Chittering, chittering.

  It was deeper than it should be, coming out almost like a growl from both behind and ahead. Nothing entered the radius of the magelight, but slowly the noise got louder as large feet pattered against the stone floor, and I knew we didn’t have much time. There was more than one, there shouldn’t be more than one. The part of myself that expected Alvir to make this easy spent quite the effort bombarding the rest of me at how stupid I was to trust a man who openly said not to trust him.

  I let myself glance at the two behind me before the inevitable violence to come, and found a surprising juxtaposition of the same emotion in their stances.

  Riri stood stalwart, eyes wide and searching. Almost seeming calm if I was to see her from a distance, but from here familiarity won out over her fa?ade. Her blade was pointed unshaken and ready to draw blood, nothing perfect but it was an admirable amount of composure for the unexpected.

  Gar, on the other hand, was an absolute wreck. Tremors overtook his form as he kept glancing at me for guidance. At least his blade was unsheathed, and his stance wasn’t horrible. Something to work on once they survived this.

  Both were pale as snow, and I imagined my face being much the same.

  Eventually the giant rats were graced with the light emanating from the magelight I had tossed to the floor, and there’s one more Muri-Ursi than I expected. Both sides having two of the monsters eyeing them with naked hunger. I grit my teeth but…at least I had the harder portion.

  I had never fought two at once, and they had never fought to the death at all. Always time for a first though.

  I held my blade steady at the two in front of me, and they displayed the same uncanny awareness as their cousins. Observing before they’d inevitably charge. I wasn’t going to let them have the initiative this time.

  I pushed the strengthening spell through my body, all the mana it could handle, and felt the intoxicating power coursing through my veins. It felt like absolution, like power, like certainty masked as violence-

  I kicked off the stone floor and charged with a warcry that echoed throughout the sewer.

  So, I’d been trying for the longest time to reverse engineer my spell and morph it into something that focused more on speed, if only because speed was preferable to strength when using a bladed weapon.

  But here’s the fun thing about that, stronger muscles allow for faster motion if you know what you’re doing. To a point. Which meant I could propel my small body much faster than not. And with the mana tolerance potion and training? At that point I could rival an adult hunter in strength and potentially win.

  All my strength, including the bits locked away by my brain to prevent shit like bones breaking and tendons tearing. I assumed the spell had something to do with that not happening, but I’d have to figure it out later.

  As it stood, in the moment since I kicked off from the ground, my blade had lodged deep into the brain of a giant rat from its overgrown bead of an eye. It slumps, dead on delivery of the desperate opener, and I couldn’t help the smile that crawled on my face.

  The other rat beside me let out a shriek and charged. I had to let go of my blade if I had any hope of dodging, and brought a fist up to punch the rodent in its jaw. It barely flinched. Right, I didn’t use my entire mana pool, any chance a little demon in my soul was willing to take on the burden like last time?

  All I got was silence.

  Yeah, thought not.

  I heard a scream from behind that sounded disturbingly like Riri. I let out a curse and charged for my sword, consequences be damned. I grit my teeth as a pair of incisors sheered through the muscle of my calf, letting out another warcry as I swung my now freed blade with all my strength, lodging it into the overgrown rodent’s skull.

  My blade snapped down the middle, and I kept the momentum going to run me around before springing into the chaos in front of me.

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  Riri and Gar were not doing well. They’d only managed shallow cuts on their opponents, and Riri was missing a decent portion of her forearm. Healer Ken could deal with that, they just had to survive.

  My motion wasn’t nearly as explosive as before, but the addition of a third variable was enough to give the rats something to worry about. I raked the jagged edge of my broken blade across the side of the Muri-Ursi Riri was facing-

  Sharp pain pierced through my shoulder as long teeth burrowed through my clavicle. I let out a scream as my left arm went limp. The scream didn’t end, considering the Muri-Ursi started shaking me like a dog. Hot tears streamed down my face as the rat pressed its weight on my back and kept me from moving. It didn’t do anything else as my blood streamed down onto the cobble.

