———

  CARNAGE FIEND [LEVEL 12]

  Core Racial Trait: Poisonous branches

  ———

  Ace was about to be eaten by a fucking tree.

  The Carnage Fiend exploded from the edge of the forest clearing, a grotesque fusion of bloodstained bark and hooked claws that moved with impossible speed. Ace's enhanced reflexes barely saved him as he hurled himself sideways, the ground erupting where he'd stood heartbeats before. Dirt and stone sprayed through the air as massive wooden claws gouged deep furrows in the earth.

  Ace rolled out of the way just as the beast swung at his head. It whizzed past his ear with barely an inch to spare. His shoulder slammed into the ground, and moments later, he rolled to his feet again at a safe distance.

  Well, safe-ish.

  He sank into his stance, his weight on the balls of his feet as he studied the monster before him. It tilted its head, the ball of intertwined branches and glowing yellow eyes pivoting on its wooden neck with a loud creak.

  Ace shuddered.

  This thing was horrendous.

  In seconds, the clearing had descended into chaos. Sunlight cut through clouds of dust, casting shifting shadows across the battlefield. The monster skidded, bark splintering as it raced toward him with predatory focus.

  Ace sidestepped quickly, putting a thick oak between himself and the creature. His combat training kicked in automatically—assess the threat, identify cover, locate allies, establish firing positions. Only this time, his rifle was gone, and he instead had to rely on vampiric abilities he barely understood.

  The thing screeched as he evaded it yet again, and he took the moment to run. In just a few seconds, he put another few yards between them. That would give him enough time to come up with a plan.

  Probably.

  He used the momentary cover to evaluate his surroundings. The clearing wasn't large—maybe fifty yards across—with scattered boulders and fallen logs that could serve as defensive positions. His teammates were scattered in a rough semicircle, all looking equally shocked at the monster's sudden appearance. Only he and Victor watched the creature before them with intense focus. The rest looked like they were about to piss themselves.

  None of them were combat-trained.

  None of them were ready for this.

  A nearby oak shuddered as the Carnage Fiend slammed into it. Wood groaned as the tree's roots strained to hold against the impact. The sergeant didn’t wait for the tree to fall. He was already moving, ducking low and sprinting toward a nearby rock formation. Splinters rained down as the oak's trunk began to split.

  "It's a boss!" Tara shouted from behind a fallen log about ten yards away. Her eyes glowed with an eerie crimson light as she scanned the creature. "Level 12! Watch for AOE attacks and—”

  “What the fuck is an AOE attack?” Rachel interrupted.

  Ace gritted his teeth in frustration. These civilians were going to get themselves killed.

  “Be careful,” he warned, in case someone had missed their Identify screen when it had popped up. “It’s got poisonous branches. Keep clear!"

  "That thing has poison?" Olivia’s voice cracked with panic as she scrambled behind a large boulder.

  Well, at least now he knew who needed situational awareness training.

  Before he could reply, Victor charged into the clearing with a predatory grin on his face. "Everyone spread out! Surround it!"

  "No!" Tara countered. "We need to group up! That's how you handle these things!"

  Ace huffed in frustration as the contradicting orders echoed across the clearing. The last thing they needed was confusion, but no one was listening. They needed a chain of command, and they needed it fast.

  The Carnage Fiend abandoned its assault on the splintering oak and lurched toward the center of the clearing right at Victor, its wooden joints creaking like ancient hinges. It roared and swung at him, but missed by inches.

  Its misshapen head swiveled as multiple amber eyes—hollow knots in the bark that glowed with internal fire—scanned each of them. One gnarled limb lashed out suddenly toward Rachel, who screamed and barely ducked behind her boulder in time to avoid having her head sliced off.

  The creature pivoted without pause, another limb extending impossibly to sweep just over Marcus's head as he dropped flat against the ground.

  A third attack came within inches of impaling Tara's shoulder as she twisted away at the last second, the poisonous barbs snagging her jacket sleeve.

  Swish, slash, boom—all three attacks happened in such rapid succession that Ace barely had time to register the movement.

  This thing was fast.

