No!

  As Adon shouted in his own mind, he recalled one of his magical abilities that did not require his body to coordinate itself. His limbs were still stunned from the bear’s sonic attack, but mental magic only required one functioning organ, and his mind was not stunned.

  His vision went dark for a fraction of a second as he connected with the place—and the statuesque figure—in the darkness that gave him access to the power of mental magic. As his vision returned to normal, everything slowed down drastically in his perception. The swift-charging bear seemed to switch into moving in slow motion. The falling spiders decelerated so much in Adon’s view that it was as if tiny parachutes had deployed for them.

  Adon didn’t waste a second, though.

  He locked onto the bear’s mind with Telepathy, and he unleashed the loudest psychic shout that he could directly into the bear’s brain.

  Go away!!!! Adon screamed.

  The bear reacted immediately.

  It let loose a piercing, non-Mana-infused roar that told Adon he’d had at least some of the desired effect.

  Then the beast slowed and swiped its paws in front of its face and around the sides of its head as if it suspected that the source of the noise was a bird flying in that space.

  And Adon heard a strange sound inside his mind.

  K-k…

  Huh? Is that the bear?

  Even as he pondered what the unfamiliar sound—voice?—was, Adon sprang into motion to save his friends, who were still dropping in the bear’s general direction.

  Mental magic seemed to accelerate every mental process for the butterfly, including the restoration of his control over his body.

  His long, whip-like limbs had gone limp and partially shrunk back toward his body, but now they extended and whipped toward the spiders again. His wings tentatively opened and closed, just briefly checking that all systems were functional, but he didn’t try any more determined flapping just yet. He was afraid that he would shoot up slightly, given his present orientation, if he attempted flight. That would take him further from the spiders just when he was trying to catch up to them.

  Instead, he reached out further, extended his elongated legs a little more forcefully, and tried to get back into physical contact.

  Inch by inch, the limbs reached closer.

  The spiders twitched slightly as if trying to move themselves closer to Adon’s limbs, too, but they clearly didn’t have control of their bodies back yet.

  Come on, just a little more…

  Another roar swept through the air, and the spiders’ bodies shuddered as the sound reached them. Adon had a moment to recognize that there must be Mana infused in the sound waves again, before successive waves reached him. He tried to brace himself, stiffen his body and strengthen it with Mana as best he could, to resist the attack.

  It didn’t seem to do much good.

  The sound vibrations swept through him like a current of electricity, and everything went limp. He at least managed to keep his limbs extended—it seemed that maintaining the Transformation was more mental than physical in some sense, and his mind was still functioning at full capacity with mental magic going.

  With his mind working at more than a hundred percent of its usual capacity, Adon also analyzed the situation at super speed.

  The bear held still when it used that roar, he observed. The only reason it would do that instead of continuing the chase is because it has to. So there’s a limit, at least. It has to stop running when it uses that attack. Can it disrupt my use of Mana? Doesn’t seem like it. What if I try…?

  Adon started pulling Mana from his core toward his head.

  All right, that’s working. What else can I try…?

  He started playing out different scenarios in his head, though he had clear problems in being unable to gauge the bear’s capabilities definitively.

  I’ve never fought another mystic beast before, Adon thought.

  The bear started advancing again—the world was still moving in slow motion, but Adon marked that change as something he would have to deal with in short order.

  Something at the corner of his vision also moved, and Adon felt a slight stirring of surprise.

  Samson, what are you doing, bro? Adon sent.

  The words came out in a super-quickened rush.

  Wait, what? Samson replied, clearly still mostly focused on his self-appointed task. He was charging Mana for something.

  Adon repeated himself at a deliberately much slower pace, trying not to lose his patience and keeping his eyes on the bear the whole time.

  Oh, I’m charging a Mana ball, Samson sent.

  I see, Adon sent. I’m doing the same, actually. You and Goldie should really run away as soon as you can, though. Let me distract the bear. If one of us has to be hitting it with attacks and drawing its attention, it should be the one who can fly away. I would rather grab you guys and fly away with you, but that might not be an option.

  I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t want to just leave you to fight on your own, Samson replied. I can do something. Even if it’s not much, I can at least use this ability, just like you. Since you were going to do the same, I assume it will at least have some value in the fight. I’ll just fire it once, when I hit the ground. Then we can run for it. I don’t have all that much Mana to use anyway.

  Adon thought about trying to talk Samson out of joining in the attack—any moment that the spider spent aiming and firing attacks at the bear was one that was not devoted to retreating—but he decided not to. Samson had his pride, after all, and an extra Mana ball wouldn’t hurt anything. Samson could probably charge it completely in just the time it would take to fall and hit the ground.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  All right, Adon sent.

  At another spot in his vision, he saw another surge of Mana. Goldie was starting to charge a Mana ball as well.

  Of course she is, he thought silently.

  It wasn’t as if he and Samson were chatting on a closed channel. The three of them were almost always in the same telepathic conversation by default. And Goldie was nothing if not helpful.

  Even if she already blew through a lot of her resources with that crazy first attack…

  It was visible, as she charged her Mana, that there was much less of it than there had been before. Somehow she had enhanced her venom and silk combination further with her power, or she had supercharged her body to produce more of those substances at a higher speed, or something. Now she barely had enough energy to produce a Mana ball.

  As the arthropods all charged their attacks, the bear was continuing forward on the ground.

  Adon estimated the timing that the spiders would make contact with the ground and the speed with which the bear would reach them, and he concluded that the bear would get there while the arachnids were still in midair. It was just too fast.

