Stone cracked bone. The swing reverberated with the sound of a coin bouncing off a stone floor. Satisfying as that clear noise was, it was drowned out in the current slaughter.

Heavily breathing, Korith tugged at her hammer. The stone had sunk a little bit too deep into the gorilla skull and got stuck on splintered bone. The delay was all the opening the enemy needed.

Leaping, a gorilla-mantis nymph attached to Korith’s armour. The head-sized creature’s mandibles and teeth scratched over the surface of the armour. Its thin legs latched onto whatever little gap they could find. The jaws of the juvenile creature snapped ever closer to her face.

Korith finally yanked her hammer free. Before she could take out the creature, more insect than mammal at this stage of its lifecycle, another adult member descended on her with thick, furred arms and the lower body of its insectoid half.

A swipe of her weapon broke the descending arm. Simultaneously, the nymph reached her neck. Mantis mandibles dug into the exposed flesh. Had it not been for the magic coursing through her skin, the wound could have been fatal. Instead, she only had her skin torn. More could have happened, had Apexus not appeared.

The Monk grabbed the monster by its insectoid lower body and ripped it off. Not even two seconds passed before Apexus squashed the head of the creature between two palms. The scatter of gore was scarcely worth the mention in the blood-soaked pit they were in.

Apexus’ heels came down in precision stomps, squashing ever more of the nymphs. Monstrous instincts kept them skittering towards him and his companions anyway.

The adult monster screamed. The scream was cut short violently. Reysha’s demonic hand had rammed into the back of the neck of the monster, took hold of the spinal column, and ripped it out.

A final gargle and the monster collapsed, burying a fair number of her brood underneath it, alongside a number of eggs that had yet to hatch. Elsewhere in the pit, fire was spreading, spurred on by Aclysia’s magical ray attacks.

“Let’s get out – now!” Apexus shouted when he finally saw a gap in the slaughter.

He led the way, relying on his tremor sense to know what parts of the ground were safe to tread on. The hardened mud was covered in holes, an irregular pattern of where eggs had been buried and where they had hatched. Reysha and Korith followed him closely on foot.

They emerged from the pit, covered in blood, that of their enemies and their own. They ran towards a nearby safe spot in the landscape: a gap between two rocks that would funnel the chasing nymphs through a chokepoint.

They were greeted by a massive spider lunging at them. Apexus had not expected it. Apexus was also fully engaged in the heat of combat. His body moved with purpose, meeting the lunging spider’s face with his Ironskin-clad knuckles. Chitin cracked, eyes burst, and Aclysia joined from above, spearing the enemy with a Lance. The concentrated, unstable energy exploded, ripping the spider apart where its abdomen and main body came together.

Things finally relaxed from there. Only a few nymphs skittered in their direction. The rest lacked either the knowledge or the sight to chase after their supposed prey. Aclysia landed and started to heal Korith. The kobold had taken the brunt of the assault.

“Assholes!” Reysha cursed and grabbed a spider leg off the ground. Without much of a thought, she cracked the chitin wide open to get at the flesh inside. As she munched, she looked back at the pit with annoyance. “Since when do monsters put up elaborate traps?!”

The party had been progressing smoothly for the day, only to find themselves suddenly breaking through the floor and falling into a specially prepared burrow. Two adult monsters and their brood had then descended on them. A feeding for the newly born creatures, before they were made to fend for their own in the wilds.

“It may have been an Incursion,” Aclysia suggested. “It could also have been the manifestation of their life cycles outside of dungeons.”

“It’s hideous is what it is!” Reysha responded, stuffing the meat in her face. ‘At least the reward food is good.’

Korith felt the pain of a broken rib suddenly wash away. The fight had started with her throwing herself in the path of a fist meant for Aclysia. While the armour had blunted most of the impact, it had still been enough to rattle her insides. “You the best,” the kobold squeaked.

Apexus remained at the entrance point of the crag, staring outwards. His eyes were only the secondary sense he was focused on. His naked soles were listening for any vibration that was out of place. He only took a step back when Korith tugged at his sleeve and gave him a signal that she would take over the guard.

