As we walked, the runic paper schedule in Adelle's hand shimmered, the ink rearranging itself to state [Advanced Dungeoneering – Dungeoneering Auditorium, Room 101].

"Heh," Adelle commented, turning the paper over. I saw that a Depictomancy-animated map appeared on the back of the schedule with a flashing direction arrow made from moving ink.

"Hrm. Looks like the admin's doing something new this year," Candace commented. "I bet this has something to do with Fern."

"Are they a new Instructor?" I asked.

"Yep," the fox nodded. "The Astral tastes like... being boiled alive."

"What?"

"Also... there will be tasties," she added thoughtfully. "I foresee Culimancy."

"Tasties for victory, getting broiled for failing?" Adelle laughed. "Sounds like Fern's planning some motivations."

"More than that," Candace muttered, eyes flashing silver. "There's a LOT of magic ahead. All sorts of Elemental magic building up in the currents. Which is weird, 'cus you'd think that one Instructor would stick with one magic type. Hrmmm."

"You can see the future?" I asked.

"Kinda," she shrugged. "More like I can see the loops of all sorts of magic building up. I don't like the look of it one bit."

Her hand suddenly found my elbow, her fingers warm as she looped her arm through mine. I felt the light pressure, a weight, a warmth, a silk like-fluff that barely registered against the deadened nerves of my arm.

I should have pulled away.

Any normal person would have. But the concept of 'normal' had packed its bags and left my life a long time ago, probably sometime around the third or fourth time my brother 'accidentally' incinerated me during one of his spellchain experiments.

Dying from fire hurt. A lot.

The first time, it was a universe of agony that had no beginning and no end. My Reconstitution had brought me back, but the memory of the pain was a ghost that haunted my nerves. After a few more agonizing deaths, I'd made a conscious choice during my Reconstitution, learned how to heal only specific parts of my body.

I'd stopped letting my skill regrow all the nerves. It was a trade-off. A world muffled and gray was better than one bathed in constant agony. My sense of smell, my ability to feel subtle textures, the sharp sting of a cut—most of it was gone, sacrificed on the altar of moving on.

Moving on. Running away from my feelings.

It was a language I was fluent in. Abuse, followed by a clumsy attempt at affection, was a pattern I recognized. It was the story of my life. My brother would burn me to a crisp, and then, later, my mother might leave a plate of cold leftovers on the counter for me without making eye contact. That was the extent of their apology.

So when Candace linked her arm with mine, I didn't tell her to stop, didn't snap at her.

Yes, slightly over twenty-four hours ago, Captain Alder and her pack had beaten me to a bloody pulp. They'd kicked and clawed, marked and left me in the trash.

But then Candace paid for the hotel, told me that she liked me, kissed me, bought me breakfast. She got me new clothes that actually fit me. In the twisted, fucked up economy of my emotional landscape, that was a far more significant apology, more love than I had ever received from my own family.

I glanced at the two prad girls walking beside me. There was a wholesome, friendly aura radiating from Candace now, her eyes soft, her smile sweet, as if she was a completely different, unrecognizable person. How deeply has she divided her soul between Donutz the 'I will chop off your dick if you look at me wrong' biker and the perfect Nazarite girl, Candace the Rhinehart Heiress?

Was she like… something like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, suffering from a split personality disorder that she's created herself to run away from her parents?

Adelle, on the other hand, was changed only in color, the rough biker barely painted over by an orange gloss.

Perhaps, if I was a different person, I would have been more stern with her, yelled at her, insisted for the cheetah to stay at the hotel, to fuck off where the sun doesn't shine.

But I didn't do any of that.

Such words never managed to manifest, choked by a colder, more pragmatic voice in my head.

I was a Level 3 human about to walk into a classroom full of high-level pradavarian delvers. A lamb heading to a slaughterhouse.

My only chance of not ending up as a smear on the floor was to walk in with my own wolves.

