Chương 69: Chapter 68 - What Hunts From Above

The woods changed around her by degrees. At first the trail remained clear enough to feel like a path intended for ordinary people with ordinary business. Then the land roughened. Roots pushed higher through the ground. The timber crowded closer. Brush thickened in the spaces between trunks. The gaps between birdcalls lasted longer here, and Kira found herself listening for what had gone quiet as much as for what still made noise.

The light beneath the canopy had already begun its slow decline, enough that Kira kept one part of her attention on the hour as well as the trail. She had no intention of turning her first independent trip into the woods into a night march because she had found too many interesting things to test. Kira liked having to pay attention. Every hundred yards gave her another small problem to solve: footing, direction, visibility, some sign she could identify or one she could not.

She moved at a steady pace, letting her eyes and instincts work together. Her sight kept handing her more than simple sight had any right to offer. Small heat signatures in bark where insects hid. Broken moss where a boot had slipped and recovered. Deer crossing sign from earlier in the day. A fox trail half-overwritten by something heavier. Once, the faint old warmth of a place where a larger animal had lain and watched before moving on.

The path thinned until it vanished beneath roots and leaf litter, then returned twenty yards later as little more than a line of disturbed ground. She did not resent that. She only adjusted. There was still a small, private thrill in stepping over a root without having to think about whether her body could do it. She suspected that feeling might last a very long time. At the first long clean stretch between roots and brush, she stopped. Bjorn shifted on her shoulder.

"Ohhh. An experiment."

"You say that like I'm predictable."

"I prefer to think of myself as observant." Bjorn considered his own claim for a moment.

"Also, you are extremely easy to read." Kira paused in a stretch of cleaner ground where the roots lay flatter and the brush gave her enough room to fail without paying for it with a twisted ankle. The sphere settled around her in its invisible hush, a six-foot pocket of altered certainty moving where she moved, tightening her sense of balance and force as it formed. She looked ahead, then back the way she had come, and chose a point just inside the edge of what she could hold clearly in mind.

She chose a short blink onto clean footing, with enough room around the landing that no branch could punish a bad estimate. She drew on the Wraithfire and used Wraith Step. The world folded around her and snapped back into place. Her boots landed exactly where she had intended. Kira steadied at once and turned her head sharply toward Bjorn. He remained on her shoulder with perfect composure, tiny paws still resting as though nothing unusual had happened at all.

"You came with me."

"I did." Kira checked inward immediately. Wraithfire Reserve still felt clean. No extra wrench in the channels. No sense that bringing him with her had increased the cost so long as he was touching her. Kira checked the reserve again, then once more just to be sure. No measurable difference. A pane flickered across her vision. Wraith Step - Rare - 6%"Good," she murmured. Bjorn sounded pleased.

"I enjoy being included in discoveries."

"You are an extremely useful variable."

"That is a lovely thing to say to a friend." Kira laughed softly and moved on. She practiced again later, carefully and only where the ground gave her permission. A short blink over a root tangle. Another across a little wash where the dirt had broken clean. Once from a low stone lip to a patch of firmer earth ahead. She did not try to force distance she did not own. Wraith Step lived inside the sphere, and the sphere's range remained what it was. Six feet. Precise. Useful.

The kind of limitation that rewarded discipline instead of ego. She repeated the test whenever the ground offered a safe landing and got the same result each time: Bjorn traveled with her while in contact, and his presence did not measurably increase the cost. By the fourth Step she trusted the result enough to stop treating it as provisional. The core continued its slow constant labor beneath all of it, the condensing work now so routine it had become part of the act of existing.

After another hour she could feel the difference there too, subtle but distinct: the core had grown denser under the steady work, its internal pressure a little tighter and more exact. Then the System marked it. Heart of the Wraithfire Court - Unique - Rank 1 - 13% Thirteen percent matched what she had been feeling: the core was tightening under steady work instead of changing in sudden jumps.

