“Testilands, Ali. I’m calling bollocks.” We were circling over a waterfall. Leftball, or whatever the hell the locals called the island we’d arrived on, rose in a series of forested cliffs to the top of the central hill. It was almost a small mountain. A number of rivers flowed down from the peak, the control of which was incredibly important to the locals, and it was usually in the paws of the badgerkin, a vicious bunch of sociopaths by all accounts.

  “What?”

  While the brief history lesson I'd received as in-flight entertainment had been enlightening, it had failed to convince me of the werewolf's claims. My tongue flicked out to taste the air again. Preindustrial coastal bliss. So it mostly smelled of mud, salt and shit.

  “There’s no way your nose is that much better than my tongue. You can’t bloody smell Remy, you just want to stop down there and pee on some trees or something.”

  “I didn’t say I could smell him. I used a skill, Moon Touched Mark.”

  “You don’t have magic. None of your lot do.”

  “It’s a spell-like skill. Tons of classes and species have them. How has Kat not even taught you the basics? What am I saying? I know why she hasn’t bothered to try.”

  We suddenly dropped, then I heaved my shoulders to regain altitude.

  “We are experiencing some attitude-related turbulence. Please ensure your seatbelt is plugged in and put your tray in the upright position.”

  I could feel her paws wrapped desperately around a pair of horns that sprouted from the base of my neck, and her legs had clamped down tightly. I dipped a wing and began circling lower.

  “Asshole. He is down there. Close to the base of the waterfall. I don’t know exactly where, but I know his general location.”

  “Fine, we can take a look. But we both know he’s some stooge of the Wyrm who is obviously the big bad guy, and this is just a waste of time. We should just fly straight to the giant johnson nuke him from above,” I grumbled.

  Dust and leaves flew up as my feet touched the ground, hard wingbeats creating a cloud that briefly obscured my sight for a few moments. As the obstruction cleared, I felt Alicya slide down off my shoulders. I tucked my feathery wings back against my flanks and took in the scenic beauty.

  The mist from the waterfall rose up to form half a dozen ever-shifting rainbows that danced over the murky pond. The water was a deep blue, but the drop pool stirred up silt, tainting it and leaving it only semi-transparent.

  Trees, some of which must have been hundreds of years old, grew up a few metres back from the edge of the little lake. Mossy, with tangling vines growing between them, I have expected a talking panther and a drunken bear to be arguing nearby. On Helstat, that wasn’t exactly unlikely, now that I thought about it.

  The birds had stopped singing when I landed. I’d seen them take off in the corner of my vision as I came in for a landing, but they were already flitting back, chirping angrily as though they were challenging me for my right to be there.

  “He’s that way,” Alicya said softly, pointing towards the clouds of water at the base of the fall.

  “Of course he is. Looks like you’re going to get a bath after all.”

  She scowled at me, then led the way. Both her tails dropped down behind her as she went. She really didn’t like the B word. I followed, keeping my neck coiled slightly and my head on a swivel. I couldn’t imagine anything that was a real threat to us living in this rural idyll. A talking bear with a love of honey seemed more probable.

  Alicya kept to solid ground, but I just stomped out into the pond, maybe-accidentally sending a spray of water at the werewolf as I did so, which elicited a round of annoyed cursing.

  The water came up to my thighs at its deepest and was refreshingly cool on my scales. “You reckon he’s behind the waterfall?”

  “He’s further on, and moving away from us, but he’s in that direction and on our level… wait, he’s descending now. Some kind of cave system.”

  “Thanks, Sally satnav.” I poked my nose cautiously through the waterfall, eyes open but shielded by my nictitating membranes. A large, damp cave that disappeared into darkness at the back. I pulled my head back, blinking away the water.

  “It’s big but not big enough for my real body. There’s a ledge on the other side to get in behind the fall.”

  I waddled over, walking in water up to your armpits is tricky. Not deep enough to really swim, but deep enough that walking was a bother. I shifted back into my mammal suit, pink silk undies seeming to act like a sponge to the nearby mist and immediately soaking through.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Alicya hurried around, moving in a loping run that made her forepaws sway in a fairly menacing fashion. Or at least it would be menacing to a puny warmblood.

  “Fuck it. I’m going in damp,” I said as she arrived. Her fur was quickly getting soaked as well, and she just ignored me and trotted into the cave and away from the spray.

  As soon as she was a few metres in, she stopped and shook herself vigorously from snout to tails, spraying water all over me as I arrived next to her.

  “I’ve always thought dogs did that deliberately. Waited till they got somewhere, or next to something, you don’t want to get soaked before they shook off.” I produced a pair of towels from storage, tossed one to her, earning an annoyed glare, and began rubbing myself down as we headed further into the cave. “I’m more of a cat dragon myself.”

  “I am not surprised,” Alicya muttered, rubbing at her furry shoulders before giving up and just draping the towel over them and following me.

  The cave began to narrow even further. The stone was slick and wet, splotches of lichen and moss covered sections of the walls, creating weird patterns of yellow, brown and green on top of the dark grey background.

  “Something doesn’t smell right. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Her tails wagged nervously.

