I rounded the corner, almost tripping over a large step. I placed my foot on the dry rock and pushed myself up on my newly-healed leg. In an instant, the mana density weighed down on me to the point that I nearly couldn’t breathe. It flooded the room like a fog. While the air itself was stagnant, the mana seemed to be slowly moving toward the back of the cavern and directly into a pool of water. It looked like a river of energy flowing into an ocean. I couldn’t tell where the mana came from either, except that it seemed to enter through the ceiling itself. The mana swirled so much that I could not pick out distinct shapes. At least we were out of the water. See, I can look on the bright side of a situation.

I could, however, make out two pairs of green eyes looking at us from either side of the mana flow. I was expecting to see vertically slitted eyes like a snake, but the pupils were round, in nearly perfect circles of green irises.

“Andy, go!” I shouted.

We retreated behind the corner of the entrance while Andy shuffled to the front of the group. He took in the positions of our targets and tossed a grenade.

“I’m on my last one!” he yelled right before the explosion drowned him out.

That was the next signal. We charged around the corner and I jumped toward the one on the right, leading with the tip of my sword. This left the rest of the party clear to open fire on the other Komodo.

My target came at me, stumbling from the shock of the explosive. Despite its disorientation, I was forced to dance sideways as it lunged, standing on its back legs and swiping sharp talons directly at my chest. That’s when I realized just how large the Komodo dragon was. When it rose to its full height for that brief moment, its head was almost level with my own. I also met its eyes directly. Bragg had said something about their eyes, shuddering while he mentioned it. The reality was far worse.

They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. That isn’t just for humans. Cats, horses, even some dogs – you meet their eye, and there’s a level of intelligence there. I never thought I’d have the same sense when gazing back at a reptile. The thing in front of me certainly had a soul, and it was as black as corruption mana. Hell, for all I knew, the soul of this thing was corruption mana.

In the brief moment I met the thing’s eye, it lunged again, swinging its claw low at my leg. The sharp nails bit into the back of my leg and tore through the muscle on my calf. My vision went red. I thrust my sword at its chest, yelling through the pain and anger. The Komodo slithered sideways, and I missed the bright core in its chest, but the sword tip cut through the more lightly armored scales and sunk deeply into the meat next to its foreleg. A hiss of pain escaped the large lizard, cutting through the sound of gunfire and my own yell. It pulled away from me, and my sword slid free from the wound. Black blood splattered the rock at my feet.

It kept itself low as it came toward me again, all signs of initial shock gone. It ran on all fours, though it was clearly favoring the left foreleg. Its neck snapped forward to bite at me, but I slipped back and struck at its head. The sword again proved its value as it bit deeply into the neck of the creature, and I was rewarded with a spray of blood. The reptile, again, reeled back. However, in our fight, I hadn’t noticed that it was now between me and my group. As it retreated, its tail lashed out and clubbed Andy in the side to send him flying. I continued to move in, swinging furiously at the lizard. Where my mana sight was usually an advantage, the mana density was so high that it nearly made the dragon disappear. The stench pushed into my lungs, making me want to heave and cough at the same time. I fought down my bile and opened more gashes on the predator’s head, neck, and shoulder until it was dead.

With a cry of triumph, I turned my eyes on the other lizard and refocused for action. I took in the scene. The lizard had a smattering of gashes and puncture wounds along its side, no doubt the effect of the grenade. Bragg and Carter were still on their feet, the wrestler swinging desperately at the lizard with his long rifle to keep its head at bay. Carter took every opportunity she could to empty more bullets into the existing wounds.

Andy lay on his back, firing his rifle at the dragon when he had a clear shot. Chavez was on the ground, blood pooling from a slash on his chest. He didn’t move. I spared no remorse for the man as I once again engaged with one of the largest lizards on the planet. It paid no attention to my weapon. After all, little else had been able to hurt it so far, so it was thoroughly surprised when my sword drove point-first into its thick hide above the shoulder.