  For a while it was just my tears, the rat's weight pressed against my back, and the blood leaving my body.

  Breathing, breathing.

  In and out, air enters and exits my lungs under the direction of a muscle separating my abdomen from my thorax. Lungs fill with oxygen, binding to the hemoglobin of my blood before it traveled to my heart. Pooled into an atrium and pumped through a ventricle to travel throughout my body and in some places, just a few, escapes through veins and arteries onto the pavement below.

  There wasn’t supposed to be four, that phrase repeated through my mind like a mantra. There wasn’t supposed to be four. But there was, waiting for me and my loved ones, and now I was here, bleeding freely.

  Gar wasn’t coming to help me, I could tell by the noise of the two of them fighting the other one. Alvir sent four, why not bother to kill me?

  Thoughts are thoughts and they don’t connect as well as they should but somewhere in my mind I knew that whatever this was, it was a betrayal. It was an ambush, it was a slaughter, but first and foremost a betrayal. A paw presses against my back, almost gentle in how it pushed me into the ground, right over the wound it bit through my shoulder. It sniffed at my hair with breath like magma.

  I didn’t have a sword, just a broken thing clattered on the ground and two friends that had already given up on me. Funny, that’s the second time it broke when facing these things. I have teeth though, wonderful little molars adorning my gums. I struggled under the rat’s paw and bit down, I didn’t get more than a nibble.

  I looked at my strengthening spell, turned it over a bit in my mind, then shoved it through my jaw with all the mana I had. What was a nibble turned into the crunch of a hyena, ripping through two of the rat’s fingers and a portion of the paw. My jaw shattered with something beyond physical stress.

  The rat screamed and reared up and away, but before it crashed to the ground I was gone, rolled to the side and snatched what remained of my blade with my right.

  I looked up and let out a feral growl through the mess that had become my jaw which the rat returned, a rumbling thing that irritated me more than scared me. That fucking rodent bit through my shoulder. Blood poured and poured and didn't slow and I didn’t care because I was going to kill that thing.

  It was a blur, such a blur, I could barely think of the motion that preceded my charge. Because I did charge, didn’t I? Straight at the rat sized bear with a cry ripping from my throat, and it charged me just as well, because it had to. Didn’t it? I dodged something, from which direction I didn't know, and struck a line across the Muri-Ursi’s belly, letting a small amount of intestines free to the world.

  It let out a screech, and the screech hurt my ears but everything hurt somehow so I didn’t care.

  I didn’t care.

  Feral or rabid or insane, take a pick at a descriptor, one of them would fit better than the rest, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to tell which one. Instead I stabbed the rat, and then I did it it again

  I think there was a point where I was riding the thing and through bloodshot eyes aimed my broken blade at its neck. Again and again and again and again. I heard something so close yet so far, a scream or a cry of jubilation or something but it didn’t matter in this moment of violence as the only part of my world was the rat and the blade and the arc of my arm.

  Eventually, through gore and blood, it stopped moving.

  I didn’t stop stabbing.

  It was only through a scream that I regained some of my faculties, and somewhere in the mind that belonged to a girl called Yir, I remembered my friends.

  I whipped my head to the side, and the first thing that caught my attention from the scene in front of me, surprisingly enough, was Riri on her knees as tears streamed down her face.

  The second was the corpse hanging from a mountainous rat’s maw. Skiski ripped off Gar’s arm and proceeds to start chewing through loud crunches. The rat they were meant to be fighting was dead. Dead, dead, dead.

  Just like Gar.

  Trust. Trust, trust, trust.

  Such a simple word isn’t it? Takes so much to give, and it was so easy to break. Like glass, there’s a whole process. A delicate process. A valuable process. He broke it, took it and shattered it on the cobble floor where their blood stains. So much blood. Oooooh, there’s so much blood. Spilled like a flowing river, staining broken glass in vibrant crimson.

  This wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

  Riri and I watched in helpless horror as Skiski continued to feast on Gar’s corpse. Once it finished, it turned its eyes to the frozen slum girl in front of it, and let out a deep chitter.