Tyler had learned a lot of things from his last fight with a duneclaw.

  His projectiles were very effective against them, but his throwing arm hadn’t been great. His joints still bothered him incessantly, and though he was heavier and theoretically stronger, getting up close had almost spelled out his doom when the thing had surprised him with a lunge. And his improvised weapon — which he’d hoped would provide him with enough reach to lessen the monster’s greatest advantage — had snapped the instant it had come in contact with the thing’s tail claw.

  In short, he had been woefully inadequate.

  He’d almost died against a single juvenile, so he shuddered to think of what would happen if he’d instead encountered a fully-grown specimen — or God forbid one of their swarms.

  His footsteps quietly navigated the pieces of mangled, half-eaten fruit littered atop the underbrush as he stalked forwards, spear in one hand and throwing rock in the other. More rocks were in his pockets, and his duneclaw knife was wedged into his dirt-stained waistband.

  He’d specifically chosen this space in the foliage so the cave was on one side of him, and the beach on the other. He had two directions of escape, and the area was littered with rocks that he could use as weapons. No matter what happened, he could always regroup and find a way out.

  But his heart hammered despite his preparations, images of the juvenile duneclaw lunging at his throat arising from the back of his mind.

  This was the first taste of freedom he’d had since the day he’d come here, but he couldn’t even enjoy the fresh air.

  The cosmic ocean seemed to envelop even more of the horizon in the nighttime, and rippling cracks of shifting color throbbed in the sky like scars upon the world itself. He was forced to squint as his eyes slowly adjusted to the light of the full moon, and as a sea of chitters slowly began to consume the island, he found himself flinching at every swaying branch and falling leaf. Their claw-marks were on everything, from the tree trunks to the leaves to even the fucking stones littered around the beach. He gazed out into the multidimensional liquid, noticing the hazy forms of what looked like skyscrapers sunken underneath the black-and-violet substance. The quiet crash of the waves seemed to grow into a roar as his senses twisted themselves into high alert.

  As much as he’d trained, there were some limitations that he simply couldn't overcome. For one, learning any organized fighting style was a product of years, not weeks. Even with hours of practice every day and careful Analysis of the Reamans’ teachings, he couldn’t be sure if he was doing any of it right.

  And this fighting style was built for aliens. Aliens with a similar body shape to him for sure, but there were still fundamental differences in their biology that made it hard for him to fully adapt. His limbs just couldn't handle the same twisting forces that the Reaman could, and if he hadn’t had the Aspect of Resilience enforcing his body, he was sure there would have been more than a couple of times when he pounded his elbow or shin into the wall and broken a bone.

  His range of motion wasn't quite as large, his skin weaker, and his feet lacked the small claws that the Reamans had which allowed them to better navigate rocky terrain.

  And perhaps most unfortunately, the Reamans had large twisting horns which sprouted from the side of their head and framed their face like the front of a helmet. These horns were crucial not just for headbutting attacks and protecting their head from blunt strikes, but also were a large part of the Reaman response to a duneclaw lunging for their neck.

  The Art of the Sandstorm taught that when faced with a strike to the head, one could simply tuck their chin in and turn to take it on the horns. With ones as large as Savadiere’s, Tyler could see how that could turn a potentially deadly attack into a harmless scratch.

  He had never been more conscious of his own lack of facial protection.

  Nor of the Curse binding his soul to his body. He’d pored over each and every magical tool that Savadiere had left in the cave during the weeks that he was trapped, and eventually he’d begun to understand enough that his Analysis could give him a solid description of the things. They seemed mostly dedicated to alchemy and other practices that Tyler didn’t understand, but despite their intended purposes some of them would have been so useful in combat. The burner appliance might have been a little unwieldy, but he’d lug around the twenty-pound metal bowl all day if it meant being able to shoot out a rush of fire hot enough to melt some metals.

  He’d tried everything he could, from cracking one open to see if there was any internal circuitry to rubbing his blood on them the same way Savadiere had done to bond Tyler with the Core of Protection. Nothing had worked.

  So now he was out in the wild, with nothing but the stupid improvised weapons he’d fabricated from rocks and sticks.

  He counted one minute, two minutes, three minutes as he waited for a duneclaw to wander by, and it was only in this moment that he truly realized how many of them there were. Their chitters enveloped the entire island in a constant eerie buzz, so instinctually repulsive that it made his hairs stand on end. He hadn’t done his exercises this morning in an effort to preserve his energy, but now he wished that he’d rested another day before doing this. His body was still so stiff, not at all ready for a real fight.

  Tyler shivered. He felt so small outside of his little cave, like prey caught out in the open by a pack of hunters.

  A growing chitter and the sound of scuttling feet alerted him as to the location of his first pursuer. His Analysis predicted that it would scuttle towards him for a couple of steps and then stop, giving a low hiss as it tried to sense the exact location of the magic on his person. It hadn't spotted him yet, perched as he was on top of a low branch of a half-rotted fruit tree, but his eyes honed onto it as it came out into the small clearing.

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  The duneclaw's sight would be impaired in the night of earth, his Analysis had told him. On Korshaan, even the night looked more like a perpetual twilight under its two suns. As such, the creatures would be relying almost solely on their magic sense until an object got within striking distance. He would use that to his advantage.

  He felt the familiar ‘click’ of his Analysis activating as the world slowed.