Adelle and Candace were weapons. Living, breathing, clawed-and-fanged weapons. They were delving experience, cheetah muscles and Binding magic, aggression and power that I could now point in a direction other than myself. A twisted kind of asset management.

If I couldn't get rid of the bond, then I would leverage it—be as polite and friendly as possible, tolerate them as I always tolerated everything that tried to tear me down.

Forgiveness wasn't on the table. This was a truce, no... more of a strategic alliance born of mutual desperation. The prad femmes needed to survive the Magnetic Lynx and I needed to survive Advanced Delving.

And a small, ugly part of me—the part that had grown in the burned-out ruins of my self-worth—saw this as an opportunity. I was their Alpha. A title given under duress, but a title nonetheless. If I could steer this wreck, if I could take Adelle's raw, uncontrolled aggression and aim it at our shared problem, maybe that was a form of control. A way to reclaim some piece of myself from the wreckage of my life.

So I let Candace hold my arm, smiled and nodded at her banter and I walked beside the predator who had marked me without flinching, without expressing anything, holding a stoic poker face on. Because in the cold, hard logic of survival, of existing in a world of pradavarian predators bigger and stronger than me, having two monsters on my leash was better than having one at my throat.

I spotted Kristi immediately as we entered the imposing auditorium—she sat right near the entrance, alone at the edge of the white Gothic revival seating area, her emerald and violet feathers visibly drooping. There was a lot of tension in her shoulders, the way she held herself like someone expecting another blow.

Spotting me, she smiled and then frowned at the sight of my companions, especially when she saw that Candace was possessively holding onto my elbow.

I made my way over to Kristi, settling into the seat beside her without a word.

Adelle and Candace followed, with Candace sitting in the empty row directly behind me and practically draping herself over the back of my chair, her chin resting on my shoulder.

"Morning," I said to Kristi. Her eyes brightened for another moment before her gaze darted to my companions.

"Alec," she hissed under her breath, leaning closer, "what the fuck are those two doing here?"

"Those two have names," Adelle snapped back from behind me.

"I know exactly who you idiots are," Kristi snarled, her feathers bristling as she twisted in her seat to glare at the pair of ex-bikers. "Candace Rhinehart and Adler Silvertail. What I don't know is why Alec is letting you anywhere near him after what your gang did to him."

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"We're not a gang," Candace said with that same inverted sweetness, absently playing with a lock of my hair. "We're Alec's delving team. His pack."

Kristi's eyes went wide. "His delving…? Alec, tell me you aren't seriously—"

"I am," I said. "I took responsibility for them."

"WHAT?!" The raptor's voice rose slightly before she caught herself, glancing around the filling auditorium. "Alec, these two have serious problems. Rhinehart's a topaz addict, and Silvertail is prone to violent outbursts! How the shit is she even here?!"

Candace's fluffy, white tail bristled. "So what if I take a little T' now and then to chill out?" She growled under her breath. "I'm not addicted because I can just unbind the addiction whenever I want. If you saw the tenth of the freaky shit I see in my dreams in the Astral, you'd snap like a little knobby twig by now!"

"I'm not Silvertail, ya dum' beerch," Adelle added with a murderous edge to her voice. "I'm… uuuhhh…"

"This is why I didn't fractalize this dummy sooner," Candace sighed. "She's a potato with names. You're Adelle Sylvia Dallia, dude. Gimme your paws. I'ma write it on your claws all pretty-like before you embarrass yourself any further."

"Yeah, what she said," Addie sent a feline glare at the raptor offering her left hand to the fox. "Keep talking shit about my pack, and I'll cut you a new breathing hole, feather duster."

Kristi's claws extended reflexively. "Look! They're literally proving my point right now! This is exactly the kind of behavior I'm talking about!"

"Oi, you wanna take it outside?" The redhead cheetah threatened.

The raptor for her part looked like she was going to strangle the cheetah, feathers sticking up threateningly.

"Kris, please chill," I said firmly, placing a hand on Kristi's arm. "All three of you, dial it back. We're in public."

