Chương 519: 247.Predator 1

Emily's Perspective The drop pod hit the ground and slammed hard to the right. Emily had her entrance all set up. Cigarette lit. Visor sealed. Assault rifle at hand. Battle-axe across her back. Freeze-frame that moment, and it really did look like the promo art for some grimdark tactical game's limited character: not young, bad-tempered, smokes on the job, and probably treats the player's life as a running joke. Then Orpheia informed her, with total fairness, that promo art means nothing on the surface.

The hatch had barely unlocked before her center of gravity went. Her boot came down on a layer of acid-soaked slick membrane. Her knee folded, and she went straight forward. Reflex caught part of it, but not enough to salvage anything. She landed squarely on her ass in the hatchway, legs splayed, in a position ugly enough to make any military etiquette textbook spontaneously combust. Someone outside the pod hesitated a second, then reached in and shoved the half-stuck hatch the rest of the way open.

Charles Bingham stood outside, his expression rigid enough to almost pass for proper. Emily looked up, saw his face, and her temper spiked immediately.

"What are you staring at?" Her tone was vicious enough to suggest it wasn't just her that had gone sprawling — it was the entire concept of military discipline. Charles flinched at the shoulders but didn't step back. He just stood there, clearly unsure whether he was supposed to look away or not. That particular uncertainty was, in itself, irritating. Emily's temper climbed another notch.

"Hey. Give me a hand, virgin." Charles visibly choked on that, but reached down anyway.

"My name's Charles," he muttered, hauling her up.

"Charles Bingham. Not virgin." Emily used the pull to steady herself, slapped the disgusting wet muck off her leg armor, and slanted him a look.

"Yeah? Standing there staring at your Senpai's thighs — what else am I supposed to call that?"

"I wasn't staring." His ears went a little red, but he still defended himself quietly.

"I was checking whether you'd hurt yourself."

"You're a nice kid." Emily snorted.

"Unfortunate, since I'm not in the mood to praise you right now. Where's the envelope?" That, at least, got him back on script. He pulled the sealed envelope from his gear slot with near-ridiculous care, as if it weren't a relay device but an heirloom scroll the judges would personally end him over if he dented a corner. The seal tore open, revealing the cylindrical verification device inside. Emily reached for it. Nothing. She frowned and tried again. Still nothing. Her eyes went cold instantly.

"What." She stared at the dead device, voice flattening.

"Did you break it, virgin?" For a moment, Charles's face said I knew this wouldn't go smoothly. He swallowed it. He looked at the hand she was using, then at her face, and chose his words with real care.

"Senpai... maybe try your other hand?" Emily paused. She looked down at the hand she'd been gripping it with. Military-grade prosthetic. Fast, strong — snapping a neck would probably take less effort than twisting off a bottle cap. But no matter how much it functioned like a hand, it wasn't the kind of "human hand" the verification system recognized. She swore under her breath.

"Garbage specs." Then switched to her right. This time the ID ring lit blue almost instantly. Third-leg handoff confirmed. The system voice came through cold and flat, as if this weren't a relay designed to march people, leg by leg, into a killing field, but some over-automated logistics sequence. Emily's expression darkened further. She stowed the device back in her own envelope, pressed the new seal down with movements a little too sharp to call neat. Charles stood beside her, wisely silent.

He'd probably worked out that critiquing the system's design right now would only add one more body to the day's count. Once the seal was secure, she looked up at him.

"Hey. Virgin." Charles had given up correcting it.

"... What."

"Hand over your ammo."

"What?" He genuinely blanked.

"But—""Save it." Emily cut him off. Not loud — the pressure underneath the words hit harder than a shout would have.

"Your leg's done. You're staying put for recovery. Carrying that much ammunition — planning to hunt birds, or just padding your nerve?" Charles opened his mouth, looked like he wanted to argue, and let it go. He understood perfectly well this wasn't a negotiation about loadout. It was her running her own battlefield logic. Not polite. Effective. A few minutes later, Emily had considerably more spare magazines.

