Yuto’s eyes swept the tree line. Two wolves dead on the ground. Nothing moving in the shadows. No rustling. No shapes detaching themselves from the dark between the trunks. The forest carried on making its sounds the way a forest does when it isn’t hiding anything.

He let out a slow breath and did a more thorough scan. Nothing detaching itself from the shadows. No shapes in the undergrowth. No second wave gathering just out of sight. The forest made its ambient sounds, things rustling, something calling from high up in the canopy, all of it ordinary, none of it warning.

So maybe the two wolves hadn’t been part of a pack after all. Or they had been, and the rest had simply gone elsewhere. Either way, no ambush was materializing, and he allowed himself to relax exactly as much as the situation seemed to warrant, which was not very much. He was still turning this over when he remembered the girl was standing three meters away.

He turned to her. She was watching the bushes with the same expression she watched everything else with, which was no expression at all. "What’s your name?" he asked.

Before she could answer, Shiny drew his sword.

He didn’t say anything. He just unsheathed it in one quiet motion and fixed his attention on a section of the undergrowth to the left, and the sound of distant snarling was already low and growing.

The bushes split.

Six wolves came through, one after the other, deliberate and unhurried. Five of them were the same size as the ones already dead on the ground. The sixth was not.

The sixth was larger by a margin that made the word larger feel inadequate. It moved differently too, like it had somewhere specific to be and full confidence in its right to be there. The aura around it was thick enough to notice from across the clearing.

Yuto swallowed.

Paragon menace. The alpha.

Which meant Shiny was going to be occupied, which meant the five regular wolves were his and Mayu’s problem, which was going to be a problem.

Shiny didn’t wait to be told. He looked at the alpha for a moment, then looked back at Yuto once, then crossed the clearing at speed with his sword raised. The alpha met him halfway. The collision cracked through the trees like a gunshot and a group of birds erupted from the canopy all at once and didn’t come back.

Yuto turned to the girl. "Looks like we’re handling the other five."

"Mayu," she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"You asked my name." She was watching the five wolves spread out around the edge of the clearing with calm, tracking attention. "It is Mayu."

"Oh." He nodded. "Right."

Internally, he was wincing. Is she, does she always do that? Who answers a question six minutes after it was asked, in the middle of a wolf pack, without acknowledging the gap at all? He thought about Shiny, who also answered questions at whatever pace he found convenient and wore approximately the same expression. He was apparently collecting emotionally unavailable companions. He glanced at Mayu sideways. At least one of them was very easy to look at, he stopped thinking it immediately and charged at the wolves.

The five wolves rushed them simultaneously.

He went straight at the nearest one and swung with everything, putting his whole body behind it. The blade caught it across the back and it stumbled to the ground howling. He was already stepping forward when the second wolf hit him from the side and he left the ground briefly before landing on one knee, pain blooming up through his leg.

The wolf came in fast, jaws going for his arm. He got the blade up and felt the impact travel all the way to his shoulder. Strong. They were all so unreasonably strong.

A third wolf snapped at him from the other side. He twisted, it got air, and he hacked at it on instinct, wild and completely inelegant, but it drove the wolf back and that was enough. The first wolf had recovered and was going for his shoulder. He turned into it and let the blow land on his arm instead of his neck, a trade he was not happy about but had no better option for, and he drove the sword in close range into its throat.

Warm liquid hit his hand. He swung again. And again.

The wolf dropped.

Wolfhound slain.]

[+1 Soul Core]

He straightened up and looked across the clearing.

Mayu’s eagle had gone immediately for the nearest wolf’s face, talons first, and opened four lines across it before the animal knew what was happening. A second wolf caught the bird mid-flight, dragging it down. Mayu was already moving, she covered the gap and put her dagger into the wolf’s side, and it released the eagle with a sound of sharp fury and rounded on her instead. The eagle shook itself and climbed back into the air.

A third wolf hit Mayu from behind while she was facing the second.

She didn’t panic. She went with the impact, turned it into a roll, came up facing it. Her arm was already moving, a slash at the height where the wolf’s jaw should be, and it was, and the blade opened a line across its face. She followed with a kick and the wolf skidded back, twitched twice, and stopped.

Yuto arrived beside her and chased off the third wolf with a swing, giving them room to breathe. The eagle pinned another and he put his sword through its throat. He looked up in time to see Mayu withdrawing her dagger from the fourth, which lay still at her feet.

Four down. One wolf left in the clearing, circling at a cautious distance, apparently reconsidering its life choices.

——

On the far side of the clearing, something hit a tree hard enough to split it.

Shiny stood up from the impact and walked back toward the alpha without changing his expression. The alpha was relentless, it absorbed punishment and kept generating more force, kept pressing, kept driving forward. This was not nothing. Shiny’s sleeve was torn. The alpha’s left eye was bleeding freely and it still hadn’t slowed down.

They exchanged another sequence of blows that scattered dirt across the clearing and bent a sapling sideways. The alpha pushed and Shiny gave ground, which was not how Shiny usually operated.

He had been watching though. Every lunge, every pivot, every way the alpha loaded weight onto its back legs before it launched. Pattern recognition was not something the alpha had planned for, and Shiny had been quietly cataloguing the whole time.

Shiny stopped retreating. He turned and faced the alpha with a flat, unhurried look that contained no fear and no particular urgency, just attention.

The alpha read this as an opportunity. It snarled and launched itself forward, all weight and speed and killing intent.

Shiny pivoted smoothly off his back foot and drove his sword straight forward, into the wolf’s chest, meeting the momentum rather than fighting it. The alpha’s eyes went wide, and its claws raked across Shiny’s arm in a last furious attempt at relevance. Shiny leaned his weight into the sword and held it there, still and patient, until the claws stopped.

The alpha went down.

Three notifications arrived at once, and then a fourth.

[Wolfhound slain.]

[+1 Soul Core]

[Paragon slain.]

[+15 Soul Cores]

[Menace slain.]

[+10 Soul Cores]

[Soul Core threshold exceeded.]

[Rank up available. Proceed?]

Yuto stood very still and read the panel twice.

"...Oh," he said.