The Queen let out an earthshaking roar as she charged at Britt with terrifying speed. Britt dodged, running across the arena rather than facing the boss head on. She wasn't strong enough to deal with a Level 150 monster on her own.

She felt the tickle of an enhancement spell and her feet felt instantly lighter. She wasn't sure who had cast it, but she didn't have time to show her appreciation in any case. The Queen reached Britt, one of her scythe-arms swinging downward, aimed for Britt's neck.

Britt dropped to the ground, drawing a rune to create a cushion of air that she used to launch herself between the Queen's legs. It was a tight fit, but thankfully the Queen didn't have the idea to sit on her and crush her like the idiot she was. That move was far too risky.

Fluffy, on the other hand, seemed intent on trampling Britt on his way to attack the Queen. Britt swerved so sharply that she spun out, slamming into the wall with a painful crack in her ribs.

Emma's healing spell took care of the broken ribs almost before the shock wore off, saving Britt some pain as she gathered herself off the floor. The cool soothing Miasma meant that Emma had already run out of System Mana and was using the residual Miasma in the air. That confirmed Britt's theory that their 'unlimited Mana glitch' was just the humans' ability to harness outside energy.

This was good. Healing wouldn't hurt as long as the humans cast spells while their Mana was depleted.

Britt dodged to the left, zipping away as the Queen slammed into the wall where she had been standing a moment before. Britt needed to stay focused. If she didn't find a way to combat the Queen soon, she would get squashed the first time she missed a dodge.

But what could she do? She couldn't cast her spells and run at the same time. Anything strong enough to get through the Queen's hide took too much preparation and aiming. She didn't have any shield spells strong enough to tank the boss' attacks, either.

The Queen shook herself, momentarily distracted as Fluffy rammed his head into her stomach. A small chunk of her Health evaporated but it wasn't enough to convince the monster to change her target. She came at Britt with renewed vigor, her scythe-arms blurring through the air faster than Britt's eyes could see.

Britt retreated out of range, avoiding the arena wherever possible. The Queen was slower outside of the arena than she was inside it. Whether there was some buff active in the center of the room or the Queen was being affected by the overabundance of boundary cracks that opened and closed around the edge of the room, it meant that Britt had more time to dodge if she stuck close to the wall.

The problem was that Britt too had to deal with the boundary cracks. She dodged through the minefield of opening and closing rifts, thankful that there didn't seem to be any attractors opening in the destabilized dungeon. A crack opened to Britt's left side, bathing her in a rush of Miasma that mingled with the Essence in the air. It exploded, tossing Britt across the room.

This time she managed to catch herself with a wind spell before she slammed into the wall again. The Queen took the opportunity to charge Britt, swinging her Scythe down at her. Britt was only saved by the wall as the badly aimed attack sank into the solid stone, getting stuck there long enough for Britt to escape.

Britt ran around the Queen's legs this time instead of through them, speeding away on a cushion of air.

This isn't working, Britt thought furiously. Sooner or later, she's going to catch up and I won't have any more tricks up my sleeve.

She was burning through the Miasma in the room faster than the portals could replenish it, making the room even more unstable than it had been before. Pockets of miniature explosions rocked the edges of the arena and the portals that opened seemed to be growing larger and more jagged.

Britt needed to try something else, and she needed to do it fast or the ceiling might collapse and bury them under a pile of rubble.

She was too slow; too weak. She needed to find a way to power up.

She needed to be bigger.

Britt dodged another attack, knowing what she needed to do, but not sure if she could do it with an audience. She didn't want to scare them, but as much as Britt would hate losing her new friends, she wanted to live.

She reversed her direction, running toward the Queen instead of away from her.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Emma screamed, preemptively casting several healing spells on Britt.

Britt didn't have time to respond. She dodged the scythe-arms that sliced at her, throwing the strongest wind spell she had at the Queen's feet. It wasn't enough to put the monster in a stun state, but the Queen staggered backward, slamming into the wall with enough force to slow her down.

