Chương 45: [B2] Chapter 3: The Midnight Jaguar

The vultures gave it away before anything else did. Zero noticed the pattern first as a shape in the sky: a slow, patient wheel of dark bodies circling the same patch of canopy, descending and rising in a rhythm too unhurried to be searching. Scavengers did not circle territory; they circled meals, and they circled this one from a height that suggested even they weren't fully certain the meal had finished being dangerous.

"There," he whispered, and the other three followed his line of sight without needing more than the word. They reached the clearing an hour later, and it was not, Zero understood within the first few seconds of looking at it, really a clearing at all. It was a space the jungle had failed to reclaim, growth pushed back in a rough circle by something that had died there and stayed long enough to poison the ground beneath it. And at the center lay the rotting corpse of the Midnight Jaguar.

It was larger than the tutorial's baseline predators by a margin that made the designation feel almost conservative. Black fur, matted now with decay, stretched over a frame that would have stood taller than Miho at the shoulder in life. One foreleg lay at an angle that suggested it had broken before death rather than after.

The rest of the body carried puncture wounds clustered along the throat and spine, deep, precise, arranged with a symmetry that suggested teeth rather than claws or talons, in a pattern no scavenger bird could have produced afterward. Bite marks, most likely. But what struck Zero most was how little of it had actually been eaten. Scavengers had taken what scavengers always took first; soft tissue, eyes, and whatever had gone earliest in the weeks since death.

But the bulk of the animal remained largely intact beneath the decay, muscle and mass that any predator capable of inflicting those wounds should have wanted, needed, and returned for. And yet, nothing had come back for it.

He ran Identify: Corpse: Midnight Jaguar (Territory Apex, Sector 8) Estimated Time Since Death: 5-7 months Estimated Level: 70 Cause of Death: Puncture trauma, throat and spine, consistent with a single predatory strike Consumption: Approximately 8% of available biomass Note: Consumption pattern inconsistent with feeding behavior"Five to seven months," Miho read over his shoulder, her voice flat in the specific way that meant she was working to keep it flat.

"We have been searching for a target that was already rotting before this leg began."

"Eight percent," Viria said.

"That's not eating. That's barely tasting it." Yukito crouched at the body's edge, careful not to touch it, studying the wound geometry with the same attention he gave a shadow he was trying to read correctly.

"The birds didn't want to land close either," he said.

"Even now, the scavengers are giving this thing room." Miho circled the corpse slowly, two fingers extended the way she'd extended them over the fruit that morning, though this time she did not need to touch anything to know what she was reading.

"My clan's territory was contested more than once, before the end," she said.

"When something powerful decides it will not share ground, it does not always eat what it kills. Sometimes the killing is the entire message. A warning left where the next challenger will find it." This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"A warning requires an audience capable of reading it," Zero said.

"This one has been standing unread for months."" Or the audience it was meant for already understood, and left." Miho's tails, both of them, had gone still.

"This may not have been a warning to a rival predator at all. It may simply have been what happened when something crossed a line and did not survive crossing it." Zero considered this against the wound pattern directly rather than answering it with agreement or argument. He measured the spacing between punctures against three points along the ribcage. He measured penetration depth where the decay allowed an estimate.

Every strike concentrated at the same throat-and-spine junction, precise in a way that suggested either extraordinary luck across every attempt, or an attacker that understood exactly where a kill needed to land to end quickly. The pattern held under its own weight: Zero did not need to agree with Miho's reading to confirm that the data supported it. [New Skill Acquired: Predation Analysis, Lv. 1] Acquisition Condition: Passive comparison of wound patterns, strike geometry, and kill methodology across observed specimens. Skill Effect: Accuracy improves with additional data points.

"I got something," he said.

"A skill. It's for identifying comparative analysis of kill patterns."

"From looking at a dead cat for twenty minutes?" Viria asked.

"From looking at it correctly." Yukito, still examining the corpse, spoke up.

"Should we… harvest the materials? It feels like a waste to just leave it here." Before Zero could respond, an insect flew out of the cavity that had once held the Jaguar's left eye. He ran Identify out of reflex.

IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Vulture Hornet Estimated Level: 13 Classification: Hostile if disrupted Type: Swarm Insect Attributes: Hive Mind, Eusocial Behavior, Cytotoxic Sting Threat Level: Low (individual), High (Swarm) Note: Hives typically found in skull cavities They both looked at the window, and then at each other.

"... I'm guessing that's a 'no'," said Yukito.

They found the second confirmation an hour later. It was a camp, smaller than the one from that morning, a single bedroll and a cold fire and a hand-drawn map pinned under a rock to keep the wind from taking it. Three names had been written in the map's corner in careful, hopeful handwriting, the kind of list someone made when they still expected to need it later. Zero did not read the names aloud.

He filed them the way he filed anything that deserved remembering without needing to be spoken, and looked past the camp. He looked at the tree line beyond it, exactly as dense and indifferent as it had been since they arrived.

"Another team," Yukito said quietly.

"Got close enough to camp at our sector. Not close enough to leave it again." Viria scratched absently at one ankle, a quick, unconscious motion she didn't seem to notice herself making, and let her arms fall back to her sides.

"How many of the 512 teams," she started, "do you think will actually make it out of this world at all?" Nobody answered that. Zero looked once more at the three names under the rock, then at the tree line beyond them, unbroken and patient in the direction whatever had killed the jaguar had presumably come from.

"We are not looking for the strongest thing in this territory anymore," Zero said, once they'd moved on from the camp.

"So what are we looking for now?" Yukito asked.

"Whatever is strong enough to have made an apex predator worth eliminating rather than avoiding." Zero considered the wound pattern once more, filed alongside everything Predation Analysis had already given him to compare it against.

"I do not yet have enough data to say what that is. I have enough to say it is not something our assigned objective prepared us for." Miho sheathed the sword she hadn't drawn, since nothing here had required drawing it.

"Then we adjust the objective ourselves," she said, "before the system bothers to adjust it for us." She was, Zero would understand much later, more correct about the timing of that than any of them currently knew. But for now, there was only the tree line ahead, dense and unbroken, and the compressed, unnatural flattening of undergrowth that marked a path nothing native to this jungle should have needed to make. They followed it.