"How on earth is it gaining on us?" Qīwù said, sparing a glance over her shoulder that was only going to tell her that, yes, it was still there.

"It is improbably fast for a specimen of that size." István said.

"It is big, it takes big steps," Viktor stated as though it was the most obvious thing ever, which also saved me the trouble of voicing my identical thought. Even if it was only stepping a few times a minute - and we could feel each step, even without looking - when your steps crossed hundreds of meters each time, it made up for the slow pace.

"Run, don't think," I said. Earlier, István had been mumbling about how an animal of that size really should incinerate itself - something about how the ratio of insides to the outsides meant it couldn't cool itself fast enough. He'd even slowed to a walk to ponder.

Then I remotely picked him up bodily and tossed him about a dozen meters forward. "Yeah, and I'm not supposed to be able to do that, either. It's a big, magical lizard that's going to eat all of us. Emphasis on the eat all of us." Which had gotten him back in the moment, at least. Not that he left his thinking pose the entire time he was traveling through the air, before landing as though nothing had happened. I wish I had half his dexterity.

And it was definitely going to eat us if it could. There was a distinct sound whenever that enormous tongue cut through the air. Now that it was closer, it was apparent just how fast that pink death really was. I happened to catch a glimpse of the tongue just as it snatched up another snack and was certain I wouldn't be able to dodge it if it was aimed at me. I'd just be an 'appetizer' to Viktor's 'main course'.

The whip-crack noise of the tongue came again, this time directly behind us.

I turned to look, and to my horror, made direct eye contact with it. It had tilted its head a little to get a better look. The mouth cracked open slightly.

WOOOOOOOOO! Came a deafening sound as a putrid wind nearly knocked us off our feet. So that's what made that sound. It was just this walking disaster's breathing.

"We need a way out. It's right there." Qīwù, our dedicated back-checker, told us. Not that she needed to, I swear I felt the wind from that last one. We probably had a minute, tops, before the next one was us.

I looked down into the gouge in the earth we were running along. The stream continued to grow as we went, eventually building into a fairly wide river at the bottom of a ravine, from the bottom of which we could hear the roar of water. It was almost an inversion of the geology from when we'd entered this adventure back at Mistral.

Dumb plan #29874 popped into my head. But with seconds left, a dumb plan was better than no plan.

Amorphous arms made of Nebula burst forth from me as my Streams ticked over at full tilt, driven by my borderline panic. I wrapped up my other party members in them, pulling them to me. Then I jumped.

"What are you doing?!" Qīwù screamed, the only one of them to even question what was happening.

"Saving you!" It was all I could get out before the wind sucked the rest of the words away. Here's hoping the water was going to be deep enough to arrest our fall. I built up a bolus of Nebula beneath us, a crash cushion of sorts that would hopefully negate some of the damage if we hit a rock.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

A crack rang out just above our heads: that building wearing lizard skin had missed the target. It'd been disturbingly close considering that most of its prey probably wasn't suicidal.

I could barely make out the bottom of this new crevasse, even with my aura sight running at max. There just wasn't enough Nebula in everything. The water was somewhat visible, and it was rushing up… fast. It occurred to me right before we hit that I should have made a parachute in addition to the arms.

Hopefully, I'd have enough bones left to kick myself for that oversight.

The water might as well have been concrete, the Nebula I'd gathered scattering in plumes as it forced some water out of the way. As the bottom of the pile of everyone, my legs took the brunt of the hit after the Nebula was gone. I swore I could hear the bones creak under the force.

The arms I had been using to hold our group together had come apart at the seams at the same time the cushion broke, with the backlash enough to disturb the flow of power throughout my body.

The disrupted Nebula rampaged back up through the Streams, wreaking more than a bit of havoc as it went. It left searing pain in its wake. The water, pushed away in a depression by all the goings-on, rushed back in.

Great, I thought. Managed to survive the fall but now I get to be drowned like a rat. What did it say about me that my last thoughts were a distraction about how 'rats are actually stellar swimmers and that I shouldn't malign them like that'?

The world went a bit quieter, and I looked up to see that bubbles - like you might see from soap - had formed around each of us. Steeve was sleeping on top of mine, looking a bit deflated.

Sometimes it felt like the more practical or useful the thing she did was, the more it took out of her.

I took stock of everyone: Qīwù seemed to have collapsed in her bubble, she was just lying in the bottom. István was examining the bubble. Viktor seemed to be trying to steer his around the river like some sort of little cart.

Steeve popped an eye open, saw what he was doing, and then all the bubbles changed shape slightly. She sighed, seeming more relaxed. After that, Viktor's efforts gave much better rewards.

My arms… didn't look good. I couldn't see my legs under the robes, but I'm betting none of me looked great right now. The backlash had left me marked from head to toe. You'd be forgiven for thinking that I'd been whipped aggressively from stem to stern.

I brought my hands together, wanting to meditate and perhaps get rid of some of the loose Nebula that was scattered all throughout my tissues, but my poor body wasn't having it. I rested back against the rear of my bubble, glad I didn't have to swim. It felt like all my muscles were cramping while on fire, and at the same time I was bizarrely cold and shivering from it.

Not a feeling I'd wish upon anyone. Aside from maybe the evil critter that had put me in this position in the first place.

The sky was a mere crack of blue in the distance, and that light was fading fast as the rapid pace of the water in the river drew us forward, as relentless as it was loud. It was also getting louder, which wasn't cool, as that meant something was funneling the sound towards us. Soon, even through the bubbles, it was almost deafening. The thick mist from earlier made a return, filling the surrounding air.

Only it wasn't the same; it had none of the Nebula the earlier mist did, which made sense because that was most likely some sort of interaction with the metaphysical nature of the lizard giant and the geography and weather of the canyon. That monstrosity's presence also made it more obvious why the only wildlife we'd seen were from the same branch of the family tree, even if they were all jumbled up.

The sheer weight of all the Nebula it undoubtedly contained, all with as singular Will, was probably enough to distort nature around it.

But this wasn't that. And I couldn't figure out what it might be, either: I simply did not have enough experience with water in these quantities. I'd only seen a few rivers, ever, and they all probably would have fit into this one we were now floating in.

The current briefly sped up, before the water disappeared, and with a stomach-churning lurch, we were falling again. At least that explained all the weird things.

I laid back in my bubble, unable to do anything about our impending doom and laughing at the absurdity of it.

We'd gone from a normal fall to a water fall.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.