Obliging his hunger, the humanoid chimera unhooked his jaw and wolfed down several pounds of spider meat in unchewed chunks. He needed to replenish the biomass he had lost to injury and energy consumption. Reysha was just eating for the hell of it. Feasting on a monster corpse was having the usual effects, from satisfaction to arousal. She bit the inside of her cheek not to act on those desires.

“The air smells dangerous,” the Ragressian noted in a flat voice.

Apexus nodded, his eyes ever-wandering. None of them were new to hostile environments. They had visited dungeons, confined into tunnels or exposed to the open sky, before. That, however, had still been confined instances with the usual rules that the gods provided for such places. This was, well and truly, the wilds.

Reysha forced herself to throw the remains of the spider leg aside. There was still room in her stomach, room she was used to filling when she got the opportunity to feast on flesh that tasted better than mouldy wheat straws extracted from cow dung. As it stood, she was better advised to eat only as much as she required to fend off the distracting gnawing of her own stomach. If she ate until she was truly full, that would slow her down. A handicap they could hardly afford.

“Everyone good?” Korith asked, then glanced at the stone wall next to them and perked up. “Oh! Oh yes!”

Mild amusement found its outlet in a variety of chuckles, as the healed members of the party followed the kobold’s rapid change from concerned to distracted. Korith had spotted a silvery glint along the boulder’s wall. To inspect it more closely, she leapt, clinging onto the craggy stone. Some spider silk obscured her vision.

“Need a knife?” Reysha offered when the shortstack tried to get rid of the sticky webbing with her hands.

“Thanks,” Korith said after taking the sharp throwing weapon. The keen edge sliced through the fibres like a shear through silk, revealing more of the material. Korith handed the dagger back once she had cleared enough of the wall, then proceeded to dig into the rock with her claws.

The dull, dense end points of a kobold’s hands were adapted to this kind of work. Thin enough to enter crags in weathered rock, sturdy enough to survive the pull and sensitive enough to make out whether they were about to unearth something they shouldn’t, the claws and scaled hands made for optimal tools to chip away at the surface of a mountain. Incidentally, they were also quite apt at working with machinery, specifically artifice, but that was, all things considered, more of a happy accident of their guided evolution. By design, the claws were meant to help dig out warrens in rocky landscapes and prospect for minerals.

Korith was currently doing the latter, removing a somewhat loose chunk from the large stone. A regular kobold would not have been capable of ripping it out. A Warrior of her level did it with relative ease.

The satisfaction of removing the rock was followed by immediate disappointment. Korith dropped to the floor and presented the chunk of silver-veined stone to the crowd. “Ore?” Aclysia asked. “I must assume not, considering your disappointment.”

“Too light.” Korith weighed the stone demonstrably in her hand. “It’s just muscovite.”

“I must admit that there is a gap in my knowledge,” Aclysia confessed and looked a little closer. “Could you inform me on the nature of muscovite?”

“Basically, it’s a kind of rock that looks like silver at a glance but it’s just a worthless rock,” Korith answered and dropped the chunk. “Sorry… got excited for nothing….”

The weight of Apexus’ gently placed palm made the blonde’s head bob. “Get excited as you desire, I adore it,” spoke the giant of a slime.

‘Hamena, hamena, hamena,’ thought the shortstack of a kobold, while swaying under his patting hand. The adorableness was almost enough to distract them all. It was certainly enough to distract Aclysia.

Reysha only appeared distracted. Her amused little smile turned into a manic grin. A spin on the spot and the throwing knife she had lent Korith a moment ago went whistling past the angel’s head. The true silver sliced through the base of the left wing of a fist-sized insect that had swept in. It immediately dropped to the ground, its life force extinguished in an instant. The throwing knife sunk half a finger’s width into the stone wall, cutting into it like a steel knife would do with tree bark.

“Why!” Korith shouted, staring at the dead thing on the ground. It was a thoroughly creepy mixture between a mosquito and a tarantula. It had the fuzzy legs and size of the latter while possessing the clear wings of the former. The head was an absurdist mixture between the needle-like mouth of a mosquito and the abdomen of a spider. “Why make that! Why?!”

Apexus picked it up and inspected it from a few sides, then he devoured it whole to understand better how it worked. From his lower right arm, he formed a half-functioning replica of the creature. It looked like it had been grafted onto him. Incidentally, that was what this kind of creature specialized in.