  Rachel still crouched behind her boulder, her hands trembling as she attempted to channel one of her new Skills. The faint blue glow surrounding her flickered erratically. "I can't—I can't get Hunter’s Resonance to work, damn it!”

  The anthropomorphic tree drew back to the clearing's center after its flurry of probing attacks, its body rotating in a full circle as it studied them all. Its glowing eyes flickered from one vampire to the next as the bark plates that served as its hide shifted and realigned. The subsequent creaking reminded Ace of a chittering beast about to strike its prey.

  It looked right at Marcus.

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  Marcus backed away, his eyes wide with terror as he stretched out a shaking hand toward the monster. "Mind Leech,” the man muttered to himself, his voice barely audible over the chaos in the clearing. “Mind Leech. Mind Leech, damn it! Work!”

  “Focus on what you want to happen!” Tara yelled from behind her log. “Just shouting its name isn’t going to do anything!”

  As Ace was about to charge the creature to distract it from impaling Marcus, he caught a glimpse of Olivia out of the corner of his eye. She stood with an unnerving stillness at the edge of the clearing, her head tilted slightly as she observed the creature with clinical detachment.

  "Fascinating," she murmured, seemingly unaware of the danger as she studied the thing’s spinning form. "Note the symmetry of those barbed branches—reminiscent of Gothic architecture. And that movement pattern—perfect economy of motion."

  At her voice, the creature's attention snapped toward Olivia. It tensed to spring.

  "Olivia! Move!" Ace shouted.

  Just as the monster lunged, she stepped aside with the grace and patience of a ballet dancer. Its claws tore through the space where she had stood, and she simply tilted her head out of range as it swiped at her once more.

  "Remarkable response time," she noted with the casual tone of someone admiring a painting. "The attack pattern flows like water."

  “What the hell is wrong with you?!” Rachel shouted at the woman.

  That seemed to snap Olivia out of whatever daze she had been in, and she looked up at the monster with wide eyes—as though seeing it for the first time.

  Something was not right with this woman.

  Ace would have to figure it out later.

  The Carnage Fiend towered over them, its massive form blotting out the sun. Its jaw dislocated, stretching to an impossible width as it unleashed another scream. A shower of bloodstained splinters erupted from its mouth, along with a fine mist of blood that filled the air with a coppery tang.

  Blood from its previous victims sprayed across the clearing, and the aroma hit Ace like a physical blow. His fangs extended involuntarily, a fresh wave of hunger surging through him with such intensity that, for a heartbeat, he forgot the danger. The predator in him responded to the blood, even as the Marine in him calculated angles of attack.

  Nope.

  Nope, he needed to focus. This was the time to test his new abilities and to see how far he could push them. Even if it meant taking this thing down by himself, this wasn’t where he was going to die.

  The Carnage Fiend struck without warning. Its entire body twisted, branch-arms extending in a devastating whirlwind attack that swept the clearing. Everyone dove for cover as the massive limbs whistled through the air, shredding vegetation and sending debris flying. The claws cut through rock and bark alike, flaying everything it touched.

  Ace rolled behind a boulder, but not before one of the barbed branches grazed his shoulder. Despite the enhanced skin he'd developed after absorbing the Crystal Wolves' essence, the barb punched through, lodging deep in his flesh. White-hot pain exploded through his body as poison flooded his system.

  "Fuck!" he snarled, gripping his shoulder. He ripped the barb out of him, but the pain persisted. The poison burned like acid, creating a sensation like molten metal spreading through his veins. The wound leaked a mixture of his blood and greenish fluid.

  "Ace!" Tara's voice cut through his haze of pain. She was scrambling toward him, ducking under a sweeping branch. "Hold on!"

  Thin, needle-like splinters rained down across the clearing, forcing everyone to shield their faces. Rachel screamed as several pierced her arm. Marcus curled into a ball, covering his head as the deadly shower peppered the ground around him. Olivia’s eyes glazed over, and she twirled with the grace of a dancer as she dodged each falling nettle with seamless ease.

  Tara reached Ace and pressed her palm against his wound. "I’m going to use Trauma Conversion," she muttered, her brow furrowed in concentration.