"Alec," Kristi's voice dropped to an urgent whisper as Candace began binding white, fancy, decorative, repeating name pattern onto the cheetah's claws while making bits of white paint vanish from the seat's handle, "you don't understand whom you're dealing with! I get that you helped them when they were bleeding out in the wilds, but why the fuck are they here? You can't control these two prads, it's a horrible idea to bring them here! Rhinehart flipped her shit and disappeared at the end of last school year without a trace. And Silvertail was expelled for setting fires and attacking students and teachers!"

"One teacher. Who was hitting on me," Adelle growled. "He deserved a punch to the noggin'. Also I'm not Silvertail! My tail's clearly orange! See?" She waggled her orange-black striped tail.

"New fur color doesn't change the rot of what's underneath, Adler. You can't fool me, I know you way too damn well." Kristi shot back.

"Maybe if I smack you hard enough you'll forget you know me," Addie's fist came up, claws out.

"Addie, down," I growled.

The cheetah stared at me and then lowered her fist, grumbling under her breath about annoying raptor beerches.

The auditorium's heavy doors suddenly slammed shut with a resounding boom that echoed through the vaulted space. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees as footsteps echoed from the rear entrance—slow, measured, deliberate.

Professor Ignis L. Fern emerged from the shadows like something out of a fever dream.

She was tall—easily seven feet—with the lean, predatory build of a raptor, but there was something fundamentally wrong with her proportions. Her arms were too long, her fingers extending into claws that gleamed like polished obsidian. Her feathers, what few remained visible beneath her perfectly tailored charcoal gray suit, were the color of burnt copper with edges that seemed to shimmer between orange and deep crimson.

But it was her face that made me shudder. Half of it was covered by an ornate metal mask that looked like it had been forged from blackened steel and set with tiny rubies that pulsed like heartbeats. The visible half showed scarred, mottled flesh marked by what looked like acid burns or extreme heat damage. Her single exposed eye burned with an inner fire—not metaphorically, but literally. Illusory flames seemed to dance in her pupil. Similar flames danced across her damaged feathery mane, drawing all eyes to her.

She moved to the bone-white podium at the front of the auditorium with the preternatural grace of a high level delver, her claws clicking against the stone floor with each step. When she reached the microphone, she didn't need to adjust it—she was exactly the right height, as if the entire room had been designed around her presence.

"Good morning, aspiring delvers," she said, her voice carrying through the auditorium. It had a strange quality—like the sound of distant thunder mixed with the whisper of flames. "I am Professor Ignis L. Fern, and for the entirety of this year, I will be responsible for determining whether you live or die in the depths."

She paused, letting that sink in as her burning gaze swept across the assembled students.

"Some of you are here because you believe dungeon delving is glamorous. Some because your families expect it. Some because you think it will make you rich or famous." Her head tilted slightly, and I could swear that flaming eye lingered on our little group. "You are all wrong."

Adelle shifted uncomfortably behind me. Even Candace had stopped playing with my hair.

"Dungeon delving," Professor Fern continued, "is the art of controlled dying. Of sacrifice. Of yourself and your packmates. Every time you enter a dungeon, you are volunteering to experience every possible unexpected way that unreality can kill you, in the hope that you might stumble upon a magic reward and the one path that lets you return home with your sanity, soul and body intact."

She raised one clawed hand, and flames danced between her fingers—not the warm, orange flames of a campfire, but something that hurt to look at directly—magefire, possibly a variation of dragonfire.

"This semester, you will learn to embrace death as a constant companion. You will learn to make friends with pain, to court disaster, to parlay with eldritch forces that view your existence as an amusing interruption to their eternal slumber."

The flames in her hand suddenly extinguished, leaving the auditorium feeling colder than before.

"Let us begin with a reminder of a fundamental truth of dungeon ecology," Professor Fern continued, beginning to pace across the front of the auditorium with predatory grace. "Dungeons are not places. They are entities. Living, breathing, thinking organisms that exist partially in our reality and partially in dimensions we cannot fully comprehend. Dimensions have different rules than our linear reality, featuring environments, objects and entities aligned to Entropy, Syntropy or Infinity."