Her footing had improved, her route choices were cleaner, and she was beginning to notice mistakes before committing to them. She chose cleaner routes through broken ground. Avoided soft patches before stepping into them. Circled where circling was wiser than forcing a line. Paused in the places that wanted listening. Trusted the small changes in bird behavior, the feel of old runoff under the leaf litter, the way brush sometimes told the truth faster than a path did. At some point the System rewarded that too.

Survival - Common - Rank 2 Kira smiled to herself.

"You sound encouraged," Bjorn said.

"I am. Getting a little better at existing, one step at a time." He was quiet for a moment, considering that.

"That has always seemed worthwhile." As the hours passed, more of what she saw began to carry meaning. Bent grass suggested direction. Broken moss showed where weight had shifted. Birdsong told her when something ahead had moved recently enough to matter. High above one narrow turn in the trail, Carden watched her pass from the fork of an old pine. He had seen her on the approach to Briarwake. Seen the cloak. The eyes. The little ruby creature on her shoulder that had waved at him like it had every right to exist.

He had watched her leave the lodge too, this time on foot, which told him more than a horse ever would have. Leaving the horse behind told him she had listened to the lodge. Carden watched her hesitate at a wet patch, backtrack three steps, and take the higher roots instead. Ten minutes earlier she would have walked straight through it. Later she stopped before a blind turn and listened until a jay resumed complaining somewhere beyond it. She moved like someone new to the woods but not new to paying attention.

More importantly, she corrected fast. The bear remained another matter. He had no category for the bear and had decided that was healthy. He watched until she passed beyond his section of timber and the woods swallowed her properly. Jarek reached the fork with six riders behind him instead of two. Varris and the Orrel brothers had caught them on the north road after word reached the rest of the band, and Kesh's nephew had come with them, pale with anger and eager to prove he belonged among older men.

Kesh himself was still behind, stripping the dead camp of anything worth carrying before following. The road forked beneath a bent boundary stone and a stand of pines that had grown close enough together to make the air beneath them feel shaded even in decent light. East promised broader travel, larger settlements, inns, ferries, wagons, and enough ordinary road traffic to swallow a lone rider if she kept moving.

West narrowed toward hunting country, lodge tracks, rough shelves, old timber, and every story men told when they wanted the fire a little closer and the dark a little farther away. Most of the men wanted east immediately.

"East," Varris said, as if the question had already been settled and the rest of them were slow to notice.

"Towns. Crossroads. Stables. She sticks to the road, we gain on her in a day." His horse had already drifted a step east while he spoke it. Kesh's nephew nodded too fast.

"And if she stops somewhere, we ask questions, sleep dry, and take her when she rides again." Maro said nothing yet. He watched Jarek instead. Noll Orrel, younger of the two brothers riding at the rear, shifted in his saddle and glanced west with open dislike.

"No point going into those woods if we don't have to." That got a few mutters of agreement. West meant timber. West meant rough ground. West meant the half-heard rumors that lived around Briarwake and the hills beyond it. Men missing on bad hunts. Sounds at night nobody wanted to name twice. Drums, if you believed the sort of people who had too much dark and not enough company. Most of them did not believe in the drums. Most of them still did not want to ride toward where the stories lived.

"East makes sense," Varris said again.

"If she meant to live." Jarek kept his horse pointed west.

"We settled this," Maro said quietly.

"You settled it with three men," Varris replied.

"There's seven now." Jarek looked at the six men around him before answering.

"She had three horses and gave two away." Jarek finally looked at them.

"If she meant to stay on the road, giving up two horses was stupid. More weight carried, fresh mount when one tires, more ground before dark. She dumped them because she knew they were about to become trouble." Varris frowned.

"Road gets worse west," Jarek continued.

"Horses start costing more than they help. She knew that." Varris stopped arguing long enough to glance west again.

"You're building a lot on one decision," he said, but quieter now.

"I'm building on the one thing she did that makes sense," Jarek replied. Varris looked west again. Noll shifted his reins from one hand to the other, and nobody answered immediately. Everything else at the camp contradicted something: Brann's purse untouched, gear left behind, the sword cut through, Tessa's head lying where no ordinary road fight should have put it.