Charles had packed well beyond any reasonable need — less "backup" than the phrase I don't want to die converted directly into physical form and clipped neatly across his body. Emily weighed one in her palm, the corner of her mouth twitching.

"Scared this much, and still this well-prepared." Charles gave a thin smile.

"I prefer to call it risk management."

"No." She snapped the last magazine into her side mount and glanced at him.

"That's called being very afraid of dying." She said it without a shred of courtesy. Charles didn't deny it. Deep in the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars, the towering stalks glowed cold blue-violet. Haze dragged low across the ground like a breathing veil of rot. The sickly, faintly venomous sweetness in the air never let up — something half-decomposed that refused to finish the job.

Somewhere in the distance, mud swelled and burst in slow, muffled beats, reminding anyone still alive that the ground here, like the committee's conscience, could give way at any moment. Emily swept her eyes across the tree line.

"You stay here," she said. Charles blinked.

"Wait for the recovery shuttle?"

"What else?" She lifted her rifle, voice lazy, without a trace of humor.

"Runners who've finished their leg stay put — that rule made it into your head, right? Or were you planning to trot along behind me and die somewhere educational in the next five minutes?" Charles shook his head. Fast. Scared, clearly — but not scared enough to lose his judgment. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Good," Emily said.

"One thing today, done like a living person." She didn't look at him again. She turned and walked. No instructions. No encouragement. No good work out there wasted on breath she didn't want to spend. Charles stood by the pod and watched her back disappear into the shadowed slope ahead. She wasn't moving fast — almost leisurely, even. But that ease had nothing to do with strolling. It was the calm of someone who'd already decided whose count she was about to add to.

The moment she cleared the recovery zone, Emily went quiet. Not that she stopped talking — the fire she'd used to snap at people, curse the system, and strip ammunition off a junior folded away into somewhere deeper. Her breathing dropped low. Her stride stayed steady, her center of gravity steadier still. Her eyes moved across the terrain in slow, methodical passes — mud color, fungus color, cracks, footprints, drag marks, the white crust where acid had dried. Everything went in. This wasn't a race pace.

This was a hunt. She wasn't chasing a clock. And she had no intention of announcing her position to the entire planet with every step, the way certain idiots did. She was looking for people. People were more trouble than fungal beasts. And far more worth hunting. The ground answered quickly. A line of impressions that didn't match the natural rise and fall of the fungal mat grazed the edge of a low cluster of growth to her left.

A translucent pillar nearby had its outer skin scraped off, the darker inner fiber exposed. Further along, a short scrape mark — the trace a metal boot heel leaves on a hard stop. Three sets. Not one. Emily crouched and touched the marks with her right hand. Still fresh. The haze hadn't smoothed them over yet. When she stood, her eyes had changed. The woman who'd sprawled out of a hatch and cursed a system that wouldn't recognize her prosthetic — stripped now of everything unnecessary.

What remained was a very clean kind of dangerous. She lifted the rifle and cut forward along the tracks. No urgency in her stride. No break in rhythm. Almost like she was browsing. Only Emily knew that near-leisurely surface was her most comfortable state. Right before she was ready to move, her heart rate actually slowed. The world simplified along with it — down to target, angle, distance, and who spotted whom first.

She slipped into the dead angle formed by a broken pillar and a slanted rock face, pressed half her frame into the shadow, and left only one eye's worth of sightline exposed. Then she saw them. Three people, not far ahead. Three AS units in different paint jobs, spaced loose — not a formation, definitely not a team. One reading marks on the ground. One checking weapon mounts. The third with their back turned, watching for the other two.

The scent of mutual distrust, glued together only by temporary convenience, carried even at this distance. They hadn't spotted her. Good. Emily tilted her head slightly, the corner of her mouth rising by degrees. That wasn't a smile. It was the first sign that her mood had finally improved.

"Found you." Her voice was barely louder than a breath. The faint sweetness at the end of it wasn't gentle. It was the cold numbness that runs across skin the instant before a blade connects. She hadn't come here to compete. She'd come to hunt. And the prey had always been people. Emily didn't rush them. She crouched in the shadow of a broken fungal pillar, her frame nearly fused with the blackened mat behind her.