With my injured leg, I couldn’t move back quickly enough. Powerful jaws surged forward and tore the flesh from my thigh. My vision swam before me, and I almost blacked out from the pain. Dizziness took me, even as my sword came down. I felt resistance through the hilt of the weapon, but that was all as I collapsed onto the ground, and my head struck the rocky ground.

A scream of agony broke me from my reprieve, and my head snapped around to where Andy lay. I realized with mounting horror that we’d forgotten about the third Komodo dragon. It stood over Andy, its claws digging into his chest, and had already mauled the meat of his shoulder. The head came back down again, maw gaping, and the wounded man thrust his fist into its mouth as if he would punch out its long teeth. The jaws closed down on Andy’s forearm, and it whipped its head back and forth to tear the limb off at the elbow.

“See you in hell, motherfucker,” Andy yelled, just before the lizard’s head blew off and the body collapsed atop him.

I dragged myself over to Andy, my body screaming in protest as I pulled the carcass off my friend.

“You damned idiot,” I yelled, my ears still ringing from the close explosions. “You put a grenade in its mouth?”

“Yeah, well I figured it was a good way to go,” he grimaced. Blood was still flowing from his shoulder, and he held the stump of his other arm to his chest. “Guess the thing’s hide was tough enough to keep it from killing me. I guess I just get to bleed out instead.” He chuckled at his own dark humor.

I pulled my sword around and began cutting into the body of the lizard next to Andy, cutting open a gap wide enough to get a hand in. When I finally cut through the muscle and bone, and I could see I’d be able to reach the core, I grabbed Andy’s whole arm and thrust it into the lizard’s insides. He screamed in agony as more blood spurted from the wounded shoulder. Finally, his fingers reached the shining core, and I could see a massive amount of energy flowing into him to spread around his body. The wound on his shoulder closed up, regrowing the missing pieces. His right arm was still missing from the elbow down, even if the skin had smoothed over. Blissfully, however, Andy was no longer conscious.

“He’s still breathing.” I turned to see Carter kneeling over Chavez. She was the only one who hadn’t been injured seriously in the fight. I could see some scrapes and scratches, but it was nothing compared to the rest of us. Damn good for her. Bragg, on the other hand, was sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth, hugging a leg that looked like most of the flesh from the calf down had been stripped away.

I pushed past the pain and ever-increasing exhaustion and forced myself into motion again. I pulled myself over to the body of the second dragon I’d killed, and I repeated the same evisceration process. “Put his arm in to touch the core,” I told Carter as soon as I’d finished.

“Bragg, this one is for you,” I told him when I’d finished with the last one.

The man groaned but hopped on his good leg over to the corpse. I lay on my back, catching my breath, and I realized there was only one option left for me. I turned to the concentration of mana in the water near the back of the cavern. As I fumbled my way closer, the floor descended rapidly, and my gaze followed the mana flows down into the depths of the water. The energy seemed to sense my approach as I touched the edge of the water, and it pulsed more brightly. I took a deep breath and heaved myself over the edge and down.

The water itself seemed to be made of energy. I could immediately feel my wounds soothing, though the exhaustion remained. I felt myself drift deeper, grasping and reaching for an object I could finally see. It was a green, glowing orb. It teemed with highly concentrated mana, but it was the green mana that was the strongest. What’s more, I couldn’t spot even a speck of black in the roiling colors.

As soon as I touched the gemstone, I felt the energy surge into me. The wounds in my legs finished healing first, as I willed the power into them. After that finished, I expected the massive amount of energy to cycle through my body once and dissipate, just like all the other cores I’d touched that day. But the new energy started filling up my head, and chest, nearly to bursting, burning through like a purifying fire as it went. This last year, an old football injury had begun to bother me again, but it disappeared. Aches in my legs and arms from a high-intensity life in the military, old pains I’d long grown accustomed to, likewise vanished. I was left with a single moment of bliss… before pain flooded my senses.

“Ugh,” I heard a voice in my head utter in disgust. “The monkey is going to ruin my clean pool of water.”

Then I blacked out.