"Maybe she had somebody watching from the trees," Noll said. Varris shook his head.

"Then where were his tracks?"

"Class skill."

"For four kills?" Maro rubbed at his beard.

"Could be." Jarek looked at him. Maro shrugged.

"Don't mean I like it." Reff had gone quiet.

"What if it was her?" Reff's horse tossed its head at the sudden pressure on the reins. He loosened his grip immediately, pretending he had meant to. Nobody answered him. Varris swore softly.

"A Jaheiran messenger did not kill Brann, Tessa, Lute, and Harlan."

"Then what did?" Maro asked. Reff looked down at his horse's mane. Varris stopped chewing the inside of his cheek. They took soft targets and left when numbers turned. Men who forgot that did not stay on the road long. Varris looked west again and worried the inside of his cheek harder. Kesh's nephew glanced west again, then away.

"If the stories about those woods have teeth, and if the girl didn't do it, then what are we actually riding after?" Jarek looked at him. The part Jarek could not shake was how calmly she had behaved afterward. Scared people ran. They did not stop to hand horses over and talk to reeves. Varris rubbed one hand over his jaw.

"Most of the band would vote east."

"They don't get a vote," Jarek said. That shut it. Not because they liked him. Because Jarek was Brann's brother, and because the boss waiting behind them would be less forgiving than the woods ahead. If they brought back nothing but guesses and excuses, they would have a problem at their own fire that made lodge-country look hospitable. Maro tilted his head slightly.

"You think west because the girl had a plan." Jarek turned his horse toward the darkening line of timber.

"Whoever killed Brann knew where they were going." He gave his horse a touch of heel. Varris went last, still looking east once before the trees blocked the fork behind them. The forest deepened around her as the hours passed. The trail had narrowed from road to track, from track to suggestion, and then from suggestion to the sort of passage only people who belonged there knew how to read. Kira did read it.

Out here, with no streets and no crowds and no walls pressing in, her eyes felt like they had been waiting for this. They drank in everything: the bend of grass, the pressure of old tracks in soft earth, the slight scrape on bark where something had passed too close, the way light broke differently where branches had been disturbed. It was not quite subconscious. Her mind was simply sorting faster than she could name, cutting through noise and handing her what mattered.

She loved it, even with the nervous part of her insisting that enjoying unknown predator tracks was probably a character flaw. She found the paw prints in a patch of damp ground near the base of a crooked pine. They were larger than she expected, clawed, deep at the front where the weight loaded, then lighter at the back. Cat, maybe. Wolf, maybe. Something in between. She crouched and stared at them.

Bjorn, balanced on her shoulder as though that had always been the correct place for him to ride, looked out into the woods instead of down at the track. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Do you know what made those?" he asked.

"Nope."

"Do you think it is nice?" Kira followed the next print with her eyes, then the next.

"I hope so." Bjorn considered that.

"I have my doubts." The depth of the prints suggested substantial body mass, and the edges were sharp enough that whatever made them had passed recently. Following it was objectively a poor decision. She looked uphill.

"I'm going to follow those for a little while." Bjorn made a thoughtful sound.

"I suspected you might."

"You can say it's stupid."

"I think you already did." Knowing better turned out not to be enough to stop her from following the prints uphill. Once a narrow stream cut across her path. Rather than pick her way across the slick stones, she marked the far bank and blinked. Landing there still gave her a tiny surge of delight that had almost nothing to do with efficiency. The tracks led higher, then along a shelf of darker earth where roots knuckled through the ground and thorn-bushes pressed close.

They angled around a stone outcrop, dipped beneath a leaning cedar, and continued for long enough that Kira began building a picture in her head of something low and powerful, moving with lazy confidence through territory it knew well. Then the tracks stopped. Kira halted. The last clear print sat in a patch of black soil beneath a half-fallen log. Beyond it - nothing. No stride. No scrape. No sign of a turn. She frowned and stepped closer, eyes dropping, tracing the ground in widening sweeps.

"I missed something." Bjorn's voice came quietly beside her ear.