The light in the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars had never been clean — cold blue-violet leaked down from the edges of the high canopy, as if some unstable painter had soaked the night in a petri dish and poured it over this planet. A place like this was very good for hiding things. Including people. The three ahead stood at a careful distance from each other — three beasts drinking from the same rotten pool, none of them trusting the others. Emily looked left first.

Dark blue AS, Totoki crest on the shoulder plating. Seikan Academy. She let out a cold, internal laugh. Seikan Academy wasn't famous for tactics, physical conditioning, or any hot-blooded military spirit. It was famous for its accounting department — supposedly the best bookkeepers in known space, capable of turning a fleet engagement that should have bankrupted a house into a triumphant line item on the annual report.

What kind of field talent a place like that could actually produce, Emily had always held serious doubts about — or more precisely, she considered even holding doubts a waste of feeling. She filed him away. The second stood further back, in a bulkier, camouflage-painted frame — joints and chest plating carrying the aesthetic of we're practical, so we just built you a wall. Itsuwa Heavy Ordnance Academy. That kind of opponent was easy to understand. Hard. Slow. Takes punishment. Annoying. Just annoying, though.

The third was the one that made Emily's eyes narrow. Much lighter frame. Lines pulled tight, outer silhouette deliberately broken up, stance never settling. Not restless — very deliberately folding itself into the background. Beside a pillar, at the haze's edge, behind a root mass. Every step a small negotiation with the sightline, nothing dramatic, all of it good at disappearing. She didn't bother guessing long. The flavor was too obvious. A trainee off the Sanjo Special Warfare Directorate's track.

"... There it is," she murmured. The first two were the appetizer. This one was the main course. In a real engagement, meeting a fully trained Sanjo operative in the field, she'd have turned and walked without a second thought — not fear, just the respect you learn after living long enough to know the difference between a professional and a student. But this one was still training stock, a weapon still being shaped, not a finished product properly marinated in combat.

The thought that she might get to hunt something bred to be the Federation's best at vanishing made her tongue brush the inside of her canine, unconsciously. Like running a thumb along a blade's edge. The three ahead were still each minding their own business — clearly not a team, just sharing a stretch of road and a deeply unhealthy mutual tolerance. Normal enough, on Orpheia. Most people preferred keeping someone they didn't trust where they could see them, rather than turning a back on them.

That kind of armed wariness felt safer. Unfortunately. That kind of safety usually died fastest. Emily raised the rifle slowly. Kinetic, not energy. The reason was simple: anyone whose brain lived somewhere other than a briefing binder knew nearly every AS ran anti-beam coating these days. An energy weapon hitting that surface usually amounted to pointing an expensive flashlight at armor and paying it a compliment. Kinetics were honest. A bullet didn't negotiate.

Penetration or not, it at least reminded someone how hard the world could hit. She sighted on the Sanjo unit first — no other reason than that it was the most dangerous. Bang. Clean. Not the shriek of a beam tearing air — the flat metal shout an older era left behind, still entirely persuasive today. The round caught the Sanjo student's shoulder plating, sparks scattering. The reaction was absurdly fast — rolling forward almost with the impact, clearing the position instantly. Not a rout.

A conditioned reflex: survive first, sort the rest later. Good. First shot wasn't meant to kill. It was meant to tear the scene open. Second shot came right behind it. Seikan's turn. The blue-armored student hadn't finished processing anything — just turned on reflex toward the first shot's direction. The round met the center of the visor in that instant. No dramatic last line. No pause generous enough to flash back through an entire youth. One round. Dead center.

The blue frame rocked back and dropped — fast as an accountant deleting a line item that had no business existing before year-end close. Third reaction: Itsuwa. No shout, not even a wasted curse. A folding shield snapped off the back, mechanism clacking open, and in one second the scattered camouflage paint became a single, unreasonable wall. Emily fired again. Ping. Deflected.

