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.
