What?

  As Adon’s body threw itself headlong after the bear, his mind tried to grapple with what he’d just heard. It wasn’t in Claustrian. It was a half-remembered language from one of his previous lives. Which one, he couldn’t even put his finger on definitely.

  But that didn’t matter.

  I heard what I heard. Right?

  In a strange, gruff yet quiet inner voice, grown rusty from disuse, a mind that could only have been the bear’s had thought: K-kill me. Please kill me.

  The psychic shout had otherwise achieved the effect intended. The bear’s leg wobbled as the loud interior noise disturbed its equilibrium for a moment. When the raised paw came down, it missed Samson by a wide margin. The little spider even got a few steps ahead of the bear while the beast shook itself and tried to purge the effects of Adon’s shout.

  But the butterfly was reeling inside.

  It was fortunate that his mind was still processing at superspeed.

  Can I really kill this thing? he questioned. I mean, even if we can win, should we kill him? It was not lost on Adon that he had only really begun thinking about the morality of murdering the mystic beast once it asked for death. Maybe I’m being silly thinking about it this way. Still, the bear really is intelligent. He just can’t control himself, I guess? This damn rabies… Man! I’ve done some terrible things from a certain point of view. Killed plenty of semi-helpless animals to make myself stronger. But never something that could think and speak like a person. I guess it would be a mercy kill anyway…

  He again considered whether he might be able to somehow heal the bear’s rabies. It seemed unlikely. As far as he recalled, rabies was only treatable with a vaccine. But he had been informed that in this world, healing magic worked by enhancing the body’s natural healing process. That was why he couldn’t help Rosslyn to regenerate her lost eye.

  And he similarly doubted that he could cause the bear’s body to produce an effective immune response to rabies.

  It might be worth a try if I get the chance, he thought. But if he’s about to kill Samson, well, this thing did ask for me to kill him!

  Still flying rapidly toward the bear, Adon gave the environment a quick visual sweep, looking for Goldie and trying to peg down the geography in his mind. He knew where Samson was, but he wouldn’t want to put Goldie in harm’s way while he was trying to save her son.

  Following a quick scan, he couldn’t see where she had gone off to, which he thought was all to the good. The fight had become quite dangerous. If she had managed to escape, at least one of them would survive this.

  Samson was another matter.

  The little spider had, as Adon analyzed the situation and continued to accelerate toward it, clambered up over and behind a fallen log. The bear simply pulled Mana from its core, quickly enhanced a claw with it, and chopped through the log. The wood split apart to reveal Samson standing in the gap, charging another Mana ball.

  So much destructive power that he can use so casually, Adon thought.

  As the chunks of log separated, Samson visibly quaked with fear at his proximity to the massive bear. With the hulking creature looming over him, Samson lost his focus on the Mana ball for a moment. The Mana that Samson had gathered near the front of his head dissipated.

  The bear raised a foot to stomp on the spider.

  Adon was almost close enough to intervene directly, just a few feet away.

  With a thought, he pushed a small portion of Mana into a dozen spines, then triggered them to fire in the bear’s general direction. The butterfly didn’t even take time to aim.

  As the bear’s foot came down, Adon saw the spines were moving too slowly. He unleashed another psychic shout.

  Pick on someone your own size!

  More quickly than Adon would have thought possible, the bear snapped its head sideways to face the butterfly, then lunged at him, jaws opening wide to suck Adon in.

  Shit!

  The bear must have anticipated another such attack.

  And Adon’s momentum was too strong for him to make a big change in direction now.

  As the big, razor-sharp teeth closed in around him, the butterfly did the only thing he could think of that might save his life in that moment.

  Adon’s body warped and shifted as Transformation took hold. His wings bent and curled around him and grew much thicker, as Adon morphed into the strongest shape he could think of in that moment: a clamshell, made thicker and tougher than any real world clam’s exterior by Adon’s desperation and will to live. Once the shell had taken shape, Adon pushed more Mana into it to harden it further.

  Then he was inside the bear’s jaws. The beast instantly snapped its mouth shut on its prey.

  Please hold up, please hold up, please hold up, he silently prayed as the bear’s teeth came crashing down around him.

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  The sound of impact was reminiscent of a car crash, but fortunately it was one of those crashes in which one’s car does not take the brunt of the damage. It was extremely noisy inside of Adon’s shell, but he didn’t feel any pain on contact with the bear’s fangs. He wondered if it was possible that the bear had taken damage to his teeth. Adon didn’t think anything had broken on his own side.

  I’m alive, he thought. Somehow. Still alive.

  Adon! Goldie and Samson’s voices screamed in unison from the outside. Goldie sounded like she was positioned on the opposite side of the bear relative to Samson, probably in a blind spot for the beast, but much closer than Adon had expected after he failed to spot her earlier.

  I’m all right, guys, he sent quickly. Don’t do anything crazy, just try to get away!

  Like hell! Samson replied.

  You are not fighting alone, Adon, Goldie agreed. We are your friends. We can do this, but only together. Adon took note that Goldie’s voice sounded a bit stronger. She had seemed worn down after her massive venom attack on the bear earlier, but she must have recovered somewhat over the last minute or so.

