Chương 50: [B2] Chapter 8: Lost Together

It made its decision in less time than Zero had hoped for and more time than he had any right to expect. The strike came low and fast, a wave of displaced water arriving a full half second ahead of the creature's actual body. Zero was already moving before the wave reached the bank, hauling Viria backward into the tree line with a speed his legs had never been able to produce before.

"We're running. Follow me." Zero was already moving, leaving Viria little choice but to do as he said.

"That way is—" Her voice caught as a tree behind them came apart under a tail-sweep that reduced a century of growth to splinters in a single indifferent motion.

"Zero, that's the wrong way, the camp is—""I know where the camp is."

"Then why are we running away from it!?" He didn't answer immediately, because answering cost breath he needed for the shift that was already reshaping his legs into something built for speed over uneven ground rather than for looking human while doing it. He answered once the shift had settled, and the gap between them and the thrashing serpent had opened enough to spare the words.

"Because if we run there, we lead it toward Miho and Yukito, who do not yet know what we know. We do not have the information nor strength it would take to fight this. Neither do they. And I am not getting any of my friends killed today." Viria's face, for one raw second, showed him something that wasn't fear nor argument. It was understanding, arriving faster than she probably wanted it to.

"Fine," she said.

"Wrong direction. Right reason." Behind them, the jungle continued coming apart.

The serpent moved through the dense growth the way water moved through a crack that had always, secretly, been wide enough, closing ground through terrain that should have slowed anything its size and simply didn't. Wind gathered ahead of it in short, hard gusts that had no business existing under a canopy this thick, snapping branches loose before the creature's own bulk ever reached them.

Zero cut left through a gap in the undergrowth, forcing a correction, buying mere meters that vanished as quickly as he produced them. Viria's hand found his shoulder from behind, and a violet seam tore open just ahead of them, wide enough for both to pass through and close behind, buying two, maybe three seconds before the creature simply plowed through the space the fold had occupied as if the interruption in reality had personally offended it.

"That… should have… worked better," Viria panted. Zero did not waste breath on a response The tail came around in a wide, scything arc, and Zero threw himself sideways with Viria gripped in one arm, feeling the displaced air of the near miss like a physical blow against his back. They hit the ground hard, rolled, came up already running, and Zero understood, in the brief clarity that preceded every genuinely desperate decision, that outrunning this in a straight line would not resolve favorably.

"The bow," he said.

"Can you slow it?"

"With arrows? Zero, look at it!" If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I don't expect you to kill it, but we need to buy some distance." Her jaw set, the expression she wore right before doing something she was going to complain about afterward. Still, Viria wrenched the bow free without breaking stride, nocked an arrow, turned, and loosed in a single motion that three days ago had taken her five attempts and a dead eagle to manage cleanly. The arrow struck one massive golden eye and skittered off scale that hadn't even registered the impact as worth responding to.

But the creature's head snapped sideways regardless, a half-second flinch, reflexive and small, and Zero used the half second for exactly what it was worth. With adrenaline pushing his energy into overdraw, he grabbed Viria, shifted the joints of both legs into a configuration that traded balance for raw speed. It was unstable, and he had tested it exactly once before, and never under conditions this desperate. Still, he covered ground that should have cost them twice as long.

"Again!" he said to Viria, who was slung over his shoulder. Viria loosed two more arrows without arguing, each strike buying the same small flinch at the cost of an arrow she didn't have infinite supply of, and a draw visibly straining muscles that hadn't held a bowstring in five years before this week, and not once in the awkward position that she was currently being carried in.

They broke into a wider stretch of terrain, with thinner root systems, more open ground, and the mistake revealed itself the instant open ground let the creature move without dense growth to slow it. It closed the distance in a single surge, and Zero didn't have time for anything more sophisticated than stopping suddenly, flinging Viria off his back, putting his own body between the creature and her, then reshaping his spine into something with reinforced plating along the vertebrae.

The strike that landed was not the finishing blow he'd braced for. It was a glancing pass, close enough that the wind of its passage threw both of them sideways into the underbrush, but not the direct hit he'd prepared his body to receive. However, Viria was not as unharmed. Between Zero's sudden halt and the serpent's pass, she was knocked unconscious. For one horrible second, Zero thought both of them were about to die.

Then, the creature arced past them, banked in a wide, water-heavy curve, and did not immediately turn back. Zero lay still for another full second, registering damage that turned out to be minimal, before he understood that the serpent was not right behind them. It had stopped at the tree line's edge, coiled and massive, watching them from a distance it hadn't closed further. Its attention, total and singular since the moment it breached the river, had begun to divide.

Its gaze drifted back toward the water as often as it held on the two of them still tangled in the underbrush. The creature held its position a moment longer, its gold eyes fixed on them with a weight that promised nothing about mercy, and then, with the same unhurried, ancient confidence that had characterized every motion it had made, it turned and poured itself back toward the water.

Viria groaned in pain as she regained consciousness shortly before midnight. Zero, who had not left her side, was tending to a fire when she started to stir. He watched her blink for a few seconds while she got her bearings.

"What… happened?"

"It's not chasing us anymore," Zero whispered.

"I think we're safe. For now, at least." Viria opened her subspace and added a dry stick to the fire.

"We're alive," she said, as though needing to confirm it aloud before trusting it.

"Yes."

"That… thing is what's been killing apex predators across probably every territory that we've been to, and it looked at us the way you'd look at something that walked into your house uninvited."

"That is one way to describe what we did." She let out a laugh with no humor left in it, just air that needed somewhere to go.

"Great. Wonderful." Zero looked around them at terrain he did not recognize, canopy giving no clear indication of direction, a river now somewhere behind them that had briefly promised safety and delivered the opposite.

"Do you remember which direction we came from?" Viria asked. Zero ran every version of the calculation he knew how to run, and arrived nowhere useful.

"No," he said.

"I do not. Do you?" Viria made a sound between a snort and a wheeze.

"I've been unconscious for hours, and it's too dark for me to see anything except for the fire. So no," she said.

"And besides, you're the one with the night vision, not me." Somewhere around them, faint and swallowed by distance, the river continued exactly as it had before either of them had ever waded into it.