"Ohhh. You have been looking down for a very long time." Kira understood what he meant a beat too late. Bjorn's paws tightened once against her shoulder. The warning hit her a heartbeat before the attack. She moved on instinct. Kira threw herself backward into a hard rolling fall as a black shape crashed down where she had been standing. Soil and bark exploded across the clearing. She came up in a crouch just in time to see the creature fully.

It was bigger than a panther and much heavier through the shoulders than anything that size had a right to be. Its black fur blurred the line of its shoulders whenever it crossed shadow. Its head sat too broad, jaws thick with pale hooked teeth, and its foreclaws bit into the ground with enough force to cut grooves in the earth as it turned toward her. Its yellow eyes never left her, and it came forward without testing the distance first. Bjorn peered at it.

"Ohhh. A duskmaw." Kira did not look away from it.

"Are they nice?" Bjorn thought for a moment.

"No."

"No kidding." Its shoulders rolled low beneath the black coat as it came toward her, paws setting down without sound despite the weight behind them. Kira called the sphere. Bjorn did not jump down. He stayed exactly where he was. Invisible pressure settled around her, and with it came that sharpened sense of space and movement she was already learning to trust. Wraithfire flowed through her channels. Her blade formed from the back of her hand in a pale white-blue edge just as the duskmaw loaded itself and launched.

She blinked. The world folded and snapped open again five feet back and left. Bjorn shifted with her without so much as losing his footing. She came out of the Step turning, appearing behind the tree it had used as cover moments before. The beast sailed through the place she had vacated, twisted in the air with frightening speed, and landed in a shower of dirt. Wraith Step - Rare - 9% It recovered before she had fully reset her footing.

Kira had expected it to turn wide after the missed pounce; instead it planted one forepaw, folded around its own momentum, and came back at her from an angle she had not prepared for. She moved before it could finish the turn, trying to take the opening before it vanished completely. Her first step landed half a foot farther inside than she wanted, close enough that the duskmaw's breath hit her wrist. The blade opened a line across its ribs, black fur parting around sudden wet red.

The duskmaw recoiled half a step, more angry than slowed. Her reserve dropped hard enough to make her stomach sink. Just under half. She had spent too much of it playing with Wraith Step. The duskmaw spun back toward her, wounded now, one side wet with blood. The sound in its throat deepened as it turned, lips peeled back from wet teeth. Kira shifted her footing. It came again, this time lower and faster, trying to rush through her centerline instead of pouncing clean.

She tried to read the shoulder, then the weight behind it, but the duskmaw changed direction halfway through the commitment and her prediction went bad. She slipped left. Too late. One foreclaw caught the outside of her thigh. Cloth tore, then skin, and the impact spun her hard enough that the ground came up sideways. Her knee struck first. Pain followed a fraction later, hot and immediate, and for one sick instant the leg did not want to answer her.

The duskmaw was already turning again, her left leg was not stable, and her reserve sat under half. For the first time since it dropped from the tree, Kira understood that the next exchange could kill her. She drove the blade down as the duskmaw passed. Wraithfire met hide, then the dense resistance beneath it, and Kira had to keep pushing until something gave with a hard internal jolt.

For a second the jolt through the blade became Lute again - the steel giving, the softer resistance after it, the scream that followed. Kira's stomach turned. Not Lute. Move. The duskmaw hit shoulder-first, rolled hard enough to tear leaves and soil loose, and kicked once before going still. Silence returned in a rush. Only when it stopped moving did Kira notice her blade hand trembling. Kira stayed crouched until she was sure the animal was not getting up.

Her breathing sounded too loud inside her own head, and when she looked down, blood was already darkening her trouser leg.

"Okay," she managed.

"That sucks." Bjorn looked from the carcass to her leg.

"You corrected the second mistake faster than the first." Kira stared at him.

"I got clawed."

"Yes."

"You are grading this?"

"Of course." Blood ran warm down into her boot. She crouched carefully, grimacing, and examined the wound. The claw marks were deep enough to matter and bleeding hard, but nothing looked obviously severed and she could still put weight on the leg. She drew on Wraithfire and formed a binding wrap over the torn flesh, tightening it with practiced focus. Wraith Bind - Rare - 6% The Bind tightened over the torn flesh until the bleeding slowed enough that she could move without marking every step in red.

