The creature's head lifted slightly.
It had scented me now.
Good, I thought before I could stop myself.
The monster turned.
Its face was all wrong up close. Too narrow through the muzzle, with eyes set too high and teeth packed too tightly in a jaw that looked built for ripping, not chewing. It hissed and gathered itself.
I stepped off the trail before it could rush me.
"Feet first," Finn said. "Then blade."
The creature sprang.
This time I was ready.
I widened my stance instead of flinching backward, caught the angle of its jump, and slashed through where it had to descend instead of where it had launched. The blade opened a long red-black line across its ribs. It screamed and twisted in the air, landing badly but not dead.
"Do not admire your work," Finn snapped. "Move."
The monster came again, lower, faster, angling for my legs.
I pivoted left, almost slipped on wet leaves, corrected, and felt claws scrape the side of my boot instead of biting into my ankle. I brought the sword back up with both hands.
"Loosen your shoulders," Finn said. "You are strangling the grip."
I forced myself to breathe once, then stepped into the next strike instead of chopping downward. The sword cut through the side of the creature's neck and buried halfway into the ground beneath it. Hot blood spattered my wrist.
The monster convulsed, claws tearing at the leaves. I ripped the blade free and finished it with a shorter thrust under the jaw into the skull.
Then it was still.
I stood over it breathing hard, not because the fight had been long but because my body still didn't trust that it was over.
Better, some detached part of me thought.
Better than the road.
Cleaner. Quicker.
And right behind that came the now-familiar flicker of satisfaction, small, sharp, sickeningly pure.
The thing was dead.
I had done that.
The feeling curdled immediately into disgust.
I stepped back from the corpse too quickly, almost catching my heel on a root.
"You are improving," Finn said.
"That's one way to put it."
"It is the correct way."
I looked down at the dead thing. "I still hate that I liked it."
"Yes."
I tore my gaze away from the body. "That's not a useful answer."
"It is an honest one."
I wiped the blade against damp leaves and only succeeded in smearing the blood into darker streaks. My stomach twisted, not from the corpse but from myself.
Finn seemed to feel it.
"Hatred is simple," he said. "Discipline is not. One will drive your hand. The other must guide it."
I pushed the sword back into a ready grip. "You saying I don't have discipline?"
"I am saying that if you keep letting emotion choose the moment of the strike, something stronger than this will use that against you."
The foreboding feeling returned in the same instant, stronger than before.
No.
Not returned.
Deepened.
I went still.
The forest around me seemed to hold its breath.
Then, somewhere off to my right and much farther ahead, something heavy moved through the trees.
Not a single step. A sequence. Slow, crushing impacts that did not care what roots, brush, or fallen branches stood in the way. I heard wood crack. Not a twig. Something thicker. Then silence. Then another step.
My skin tightened over my whole body at once.
"What is that?"
Finn's answer came softer than before. "Something you can't fight."
I turned slowly toward the sound, every muscle in me wanting to either crouch lower or run outright. The trees there stood thicker, darker. No clear line of sight. Just trunks, shadow, and layers of green-black undergrowth.
Then the wind shifted.
The smell hit me first.
Blood.
Not fresh in the clean way of a wound, but thick and old and layered over rot and musk and something hot beneath it, like damp fur carried too close to a fire. The scent rolled through the trees hard enough that I could almost taste it.
A few more careful steps brought me to the edge of another clearing, smaller than the first.
Something lay in the middle of it.
At first I thought it was a fallen boar or some other large animal. Then I saw the claws. The hide. The split skull.
A monster corpse.
A big one too, larger than the beginner-class things I'd fought so far, with a body broad enough that I would have struggled against it badly if it had been alive. Its chest was torn open. One entire forelimb had been bitten off or ripped away. The exposed ribs were cracked outward like kindling.
I stopped breathing for a second.
"It hunts monsters stronger than you," Finn said.
The words were flat. Not dramatic. That somehow made them worse.
The carcass looked brutal enough on its own. Knowing that something had killed it and kept moving made the clearing feel suddenly much too open.
A low sound rolled through the trees ahead.
Not a roar.
A growl, maybe, but too deep for that word to feel right. It vibrated more than echoed.
And then I saw it.
Not all at once.
A shape moving between trunks farther ahead. Dark hide sliding through shadow. A shoulder high enough that it vanished behind brush meant to cover a man. A head lowering briefly near the ground before lifting again.
Then it stepped into a line of light.
I felt my whole body go cold.
It was too big.
Not as monstrous as the three-headed lion had been, not in presence, but big enough that comparison barely mattered. Its body was long and low like some cross between a bear and a hunting cat stretched far past natural proportions. Thick muscle rolled under a dark gray hide marked by old scars. Its front limbs were heavier than the rear, each ending in claws the length of my hand. Its head was blunt and wide, with a jaw that looked built for crushing bone rather than tearing flesh. A ridge of hornlike bone ran above one eye and down the side of its neck.
It paused over the corpse in the clearing.
Then lifted its head.
At this distance I could still see the eyes.
Pale, steady, and much too aware.
For the space of a heartbeat, a violent stupid part of me thought: Could I take it?
Not because I believed it, not fully. Because hatred had worn grooves in my mind and every monster-shaped thing I saw wanted to slot itself into them.
The creature took one step closer to the clearing.
The ground seemed to notice.
No, I thought.
Not even close.
Finn's voice cut through me like cold water. "Run."