The veilgator’s protruding eyes snapped open, and the “dead” parabeast raised its head and snarled down at me. Its stained yellow fangs practically glowed in the spotlights. A clump of putrid saliva plopped on my cheek. I yelped and fell hard on my ass, dropping into a backward shuffle over the dusty cavern floor. The creature rose and limped after me, claws the length of my hand clicking on the stone. Blood trickled from the wounds in its chest and legs, and black lines of blood pooled in its eyes.

I panicked, watching those disemboweling claws come closer. My wild eyes met Matthew’s then Arnold’s as I silently begged them for help, humbled in an instant by the terror choking off my air. I felt like a faun, frozen under the reflective eyes of its predator—I knew I needed to run, but my head spun with images tinted in my own blood, and my shaking legs refused to hold my weight.

Bile rose up in the back of my throat. I hated this insurmountable weakness that had defined so much of my life. But it did offer one consolation prize. The veilgator probably wouldn’t eat me after it killed me. Without raden, I’d be about as appetizing as one of the cave rocks.

Arnold reached for the bonesword sheathed at his side, but Matthew casually grabbed his friend’s wrist. Arnold rolled his eyes but relented, watching with a sour expression, one hand on his sword’s pommel.

I opened my mouth to shout at them, but the parabeast charged, and all I managed was a whimper as I rolled sideways, feeling the scales snag my shirt in passing. The grit on the floor bounced from the thunderous footfalls of the heavy, hobbling demon. One false move, and it would crush my ribs beneath trampling feet, whether it intended to or not. I spun, tracking its movement, and saw the creature’s nostrils flare, sniffing toward an unguarded tunnel not far from another ardent, Nathan. Oblivious, he grumbled as he dropped a pile of monster corpses by the wall on the far end of the cave.

The veilgator bolted for the exit, its scales changing colors to blend in with the landscape, and I let out a sigh of relief, sagging on all fours.

“Nate! Herd it back here!” Matthew shouted.

My head snapped up.

“Huh?” The bearded ardent scowled with confusion but was quick to draw his sword and smack the escaping parabeast with the side of his blade. A harmless blow when he could—and should—have killed it.

“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted as it shambled back toward me, running blind and afraid. I barely scrambled clear.

“Come on, Red. Protect us.” Matthew sneered at me, his excited, ruddy hue highlighting the thin scar beneath his eye. “It’s just one half-dead gator.”

Arnold conked the frantic beast’s skull with his pommel when it approached. It shook its head and swiped at Matthew. A golden raden glimmer raced across his sword as he blocked its claws with a resounding clang. Matthew brought the illuminated blade around in a flash, slicing the veilgator’s left foreleg cleanly off.

With an agonized snarl, the hopping parabeast careened back through the circle where I’d been trapped by the day’s haul and these assholes who had clearly decided to remind a “defect” of his place. The wounded beast collapsed into the pile of boneswords, sending them spilling over the cavern floor.

“Hey, shouldn’t we just kill it?” Nathan asked, an uncertain frown forming underneath his dirty beard.

“Nah, the big bad forger’s got this,” mocked Matthew.

Nathan shrugged and stayed back.

My head was a steam engine, puffing out hot clouds of anger fueled by the well-tended coals of shame that were always smoldering in my belly.

With a smirk, Matthew kicked a particularly worn and bloodied blade toward me. “There. That should help even the odds,” he muttered, nudging Arnold with his forearm.

A few ardents were still going about their duties, dropping off more veilgator corpses or depositing damaged weapons to the pile. Some stopped to watch. A couple shot disapproving looks at Matthew and Arnold, but they were quick to turn their backs and leave the cave. Not one of them intervened.

No one would cross the invisible line that separated me from them. Why stir up shit with Matthew and Arnold over a radenless boneforger?

The veilgator’s hiss choked into a blood-spraying cough as it pushed itself to its three feet, frantic eyes scanning the edge of the circle for a way out.

Neither it nor I had one. And I’d made the mistake of positioning myself with its one hope—that open tunnel—at my back when I’d dodged it the last time.

It whirled toward me, slipping in its own pooling blood, and I saw the slitted pupils of its bloodied eyes expand. Agonized, terrified, it wanted to bite and tear its way out, and I was the weak link in the chain.

Always the weakest link.

I ground my teeth and reached for the bonesword Matthew had kicked to me. I scrambled to my feet, a bestial groan of fear and fury bursting out of me. My jellied arms protested at its weight, but desperation and adrenaline surged through me, and I lifted it up over my head.

With a shout and a roar, the beast and I ran forward as one. Juking right, I brought the heavy bonesword down across the veilgator’s muzzle. It rebounded off the thick hide, racking my hands so badly that I lost my grip, and the bonesword tumbled away.

There was a chorus of disbelieving laughs from the audience.

The veilgator sneezed and opened its maw in another reptilian hiss, locked on me now. I scrambled toward my bag, my stomach sinking. I tripped once along the way, scuffing my knees against the rocky ground in my desperate bid to find a suitable weapon.

The crippled creature’s claws scritched behind me, drawing closer as I reached my kit. I shoved it aside and grabbed my crossbow.

Lying on my back, I twisted around and aimed at the parabeast as it pounced.