Only then did she let her interface come alive. Experience Gained Duskmaw - Level 4 - Defeated Experience Progress: Level 2 - 86% More panes followed. Wraithfire Blade - Rare - 9% Sphere of Wraithfire - Unique Class Mechanic - 17% Acrobatics - Common - Rank 22 Athletics - Common - Rank 16 The reserve loss finally made sense. Holding the blade was cheap; making it cut through living resistance was not. Kira let out one unsteady breath. She looked over at the dead duskmaw and then at Bjorn.

"Am I supposed to skin it or something?"

"Perhaps." Kira waited. Bjorn looked at her bleeding leg.

"That is a lesson for a day on which you have fewer immediate lessons."

"Strong no."

"That seems sensible." Kira straightened slowly, tested her weight, then nodded once to herself. It hurt, but it held. She looked once at the branches above the dead duskmaw.

"I never looked up." Bjorn's ears tilted.

"No." She grimaced.

"That's going in the notebook." Kira checked the branches before she looked back at the tracks. She had not done that twenty minutes ago. Her leg hurt, her hand still trembled, and she was disturbingly pleased with herself. The road attack had been chaos, with Seralyth doing half the killing before Kira understood what was happening; this time she had chosen the pursuit, misread the danger, taken the wound, and still finished the fight herself.

She reached down, rested her good hand briefly against Bjorn's head, and smiled despite herself.

"Come on," she said.

"Let's find somewhere I can limp with dignity." Kira limped away from the kill site before she let herself sit. She went far enough that the carcass was no longer the first thing anything following the blood would find. The duskmaw lay where it had fallen, black fur drinking the light and the blood around it soaking dark into the forest floor. That much blood in a quiet stretch of timber was an invitation, and Kira had already learned enough today to distrust invitations she had not meant to send.

Bjorn watched her slow, as though she meant to stop here.

"A little farther," he said gently.

"How far is a little farther?"

"Far enough that whatever comes first goes to the dead thing instead of to you." Kira kept moving, favoring the torn leg, until she found a low rise of stone and roots where the ground opened just enough to give her decent sightlines in three directions. A fallen cedar behind the rise was thick enough to break a direct approach. She lowered herself onto the stone with a hiss through her teeth and put her back where she could see the approach.

"Good enough," she muttered. Bjorn hopped down beside her and looked back the way they had come.

"Duskmaw blood carries." Kira glanced at him.

"Carries to what?"

"Scavengers. Other duskmaws, if there is a mate. Anything nearby that follows blood instead of tracks."

"Charming." Kira looked down at her leg. It still throbbed hard enough to make every step unpleasant, but the leg held her weight. She called up her interface. Health: 93% Seven percent did not look like much on a pane. The blood soaking her trouser leg disagreed. Bjorn glanced at the wound, then back to her face.

"For a claw that deep, that could be worse."

"That is exactly the kind of sentence I never enjoy hearing." She shifted carefully and laid two fingers near the edge of the wound, feeling the heat and tension there. The flesh was already closing faster than any normal body should have managed without a healer working over it. Her body, with all its Vaelor refusal and strange refinement, had started the moment she stopped making it worse. The speed of the closure made her reach for the notebook.

Kira pulled out her notebook, licked the tip of the charcoal stick, and wrote: First solo monster fight Duskmaw - killed Leg injury from foreclaw Health dropped to 93% Wraith Bind used to stabilize / reduce bleeding She paused, then added: Find time to first +1% health recovery Once the wound had a timestamp and a percentage beside it, Kira could think about it instead of merely hurt. Bjorn settled himself beside the notebook and watched the woods with his usual calm interest.

"You did very well."

"I got hit."

"Yes."

"That generally means room for improvement."

"You were hit, learned why, and changed what you did next. That is more useful than an easy victory." Kira snorted once.