  Adon started formulating a reply, but the bear smashed its teeth down into him again and broke his train of thought.

  All right, I need to think about this before I tell them to get lost, he decided. I’m not exactly in a dominant position here. It would be pretty dumb if I sent them away and died here. Don’t know how I would explain that to the Goddess. I’m about eighty percent sure she actually had a plan when she dropped me into this world now…

  The bear crashed its teeth into Adon a couple of times more over the next thirty seconds or so, as fruitlessly as the first couple of times, but the butterfly managed to keep his train of thought going normally this time.

  He also sensed something more ominous going on. Mana was coalescing within the beast’s core. Adon had a closer view than he’d ever experienced before, and he thought the bear must be preparing some massive attack.

  He’s either going to enhance his fangs to crush me, or he’s going to try some crazy ability against Goldie and Samson, he thought.

  Adon waited inside the jaw of the behemoth for a moment, fortifying his Transformation and further monitoring the movement of Mana with his enhanced perception.

  The power was moving toward the bear’s throat, he observed.

  Probably just another one of those sonic roar attacks, Adon thought. He didn’t expect that it could disrupt his Transformation with his brain operating at such a high level, though the possibility was not so remote that he could discount it entirely.

  But he was fairly confident the actual target was the spiders. The bear lumbered after them in what felt like slow motion from Adon’s perspective, whipping back and forth between Goldie and Samson. If it could use that Mana-infused roar to disrupt the spiders’ movements for a key few seconds, the external battle would quickly be wrapped up, and the bear would only have to worry about the enemy inside its mouth.

  Adon’s mind rapidly ran through options to deal with the bear, ideally before it could launch its next Mana-fueled attack.

  He considered trying to heal the bear’s rabies and then dismissed the idea almost as soon as it had occurred to him. If healing magic failed to cure the bear’s rabies, and the bear’s small number of surface injuries healed instead, the arthropods would lose one of the only advantages they had attained in their struggle thus far. Goldie’s powerful chemical attack aimed at the bear’s fur—leaving the creature bald, and its skin irritated, in large patches, along with melting one of its eyes—had meaningfully weakened the beast in Adon’s view.

  What about trying to charge a Mana ball and fire it straight down his throat? Adon thought. Then he pictured the bear simply spitting him out as he charged the attack. So, that’s probably out…

  Similarly, now that he was inside the enemy’s mouth, he thought it might be difficult to use fire magic. The technique for it that he had learned from Rosslyn essentially involved igniting Mana like one would normally do with kindling for a fire. It was hard to imagine that working out in the moist, tight environment that surrounded Adon currently.

  Then Adon remembered something he had done with Red, back when Goldie’s mate was still alive and working with Adon to try to learn language. And he knew what he wanted to do.

  As the bear crashed its teeth into Adon once more, he began messaging again.

  All right, he sent finally to Goldie and Samson. We can do this together. I have a plan. I need you both to attack on my signal. I’m going to make an opening for you…

  A moment later, the spiders confirmed they were ready. And Adon launched what he hoped would be his final attack of the battle.

  As the bear’s jaws crashed down around Adon once more, he reached up, through the roof of its mouth, and touched its brain with his power.

  Once, Adon had temporarily enhanced Red’s brain, so that the spider could try to develop a vocabulary.

  Now, Adon began attempting to shut parts of the bear’s brain down.

  He had little knowledge of the structure of the brain, least of all the structure of random animals’ brains, but he messed with everything that he came into contact with. He drained energy flowing between areas and redirected it to other parts of the brain.

  The bear instantly lost control of its Mana and stopped opening and closing its jaws on Adon. It began staggering around, swiping at what Adon guessed would be the empty air with its claws. He was not done yet, though.

  There was a part of the brain that seemed abnormally swollen for the size of the bear’s skull, and Adon guessed that this area was either particularly inflamed from rabies, or it was essential to the bear’s higher functions, which would naturally be more developed than those of an ordinary bear; he had not forgotten that this was a mystic beast.

  Adon focused on that one, fairly large area, and he shut off all traffic to and from that place.

  The bear, which had stood up on its hind legs and was moving drunkenly, suddenly stopped. Every part of it tightened and then loosened. Adon was fairly certain its bowels had released. Then its massive bulk toppled to the ground and lay still.

  Did I kill the bear? he wondered for a tiny fraction of a second.

  But Adon’s magical senses told him before he thought about it for long that he had not. The bear was still breathing, its Mana remained thick and strong in the core of its body, and its brain was still alive. It was as if he had frozen the bear in time.

  Then Adon heard the spiders outside the bear’s jaw, executing their part in the plan.

  He knew that Goldie and Samson would be injecting as much as they could of their most lethal venoms into the exposed flesh of the bear’s neck, which Goldie’s initial attack had laid bare.

  Sure enough, thirty seconds passed, and the bear’s body began to twist and writhe.

  All the while, Adon maintained his hold over the vital area of the beast’s brain, even as the butterfly began to develop a bad headache from doing so for too long.

  Just a little bit more, he thought. Just a little bit more, and this will all be over…