Chương 56: [B2] Chapter 14: Reunited

The horizon, when Yukito finally saw it whole, was somehow more disorienting than the jungle floor had ever managed to be. Green stretched in every direction without a single break he could use as a landmark, the canopy was now an unbroken floor from above the same way it was an unbroken ceiling from below, and for one disoriented second he understood why nobody who'd ever crossed this jungle had bothered mapping it from the air. There was nothing up here to map.

Just distance, and the crude, shuddering shape of his own shadow-wings straining to hold him above it. He didn't have time to appreciate the view. He had, according to the window, less than thirty seconds before the shape would collapse and drop him back into the canopy he couldn't currently see through. He scanned fast, sweeping the horizon in the same rough arc Miho used when checking a blade's edge, and found nothing at first. Green. More green.

The distant glint of water that had to be the river, sluggish and wide even from this height. He didn't have the sight, time, or range to close the distance, but he only needed to be seen.

He hammered every scrap of density he could manage into the crude wing-shape, holding it wide and dark against the pale afternoon sky, willing it to hold past the threshold his own uncertain skill had already tried to impose on it.

The shape screamed against his control the entire time, threatening collapse with every second, and Yukito understood, gritting his teeth against a strain that had nothing to do with muscle, that this was the first time Umbral Glide had ever been asked to do something that actually mattered rather than something he was merely practicing at getting right. He held it for twenty seconds. He held it for twenty-five.

At thirty, it began to fray at the edges, and he pushed everything he had left into holding the shape a few seconds longer, because a few seconds might be the difference between being seen and not.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Zero saw it first. It was a shape too structured to be a bird, too dark and deliberate to be anything the jungle would have produced on its own, holding position above the tree line with an intent that could not possibly be accidental.

"Viria." She followed his gaze, squinting against the fractured light breaking through gaps in the canopy.

"Is that—""Yukito." The shape held for a few more seconds, unmistakable now that they were both looking directly at it, before it dropped suddenly and without grace, collapsing back below the canopy the way it had come.

"He found a way to fly," Viria said, something close to wonder breaking through the exhaustion in her voice.

"He actually found a way." Zero was already moving, cutting a direct line through undergrowth toward the bearing the shape had held, and Viria followed as fast as her improving ankle allowed, favoring the joint but no longer needing to be carried by anything but her own determination.

Yukito hit the canopy hard on the way down, the glide giving out entirely a few meters above the branches rather than holding gracefully to the ground, and only Miho's timing kept the landing from being worse than it was: her hand caught his arm at the last moment, absorbing enough of the fall that he came down hard rather than badly.

"You did it," she said, checking him for injury with quick, efficient hands before he'd even fully caught his own breath.

"Barely." His legs were shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the landing.

"Now, we wait."

They moved toward the spot Yukito had come from with the same urgency that had carried them this far, and it was within two hours that the two pairs found each other properly, breaking into the same rough clearing from opposite directions at nearly the same moment. Miho saw Zero first, and something in her chest, held tight since the roar had first reached them, finally allowed itself to loosen.

"You're alive," she said.

"We are," Zero confirmed.

"Considerably more informed than we were before we split, and considerably less rested, but alive." Viria limped into view a few steps behind him, and Yukito crossed the remaining distance before either of them had finished processing that the reunion was actually, finally happening. They stood there a moment, all four of them, in a clearing none of them had chosen, breathing hard, saying nothing yet, because the sight of each other standing upright was, for the length of that first breath, more than enough.