Page 45 of Bite Bonded Bride

Veyrik's fist hits his chest armor once. The sound ripples outward. Then the room erupts.

Malachar did not wait long.

His explosion tears through the eastern passage before the echo of the crowd has fully died, a concussive burst of dark elf battle magic that turns three Vrakken warriors into silhouettes and then into nothing. The violet light preceding it is Oily. It does not illuminate; it stains.

"Formation—" Veyrik's voice cuts through the chaos before I can draw breath. "Spear line, eastern corridor, now⁠—"

My legs are already moving.

The elven soldiers come in tight disciplined columns, shields locked, rune-etched and humming, magic cycling through the formation in coordinated pulses. They fight the way they always have: beautifully, coldly, with no wasted motion. Malachar trained them for tunnels. They have kill-lanes mapped. They have practiced this.

What they did not practice is us.

I drop low, below the first volley of conjured flame, feel it shear the air above my head, and slam into the shield wall sideways. The formation cracks at the joint, where two bodies negotiate space and I drag the nearest soldier through the gap by his throat. His neck doesn't survive the introduction to the stone wall.

Around me the tunnels become akin to hell.

Our people fight the way we were made to in the dark, in the narrow spaces, using the mountain itself as a weapon. Vrakken claws strip armor plating that swords can't breach. We move between their formations like water between cracks, appearing where the light doesn't reach, gone before they can regroup.

But then the creatures arrive, and the calculus changes.

These are not the starving, half-mad things I have hunted through collapsed districts. Malachar has worked on them. The first one that tears through the eastern wall is twice the size of anything I have seen before, its limbs re-jointed at wrong angles, its hide thickened into overlapping plates of blackened flesh. It moves faster than its size and a violet light pulses from beneath its skin.

Three of my soldiers are simply gone. One moment present, the next removed.

"Flanks!" I shout.

Veyrik is already there, driving a blade through the seam where the plating separates at its shoulder, twisting, pulling it off-trajectory so it crashes into the stone wall instead of into our line. He moves without hesitation, without wasted motion, forty years of fighting beside me in perfect, wordless synchrony.

We push deeper into the passage. The tunnel narrows, which helps us kill them, their size becoming a liability against close stone. I track three, dispatch two, and catch Veyrik in my peripheral vision taking a hit across his side that would have put a lesser Vrakken down. He rolls with it, comes up snarling, and drives his elbow into the thing's eye socket until it stops moving.

Then the largest one finds me.

I hear it before I see it, a sound like the mountain clearing its throat and then something the size of a war machine slams into me from the side passage I didn't clear fast enough. I hit the wall and the wall cracks. Stars fracture across my vision. I get one hand up, two claws sinking into the plating at its neck, trying to find purchase, trying to haul it off⁠—

It is strong. Stronger than natural corruption allows. Malachar fed this one something specific.

Its arm pulls back. I see the trajectory. The claw is aimed at my chest cavity.

I hear Veyrik's footsteps.

I know, in the half-second I have, what is about to happen.

The sound of impact is enormous and intimate at once, a wet, cracking finality that silences the air around us. The creature stumbles sideways. I fling it off me, put a fist through its skull, and turn.

Veyrik is on his knees.

The claw that was meant for me has gone through his side, leaving a deep gash below the armor's reach. He is holding it together with one hand. The other is still gripping his blade.

I kill the two remaining creatures in under ten seconds. I am not conscious of it. I am only aware of the distance between me and Veyrik’s shrinking form, of dropping to my knees beside him, and the deafening ringing in my ears.

"Don't." The word tears out of me.

He looks up. His eyes are still sharp, still him. That, somehow, is worse.

"You always—" He stops. Breathes. Tries again. "Always were terrible at taking cover."

My hands are pressing against the wound with no logic behind it. As if pressure changes anything.