Chương 192: 16. Figure It Out

I awake with a start and know that I only have a split second to act before the monster will be on us. Talla stirs awake next to me, but too slow—still groggy from being suddenly ejected from our dream. I quickly roll on top of her, eliciting a yelp of dismay, and hurry to wrap the loose bundle of fabrics she's using as a pillow around her head, making sure her long ears are pressed flat against her skull. Not a moment too soon, as a deafening shriek rattles our bones.

It's so much worse than I expected, and I regret not covering my own ears, even if Talla's are far more sensitive. It's like something is driving spikes through my eardrums, and a wave of nausea and dizziness washes over me as almost all sound is replaced by a dull ringing in my ears. That's going to cause permanent hearing damage for sure, but I don't have time to worry about that.

"Maggie!" I try to groan, my own voice drowned out by the ringing. Fuck! How did we let ourselves get ambushed like this? The monster should have been miles away still, and I don't see how it would have found us so fast unless it basically made a beeline straight for us—but how?!

"Maggie!" Vi shouts again, snapping me out of it. Right, shit! Talla is trembling beneath us, probably still stunned from that shriek despite Vi's best efforts. Not really how I'd hoped to end up with a quivering Talla underneath me, but this probably isn't the time to be enjoying it—we've got to fucking move. Dragging her out of the tent is a non-starter—Fa'aun are much larger and heavier than we are and I'm not especially strong in the first place.

No way am I going to be able to fumble her through the tent flaps faster than the monster can squish us. The only other option is something I haven't tried with a whole other person, but it should work. Thankfully, I've got a cheat to improve the odds. I conjure up a little magical signal outside of the tent. Nipper, our stalwart, earless champion, is completely unaffected by the sound and adroitly reads my intent, slipping silently through the astral field and emerging on the other side in the blink of an eye.

Thanks to our bond, my own magical senses, and a whole lot of practice, I can follow the path he took—or at least use it as a hint. The astral field is what this world's scholars call the magical dimension, and aside from being the maddening source of all magic, it's an actual spatial dimension that can—with the right tools—be detected and traversed. If normal space has up-down, left-right, and forward-backward axes, then the astral field essentially adds an in-out pair.

In theory, all I have to do is roll in, escape the tent, then roll back out. In practice, it's a lot more complicated than that. Moving in or out through the magical dimension doesn't eliminate 3D space, it just distorts it, and finding valid paths through solid matter is a whole ordeal. Nipper, however, is a born natural. He understands the astral field on an instinctive level, and senses it as naturally as the rest of the world—maybe even better, since it's the only sense he has aside from touch and maybe taste.

No tongue, though, so probably not. Anyway, all of this just to say that when I attempt to pull Talla through the path that Nipper traced, I'm more than a little worried that we won't fit. Nipper is, even with all his hidden mass, quite a lot smaller than either of us, after all. What happens if we don't fit? Well, last time landed me in the ocean, and it's a good thing Msshi is such a strong swimmer because that could have been bad.

Space works differently along the astral field and what feels like a small adjustment could throw us way off course. Not ideal given how many cliffs there are around. Thankfully, my worries are unfounded, and with a grunting heave of effort, Talla and I roll out of the tent and into a muddy tangle of limbs and blankets just in time for our tent to get flattened by a giant furry black blob. Oh shit! My glasses! Goddess damn it, we're going into this fight deaf and blind?!

I scramble to my feet and help Talla up, squinting in a vain attempt to make out any details of the thing currently trying to kill us. She says something, but all I hear is vague muted humming beneath the ringing.

"Can't hear you," I say. Probably too loudly, since the black blob ahead of us turns its glowing red gaze upon us in response. Oops. I scoop up Nipper and dash to the side as the creature lunges, hoping to find a bit of cover in the trees.

"Tag out!" I cry.

"Fucking tag out! I can't do shit against this!" We hit the tree line and I hurry behind one, poking my head out and squinting my eyes in an attempt to survey the situation. From what little I can make out, the creature's attention is divided. It keeps trying to break off to go after us, but Talla distracts it with beams of light. Probably the burning kind considering how much it avoids them, but if it really is bat-like, it might have sensitive eyes.

For just a moment, I focus on remembering what we saw of the creature before waking up. Eva got a decent look at the thing before sending Reverie to warn us, but recalling the image through second-hand memories is difficult. Like a dream, it fades, leaving only ideas and concepts behind, but that's enough.

"Giant bat" is, as expected, an incredibly unhelpful description. It is black, winged, and furry, and the similarities more or less end there. Its face is more like a jaguar or panther, but with tiny triangular ears that face back away from its head. Its forelimbs are a pair of huge leathery wings that end in sharp spines, with claws at the joint that it uses when prowling on the ground.

The body is covered in sleek black fur, with the lower half's feline legs disproportionately small compared to the monstrous upper portion—to enable flight, maybe? The last detail is a long, whip-like tail tipped with vicious looking barbs.

"I'll eat a whole pot of day-old fish stew if those fucking things aren't venomous," Maggie comments. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. I don't have time to wonder how she knew what I was focusing on. Talla can't handle that thing alone, and I'm not going to be much help without recovering my spear. Hurling fire around in a forest while blind is a recipe for disaster—even one as wet as this—so I need to get to the tent.

