I looked through my cracked and blackened Force Barrier shield and caught sight of one of the soldiers pulling the stopper from a flask with his teeth and lifting it to drink. In his hurry, he spilled some of it. The spilled liquid glowed a phosphorescent blue in the dim light of the forest evening.

It was a mana pot. So that was how they were able to fire so many spells in quick succession. Mana pots were nearly legendary among the lower-level magic community. They were incredibly rare, expensive items, created by an arcane process nobody knew the details of. I’d only ever seen them in dodgy YouTube documentaries or in movies.

If these soldiers had access to mana pots, then they were working on behalf of some serious heavies. Which made sense since they were wearing the PentaTech symbol. And I’d just roped myself into whatever the hell was going on between Astrid and their group.

I swallowed back the instinctive fear in my throat. They obviously didn’t intend anything good for Astrid, and I wasn’t going to let that happen, even if it meant trouble for myself. Whatever the hell was going on here, I was in it now, up to my neck, and I wasn’t going to let her down.

“Ready?” Astrid asked.

She’d moved up beside me. Looking to my right, I was treated to a close-up view of her were-face. Black spines grew along her long, lupine jaw, and canines as big as my thumb protruded over her black lower lip. She smelled clean, fresh, and wild.

Well, turned out my date was a hot beastkin chick some of the time, and a terrifying werewolf at other times. Damn, but I was glad she was on my side. I almost smiled.

“Ready, Astrid,” I breathed.

“All right,” she growled, her haunches bunching and her shining claws flexing as she prepared to make a massive spring forward. “Do it… now!”

I dispersed the spell, sucking up what active mana I could back into my body, while the rest—a large majority—dissipated into the air with a faint smell that was almost like gasoline.

As the Force Barrier dispersed with a tinkling sound like shattering glass, Astrid bunched her hind legs and leaped forward with a fluid, deadly grace that was like nothing I’d ever seen. She hit the ground running, not slowing her momentum down at all. In less time than it took the enemy soldiers to drop their empty mana pots and raise up their rifles, she was among them.

Their rifles went off wildly, blasting bolts of mana in the form of lightning and fireballs up into the trees, but none of the shots found a mark. Astrid’s claws ripped through the kevlar armor of one of them, spilling the contents of his chest cavity in the dirt.