"Get out of there!" Patty yelled. "Head to the tunnels. Fluffy can recapture aggro when you get out of range."

Britt heard the command, but she couldn't follow it; she was already transforming.

Her legs grew thick as tree trunks, and her viewpoint drew even with the Queen's. Her skin thickened enough that she didn't think the Queen's scythes could even touch her and a horn sprouted from her head.

Britt roared, her voice shaking dust loose from the walls as a sudden rush of territorial malice flooded her. She checked it just enough to keep herself from harming any of the humans as she bore down on the Queen, stabbing the monster with her razor-sharp horn.

The Queen screamed, slicing at Britt's unprotected eyes with her arms. Britt was forced to back away to avoid being blinded. She reared on her back legs, allowing the Queen to advance ever so slightly.

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Britt brought the entire weight of her enormous bulk down on the Queen's back. Her carapace broke with a deafening crack and the Queen chittered and screamed, her arms flailing ineffectually on the ground. Britt reared and slammed down on the Queen again, silencing the dying creature.

The notification that she had killed the Queen arrived in Britt's minds' eye, but she stomped on the monster one more time, just to be sure.

Assured that the interloper was well and truly dead, Britt immediately returned to her previous form, not willing to risk her Emurian instincts with so many people around. She shook with the intensity of the remaining instincts, glaring at the Queen's carcass.

The arena was silent. You could hear a pin drop, and it took Britt several minutes to calm down enough to realize that every other player in the room was staring at her, a mixture of shock and awe on their faces.

She didn't see fear. Britt warred with herself, finally giving in to base instinct and opening her telepathy to gauge the room.

She found a surprising level of… excitement?

"That. Was. AWESOME!" Nathan shouted, grinning like a maniac as he threw his hands in the air. "What the hell were you thinking, keeping a trump card like that all to yourself? We could have pranced through that damn forest. You would be like plow, pop, stab!" He made motions to accompany his verbalizations, punching his way through open air.

Britt left the Queen's side, walking in such a way that she never actually turned her back on the dead monster. Even being able to feel their emotions—the majority of which were positive—it took a considerable amount of self-control not to retreat as her party mates congratulated her on her overwhelming win.

"How long can you keep that up?" Nathan asked. "The leveling potential! We could just slam through the monsters like tissue paper!"

"It's gotta be limited in some way," Andrea said. "Otherwise, Britt would have used it before now. High Mana cost or long cool down?"

It took Britt a moment to realize that the question was aimed at her. "High Mana cost. The glitch made it possible."

It wasn't exactly a lie. On a normal day, Britt didn't have enough Miasma in Ember to manage a transformation, even back into her natural form. She had been gathering some while she was in Ashen, but she used all of that up to avoid the Queen's overwhelming assault.

"That was an Emurian, wasn't it?" Patty asked, intrigued. "Can you make other monsters or is it limited to that one? A smaller form would be great for exploration or reconnaissance."

Britt pushed down the rush of guilt over lying to the humans once again. She hadn't been expecting to be able to keep her secret this long. The fact that the humans assumed this was some sort of System-given skill was a welcome explanation that she latched onto for the sake of keeping her cover.

"It's easier to do smaller animals," Britt said, finally relaxing after a nerve-wracking battle. "They're easier to maintain as well."

"And there are no major side effects?" Emma asked. She was worried, but Britt couldn't pinpoint why that was exactly. "No major limiting factors like reduced stats or a Health-leeching effect?"

Britt shook her head. "Nothing like that. It can be a bit difficult to control strong instincts, but the more I use a specific form, the easier it gets."

The random explosions around the room were dying down as the Miasma finally overwhelmed the Essence in the area. There was still considerably less Miasma in the immediate vicinity due to the humans' strange ability to absorb it, but it didn't seem to cause as much of a problem as the boundary cracks.

