Divine Milking System

The thing that came through the canyon wall was not a leopard.

It was bigger. It was worse. It moved on too many legs and its body was segmented like someone had taken a centipede and fed it steroids and nightmares and approximately forty thousand years of mana-saturated evolution. The head was armored in plates that looked like volcanic glass, and the mandibles that framed its mouth could have crushed a sedan without effort.

I didn’t wait to count the legs. I yanked Blair sideways and triggered Wave Motion through both feet, launching us downstream in a burst of spiral energy that ate another three percent of my already critical mana reserves.

Blair screamed something that might have been my name or might have been a creative suggestion about my ancestry. The river rushed past on our right. The canyon wall blurred on our left. Behind us, the centipede thing demolished the rock shelf we’d been standing on two seconds ago with a sound like God breaking plates.

"What is that?" Blair’s voice cracked at a pitch I’d never heard from her.

"Don’t know. Don’t care. Running now."

The canyon floor was a minefield of river-smoothed stones and hidden dropoffs, exposed roots from whatever impossible trees grew in this fractured dimension snaking across the path in just the right places to catch an ankle. My boots hit a flat section of rock and I pushed harder, dragging Blair by the wrist because her burned leg couldn’t maintain this pace on its own.

The centipede pursued with a rhythm that shouldn’t exist in nature. I couldn’t see it directly but I felt every impact through the soles of my boots, each strike of those too-many legs drumming against stone at a frequency that made my molars ache. The thermal signature in my Sensory Hijack range registered as massive and fundamentally wrong. It read cold despite the mana density radiating off it like a furnace, as if the creature’s biology had inverted every rule this dimension was supposed to follow. Living things in mana-saturated environments ran hot. This thing ran glacial while outputting enough magical energy to light up like a searchlight in my augmented senses.

"There!" Blair pointed with her free hand at a gap in the canyon wall maybe eighty meters ahead. The rock face had split at some point, creating a crevasse that ran diagonal up the cliff face. Too narrow for the centipede. Maybe narrow enough for two desperate people who didn’t have time to be picky.

"Can you climb?"

"Can you stop asking stupid questions?"

Fair point. I shifted angle toward the gap, adjusting trajectory to hit the base of that split rock at maximum velocity. Blair’s wrist was scalding where my fingers wrapped around it, her body’s temperature control completely destroyed by back-to-back fights and the absolute horror of being hunted by something that looked like it crawled out of a creature feature’s deleted scenes.

Forty meters. Thirty. Twenty.

The centipede closed the gap between us. Its mandibles produced a clicking rhythm like industrial equipment chewing through wet meat. The mana signature behind us flared hot and wrong as the creature charged up for something, which was precisely the kind of bullshit I didn’t have bandwidth for at this exact second.

Fifteen meters. My lungs screamed. Blair’s breathing came in ragged gasps that told me she was running on fumes and spite. The burned tissue on her calf had to be agony at this pace but she hadn’t made a single sound of complaint.

Five meters. The crevasse opening yawned ahead, a vertical slash in the cliff face that looked barely wide enough for human shoulders.

Ten meters.

I released Blair’s wrist and shoved her toward the crevasse opening. She stumbled, caught herself on the rock face, and started climbing without looking back. The trust in that movement, the automatic assumption that I would handle whatever came next, hit me somewhere in the chest that had nothing to do with my healing injuries.

Then I turned around.

The centipede filled the canyon. Its body stretched back into the darkness beyond my perception range, segment after segment after segment of armored chitin and too many legs. The head alone was the size of a delivery van. The mandibles dripped something that sizzled when it hit stone.

I had nine percent mana. One damaged kama in storage. Zero good options.

The creature lunged.

I dropped flat and the mandibles passed over my head close enough to ruffle my hair. The wind from its passage smelled like copper and ammonia and something older, something that had been killing things in the dark since before humans figured out fire was useful.

I rolled left, came up on one knee, and punched Wave Motion directly into the ground.

The spiral energy discharged into the stone and kept going, boring through rock in a drilling pattern that destabilized the canyon floor in a ten-foot radius. The centipede’s front legs found no purchase as the ground simply stopped existing beneath them. The creature’s momentum carried it forward into the sudden void, and for one beautiful second it thrashed in confusion as gravity remembered it was supposed to be working.

The crash shook the entire canyon. Dust and debris erupted in a cloud that turned visibility to zero. I heard the centipede screaming, an awful chittering sound that seemed to come from multiple mouths, and I didn’t wait to see what happened next.

I ran for the crevasse.

Blair had already climbed twenty feet up, her hands finding holds in the rock with the desperation of someone who understood that falling meant death. I jumped, caught the lip of the gap, and started hauling myself up with arms that felt like they’d been replaced with lead weights during the past six hours.

The centipede recovered faster than anything that size should have been able to. It surged out of the debris cloud and slammed into the canyon wall below us, mandibles gouging stone in its frenzy to reach the prey that had escaped. The crevasse was too narrow for its head to enter, but that didn’t stop it from trying, shoving itself against the gap with enough force to crack the surrounding rock.

"Climb faster!"

"I am climbing as fast as humanly possible, Monroe!"

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