"You are deeply unbothered by edge cases." She looked back toward the direction of the kill site, though she could no longer see it through the trees.

"You said mate."

"I did."

"Do they keep them?"

"Sometimes," Bjorn said.

"Sometimes they range alone. Sometimes they pair for a season. Sometimes they remain together as long as the hunting is good. They are, in my experience, unpleasantly flexible." Kira grimaced.

"Excellent."

"They also like high ground, fallen timber, and any prey that forgets the world has an up." Kira wrote again. Lessons: 1. Tracks can go vertical 2. Do not fixate on ground sign 3. Practice reserve use with more discipline 4. A forest predator's first attack may already be the kill attempt 5. Duskmaw may have mate She underlined the third line. That one annoyed her most. She had burned reserve while feeling clever and then nearly paid for it with her leg.

Her reserve sat lower than she liked, though it was already climbing. Wraithfire Reserve: 58% Better than half, though still lower than she should have allowed it to fall. Kira leaned her head back against the cedar and watched the health number for a while. Birdsong returned in threads, then paused, then resumed elsewhere. Something small moved through fern fronds downslope. A squirrel chattered angrily somewhere above her.

The longer she sat, the more obvious it became that the silence was crowded with things moving beyond her sight. She liked that, mostly. After a little while, her interface flickered. Health: 94% Kira sat up straighter at once and looked at the note she had scratched down earlier.

"Twelve minutes. Roughly." Bjorn turned toward her.

"A useful rate."

"Fast?"

"For the injury, yes. For you, perhaps less surprising." She wrote it down immediately. 93% → 94% in ~12 minutes while seated / resting / stabilized Then beneath it: If initial rate remained constant: ~84 min from 93% → 100% Almost certainly bad model. Need additional ticks. That gave her the first useful baseline she had ever had for natural healing. The next point in Vitality - or the next clean injury - would give her something to compare against.

"See?" she said aloud.

"The body is a spreadsheet if you stab it enough." Bjorn considered this.

"I do not know what a spreadsheet is."

"It's-" She reconsidered.

"It's a very organized piece of paper."

"Ah." He did not sound convinced.

"You do turn pain into notes with impressive speed."

"It is incredibly productive if you survive it."

"That is not quite the word I would use." Kira smiled faintly and looked down at the wound again. The wound was still deep and angry, but its edges had begun closing and the weakness in the leg had eased from urgent to manageable. She could walk on it, though sprinting or trying anything acrobatic would be a profoundly stupid idea.

"How much time before the blood draws interest?" Bjorn considered.

"Depends what is nearby and how hungry it is." Kira gave him a look.

"Remarkably precise."

"The woods rarely provide schedules." She tapped the notebook against her knee.

"I want one more health tick." She glanced toward the carcass.

"I also don't want to be here when the hypothetical mate arrives to discuss my choices." Kira let out a breath and looked toward where the duskmaw lay. A few minutes earlier she had been following tracks because she was curious. Now she was injured, low on reserve, and sitting within scenting distance of a fresh carcass. She would wait for one more Health tick, then move before the blood behind her became news to anything larger.

Birdsong had begun returning in cautious patches, though every few minutes it cut out again somewhere deeper in the timber. Her interface hovered at the edge of her vision. Health: 94% She wanted the next tick because one percent meant little and two data points could lie; three would at least begin to suggest a pattern. So she waited. Bjorn sat beside her notebook on the stone, tiny ruby paws tucked neatly beneath him, eyes on the trees. After a while he said, very quietly, "Something is coming."

Kira did not move her head.

"Big?"

"No." That was not automatically comforting. She let her breathing stay shallow and slow, every part of her held in that careful stillness just before action. The breeze shifted and a moment later she saw it. A fox-sized animal stepped through the ferns near the carcass, narrow-footed and pale along the spine as if somebody had dusted its fur with ivory ash. The color of old bone showed through the darker coat in sharp lines at the shoulders and muzzle. Its ears were narrow and high.

Its tail trailed behind it in a pale-black sweep. Kira watched it pick its way toward the duskmaw carcass and frowned slightly.