  “Oh, come on. You’re the deadly Moon Shiver, She Whose Pee Kills The Grass and all your other silly titles. Now you’re scared of a cave?” Something squished unpleasantly beneath my foot. “Bugger. You’d better not have relatives living in here who don’t understand what poo bags are for.”

  Barrow Slime (level 3) slain!

  Gold earned… Nothing!

  1.2kg of biomass added to storage.

  That was a lot of biomass for something the size of a fancy cigar. I stood on one leg as I brought the slimy foot up to look at my sole. I poked it with a finger, and the stuff stuck, pulling away like bubblegum. “Gross. At least it’s not crap, I suppose.” I pulled the towel over my shoulder and wiped at it. Alicya leaned in and sniffed.

  “Barrow Slime. That’s not good.”

  “The system told me what it was. Why are they a problem?” I asked with a weary sigh.

  “They feed on the dead. And the undead.”

  “Zombies? No worries, puppy! I can just banish them back to the earth.”

  “Not all of them, Bob. We should move more carefully.”

  “It’s damn near pitch black, and I can’t see shit. Give me a second.” I pulled a light orb from storage and poked it until it started to glow brightly. “Spiritus Manus!” The ghostly blue hand took the glowing sphere and held it a couple of feet above my head.

  “Idiot. How the hell do we sneak up on him if you're lit up like Bulb’s bloody temple in the darkness? Put it out.”

  “I don’t want to step on anymore squishy critters, and what the hell does it matter? He can’t outrun us both.”

  “He can hide.”

  “You can sense him, and I can see. Just because you’ve got total dark vision doesn’t mean I have to stumble from splat to splat. Look, there’s another one of the little bastards!” I pointed to a slime that was folding itself over something small and furry. “OK, that’s pretty gross as well. Maybe the darkness is better.” The tiny mammal, some kind of vole or mouse, had been engulfed by the blue slime and was thrashing feebly as its flesh and fur began to melt.

  “How did it catch the mouse? They aren’t exactly fast movers,” I wondered. Alicya just pointed up at the ceiling. Dozens of blue and grey blobs glistened above us. “Should have packed an umbrella,” I muttered.

  We continued into the not-so-dark cave, both of us minding where we put our feet and keeping half an eye on the tiny acidic menaces that clung to the stone above us.

  We came to a fork in the cave, and I flicked my tongue out as Alicya took a long sniff.

  “That way,” we both said at once, pointing to the right. The cave narrowed again; it was barely wide enough for us to walk side by side for a short distance. Then it opened a little bit, and Alicya stopped pressing herself against me so she could keep her fur away from the soggy walls. The air tasted of moss and wet dog, with a faint tint of terrified rodent that was gradually getting stronger.

  “Is he still running?” I asked quietly.

  She cocked her head to one side and raised one of her ears. “He’s stopped. Hard to say how far… half a mile or so?”

  “Unless this place has another exit, that means we’ve got him. Only problem would be…” I turned my head over my shoulder. “Mortem Fucem!” The glowing, magical sentry flickered into being and slowly rotated. “That’ll sort him out if he comes back this way,” I said, covering a sigh of relief that the bloody thing didn’t start blasting at the handful of slimes I could see above me. That would have been embarrassing.

  The walls of the tunnel seemed to come to a stop, and darkness loomed beyond. The light reached out like a torchbeam to illuminate a tunnel-sized stretch ahead of us, but to either side, there was only darkness.

  Strange fungal growths showed in the entrance to the cavern. Giant mushrooms, all a sickly pale white, grew nearly six feet tall. We emerged, and my mage hand carried my light up higher as I peered around. It was a shroom forest. There were strange rustlings deeper in, where the mushroom grew even taller, and the odd flicker of movement in the corner of my peripheral vision had my head snapping back and forth as I tried to get a good look at whatever was running about.

  “Shall I just burn it? Probably easier, to be honest. I don’t know what the spores from those things will do to me, and I don’t want to find out.”

  “This place… shouldn’t exist. We cleared all of the Fungests out while I was running the clans.”

  “Not a fan of portobello?”

  “No they always have—”

  A dagger attempted to plunge into my side at the same moment a yelp cut off whatever Alicya had been planning to say. The now broken flint knife was attached to a skinny green arm, fragments of the blade clattering to the stone at my feet. Slender, wiry muscles ran down the limb from a shoulder cloaked in some dark fabric. Above the ragged tunic was a very surprised face.

  A long nose that would have made the anteater dudes jealous drooped over a mouth that hung open, exposing jagged brown teeth. Above was a pair of beady black eyes currently shifting from gleeful murder to abject terror.

  The move Fuck-Off-Wasp sent the back of my hand smashing into this horrific face, launching whatever the hell he was back into the wall behind me. He landed with a crack and a wet thump. As his body dropped down to the ground, a trail of lime green blood was left behind from his shattered skull.

  Hobnob (level 62) slain!

  Gold earned… Nothing!

  83kg of biomass added to storage.

  “Noblins!” Alicya snarled as her jaws closed over the face of the one who had tried to attack her.