimes causing a noise to come from the wrong direction. But that sounded like it had come from in front of him.

  He slowed to a jog as he neared a bend in the path and listened. The scraping sound came again. Followed by a footstep. Then another. Heavy. Its shadow rounded the corner before it did, flowing across him like a funeral shroud. He couldn’t go back; the mob would kill him.

  But he couldn’t go forward anymore, either.

  The fiend that lumbered into view blocked the entire tunnel. Its bloated body stretched fifteen feet tall, with rolls of pale, pustule-covered flesh hanging from its crimson frame. Small, piggish eyes glinted with malice above a mouth full of jagged teeth. It held a cleaver in one hand and looked at him as though it very much wanted to use it.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “Shit,” he whispered, raising his damaged blade.

  The creature lunged with surprising speed for its bulk, its massive cleaver sweeping toward him. Kaphle ducked under the blow, feeling the wind of its passage ruffle his hair. Then he slashed upward as he rolled, opening a gash across the fiend’s wrist. Black ichor sprayed from the wound.

  The monster was silent but for a slight huff of pain or annoyance or exertion.

  Then it struck.

  Its backhand was much faster without the weight of that cleaver. Fast enough to catch Kaphle squarely in the chest before he could recover his balance. The impact sent him flying into the cavern wall, a jagged bit of rock piercing through his back. It held him upright despite the weakness in his knees.

  He’d die standing whether he wanted to or not.

  Suddenly, a loud thunk shattered the tension in the air. The fiend staggered forward as a whirling greatsword buried itself deep into its shoulder with a sickening squelch. The fiend alerted, turning to face this unknown attacker as an odd distortion echoed from the sword.

  Bssht

  Suddenly, a familiar looking young boy stood precariously on the hilt of the blade, his white hair shimmering in the dim light of the cavern. His expression bore a mix of determination and focus. In one hand, he gripped an oversized mace that looked nearly as big as he was, while his other hand held tightly to the sword’s hilt.

  “Back here.” The boy said calmly, as though explaining the situation to the baffled fiend. It responded, predictably, with violence. It swung its massive hand toward the boy, but he was ready. No, not ready. He expected the attack. He planned for it. He leapt from the sword as the attack descended and planted his feet against the fiend’s hand, using the momentum of the swing to tear his blade free with gruesome results.

  The blade shrunk in a blink of an eye, and the teenager threw it toward the cavern roof. That odd sound came again, and the youth flickered moments before he hit the ground. He reappeared at the cavern ceiling, once again standing on the blade of a greatsword impaled into the roof.

  He threw his mace at the fiend with the shifting greatsword hot on its heels. The first struck the fiend hard enough to pierce inside its body despite the blunt force nature of the attack. The momentum of the blow knocked the fiend off its feet, which allowed the thrown greatsword to pierce through the fiend’s skull mere moments after it toppled over.

  Bssht.

  Again, the boy blinked out of existence as he fell. This time, he appeared on the fiend’s neck. He tore the blade out through the creature’s face, then struck thrice more until it stopped thrashing.

  “Ugh.” The boy said, his nose wrinkling as the overwhelming stench of rot emanated from the wounds. He took a few steps back, then hopped off the side of the body. His mace trailed after him, dragged out of the fiend’s gullet by a magical hilt wrap. It scraped loudly across the cave floor as it returned to his hand.

  Only then did the boy finally notice Kaphle.

  There was a flash of recognition and sadness as violet eyes looked Kaphle up and down. His neutral expression deepened into a frown. Then he pulled a slim vial from an insert on the back of his bracer, tossed it to the injured soldier, and turned away as Kaphle greedily downed it.

  “Orphan to Control,” the boy said, a finger to his ear.

  “Mm. Mm,” He nodded in time with each grunt of acknowledgement, then glanced Kaphle’s way once again. “One survivor. Mm. Understood.”

  Kaphle stumbled up alongside the younger soldier, only slightly worse for wear. The potion had been powerful, its magic far in excess of anything the Vitrians normally would have wasted on fodder like himself. “T-thank you. If you hadn’t arrived when you-”

  “I am sorry about Val.”

  Kaphle frowned, his brows knitting together in confusion. “Val? Why would…? Oh. Oh!”

  He’d taken his savior for a Vitrian. The way he carried himself, the clothes he wore, the accent and the way he spoke, to say nothing of that overwhelming power. But on closer inspection, Kaphle recognized him. The last time he’d seen Alarion, the boy had been scrawny, caked in dirt and filth, with eyes full of terror. The resemblance was there, most starkly in the crop of white hair, but it was like he was looking at a sibling of the child he’d known.

  It hadn’t even been a year!

  “How… what did they do to you?”

  Alarion ignored the question. “Wait two minutes, then follow me up the trail. Take the other half of the split and it will lead you to the surface. The way is clear.”

  “We can’t. There are at least a few dozen fiends just up that corridor. Too many to fight. We should just hunker down and wait for the specialist to draw their attention.”

  Alarion gave Kaphle an odd look, then whirled abruptly. He brought his mace down hard on the massive fiend, a sharp crack accompanying the wet squelch of impact as he destroyed its core.

  Satisfied that it was dead, Alarion glanced down the corridor ahead of them, judging the distance. His greatsword shrunk down to the size of a dagger as he lifted his arm and threw it. “Two minutes. Any longer and something else might find you.”

  “But-”

  “It is fine. I am the specialist.”

  Then he flickered and was gone.

  prologue. I'd intended for much of book 1 to be covered in backstory stuff, but as I fleshed out the early drafts I realized how much I hate flashbacks and from there book 1 was born.

  finally I will take this opportunity for some begging! The actual release of the book on audible/amazon is going to be sometime this summer (inshallah). When it does, I'm going to be pleading with people to buy it, review it, link it, whatever you can to make sure that my cats don't starve.