I
The tunnel opened, after a short crawl through cramped, root-choked darkness, into a wider underground chamber — and the moment they emerged, it became immediately, viscerally clear that “three to five individuals” had been a catastrophic underestimate.
Horned rabbits filled the space in a dense, seething mass, easily twenty or more, their small conical horns catching what little light filtered down from cracks in the ceiling above.
The nearest ones had already noticed the intrusion, ears flattening back in unmistakable aggression.
The chamber itself amplified every sound — claws against stone, the low collective growl rippling through the mass — until the air itself seemed to vibrate with barely contained violence.
[Enemy Count: 20+ (Horned Rabbit)]
“That’s not a family group,” Rowan said, his voice tight.
“That’s a colony.”
“Options are somewhat limited at this point,” the broad-shouldered man observed, already shifting his stance.
II
“Positions!” Tal barked, drawing her bow, and the group scattered into practiced defensive spacing — the broad-shouldered man surging forward to anchor the center, Rowan falling back to a rock outcropping that gave him a clear firing line, and Tal circling to a flanking angle.
Not frozen.
Watching.
There was, he’d learned over eight years of chaotic calls, a specific kind of value in the half-second most people spent panicking that could instead be spent simply seeing — who was in the most danger, what was about to happen next, where the actual point of failure in the unfolding chaos would land.
III
The broad-shouldered man’s first swing connected solidly, scattering three rabbits backward, but the sheer number pressing in from the flanks meant the fight was already tilting toward chaos rather than a controlled cull.
Rowan’s shots were precise, but arrows were a finite resource against a genuinely uncertain number of targets, and Nivlac could see him already recalculating his supply against the swarm’s apparent size, the math clearly not landing in their favor.
And then Nivlac saw it — a break in the mass on the right, three rabbits peeling off from the main cluster, moving with the kind of coordinated intent that suggested they weren’t simply fleeing, but circling.
Circling toward Tal’s exposed flank, where her attention was locked entirely on the target directly in front of her bow.
IV
“Tal, right side!” Nivlac’s voice cut through the chaos, sharper and louder than he’d intended, but clear enough to land.
She didn’t question it — didn’t have time to — and pivoted on pure reflex, drawing her side blade to catch the lead rabbit’s horn a bare instant before it would have struck her exposed side.
The other two scattered at the sudden resistance, breaking off the flanking attempt entirely.
The broad-shouldered man had taken a solid hit to the shoulder from a rabbit he hadn’t seen coming, staggering half a step.
V
Nivlac was already moving, or as close to moving as his complete lack of combat training allowed — raising his staff and channeling Glimmer’s Blessing toward him, despite knowing with total certainty that the effect would land diminished, weak, barely more than a fractional nudge against a non-Undead target.
[Skill Used: Glimmer’s Blessing]
[Effect: 30% (Non-Undead Penalty) — +8 Balance Recovery]
It wasn’t much.
A faint, pale shimmer, nothing like the golden auras he’d seen at the temple, barely visible in the chamber’s dim, filtered light.
But it was enough — just enough of an edge, a half-second of restored balance, for the broad-shouldered man to recover his footing and drive his blade through the rabbit that had struck him, rather than taking a second hit while still off-balance.
The construct of the moment felt strangely familiar to Nivlac in a way he didn’t have time to examine properly — the same narrow window between disaster and recovery he’d learned to spot in a hundred different crises, just wearing considerably sharper teeth this time around.
“Regroup!” Tal called, her voice steadier now as the earlier chaos folded into something more controlled.
“Watch the flanks — all of them, not just the ones in front of you!”
The fight wasn’t over.
But something in the rhythm of it had shifted subtly, and Nivlac — heart pounding, staff still raised — allowed himself the smallest flicker of something that wasn’t quite confidence, but was, at the very least, no longer pure dread.