  Have to charge more quickly, he thought.

  And Adon found that he was able to push the energy from the core of his body to the front of his head more quickly, just by focusing harder on it.

  The Mana ball charged multiple times more quickly than it ever had before under the amplifying effects of mental magic.

  Then, to Adon’s surprise, the variables on the ground changed. The bear, which Adon had begun to think of as simply a mindless beast, tilted its head up. It clearly turned its gaze on Adon, and the butterfly thought the bear narrowed its eyes slightly.

  The bear is a mystic beast, Adon reminded himself. Even if he’s gone wild now, because of the rabies, he was probably intelligent once. Wait, what am I saying? He’s fighting us because he’s sick. So maybe… maybe I could heal him!

  Adon’s thought processes were so fast that they drastically outpaced the motion on the ground.

  But even as quickly as his enhanced mind worked, the bear moved too quickly for him to take this latest train of thought any further.

  Seeing Adon charging his Mana ball at a faster rate than the spiders, the bear made a seemingly rational decision. It planted its feet firmly on the ground, bent at the knees, and hurled itself through the air toward the butterfly.

  Shitshitshitshitshit…

  The brawny limbs of the bear launched it at a speed that the downward-spiraling butterfly could hardly hope to match.

  His supercharged mind grappled with countermeasures in the fraction of a second left to him before contact.

  The most expedient method struck him in an instant.

  Of course. Great idea. Have to time it right.

  Adon’s Mana ball charged at an even higher speed for the remaining time that separated the bear and the butterfly. It was already powerful enough to fire, but Adon had no confidence that it could harm the brutal beast before him. Even with additional charging, it was unlikely to do much.

  But a bigger attack has more weight. Mana that’s manifested physically like this definitely has mass. I’ve seen it. And every action has an equal opposite reaction. Thank the Goddess I’m so tiny…

  The bear drew to within striking distance of Adon, it swung a meaty paw at him, and Adon fired his Mana ball at the paw with all the force he could muster.

  The attack hurled Adon in the opposite direction, changing his momentum and sending him spinning through the air, taking him out of the bear’s reach.

  Unlike the bear, Adon had wings with which to change his direction in midair, and he was an expert at this now. He flapped once to stop the spinning, and a second time to stop the distance between himself and the bear from increasing. As much as he’d have liked to run away from the bear entirely, he was fairly certain that if he managed to get far enough out of reach, the beast would turn right back to attacking Goldie.

  The nimble change of direction allowed him to get a steady view of how the bear reacted to the Mana ball fired in its direction.

  Its eyes seemed to widen slightly in surprise when Adon managed to use the attack to get away. As Adon steadied, the bear pulled its paw back—not quite fast enough to evade any contact with the Mana ball, but sufficiently quickly to that the energy attack simply grazed it.

  From Adon’s point of view, it looked like he’d just shaved a little chunk of hair off the side of the bear’s paw.

  Damn it! What do I have to do to hurt this thing? Fire magic next, I guess, if we can’t run away.

  As the bear dropped through the air, Adon saw a mixture of rage in its bared teeth and surprising pain in its eyes. A trickle of blood dripped from the place where Adon had thought he only shaved some fur away.

  Maybe we can do this, Adon thought. Maybe we can actually kill this damned bear…

  He didn’t realize that he was transmitting that thought until a moment later, when Samson replied.

  That’s the spirit, bro! Samson sent in an energetic, fired up tone.

  The two spiders struck the ground a moment before the bear, and Samson made good use of that moment. He finished charging, aimed his Mana ball at the bear, and made as if to fire at the still midair bear. Lacking wings, it would have no means of dodging at such close range while it was off the ground.

  That would have been good, except that Adon observed both his brother’s actions and those of the bear. He saw that Samson’s attack looked much weaker than his own, and perhaps more importantly, he saw the bear first shift its focus to the spiders and then begin charging Mana itself.

  Shit, he thought.

  Then, Samson, don’t do it! Just run!

  But the words came out a second too late.

  The little spider had fired the Mana ball, and from the bear’s posture, Samson appeared to have drawn the behemoth’s full attention.

  As the Mana ball flew through the air, the bear’s Mana quickly flowed down its torso and into one of the posterior legs. Then Adon saw the fur in front of the leg stiffen and turn spiky.

  The Mana ball got within a certain range of the bear’s body, and the bear struck out with his Mana-enhanced limb and kicked at it. The ball struck the shin and glanced off harmlessly, spiraling off in a random direction like a soccer ball kicked by a defender sprinting at full speed to block a goal shot.

  The bear let loose another roar, but the mood of it felt triumphant, even as Adon thought he saw the pain behind its eyes continue.

  The butterfly had no room to worry about the bear’s pain, however, as it struck the ground, looked down, and began stomping after the spiders.

  Samson and Goldie had listened to Adon and begun running for their lives, and they even had the sense to run in different directions to force the bear to choose one to chase.

  Even so, the spiders were far from capable of outpacing a Mana-equipped bear, of all things.

  The titanic creature shook the ground as it scrambled after the weak link in the group, Samson.

  No!

  Adon poured Mana into his wings at superspeed and then flapped with such intensity that the delicate membranes practically clapped. He felt the air shake behind him. He knew he was moving with greater speed than the bear, for at least a moment.

  It wouldn’t be fast enough.

  The shadow of the bear’s paw hovered over Samson, and Adon resorted to his psychic shout again.

  Stop it! Back off!!!

  He heard the strange, quiet response again.

  K-k…