"Now that the boss is dead, can we continue this conversation somewhere else?" Bob asked, glancing uncomfortably at the mangled bug corpse. "I've seen too many multi-phase boss fights to hang around in boss rooms for no reason."

"True that," Helga agreed. "Fluffy, leave the bug alone, it's already dead! We're leaving!"

The wolf pulled his massive nose out of the carcass, purple blood covering his snout. He yipped twice before jumping over the Orcan Queen to answer his master's call. He transformed mid-air, landing on the ground as a rather plain-looking wolf, though he was larger than the wolves on Earth and Britt couldn't think of a similar canine species from Ashen.

"That's nifty," Nathan said, moving forward to scratch the wolf behind his ear. He growled momentarily, making Nathan's anxiety spike, but a quick word from Helga silenced the familiar.

Nathan relaxed. "How long have you had him?"

"About a week," Helga said, patting the dog's side affectionately. "Found him injured in the tunnels and healed him up. He's been glued to my side ever since."

Bob snorted. "You forced us to let you keep him. Not to mention, he spent most of the last week in his kennel, terrorizing the nearby familiars because you were too scared to take your precious pet on a hunt. Do you know how much Experience we missed out on over the last week?"

Britt frowned, getting an image through her telepathy of a large selection of monsters kept in kennels outside of a city. "Are there a lot of…. pet monsters… in the area?"

She had Tiny—that was the name she had given the Emurian calf—but he had been a spur of the moment thing. She wasn't even sure how it had worked, since monsters were not actually animals. It seemed that she wasn't the only one who managed to skirt around that particular rule.

Once again, the humans' general lack of caution made Britt wonder how they had survived to this point.

"Alatha is becoming a zoo," Bob said with feeling. "I've never seen so many monsters in one place, and I just fought my way through a bug dungeon. I think there was actually one of these things in the kennels as well." He shuddered, looking at the Orcan Queen with revulsion.

Helga rolled her eyes. "You're just jealous that you haven't managed to pick up your own familiar. It would help if you didn't antagonize every single monster you come across."

"We're in a dungeon," Bob said. "That's literally the whole point."

Patty let out a long-suffering sigh. "You're both right. Let's circle back to getting out of here. The explosions are starting to get on my nerves."

Britt glanced back at the portals. Despite Patty's statement, they had calmed down quite a bit. The rate at which they were appearing didn't seem to change, but the reaction only happened once every minute or so now. She frowned, wondering if there was something she could do about the cracks. If there were this many in the boss room, she could only assume that there were even more in the rest of the dungeon. So much destabilization would wreak havoc on the nearby area, causing dungeon breaks and crop deterioration among other things. If they could close the main crack…

"I think they're mostly there for decoration," Patty said unexpectedly. "They don't seem to do anything but push out that black smoke. Although I guess the explosions make them part of the boss fight. Whoever designed this dungeon is a sadist."

Britt whirled on Patty, staring at her as her telepathy allowed her to see through the other woman's eyes for a brief moment. "You can see them?"

A wrinkle appeared between Patty's brows. "The rifts, right? Or portals, maybe? You guys came through the big one." She pointed at the large one in the center that had unexpectedly thrown Britt and her friends into the middle of a boss room.

"The two of you want to clue the rest of us in?" Emma asked.

The others nodded in agreement.

Britt shook her head. "Remember how I was telling you I could see boundary cracks?" Britt inclined her head at Patty. "It seems I'm not the only one."

All eyes turned to Patty.

Patty blinked. "Boundary cracks…"

Britt could feel the recognition in the phrase, along with the brief image of Kiori and her hovel. The herbs in her kitchen and something she had said…

Thank you for your gift of knowledge, Patricia Holland. We will use it well. The people of Jeshilon will not disgrace the faces we wear.

Britt wasn't sure how she knew, but there was no doubt in her mind. The humans in Jeshilon were not what they seemed.

There were other Corvi in Alatha.

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