Chương 23: Friends

The horse found them before they found it. Miho and Viria had traveled three hours East of the trading post, following directions that had been frustratingly vague, when the ground began to tremble with a rhythm too fast and light to be an ox's heavy gait.

"There," Viria said, pointing. Crested a low rise at a dead run was a creature of pale, grey-white coat shot through with streaks that crackled electric blue along its flanks, its mane whipping in a wind that did not match the still afternoon air around it. Identify caught it as it closed the distance. Storm-Mane Horse Species: Spirit Beast (Equine) Attribute: Lightning/Wind Traits: Extreme ground speed; static discharge on contact; evasive instinct Threat: Moderate Note: Outpaces most ground-based pursuit.

Direct chase inadvisable.

"Outpaces most pursuit," Viria read aloud.

"Not all." It circled fast and wide, testing the perimeter of their position with the wary calculation of something that knew direct confrontation was rarely necessary when its speed alone could solve most problems. Viria moved to intercept it, sword in hand, and it was gone before she'd closed half the distance, vanishing into a streak of grey-white and crackling blue. She caught up, breathing hard, ten minutes later, to find Miho waiting where the horse had briefly paused to graze before bolting again.

"Okay, that approach is not working," Viria said.

"No," Miho agreed.

"It isn't."

"Do you have any suggestions?" Miho considered the open terrain around them; the low rises and shallow draws, and the way the horse's circling pattern had repeated itself twice now in roughly the same shape.

"It's gauging us," she concluded.

"If it wanted to leave this territory entirely, it would have by now. It's deciding whether we're worth the trouble of driving off."

"So it'll come back?"

"It already has. Twice, actually." Miho traced a rough circle in the dirt with one finger, marking the horse's path as best she could reconstruct it.

"It seems to favor this direction when it breaks off. There's a narrowing in the terrain there, where the draw cuts between those two rises." Viria looked where she pointed.

"Go on."

"If we can predict where it commits to a pass, you could be waiting at the narrow point with the space-severing cut ready before it ever sees you as a threat worth circling."

"And you?"

"I herd it. Pressure from the correct angle makes it choose the path of least resistance, which we control by limiting its options." Viria thought about this, turning the strategy over with visible focus.

"I can work with that."

They positioned themselves accordingly: Viria at the narrow point between the rises, waiting with her blade at the ready. Miho circled wide, deliberately visible, applying pressure from angles that left the horse exactly one comfortable direction to run. It took the bait within twenty minutes.

The horse broke from its grazing at Miho's approach, bolted in the direction she had shaped for it without realizing it had been shaped, and entered the narrow draw at a speed that left it no time to recognize the second threat waiting until it was already committed to the line. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Miho made the agreed-upon sign—a sword arc directly above her head—to signal Viria to start the cut.

The horse reached Viria before a shout from Miho could have. But Viria was ready. Her cut was precise, with the spacial extension catching the horse mid-stride. It stumbled, momentum carrying it forward into the narrow walls of the draw, and Miho's second strike, arriving from behind at full speed, finished what the Viria's had started. It went down in a final crackle of dispersing static. Viria stood over it for a moment, breathing hard, sword still extended.

"That," she said, "was the best plan we've ever come up with together."" My plan," Miho corrected, already moving to find and extract the core.

"Miho," Viria said, her tone less playful than usual. Miho paused extraction, and looked up at her.

"Thank you." Viria's cheeks flushed slightly, "You're… an incredible teammate. I mean it." Miho looked at her, surprised and thoughtful in roughly equal measure, and cracked the closest thing to a kind smile Viria had seen on her.

"Shut up," said Miho, in a warmer tone than her words implied, "and start preparing for the journey to Seol-Ainu." She couldn't hide the genuine happiness that Viria had learned to read from her demeanor.

Zero and Yukito found the ram two days after the boar, in a cliffside dwelling that the journal's underlined warnings had not adequately prepared them for. The Stonecurl Thunder Ram lived in a series of stone outcroppings high along a windswept ridge, its territory marked by curled horn-prints driven into solid rock with enough force to leave permanent grooves.

When it finally appeared, charging from a ledge above them with a speed that defied its heavy, curling horns, the air around its strikes carried an audible crack of displaced thunder. The fight took longer than the boar had, as the ram's mobility on the cliff terrain worked against every approach that would have succeeded on flat ground.

It was Yukito's shadow, finally, that solved the problem: anchoring the loose scree beneath its hooves at the critical moment of a charge, destabilizing its footing long enough for Zero to close the gap and find the vital point along its lowered skull that Identify had marked. It went down with a final roar of thunder that echoed off the surrounding stone for several seconds after the ram itself had stilled.

They camped that night at the base of the ridge, the cliffs rising against the dark sky, with more stars visible here than either of them had seen since the orientation chamber. Yukito sat with his back against a rock outcrop, the fire small and carefully shielded from wind, his shadow pooled comfortably beneath him in the particular settled way it took on these days, more often than not.

"We have two more cores," he said, mostly to himself.

"Plus what Miho and Viria have," Zero said.

"Nine total, if both of their hunts succeeded."

"They succeeded."

"You sound certain."

"I am," Yukito said.

"About that, at least." Zero looked at the fire for a while, watching the small flames work against the cold mountain air, and thought about the boar's vital point, and the ram's loose footing, and the way the last weeks had assembled themselves into something that no longer required deliberate cataloguing to track. He simply knew where they were in the sequence. He simply trusted the others were where they were supposed to be. He had not, he realized, checked if the core count had updated today.

And for once, he didn't feel the need to. Yukito and Zero lay down on the ground, looking up at the stars that dotted the ink-black sky For a while, none of them spoke.

"Zero?" Yukito finally asked. Zero turned to look at him, noting his shadow trembling like it did when he was nervous.

"Are we…" He paused.

"Friends… yet?" Zero went still. He turned the word over the way he had learned to turn over words that mattered. Friend. He had heard the word in the lab's recordings; an abstract term applied to relationships he had never been permitted to form. He had heard Viria use it loosely, performatively, the way she used most language. He had watched the junior disciples use it among themselves. Zero thought about what a 'friend' would mean to him. He did not have a researcher's definition for it.

There were no operational parameters, nor a measurable threshold. He had only the accumulated weight of the last weeks: the way Yukito's shadow settled when he trusted the people around him. The way Miho's tail moved when something landed that she would not say aloud. The way Viria's silence cost more than her speech, and how she had still, despite that cost, told him to be careful at the fork in the road, because she meant it.

He thought of his own list, when he made it, and found it complete without effort: Yukito, beside him now, asking a question that had clearly cost him something to ask plainly. Miho, north of here under the same cold stars, who had taught him to observe everything that mattered. And beside her was Viria, who made jokes because the alternative was unbearable silence, and had still chosen, every time, not to leave him in it.

"Yes," Zero said after contemplation. Yukito looked at him, his shadow had stilled.

"You, Miho, and Viria." Zero said it plainly, because he had learned, somewhere in the last weeks, that the plain version of a true thing was usually the correct one.

"All three of you are my friends." Yukito was quiet for a long moment, looking at the fire rather than at Zero, which Zero had learned was sometimes how Yukito managed things that mattered too much to look at directly.

"Thank you," he said finally.

"You're… also my friend. If that's okay with you." Zero nodded. Yukito's shadow, pooled beneath him, settled further still, dark and undisturbed in the cold mountain air. Neither of them said anything else. Above them, the unfamiliar stars wheeled slowly toward morning, and somewhere north, under the same sky, two more cores sat carefully stored, waiting for Team Zero to become four again.