Time stopped, and Ana was greeted by a mass of notifications.

  This time Ana didn’t worry about her choices. She knew what she needed. She knew who she was. She was a protector. That was what Mr. Stamper had spent eight years turning her into, and Mr. Stamper knew his business well. So to hell with long-term plans. To hell with agonizing over efficiency and whether it was better to get stronger or have some more cash in her pocket. What Ana needed in the moment was to be better able to protect Rayni.

  She needed killing power, and the ability to keep track of both of her opponents. She quickly put 4 points into her Strength Multiplier, increasing it one Step and her effective Strength to 26, then put the remaining 3 points into two Steps in her Acuity modifier, bringing the effective Attribute up to 20. Both numbers would be significantly higher as long as she was fighting.

  With her Advancement Points spent, time resumed. Ana only spared the notification for her new Enhancement a quick glance, but with her boosted stats that was all she needed.

  Three Enhancements in a split second, and they could all help the two of them survive. With any luck, they would.

  “Listen,” Ana barked after half a second of Acuity-boosted thought. Rayni was not a straight-up combat Classer, but she had combat Skills and was a higher level than Ana. That had to count for something. “Here’s what we’ll do.” She fended off the boar with a swing of her borrowed axe, then pushed it back with a kick. “Get that overgrown pig’s attention, if possible. Hold it off. Make it think you’re the baddest, scariest thing in this forest, but don’t try to actually fight it. I have a new Ability that will let you use my Intimidation and Perks, so just do it. I’ll finish off the deer, then go for the pig.”

  “Right,” Rayni answered, her voice shaking, and Ana fell on the deer.

  Aggression was the name of the game. She had to finish the thing off quickly, so that she and Rayni could deal with the new threat together. She couldn’t be as careful as she’d been.

  The thought almost made her laugh, even as she brought her buckler up to deflect the deer’s crown of horns. Careful? She’d been borderline berserk half the time she fought ever since she got here. It wasn’t always her choice, but it was true. And here she went again.

  The shock of impact went up her arm as her buckler smashed into the deer’s head, redirecting it and preventing a number of nasty horns from goring her. Her wrist and elbow went partially numb from the impact, letting her know that she’d been too direct, too much blocking instead of deflecting, but it was nothing she couldn’t handle. Then she was past the head, her chest colliding with the deer’s shoulder. She snaked her right arm over top of the thing’s neck, locked its good front leg with one of her own, and started hacking.

  The thing made wet, furious sounds at her, and Ana felt sharp horns pricking and scratching at the back of her neck, but she ignored them. She and Rayni had healing potions with them for a reason. She hacked for all she was worth at the demon’s back as it screamed and bucked and kicked. She was all strength, no finesse, until she broke the unnaturally tough spine and the back half of the thing jerked and went limp.

  She shoved the demon away. With one foreleg broken and its hind legs paralyzed, it still tried to drag itself toward her, head tossing, jaws chomping, and eyes full of mad hunger.

  It took five, six, then seven heavy strikes before enough horns had been broken off that Ana managed to expose, chip, crack, then fully penetrate the creature’s skull, the last strike being with the spike on the back of the axe. It jerked and twitched as she wrenched the weapon loose and turned to their surprise assailant.

  The thing was focused on Rayni, all right. While Ana had been finishing off the deer, Rayni had been screaming, slashing, and feinting at the half-skeletal boar, nimbly dodging as it charged at her. It was clear that she didn’t have a prayer of putting the thing down, though, and Ana already had a painful scratch on her hip where the pig had caught Rayni a glancing blow and Ana had almost unconsciously absorbed it. Rayni was focused on two things: keeping the thing distracted, and surviving, and she was at her limit. She might be able to escape, but if she tried anything else she’d fail at one of the first two, and it was unlikely that she’d be able to choose which.