  Mature Duneclaw

  This duneclaw is fully-grown and better able to resist the humidity of its surroundings compared to its juvenile counterparts. All three of its claws are strong enough to crush bone, but without greater illumination, it is relying mostly on its magic sense to hunt.

  His eyes skimmed over the mental text, but he was only half paying attention to the actual result of his Analysis. Some deep part of him screamed to run away and hide back in his cave, but he forcefully shoved the fear away. In this brief moment of slowed time, he thought through the distance and angle of his position compared to the duneclaw, the Flowing Sands blooming within him as he prepared his arm to throw.

  And so, a second after the world returned to normal, a fist-sized rock slammed into the duneclaw's body. It gave a furious shriek as it turned to face him — it was tough enough to immediately move to retaliate, but the density and force of the rock had still punched a crack into its armor.

  Before it could do anything, he was on it, jabbing at its head and retracting his spear backwards before it could lash out with its tail. The blow only glanced off, but Tyler was ready for that possibility. He danced back, jamming the spear into the ground and hefting another rock.

  The duneclaw would be able to rush him in a blink, he knew, so he threw a kick out as the creature crashed through his weapon, pivoting and using all of his momentum to knock the thing off-course. A month ago he would have never dared, fearing that his bones wouldn’t be able to hold up to the thing’s hardened armor.

  But now, he had a month of Reaman bone-strengthening exercises behind him, and the Aspect of Resilience was very aptly named.

  The creature’s spiked exoskeleton scraped against his shin, but then the strength of the Flowing Sands sent it flying to the side, crashing against a nearby tree trunk before it came to a stop on its back. Some part of Tyler’s mind noted that the pain of the strike didn’t even top the constant inflammation running through the limb.

  The thing screeched with such intensity that he had to fight not to cover his ears, but he gritted his teeth and stalked towards it as it struggled to right itself.

  While the duneclaw had been scrambling to recover, he’d gone and retrieved a piece of stone.

  As a fighting style that evolved to combat chitinous creatures, the Art of the Sandstorm had almost no teachings revolving around spears. Most of its practitioners used hammers, which had also been Tyler’s choice of weapon when he’d first thought about the best way to effectively fight the duneclaws. But he’d found it was incredibly hard to fashion a hammer that wouldn’t fall apart after a single strike.

  So, he’d defaulted to the next best thing — rocks.

  But this rock wasn’t one of his smooth little throwing stones — it was almost as big as his head, and full of jagged edges and pitted holes. This was the type of rock he used to break apart coconut hulls.

  As the duneclaw leveled its tail to strike, he shoved the stone downwards with the fluid strength of someone who had spent weeks learning the motion.

  The volcanic rock barely slowed as it crashed through the thing’s striking tail pincer, collapsing the entire back half of the monster's sandy armor with a horrifying crunch. The duneclaw spasmed just as the juvenile had when he’d stomped on it, and from his waist he freed the weapon that he’d fashioned from that first one’s corpse.

  Its legs collapsed from underneath it, and it flailed its front claws in a series of weak snaps, desperately trying to strike at him. But just as the juvenile’s front pincers had been too weak to break through more than muscle, now these feeble attacks stopped cold against his hardened bones.

  Tyler gritted his teeth, twisting his leg free of the pincer and raising his arms above his head.

  It gave one last spasm and ear-wrenching cry as he drove his knife through its brain.

  And then at last, blissful quiet.

  For a second he just stood there, kneeling over the corpse. An enormous breath escaped his lungs, and he slumped, his muscles burning with exertion. The rabid energy of the Flowing Sands died down in his core, and the lapping of the waves seemed to soften once more.

  And then, he couldn’t help but whoop.

  “Holy hell,” he gasped. “I actually did it. I did it!”

  In less than a minute, he’d killed a fully-grown duneclaw.

  He stabbed the thing again to confirm its death, feeling the power in his limbs that had so easily let him take the life of an alien monster. This was what all his training had led up to. This was what made all those days of fear and pain worth it.

  Tyler wanted to cry.

  He knew he wasn’t out of danger yet. There would be others coming for him soon, especially now that their numbers had grown. He’d never encountered a full-fledged swarm, and it was in his best interest to flee this instant because he was sure he wouldn’t be able to survive such a thing as he was. But even as the thought passed through his mind, that sense of fear that had been gripping him failed to raise its ugly head.

  For the first time, he really felt the cool night air rushing into his lungs, the soft grass beneath his feet, the beautiful hue of the moonlight and a sea of stars that shone bright despite the craggy veins tearing through the sky. He felt the soft touch of the wind, and the sheer aliveness of a world that he had been deprived of for what felt like an eternity. For just a moment, he was free.

  And even as the chorus of unsettling chitters began to converge towards him, even as he thrummed the Flowing Sands back into action and started frantically dragging the corpse back to the cave, he couldn’t seem to get rid of the enormous grin plastering his face.

  Tyler glanced down at the Core of Protection. It hung in the center of a plain steel pendant he’d scavenged, the string tied short to keep it tight against his collarbone. Through his soul, he could feel the artifact brimming with energy.

  The Core of Protection is fully charged.

  He laughed, and it was the same kind of laugh that had come the first time he had killed a duneclaw. A deep, triumphant howl that asserted to the world that he was the master of his own fate.

  I was never at risk of taking a deadly strike.