I fired, and my bone-bolt hit it square in the throat. Unlike the bonesword, the bolt drew a trickle of blood before snapping in half from the impact. The veilgator flinched but crashed down on top of me, knocking the weapon from my hands before I could notch another bolt. My last chance at saving myself slid across the ground with a clatter, well out of reach.

Fangs stopped inches from my face as I pushed against the beast’s neck. Its putrid breath stung my nose, and I gagged as black blood rolled over my fingers and down my arm.

If it had wanted to eat me, all it had to do was take a bite. Instead, its nose flared as it sniffed me, like it couldn’t understand what I was or had never encountered a lack of raden in anything with a heartbeat.

“What’s going on here?” a familiar voice asked.

Lungs straining to expand beneath the veilgator, I craned my neck around its foreleg and just barely made out a tall, blond ardent weaving his way through the gawkers. His green eyes swept the room, and one brow raised when they landed on me.

Colter Valera. The other ardents respected him almost as much as they feared my brother. He was easily one of the most powerful soldiers here. Although he and Seth had never quite seen eye to eye, he was no meathead, and I could have cried with pure relief.

“Help!” I choked out, arms shaking as I held back a fraction of the parabeast’s weight. Its inky blood pooled in the creases of my elbows. “Colter, kill it!”

He watched the scene in silence, dragging an inscrutable look across the gathered ardents. “Really? Since when have the defenders of humanity stooped to acting like middle-school bullies?”

The parabeast’s snarl drew Colter’s gaze back to me.

With a nonchalance I’d never be able to understand, he grabbed the veilgator by the back of its neck and pulled its jaws away from me, though its bulk still pinned my lower body.

“Didn't you apply to be a forger for the raid team? A few times, if I’m not mistaken? If you want that promotion, Torrin, this is the perfect opportunity to test your resolve.”

I looked up in dazed surprise, legs still crushed beneath the creature’s scaly belly.

“You’re really ready to graduate from post-raid work?” Colter gestured at the agitated veilgator lunging against his grip, riled by his raden. “Then look death in the eye. Prove to everyone—especially yourself—that you can keep a cool head even in the thick of it.”

The parabeast’s toothy maw snapped inches from my chin, but Colter held fast, not breaking a sweat, and I curbed my instinctual flinch, fighting the urge to tuck into a ball.

With an approving nod, Colter unsheathed a dagger and pressed the cold handle into my left hand. It was well-forged, lightweight, which meant pure parabeast bone, no steel core. Colter’s powerful hand wrapped around my trembling fist, and, with startling precision, rammed the dagger between two scales and up through the veilgator's jaw. The bones of my hand throbbed and my shoulder popped within its socket from the sudden force, but the dagger pierced the small brain shielded by its thick skull with no help from raden and not even a chip to the blade.

The veilgator jerked, then sagged, going stiff and motionless. With an easy tug, we withdrew the blade, and Colter released me before letting the corpse—truly good and dead this time—fall to the ground at my side.

The stench of its rusty blood and the aftershocks of nearly having my head bitten off were too much. I puked my last meal onto the ground. The nausea hit the back of my teeth, and it took what remaining willpower and dignity I had left to avoid hurling a second time.

I expected another chorus of laughter, but a dense silence had swallowed all sound save the drip of mineral water off stalactites. I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth and looked up. Colter still knelt next to the veilgator corpse, but every head, including his own, had turned to a newcomer at the mouth of the chamber.

Seth’s brows furrowed over sharp eyes lit with his usual intense focus. His emotionless gaze passed over me, lingering on the thick coating of black blood for only a moment, and darkened when he landed on Colter. “Explain.”

Matthew and the rest of the ardents took a wary step back. A couple whispered to each other, but the rest just stared, enraptured and breathless.

Including me.

As just about the only person immune to Seth’s frigid gaze, Colter’s indifferent shrug met my brother’s formality with equal and opposite force. “Torrin just made his first rift kill. Sure, things got a little heated, but… he was never in any real danger.” Colter extended a hand to me, then pulled me to my feet. “Right, Torrin?”

Glancing from Colter to Seth, I nodded. “I’m fine. I don’t need you to babysit me, Seth.”

Seth and Colter wordlessly tested each other’s limits. Seth looked away first, his dark eyes shifting to me.

I balled my fists as I took in his expression. The tilted brows. The deepened frown. It said everything I didn’t want to hear, all with one fleeting moment of pity.

I wrinkled my nose and glared at the ground, looking at anything but him. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the ardents around us slowly dispersing now that the show was over.

“Clean this up,” Seth ordered. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but it didn’t matter. I’d be the one who ended up doing it anyway.

“Sir, yes sir,” I said under my breath.

Eyes deliberately fixed on the ground, I watched his shadow recede as the steady thump of his footfalls faded into the cavern’s din.

“Come on, there is a lot of work left to do here,” Colter said, brushing some guts off my shirt, then patting my back. “You two.” He pointed at Matthew and Arnold, who were halfway to the exit tunnel. “I believe you were assigned to prepare these veilgator corpses, or am I wrong?”

The two huge men stopped and turned like toddlers caught with hands in the cookie jar. If not for the shock, the sight might have made me grin from ear to ear. “No, sir,” Arnold said after a couple of seconds.

“Well, then? Get to it!” Colter ordered. “And properly. I don’t want a single fiber wasted. There’s a shortage, you know.” He looked down at me from the corner of his eye and winked.