  The thing came back as [Threat: Considerable], but with no blood to bleed it would be hard to wear it down. They’d have to physically break or remove parts of it one by one, unless they could destroy it outright, and the thing was dense and solid, with solid-looking bones and thick, if horribly decomposing, hide. How it was even “alive” was not something Ana had really reflected over. After facing the revenant in the Delve she had settled on “demon magic” and done her best not to think about it too much. Now, though, she wished that she’d asked around to find out what the conventional wisdom was.

  “How do we kill it?!” she yelled to Rayni as the Huntress leaped to the side, narrowly avoiding being gored.

  “You already know! Remove or destroy the head!”

  “Right!” Ana thought about it for a moment. The sword she’d lent to Rayni wouldn’t be useful, unless you could put a shitload of force behind it. Ana wished she had a sledgehammer, or something. But she didn’t, and the sword was practically useless in Rayni’s hands, while Ana might be able to do something with it.

  “Switch weapons!” she called and threw the axe underhand in Rayni’s direction. Rayni, bless her, took a quick look in Ana’s direction, sidestepped, and snatched the axe out of the air, leaving the sword driven into the loamy soil as she kept moving.

  “What’s the plan?!” Rayni baited the demon so that it charged her away from where she’d left the sword, leaving Ana room to arm herself.

  “I try to control it, and you try to crack it!”

  “How?!”

  “Fuck knows!” Ana shouted back, and hacked at the boar’s back as hard as she could. The edge of the sword bit half an inch into the crest of a hip bone, and that was it. The boar must have felt it, though, because it turned around, empty eye sockets focusing on Ana as its powerful legs drove it toward its new target.

  On instinct, Ana did the first thing that came to mind. As the boar crossed the five feet separating them, its head at a height where it could come in and tear off her own, she didn’t dodge. They could keep dodging until the sun went down, and they’d only die tired. Or, Rayni would. Ana, with her new perk from endurance, would die when her body had been pushed far past exhaustion and simply broke down. They had to destroy the thing, so instead of dodging, Ana shoved her buckler in its mouth.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The boar bit down, and the buckler held long enough for Ana to lodge her sword down its… throat? Did it still count as a throat when most of the soft tissues were gone? She drove the blade in through the mouth and into the chest cavity, where it stuck firmly in something, leaving the hilt outside and well away from its teeth. That would have to be good enough.

  With a firm grip on the hilt of her sword, having abandoned her buckler as it buckled and bent in the boar’s maw, Ana let the thing bear her down. Her free right hand found purchase on the skull, and she spread her legs wide, throwing them around the demon’s forelegs and locking her ankles together. Then she squeezed.

  The pig crashed to the ground, with her as a cushion. It hurt like hell and knocked the wind out of her, but each of her grips held firm. “The neck!” Ana screamed as the monster thrashed, using her to plow a shallow furrow in the dirt. “Hack through its neck!”

  Rayni didn’t hesitate. With the same determination that Ana had seen in the Delve, when the bear-demon charged Deni, the Huntress threw herself at their adversary. Keeping well back from its thrashing, she stayed alongside it, darting in to deliver precise blows to the thick spine that was all that remained of its neck, save some clumps of rotten flesh and strips of hide that clung to the bone.

  “Hurry— Ah!” Ana was cut off as the boar reared up and, in a repeat of her experience with the elk, slammed her into the ground. The force slammed the hilt of her sword into her armor and drove the blade deeper, the point exiting through its shoulder blade with a crack. A fraction of a second later its jaws snapped shut, Ana only barely saving her hand by giving up her grip on the sword.

  From where she hung on for dear life, Ana saw flashes of Rayni. While lacking Ana’s strength, Rayni had some fair skill with the axe. Despite the monster’s bucking and thrashing the Huntress delivered blow after blow to its neck. Chips of bone flew. But it wasn’t one sided. As Rayni came in for another in her series of blows, the boar swung its head at her, using Ana’s body as a weapon to smash Rayni away. Ana almost lost her grip, feeling the blow both in her shoulder and her gut as she reflexively used her ability to absorb Rayni’s half of the damage and take it all on herself, but she held to the monster, her grip so hard that she could swear she heard her own tendons creak.