  A soft shimmering glow emanated from her hand, but it pulsed irregularly. One moment, it burned as brightly as a fire, and the next, it dimmed to almost nothing.

  "Come on,” Tara said under her breath. “Work, damn it!"

  Light seeped into Ace’s skin, and he let out a sigh of relief as the pain slowly ebbed. The partial healing provided enough relief for Ace to think clearly again, though the poison hadn’t faded completely.

  "Thanks," he said with a ragged gasp.

  That had hurt like hell, and he had no intention of letting the creature hit him again.

  “Don’t mention it,” Tara said as the glow faded from her palms. She scanned the forest around them, her gaze frantically flitting from one of their teammates to another, as though she were trying to figure out who to heal next.

  “Stay out of sight,” Ace warned her. “You’re too valuable to go down. We need our healer.”

  Her eyes shifted toward him, and though she paused for a moment, a small smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” The sergeant winked, but his attention returned immediately to the hulking monstrosity towering in the center of the clearing.

  Across the clearing, Ace spotted Victor eyeing what looked like a structural vulnerability in the creature's armor—a gap where two main sections of bark connected near what passed for its hip. That momentary hesitation in Victor's posture, the slight shift in his weight—Ace recognized a pre-attack assessment when he saw one. Three years in Afghanistan had taught him to read a man's intent before the first bullet fired.

  Victor was about to do something monumentally stupid.

  "Stand down!" Ace shouted.

  The mercenary didn't listen.

  Ace calculated trajectories, the monster's movement patterns, Victor's probable attack vector. The math didn't work. That gap in the armor was too perfect, too obvious. During active duty, his squad had called those suicide doors—inviting openings rigged to blow when breached.

  Victor charged forward, his whip glowing with dark energy as he reached into whatever magic he had gained from his new Skills.

  Ace was already running to intercept, but too late. The barbed end of the whip slammed into the creature's exposed joint and dug deep into the bark. For one suspended moment, Victor had the smug satisfaction of a man who thought he'd won.

  Nope.

  The bark around Victor's whip bulged outward like an abscess about to pop. A high-pitched whistle—the sound of internal pressure seeking escape—warned of what was to come, and Victor was right in the firing line. The man’s triumphant expression melted into confusion and then regret as a pressurized spray of viscous green sap erupted from the wound, coating his arms and chest.

  The chemical stench hit Ace's enhanced senses like a physical blow—acrid, corrosive, and just plain wrong. The sap hissed on contact with Victor's skin, and steam rose from whatever violent chemical reaction was slowly eating away at Victor’s body.

  With gritted teeth, Victor barely held back a scream of agony. He dropped to his knees, his good hand cradling the severely burned arm as best he could.

  The tactical part of Ace's brain was already calculating rescue angles, cover positions, extraction routes. The newly awakened predator in him, however, noted with cold interest how the poison traced Victor's veins in glowing green lines, mapping his circulatory system in toxic bioluminescence.

  Bait taken. Trap sprung. Target weakened.

  This monster was smarter than it let on.

  The Carnage Fiend shifted its massive weight, attention locked on the fallen vampire. Easy prey. It raised a clawed limb for what would surely be a killing blow.

  Ace was already moving, ignoring the burning pain in his shoulder as he sprinted toward Victor. He reached into the shadows at his feet, desperately trying to manifest his Duskblade. The shadow weapon began to form in his hand—then flickered and dispersed like smoke before it could fully materialize.

  Of course.

  He growled in frustration and abandoned the attempt, resolving to practice more with it later when his life wasn’t on the line.

  In seconds, he had crossed the clearing and launched at Victor before the blow could sever the man’s head. Using his newfound strength, he grabbed Victor's collar and dragged him away from the descending claw just as it slammed into the ground where he'd been lying. Soil and rock exploded upward from the impact.

  "Tara!" Ace shouted, pulling Victor into the treeline. "We need some help over here!"

  “Coming!” she shouted from somewhere in the chaotic haze of rock dust and dirt that choked the sunbeams lighting their small clearing.

  The chittering monster tilted its head toward Ace, and those glowing eyes narrowed in anger.

  Oh, great.

  He had pissed it off.

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