Chương 49: [B2] Chapter 7: Rot on the Vine

The fruit turned the next night. Zero understood the moment he lifted the first one from the woven pouch that Miho's warning had run out of time to remain theoretical. The skin gave under his fingers in a way it hadn't the previous morning, mushy where it should have held firm, and the scent rising from the broken flesh carried a sharpness that hadn't been present six days of eating from the same stand.

"Spoiled," he said, setting it down without needing to taste it. Miho checked three more from the pouch, each worse than the last." All of them. Overnight." one of her tails flicked, sharp and displeased.

"I told you it would fail."

"You did. I did not doubt you. I simply did not know when."

"We need more food," Viria said, already looking toward the tree line in the stand's direction.

"Fresh ones, off the branch, not whatever's left in the pouch."

"I'll go," Zero said.

"I saw a tree of them close by. I can be back before the fire needs tending." Nobody argued. It had become, over the past week, an unremarkable division of labor: Zero's shifted senses made him efficient at gathering, and efficient gathering meant less time any of them spent exposed in daylight they'd learned not to trust.

The grove was exactly where Zero remembered it to be. Heavy fruit hung low enough to reach without climbing, and Zero had one hand raised toward the nearest cluster before System Intuition pulled his attention sideways, hard, toward a nearby branch that had neither moved, nor did it give any visible reason for the pull at all. However, Zero had learned not to question that pull, even when it arrived without cause. He ran Identify directly on the branch.

IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Opaline Viper Estimated Level: 41 Classification: Opportunistic Type: Ambush predator Traits: Arboreal mobility, Refractive Camouflage, Hemotoxic Venom, Quick Strike Threat Level: High Note: Near-total optical concealment when stationary WARNING: Currently <1 meter from striking range WARNING: 95% bite mortality rate without proper antivenom Zero went still. The branches themselves still gave nothing away.

There was no outline, no shift in color, or anything that his eyes could independently confirm. Only the Identify window insisted something coiled and venomous occupied the space he'd been half a second from reaching directly into. He withdrew his hand slowly, retreated three full steps before allowing himself to exhale, and returned to camp with empty hands and a report that changed the shape of the morning considerably.

"We have no antivenom," Miho repeated, once he'd finished.

"None at all."

"We have the two vials from the first camp," Yukito said.

"Those are general purpose," Zero said.

"We haven't tested them against a hemotoxin this specific. I, personally, am not willing to discover its effectiveness by testing it on one of you after a bite has already been delivered."

"Then that tree is closed to us," Miho said.

"Which now leaves us with no confirmed food source, in a jungle that has already demonstrated multiple times how quickly it punishes wrong guesses." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"We need to find something else today. Before we're deciding this on empty stomachs and worse judgment," said Viria, repeating Miho's words from the day before.

"Covering ground in one group is slow," Miho said.

"We split in two groups, and go in two directions, at the same time. We meet back at the camp before dark." Zero looked between the three of them, and understood, before anyone said it directly, which pairing made the most sense. Yukito's shadow-work was improving nightly and needed the kind of steady attention Miho was best positioned to give it.

Zero's shifted senses made him efficient at fast scouting, and Viria's instinct for water, sharpened since the eagle, made her a useful second set of eyes near anything that moved.

"Zero and I take the river," Viria said, already reaching for the direction with the decisiveness she used when the decision had already been made.

"Running water usually means something safe is growing near it."

"Then Yukito and I will continue down the trail," Miho said, nodding toward the compressed path that had led them through three sectors already.

"If neither of us finds anything, we meet back here and reassess." Nobody disagreed. Zero fell into step beside Viria, and did not yet know that they were about to be separate for considerably more time than either pair actually had agreed to spend.

The sound of moving water reached them ten minutes before the river itself did. Viria's pace quickened toward it in a way that told Zero the sound alone had already done something for her mood three weeks of jungle heat hadn't managed.

"Please be real and not full of parasites," she said, pushing through undergrowth that had scratched at both of them for the better part of an hour. The river ran wide and unhurried between banks thick with moss, clear enough in the shallows to see pale stones beneath the surface, cool air rolling off the water in a way that made the heat feel, for the first time in weeks, like something that could actually be escaped.

"It's clear," Zero said, running Identify. IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Water Source Status: Safe"And clean," he said after reading the window." I could have told you that. I have a very sophisticated internal instrument for detecting good water. It is called 'not wanting to die', and it has never once failed me."

"It failed you the last time you filled your canteen from a stream that looked identical to this one."

"Details." She waded in three meters from the river's bank, not even a tenth of the way across, and yet the water was already past her knees. A few minutes later, she went very still, reaching down to pick up something wedged between two river stones. It was a crayfish, pale and small, its thin antennae flicking in distress.

"Are these edible?" Viria called out to Zero, who was still at the bank. Zero waded into the river for a closer look before identifying it, the water moving steadily around his ankles. Suddenly, Zero felt something else entirely. It was an impossibly large vibration through the current that had no business being there, low and vast, moving through the deep center of the river itself rather than the water above it.

Zero's eyes widened, and his arm shifted faster than he'd ever shifted before; lengthening rapidly before grabbing Viria's wrist and yanking her back to his position without regard for her balance.

Before Zero pulled Viria out of the river completely, the spot where she'd been standing erupted. It came up less like a predator breaching for a strike than as though the riverbed itself had reshaped its own geometry. A surge of displaced water and churned silt threw both of them backward onto the bank. Somewhere above the canopy's broken gaps, wind gathered where no wind had been a moment before, sharp and sudden, carrying an electrical charge against Zero's skin.

Zero got his feet under him first, dragging Viria up, and looked at what had risen. It was serpentine, coiled and vast, scaled in shifting bands of indigo, jade, and deep cerulean. Feathers grew along a ridge behind a head too large for either of them to mistake for anything smaller, dark and iridescent, shivering with the creature's own displaced fury.

Water sheeted off scales the size of Zero's own torso, and somewhere above it, the air had gone charged and restless in a way the clear sky above the canopy had no reason to produce. Its eyes found them immediately, gold-slitted and ancient. Zero ran Identify with a hand that had, for the first time since learning the skill, begun to shake before the result returned. PARTIAL IDENTIFICATION: [ERROR] Estimated Level: [DATA EXCEEDS CURRENT ANALYSIS THRESHOLD].

Traits: [PARTIAL] Amphibious, Territorial, Elemental Affinity (Storm). Threat Level: [UNQUANTIFIABLE] For a moment, both of them were too stunned to speak, let alone move.

"Zero," Viria finally said, very quietly, her hand finding his without either of them deciding it should.

"That's it, isn't it? That's what's been killing everything." The wind above them gathered further, restless, waiting on something neither of them had a name for yet, and the creature's massive head tracked toward them, slow and deliberate, the way something looked at an interruption it hadn't yet decided how to answer.

"Yes," Zero said.

"I believe it is."