  As Ana fought to keep her limbs out of the thing’s jaws and attached to her body, Rayni scrambled back to her feet and, with a furious scream, drove the axe home so hard that it stuck between two vertebrae. Try as she might, she couldn’t get it loose, not with how the boar was moving, and as she fought she was thrown off, forcing her to abandon the weapon.

  “Ana! My axe is stuck!”

  “Where!?”

  “Its neck!”

  “Pry it off! Pull on the haft and pry the fucker’s head off!”

  “Are you crazy!? I can’t—”

  “You can! Fucking do it!”

  And Rayni did. With a scream of — Ana couldn’t even tell. Rage? Terror? Pure adrenaline? — Rayni leaped onto the boar’s back, hands and feet digging for purchase until she had both hands on the haft of the axe. Then she started straining.

  Rayni was not a large woman. She was taller than Ana, though that wasn’t saying much, but she was more wiry than toned. But some combination of fear, anger, and adrenaline let her jerk and strain on that haft, her face contorting and every muscle and tendon on her standing out with the strain until something, thankfully something in the boar rather than in her or the axe, crunched and cracked.

  The axe suddenly came loose as the boar’s head drooped, the released strain snapping back at Rayni and sending her tumbling off the boar to the ground, where she rolled and was back on her feet and moving in moments. Ana was now completely pinned between the boar’s head and the ground, its feet digging into the soil as it tried to press its mouth just a little closer to her. She couldn’t breathe. Her chest was compressed, her ribs bending to the breaking point, and it was all she could do to hang on and prevent the beast from bringing its trotters to bear as well.

  Then Rayni was back. Screaming like she was the one possessed and not the boar, she hacked away at the weakened neck. No longer bothering to try and keep her distance, she traded safety for a quick end to the fight. Ana couldn’t count the hacks. Her vision was going black at the edges, and she had to focus on staying alive for a few more seconds as the monster crushed her and tried to tear her belly out with its teeth.

  Rayni let out a triumphant howl, and suddenly the Revenant was just a pile of loosely connected bone and scraps of decomposing tissue, collapsing on itself.

  “Ana!” Rayni skidded to a stop beside her. “Oh, gods beyond, you’re a mess. Lie still. I said: Lie! Still!” Rayni commanded, firmly pushing Ana down as she tried to rise. She fussed with something on her belt for a moment.

  “All right, here we go. Hold on.” Rayni put Ana’s arms around her own neck, and Ana held on instinctively as Rayni took careful hold of her shoulders and pulled her up to a sitting position.

  “Aw, hells, that’s nasty,” Rayni gasped after looking her over. “Your neck! And your hair…”

  “Learn some bedside manners, woman!” Ana groaned, starting to feel every pain she’d accumulated during the fight, just as the description for Fight Through had promised. Her back felt like a single bruise from her shoulders to her ass, and her neck and the back of her head were on fire. She raised a hand and received a slap on her fingers for her trouble.

  “Don’t you dare!” Rayni scolded, using her waterskin to wash the back of Ana’s head. “All right, better than it looked. Lots of blood, lots of hair gone, but I can’t see any bone. Now hold still.”

  From the ground, Rayni picked up a familiar-looking bottle, uncorking it with her teeth. She did something behind Ana’s back, and a moment later Ana hissed as she felt a hand and a sharp sting on the back of her head, repeated several times down to the nape of her neck.

  “All right, drink the rest,” Rayni instructed, holding a three-quarters full bottle in front of Ana. “Gods only know what your insides look like after that.”

  “Thanks,” she scowled, taking the bottle and downing the contents. It was sweet, in the way that medicines were when you wanted to hide something awful, but it went down easily. She finished with a satisfied sigh as the potion immediately started to soothe her pains.

  “So, how did you do?” Ana asked. “Rewards-wise.”

  “Two Mediums. Ridiculously good, really.”

  “Glad to hear it. You said my hair…?”

  “Afraid so. Kind of patchy back there, right now. I’m impressed you didn’t lose a chunk of your scalp. Might want to consider a helmet in the future.”

