Chương 55: [B2] Chapter 13: The Journal

The wreckage led them to a body that had nothing to do with the creature at all.

"Another contestant," Miho said, crouching beside it with the same careful respect she gave anything dead.

"But… this body looks much older than anyone else that we've found. It looks almost as old as the Midnight Jaguar corpse." Yukito knelt at the remarkably intact satchel and drew out a leather-bound journal, swollen with humidity but still legible in parts. He opened it carefully, and the handwriting inside was cramped, urgent in places, the entries of someone who had believed, right up until they stopped believing it, that their observations mattered enough to keep recording. He read the first entry aloud. Day 1.

Enigma is ruthless. Dropping us here for the third leg is a special kind of cruel. Miho frowned.

"The third leg?"

"Must have been from a previous season. That explains the body's age." Miho nodded as Yukito continued reading. Day 3. Confirmed: the pair bond is real. Two specimens, moving in coordination I have never observed in an apex predator in all of my years as a druid. They are communicating beyond simple territorial signaling. I believe they are mates. Miho's hand had gone still on the satchel's strap.

Yukito turned the page, still reading. Day 11. One specimen is gone. It was likely killed by another team. The remaining one has not left the river system since. Its behavior has changed entirely. Where it once patrolled, it now simply waits, and strikes anything that enters or drinks from the water without provocation or pattern. I do not believe this is territorial behavior anymore. The next legible entry was shorter, the handwriting looser and less controlled than the ones before it. Day 14.

I believe this is 'grief'. The entries ended there.

Yukito closed the journal slowly and looked at the corpse again, at a person who had understood something true just before it killed them anyway.

"They were a mated pair," he said.

"And one taken from the other. It's had months alone with that, waiting by the water for something to blame." Miho didn't answer right away. Her tails had gone rigid in a way Yukito had learned meant something was landing harder than her voice was letting on.

"It has had months with no way to know what to do with what it lost," she said quietly.

"I… might have ended up the same if not for the three of you." This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. She did not say anything more about her clan, nor did she need to. Yukito watched the shape of the thought cross her face and settle somewhere she'd carry without narrating it further, and understood, without her explaining it to him, exactly which part of the entry had reached her and why. He didn't ask her to say it plainly.

Some recognitions were only true if they stayed unspoken.

"This changes what we're walking toward," Miho said after a while. She stood, sheathing the sword she hadn't needed to draw for this.

"If Zero and Viria found the river, they walked right into something that has forgotten the difference between a threat and anything else that moves." Yukito tucked the journal into his own pack rather than leaving it to the roots that had already started working on everything else the dead contestant had carried.

"Then we need to find them faster than we've been finding anything else out here," he said.

"Following ground-level wreckage got us this far, but it likely won't get us the rest of the way before something happens to them." Miho looked at the canopy stretching unbroken overhead, the same ceiling that had swallowed every trail they'd tried to read since the drop.

"We need to see further than the ground allows." Yukito followed her gaze upward, and something in his chest went tight in a way that had nothing to do with fear of the creature at all.

"I might have a way," he said.

Several nights of practice had produced a shape that held for twenty seconds, and that was under no pressure whatsoever. On the last real test, hours ago at the fire, it had just barely scraped past that mark. What Yukito was suggesting wasn't a tested method as much as it was hope wearing the shape of a plan.

"Are you… certain about this?" Miho asked once she woke up.

"No," admitted Yukito.

"But we do not have another choice, regardless of certainty. And Zero and Viria most likely do not have the luxury of us waiting until I feel ready."

"Then stop telling me you're uncertain, and do what you think is right." Miho's voice carried none of the harshness the words alone might have suggested. Yukito huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh, rolled the tension out of his shoulders, took in a deep breath and let the shadow at his feet begin to spread, wider and more deliberate than any attempt he'd made under the safety of the campfire.

The wings did not lift Yukito gently. There was no careful, practiced climb the way the past nights had built it. He thought instead of Zero, somewhere beyond the reach of anything he could currently see, and of Viria's sharp, particular laugh, and the exact shape of silence that would exist in its place if this didn't work, and the shadow tore upward violently, wide and unstable, threatening collapse with every beat, but refusing, for reasons he didn't have time to examine, to actually collapse.

[Skill Acquired: Umbral Glide, Lv. 1] Crude aerial mobility via shadow manipulation. Stability improves with continued use. Estimated duration before collapse: 30 seconds.

"Yukito," Miho said, something sharp and startled breaking through her usual composure.

"I know," he said, and didn't wait to feel steady before pushing off the ground. He broke through the canopy's uppermost layer with considerably less grace than he'd hoped for, crude wings dragging and shuddering with every motion, and found himself, for the first time since landing in this jungle, looking at an unbroken horizon instead of green pressing in on every side. Yukito had perhaps thirty seconds, and he intended to make every one of them count.