Bʀᴏᴋᴇɴ Hᴀʀᴍᴏɴʏ || Tʜᴇ Cʜᴏsᴇɴ Eɪɢʜᴛ: Fᴀʟʟ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bᴇᴀsᴛs Bᴏᴏᴋ Oɴᴇ

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴇʟᴇᴠᴇɴ || ᴘᴀʀᴀsɪᴛᴇs

Sabien

I woke to screams. I was up in a moment, scrabbling for the dagger I kept nearby.

Navia bolted to her feet, eyes wide but face still soft with sleep.

"Look out!" Lucia shrieked, clearly the source of the scream that had woken me.

I looked around, still slightly disoriented and very confused.

"Sabien!" Navia yanked my arm and then stomped something into the ground.

I connected the dots then, and right in time to shake another of the worms off my foot. "What is going on?"

"The worms must've come from the creature we chased out yesterday," Skye's voice startled me.

I glanced around.

They were clinging to the wall on my left, a red spider the size of a rat perched on their shoulder.

"What?" Navia kicked another three away from us, rushing to call Cerco back to passive state. "Like, it left a cocoon or something?"

"I guess." Skye shrugged. "But I didn't see one last night."

"Did you really look?" Tazi snarled as he sliced a worm in half, then in quarters, and finally just smashed it with his axe. The blow effectively crushed it.

Skye raised a brow. "Yes." They answered evenly, unfazed by the stingray summoner's anger. "I checked every nook and cranny when you all fell asleep."

"It's true, I heard them." Zay confirmed.

There were more flashes of light as the others followed Navia's lead and called their animals to passive.

"Well obviously you didn't look hard enough." Tazi spat.

Skye rolled their eyes. "Or the creature is back. Did you consider that?"

Tazi opened his mouth, paused, then closed it with a mutinous expression.

"Tellun, Zay really jinxed it when she said she wanted somewhere quiet and that didn't try to kill us." Navia huffed as she dragged me back another step.

I steadied myself on her arm and wrinkled my nose. "Yeah."

"We have to get out of here," Sasha spoke up, taking a brief breather. Zay covered his back as he turned toward us. "We're easy targets in here."

"Sasha's right," Niko agreed, wiping an arm across his glistening forehead. His dark curls were still half-flattened by sleep. "This is a kill box. How long do you think it'll take before we aren't able to hold them back anymore? We'll exhaust ourselves, then we'll be overrun."

Zay nodded, switching with Sasha for a quick break. "I figure that if the creature really is back, it'll have the front covered."

"So we need to get out the back." Tyler looked to Skye. "Assuming there is a back exit?"

The spider summoner looked around, frowning. "There is, but it's a bit blocked right now."