Creeping forward as fast as I can, I keep an eye on the battle as I advance towards the tent. Talla continues harassing the monster with beams of light, skipping away from its retaliations with supernatural alacrity thanks to her haste spell. On the surface, she seems to be running circles around it, but I know that her burning light isn't dealing any serious wounds, and the spell letting her keep up with it will run her ragged before long. We're on a timer.

I arrive at the collapsed tent just in time to realize that we'd have no chance of sorting through the mess normally, much less without being able to see. No matter how I squint, I can't make out any details among the brown and beige smears before me.

"Maggie?" I sigh.

"All this fucking switching is giving me a headache," I grumble. At least it's working. Going back and forth like this isn't usually so smooth. I weave together a few signals, trusting Nipper to understand my intentions through our bond. The clever little worm quickly detaches itself from where it had been helpfully gnawing on the monster's ankles and slithers through the astral field to dig around in the ruined tent.

Moments later, it silently slips through a gap in the air and gleefully regurgitates our miraculously undamaged glasses. One of these days our luck with these is gonna run out, I swear. I slip them on after hastily wiping the lenses off on my shirt, ignoring the way Nipper's saliva makes my face itch.

"The spear is too big, sorry," I mutter.

"How am I supposed to fight that thing without it?"

"I don't fucking know, figure it out!" Wait, did we just say all of that out loud? No time to worry about that now. I'm not completely unarmed—I still have the knife at my belt, since I don't take that off even when sleeping, and now that I can see, magic is a more viable option. [Burning Innervation] and [Smoldering Embrace] cover me in a fiery aura, strengthening my limbs and sharpening my mind, as well as burning anything I touch as long as I can provide fuel.

Normally, I am that fuel, but Maggie's trick with Nipper's borrowed traits is already paying off, as the skill and spell burn through our magical reserves instead of our body and mind. The monster reacts instantly, whirling around to focus on us even as Talla continues her assault. I don't know what changed, but suddenly it doesn't care about her in the slightest. It lunges forward, as if to crush us like it did the tent, but I step out through the astral field and reappear a meter away.

Taking advantage of its confusion, I tag it with the quickest and easiest to conjure version of [Pyrobolt], which is little more than a tiny dart of flame, but leaves a patch of burning fur on the creature that causes it to writhe angrily. Talla falls in next to me and lays a hand on my shoulder, causing the flames of my [Smouldering Embrace] to spread protectively over her. My ears pop, and some of the dizziness fades as the sounds of the forest return to clarity beneath the omnipresent ring.

"Can you hear now?" she asks.

"Yes, thank you!" I reply tersely.

"It's targeting you for some reason—my distractions aren't working!" Before I can reply, the bat regains its bearings and flicks its whiplike tail at the place where Talla was standing before I shoved her aside.

"I fucking noticed!" I curse. It's a dungeon monster, like Nipper. Probably eats magic, like Nipper and all the other candle-scavenging fuckers that lived down there. And who here has been steadily going out of her way to build up a bigger and bigger magical reserve? I must be like a giant flashing neon sign that says "free food" to this shitter. Before I can let myself get distracted by idle thoughts, I throw another bolt of fire at the monster's face and use the distraction to run forward.

"Cover me!" I call back to Talla, trusting her to keep the beast distracted. It's an intimidating creature, up close. Even its disproportionately small lower body still resembles that of an oversized lion, while its upper body—and the wings in particular—are too massive for a natural beast. There's room enough for me to get underneath it, but then all it would need to do is crush me. Instead I gather power for a decisive strike in one hand while stabbing it in the side with the other.

The knife barely penetrates its thick hide, and it bats me aside contemptuously with a giant wing. I land hard, though the muddy ground breaks my fall somewhat, and don't have enough time to roll back onto my feet before the monster is looming over me hungrily.

"Well that could have gone better," I groan.

"It was good enough!" I counter, shoving my knife up through the giant bat's chin. The monster screeches in pain, but that was only a distraction. With my other hand I deliver the [Pyrobolt] that I've been building up at point blank. It has no explosive power, but the flames rapidly engulf the monster, which screams and thrashes above me. I narrowly avoid getting crushed by stepping through the astral field once more, then put all the practice with [Pyrothaumaturgy] to work.

Control—that's what Talla stressed to me when she first started teaching me magic months ago. And I've been training it ever since—with Nipper, with my own magic, inside Evie's dreams—every waking moment I've been quietly practicing. Violet may have the monopoly on big flashy spells, but there's a reason I haven't felt threatened by her newfound appreciation for the finer arts, and it's this!

I collect all of the fire around us, from the shielding auras around Talla and I, to the conflagration engulfing the monster, to the slowly spreading flames threatening to spark a forest fire as the beast thrashes around. All of it is mine, and I gather it into a fine point just long enough to shove it deep inside the wound Violet earned us with her knife. The giant bat freezes, slowly turning its gaze towards me with glowing red eyes that hold far too much understanding.

A shame, it could have been a good friend for Nipper if it weren't so violent and dangerous. Even if I could make it submit, it's too clever. It would just wait for the first chance to kill and eat us when we let our guard down. In the blink of an eye, that flash of understanding crosses between us, and the monster shudders. Sorry, big guy.

"Burn!" I declare with a snap of my fingers. Without any spell cast, or even a hint of the chaos magic that I'm still looking forward to exploring more thoroughly, the monster erupts in flames from within. Fire bursts from its eyes, ears, and mouth as the thing collapses like a puppet with its strings cut. Dead in an instant, roast from the inside out.