“They latch onto a person’s limbs and inject them with a tranquillizer while sucking blood. The nutrients go to the egg-sack and the eggs are then deposited under the outer fat layers to-“

“Stop! Cease! Ew!” Korith shouted. “Ew, ew, ew!”

“I concur,” Aclysia agreed, leaning onto the wall to fight off the sudden sense of nausea. ‘Curse my swift thoughts,’ she thought. With every word spoken, she had automatically and vividly imagined the process in all of its details. Even now her mind was spinning around the way the hatched larva would bury deeper into the host body to-.

“Hey there, bubble butt,” Reysha interrupted the intrusive thoughts by putting her arm around the sickened angel’s neck. “I just saved ya from that thing, so how about ya give me a little reward?”

“Its reproductive strategy would not have worked on me.”

Aclysia’s objection was overruled by the redhead leaning in. Justification ignored, the angel was more than eager to accept the prying tongue of the tiger woman. The forward approach grew in force and the healer yielded by instinct. The kiss, not chaste whatsoever from the outset, soon had the Priest with her back against the stone. Both women’s breaths were faintly audible by the time Reysha broke the kiss.

Rather than pull away, the Rogue rubbed her cheek against that of Aclysia, like an affectionate cat. The angel smiled softly, eyes only open a miniscule gap, and nuzzled into the touch. Reysha sent a half-lidded, smug glance to Apexus. It was between a challenge to join and an invitation to do the same.

The humanoid chimera took it but only placed two quick pecks on their foreheads. Disappointment was layered underneath resignation to the wisdom of that decision. “Have you recovered your mana?” Reysha asked teasingly.

“Mhm?” Aclysia hummed, her mind swimming in the happiness that kissing loved ones always brought, a buzz that she and Korith got lost in much more easily than the more assertively minded half of the party. “What?” she asked, when Reysha and Apexus laughed, one loudly, the other in his reserved fashion. “What?!” she repeated, louder, more embarrassed, when they kept going.

“See? She adores me,” Reysha flattered herself. “No taste in women, that angel.”

“Her taste is refined,” Apexus disagreed.

“What did you ask?” Aclysia repeated for the third time, now miserable from embarrassment.

“Did you fill up your mana?” Korith repeated the question in the stead of the giggling redhead. “Because, you know, you can do the whole… sucky thing?”

“She can do that sucky thing alright!” Reysha shouted, then almost fell over because her own joke made her stomach hurt.

“Can we not engage in innuendos for five minutes?!” Aclysia shouted back, composure entirely broken down.

“We can, she cannot,” Apexus answered. “A group of four crows may sit together, but one will always caw.”

“She’s more of a thieving magpie,” Korith mumbled. “Stealing innocence and whatever else…”

The joke at her expense only made Reysha laugh more. She held her stomach, taking her out of the conversation long enough for Aclysia to regain her composure. “I have not absorbed any mana. May I, darling?”

“It is more useful with you than I,” the slime answered and extended his hand.

‘I wanted another kiss…’ thought the angel, but took the hand gracefully. Mana flowed from one body to the other. Apexus pulled her against his chest and into a warm hug. ‘This is nice as well,’ the white-haired woman thought and snuggled up against his broad frame. The remaining viscera made it all a little less romantic.

They parted when she had concluded her recharge. Stopping only so Apexus could pile some more fresh meat into his stomach, the party moved out of their safe spot and further north. “Should we be worried about that?” Korith asked, pointing at circling vultures up above. They were too large to be of the regular variety.

Apexus kept a close eye on them for half a minute, before answering. “They’re not here for us, they’re here for our scraps,” he reckoned.

“They must be true animals then, not dungeon monsters,” Aclysia theorized.

“Could also be smarter dungeon monsters,” Korith suggested. “The dragons technically were dungeon monsters and they didn’t attack us on sight either.”

The angel nodded sagely. “An astute objection – as we reach higher levels, the rules blur and more get added. Old assurances may not necessarily hold, especially not out here.” The vultures landed behind them, their needle-toothed beaks soon digging into the remains of the spider carcass.

“Caution will be our primary guide,” Apexus said.

And they advanced deeper into the wilderness.