The cold hit him before his eyes adjusted.

Arthur opened them.

Dark grass beneath his feet. Not the dark of something dying. The dark of something that had never been anything else, the color of it sitting somewhere between green and black, like the island had decided light wasn’t worth the effort.

The trees were wrong too. Too thick at the base. Too tall. Their canopies met overhead and blocked out most of the sky, leaving the forest floor in a permanent shade that had nothing to do with the time of day.

And the water.

Around the island’s edges the tide came in slow and heavy. Rust colored. Dark red where it caught what little light reached it, crashing against the stone shore with the sound of something that had been doing this for a very long time and didn’t care who was listening.

Arthur stood in it for a second.

This place is wrong. This whole island is wrong.

Theodore materialized beside him with a soft hiss, a faint gold glow fading from his outline. He looked at the water. Then the trees. Then the water again.

Kreasial appeared last. She looked at the treeline with the expression of someone who had been handed exactly what they wanted.

Arthur looked around.

No other students. No sound of relic stones hissing nearby. Just the three of them and the dark grass and the rust-colored water at the edges.

"We must have transported to a different spot than the others," Theodore said. His voice carried that specific anxious quality it got when he was processing something out loud. "Some of the other triads are probably spread across different zones."

"Isn’t that better for us?" Kreasial looked at both of them. "No direct competitors at the start. We have this whole section to ourselves."

Arthur turned to them.

"Alright. We need to—"

Kreasial was already running.

"WHA—" Arthur snapped his head toward her. "KREASIAL—"

"NO TIME. FIND. WIN." Her voice came back from somewhere between the first row of trees. Already gone.

Arthur stood there for half a second.

Then ran after her.

Theodore followed. "Ah— wait—"

The forest closed around them fast.

Arthur cut the academy anchors as he ran. He felt them drop one by one. Each connection releasing like a thread going slack, the warmth of each anchor point fading until just the island remained. His chest went slightly hollow with the loss of them.

Then he pushed outward.

The island shadows answered immediately.

Every dark space under every tree. Every gap between roots. The long strips of shade running across the forest floor where the canopy was thickest. His field spread through all of it, slow and low, anchor by anchor, building a map of the island from the ground up.

His shadows merged into Kreasial’s as she ran ahead. Merged into Theodore’s. Spread further into the trees on both sides of their path.

Something moved at the edge of his perception.

He filed it and kept running.

Beside him something small was keeping pace. He looked down.

Theodore’s bellus. Brown fur, short legs moving faster than they should have been able to. Already quartering the ground ahead, nose down, feeding information back to Theodore in whatever way bonded bellus communicated.

Good. She’s already working.

Theodore appeared at Arthur’s shoulder breathing hard but focused. "We transported to a separate zone from the other triads. We have a head start on this section of the island."

"How much of it can she map."

"Maybe two hundred meters in radius. Anything beyond that gets fuzzy."

Between Theodore’s bellus and the shadow network they had eyes on roughly the same area from two different angles.

Arthur thought about 3000 credits.

100 per find if this is consistent with the novel.

30 treasures. One hour.

His jaw tightened.

We need to move faster.

Kreasial stopped.

She was crouched at the base of a large root, one hand already reaching into the gap beneath it. She pulled out a chalice covered in dark moss, held it up, and grinned.

A cloud floated in front of each of them. Someone’s magic.

[Class F Triad: Misfits have found a treasure]

[+100 credits]

"Ha." Kreasial stood. "Told you. No plan needed. Just—"

Arthur felt it through the network before she finished the sentence.

Movement in the shadow directly behind her. Something that had been completely still until it wasn’t. The specific quality of a predator that lives in shade and knows how to use it.

He moved.

Both hands hit Kreasial’s shoulders and shoved.

She went sideways with a sharp sound of surprise and the dark crawler launched through the space she’d been standing in. It passed between them and hit the tree beside Theodore with a sound like something dense meeting something solid.

It dropped to the ground and spun.

Arthur looked at it.

Wrong proportions. The body was low and lean, built for moving through tight spaces. The spine was exposed, vertebrae visible through the skin, dark and ridged. Four legs that bent the wrong way. It had no visible eyes.

It didn’t need them.

’WHAT IS THAT.’ Vexis dropped low beside Arthur.

"Dark crawler." Roz’s voice was flat. "Lives in shaded areas. Hunts by detecting aetheric fields."

Arthur looked at the shadows spread across the forest floor.

His shadows.

His network.

The thing that lived in darkness hunted by feeling for magic in the dark.

His entire perception system was built inside its hunting ground.

That’s a problem.

The crawler hissed. Low and wet.

Kreasial was already moving.

She’d been stumbling from the shove and caught herself and turned and her expression had gone from surprised to something significantly less pleasant. She pulled her arm back. White fog curled around her fist.

She extended her arm and ice shards flew, fast and flat, and pinned the crawler to the tree trunk through its exposed spine. "How dare you creeping up on me!"

It screamed. High and wrong. Then went still.

Arthur looked at Kreasial.

She straightened up and fixed her collar.

"Next time." She looked at Arthur. "Just say duck."

He stared at her.

That was... you were about to get your head taken off and your complaint is the method of warning?

Vexis beside Arthur rolled his eyes.

Arthur decided to let it go.

Theodore had gone very still two steps behind them. His pen was in his hand for some reason. His bellus had pressed herself against his ankle and was looking at the pinned crawler with her ears flat.

He cleared his throat.

"She’s very fast," Theodore said.

"Yeah," Arthur said.

They both looked at Kreasial examining her own handiwork.

"Yeah," Theodore said again.

Then the network screamed.

Not one movement. Not two.

A spread of them. Coming from three directions simultaneously. The shadows between the far trees shifting with the specific weight of things that had been waiting and had decided to stop waiting.

Arthur turned his face toward the treeline.

The forest was dark and still and completely silent.

His shadows told him what his eyes couldn’t.

A pack.