  “Damn it. I’m going to have to shave it, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah,” Rayni said, almost apologetically. “At least in the back.”

  “I’ll have to do an undercut or something…” Ana muttered to herself. “All right. I feel like I’m gonna live. You okay, Ray?”

  “I’m fine, yeah. Not a scratch. Is that your doing? Like with Deni?”

  “Guess so.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “Welcome.”

  Rayni extended her hand, and Ana took it, letting the Huntress pull her to her feet. Not that she needed it, but she was pretty sure that the offer of help, not the effect, was the point.

  “So,” Rayni said once they were both on their feet. “Ray, huh?”

  “Yeah. I figure getting through a fight like this together is grounds for getting on a nickname basis. Unless you mind?”

  “I don’t mind. Kaira calls me ‘Yna’, but… I kinda like it, I guess.”

  “What about your friends from the other night?”

  “They’re not... I mean, they’re friendly, I guess, but I don’t really know them that well. I’ve gone with them as a tracker a few times, but when I do that I don’t really spend any time with the party. And I don’t spend much time in town, you know? Too many mid-level combat Classers making my danger sense go off.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I can see how that would be uncomfortable.”

  “Yeah. And I need the money, right? So I’m better off going back out as soon as I can. Out where I can harvest things to sell, feed myself for free, and not get tempted into spending any money.”

  “Right.” Then she added, “Don’t you get lonely?” Ana was pretty sure that was what a normal person would ask.

  “Sometimes,” Ray sighed. “All right, yeah. Pretty often. That’s a big part of why I go out with Parties as a tracker — or with Casual groups. It lets me spend at least some time with people outside of town, you know?”

  “Makes sense, yeah. You ever consider just joining a Party?”

  Ray shook her head. “I’m not strong enough in combat. When I go out as a tracker, no one expects me to fight, but taking me on with an equal share just isn’t worth it for most parties.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me,” Ana said, giving the pile of bones a kick. “You killed this thing.”

  “That was—”

  “And in the last fight you crippled the fox so that we could get a quick and easy kill on it. Don't sell yourself short.”

  “Try convincing a Party of that. And, honestly… This hasn’t been normal for me. With just the two of us it’s not like I could leave you to deal with both of those monsters on your own, but I don't like to get stuck in like I have. I don’t… I can’t fight like that.”

  “You did good, though. You just need a, what do you call it, a tank? Like me. Maybe a mage to back you up.”

  “But I’m not a combat Classer! Don’t you get it? I don’t have any combat Abilities. All my Abilities, all my Perks, they’re geared toward hunting. No Party wants me. I’d just be a liability.”

  Ana scoffed. “Again, bullshit. First, I bet you’d increase the number of kills a group could get on any given day to more than make up for your share. Second, you’re good enough with your bow to have an impact. And third, you’ve got guts. You don’t hesitate. If a group doesn’t want you because you’re a hybrid Class, or whatever, they’re idiots. If they’d seen you fight, they’d change their minds.” She paused, thinking back. “Deni and her friends were starting a Party, weren’t they? Her, a Fighter, and an Archer. Ask them! Or, hell, if things don’t work out with Kaira, Tor, and Omda, I’d be happy to continue this.” She gestured between the two of them.

  Ray blinked at her in surprise. “Really?”

  “Yeah, ‘really.’ As far as I can tell, we’re doing great, aren’t we?”

  “I mean, the Crystals are good…”

  “Do you hate having me along?”

  “Of course not. Besides the constant sense of danger, you’re all right.”

  “Yeah, same. Other than the attempted blackmail, you’re all right. So why wouldn’t I want to continue this? Now, c’mon. That’s enough rest. Let’s harvest what we can and get going.”

  When Ana looked back, Ray was still standing there. “You know, Ana,” Ray finally said, before she started walking. “You’re terrible at compliments.”

  and read every finished chapter of Splinter Angel! You also get to read anything else I’m trying out — which is how SA got started.

  Join us if you want to chat with other readers, or just hang out!