"All right," she said quietly.

"Finally, one worth the effort." The Itsuwa student advanced behind the shield — not just thick, but braced at the shoulder with a serrated lower edge, built not merely to defend but to grind someone's nerve straight into the dirt. Not stupid, either: he understood the priority wasn't chasing down wherever the Sanjo kid had run, but forcing the shooter in the dark out into the open. Emily slung the rifle back and drew the carbon-steel battle-axe from her back.

No ornamental engraving, no ceremonial excess that would've earned the designer a lifetime achievement award in embarrassment. Just an axe — hard, heavy, built to split things. Seeing her step out with a melee weapon, the Itsuwa student visibly hesitated. Hadn't expected the shooter to switch this cleanly. Emily gave him no time to reconsider. She went straight in. Shield and axe collided in a heavy, muffled crash, sparks scattering like reluctant meteors.

The Itsuwa student was strong — steady as a moving fortification, pressing step by step, trying to herd her toward a nearby mud pit waiting to swallow her. Against most opponents, it would have worked. Emily wasn't most opponents. She gave two steps of ground, as if genuinely losing her footing, the axe drifting wide. His eyes lit — an opening — and he pressed the shield forward with a short shoulder-thruster burn, trying to shatter her balance in one hit.

At that exact moment, Emily planted her right foot to the side. The swollen fungal sac underneath burst on contact. Yellow-green acid slime sprayed the whole shield face. Not fatal. Disgusting enough. And more than enough to block a sightline. His head flinched back on instinct. The shield rose half an inch. Half an inch was enough. Emily slid in along the shield's edge, her prosthetic left hand locking onto the rim and wrenching the whole barrier out of alignment.

The axe came from below in a short, vicious diagonal cut, landing precisely in the gap between neck guard and shoulder plate. The armor didn't split at once. So she hit it again. Deeper. His knees went out; the shield couldn't hold. Emily let go and watched the camouflage frame tilt and fall — a wall built very thick, in exactly the wrong place. She shook the slime off the blade and drew a breath.

"That leaves..." She smiled.

"One." Then she finally ran. She'd considered cleaner tactics. Flanking. Cutting off the route. Driving him into a high-differential zone. Waiting for his own nerves to hand her the opening. Then decided against it. Sometimes the oldest, most brutal human method was also the fastest. The Sanjo student ran fast. Not fast enough. He picked his route well, diving deliberately into the messiest light and the densest pillars, trying to let the terrain swallow him. Against a different opponent, it might have worked.

But Emily's pursuit had nothing to do with tactical running. It looked like a large predator that had caught a scent, unhurried, closing distance with every step. She finally caught him at a half-collapsed root slope. The instant he turned, she'd already shifted the axe to her mechanical hand. And threw it. No fancy technique. Just force, and accuracy. The axe spun in a short, heavy arc and buried itself in his back.

He pitched forward, hands clawing the ground on reflex, as if refusing to believe he'd been caught this cleanly. Emily's steps slowed as she reached him. He wasn't gone yet. Breath shallow, shoulders shaking, fingers still digging into dirt. She looked down at him, voice flat.

"Guess Sanjo isn't quite what the rumors say." Not a fair assessment. She knew perfectly well she hadn't fought one of Sanjo's real trained wolves — just a cub still learning how to bite. She said it anyway. Then gripped the axe and pulled it free. He tried to roll. Too slow. Emily raised her arm. The axe came down. Everything went quiet. The wind through the Perpetual Night Fungal Pillars made a sound somewhere between a low hum and a labored breath.

Emily stood there, axe hanging loose, her eyes behind the visor cold as something freshly washed. She knew exactly which line she'd just crossed. Killing wasn't news in this nightmare of a tournament. But some strokes weren't about making sure someone couldn't stand back up. They were about leaving something else behind. A message. A warning. A way of forcing certain people sitting comfortably above to finally look down at the surface. She didn't care how the judges would score it.

She only knew that swing had, at last, said something the tournament could actually understand.