She gestured, and the air above her head shimmered, forming a three-dimensional projection of a massive, pulsing network made of crystalline structures and flowing energy.

"Each dungeon has its own personality, its own preferred methods of dissecting and digesting those who enter its domain. The Labyrinth of Mirrors in the Eastern Reaches feeds on vanity and self-doubt—it shows you perfected versions of yourself to distract you until it produces a copy of you, a doppelganger capable of tricking even your packmates. The Still Depths beneath New Chicago gradually consumes sound itself, stealing your voice, your heartbeat, even the whisper of air through your lungs until you die in perfect, absolute silence."

I found myself leaning forward despite my better judgment, captivated by her words. Around the auditorium, other students were having similar reactions—some looked terrified, others excited, but everyone was paying attention.

The Instructor snapped her fingers and the diagram changed to an impossible structure that twisted into itself like a mobius loop, staring at which made my brain sputter and slide sideways.

"The Superstore dungeon," Professor Fern said, and I felt a chill run down my spine, "is particularly insidious. It presents itself as a familiar environment—a mundane shopping center. But it is also limitless, feeds on consumerism, on desire, on the desperate human need to acquire and possess. It will offer you everything you've ever wanted, and the price will always be more than you can afford to pay. Worst of all it is lawful—taking stuff from it without paying at the checkout will result in it sucking out your soul and trapping you within its aisles forevermore."

She paused, her burning gaze sweeping across the students.

"Which brings me to an essential survival principle: pack dynamics. In a dungeon, your relationships with your packmates are not just social constructs. Elder dungeons can sense the bonds between delvers, the trust, the love, the hate, the fear. And they will exploit every weakness in those bonds."

Her claws clicked against the podium as she leaned forward.

"Human-pradavarian delving teams face unique challenges. Humans are fragile but incredibly adaptable. Pradavarians are powerful but often overconfident. The most successful mixed teams are those where the human serves as the pack's conscience and strategic mind, while the pradavarians provide physical protection and magical support."

Kristi shot me a look of some kind, which I pretended not to notice. Candace's silver hands gradually slid around my shoulders wrapping themselves around me. Kristi's glare in my direction intensified.

"The most common cause of team fatalities is the corruption of these relationships by dungeon influence," Professor Fern continued, "A clever dungeon will try to turn packmates against each other, to create jealousy, suspicion, betrayal. It can and will make you question whether your teammates truly care about you or are simply using you for their own advancement. A pack without absolute trust will come apart quickly in the dungeon."

I glanced around the auditorium, taking in the faces of the other students. Most were pradavarians—raptors, dogs, wolves, foxes, a few cats. There were maybe a dozen humans scattered throughout, with protective, taller pradavarian teammates flanking them.

It was then that I spotted her.

Nessy sat about ten rows ahead and to the left, her distinctive black and white fur patterns impossible to miss even from behind. She was flanked by her two companions from the quad—the gray owl with the large wizard hat and the orange fox with the gun. They formed a tight group with nobody sitting next to them for some reason.

"Mr. Parrin," the Instructor called out, making a human boy in the front row flinch. "Can you tell me how a human-prad delving team succeeds in a dungeon?"

"Through… mutual respect?" The human teen guessed somewhat nervously. "By recognizing that each species brings different strengths to the team. By understanding that in a dungeon, we all face the same dangers regardless of our level or species."

"Adequate," Professor Fern said after a moment. "Though naive. Sit down, Mr. Parrin."

"Mr. Foster," Professor Fern's voice cut through my thoughts like a blade, distracting me from my Nessy-gazing. "Since you seem more interested in your fellow students than my lecture, perhaps you'd like to share your thoughts on human-pradavarian pack dynamics?"

Every head in the auditorium turned to look at me. Candace's hands slid off my shoulders moving to wrap themselves around my waist as I stood up, her poofy silver tail swishing behind me.

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