"That's a bone fox," Bjorn murmured. Kira kept her eyes on it.

"Because it's the color of bone?" Bjorn paused.

"Maybe," he said. That made her turn her head just enough to look at him. Bjorn's expression remained very composed.

"That is not why it's called that, is it."

"Ohhh," he said softly.

"Not primarily." Kira looked back at the fox. It approached the dead duskmaw without the slightest hurry, circled once, then sat back on its haunches beside the hind leg as if considering where to begin.

"Watch," Bjorn said. Kira did. The fox lowered its head. For one strange instant her eyes lurched. Pressure gathered behind Kira's eyes as her vision tried to shift into a deeper mode she had only touched before in flashes and pressure moments. The image doubled, the visible world briefly overlaid by a second pattern she could not yet hold.

Around the fox's muzzle and paws, thin pale strands appeared for less than a heartbeat, almost like spun glass or luminous connective tissue, lacing over the leg of the dead duskmaw. Kira narrowed her eyes hard, fighting the instinct to blink. The strands tightened. Muscle loosened from bone in a wet collapse, each layer separating with impossible precision. Kira's stomach tightened when the fox bit through the exposed bone with a clean crack and began to eat. Kira stared.

"Well," she whispered after a moment.

"That is upsetting." Bjorn nodded.

"Yes."

"You knew it could do that."

"I did."

"And you thought 'watch' was enough warning."

"That seemed the clearest available path." Kira looked back at the thing and felt her eyes trying to reach again for that deeper layer. The pale strands were gone now, or hidden from her, folded back into whatever strange little system the fox carried with it. She could tell they had been there. She could not yet will herself cleanly into the mode that would show them on demand.

The lens, or whatever it actually was, kept catching anyway - half a second of strands, then nothing, like a radio station drifting in and out of range. She'd grab it, lose it, grab it again, attention snagging on the pattern every time it surfaced, only for the next crack of bone to pull it back to the animal itself. Mildly annoying. Also completely fascinating. Its ears pricked suddenly. The fox seemed to lose definition without moving at all.

Light stopped catching cleanly along its coat, and the edges of its body became strangely difficult to hold even while Kira could still see exactly where it stood. Kira's breath went shallow.

"You see that?" she whispered. Bjorn did not turn his head.

"Yes."

"I can still follow it."

"That is good." Birdsong stopped upslope first, then farther left. Something heavier moved once through brush and went still. Bjorn's voice went very quiet.

"Do not move." Kira froze before she had even decided to listen. The second duskmaw came through the trees without hurry, larger than the first and scarred across the muzzle. Each paw settled almost silently despite its size, and it advanced without hesitation, nose low at first, then rising as it took the blood and the ruin of its mate into itself. Bjorn watched it without moving. The muscles along its shoulders bunched beneath the coat. Kira's grip tightened against her palm.

Her injured leg had started throbbing again, and the reserve was nowhere near full. She remained absolutely still. The bone fox remained almost invisible near the carcass, frozen in its strange little half-absence. The duskmaw continued toward the carcass until Kira could see the scars along its muzzle clearly. Kira mapped the nearest options without moving: Wraith Step left behind the cedar, uphill if the leg held, blade only if the animal committed.

Chasing the fox or trying to seize initiative did not even make the list. Running outright was probably impossible. Fighting it in her current condition looked worse. The mate stopped beside the corpse. Its head lifted. Its eyes passed over Kira's hiding place and settled on the fox. For one long second nothing moved except a strip of loose bark shifting in the breeze. The fox gathered itself. For one awful instant its head turned toward Kira's hiding place. Don't.

It launched the other way, a white-black flicker through the brush, half-seen and vanishing. The duskmaw answered with a deep tearing roar and crashed after it. They tore away through the timber in a blur of muscle, leaves, and broken undergrowth, the fox slipping between trunks in impossible little half-disappearances while the heavier predator crashed after it with terrifying speed. The chase tore downslope, veered farther west, and finally faded into the trees.

Kira stayed still until the pressure in her lungs turned painful. Only then did she realize her nails were dug into the heel of her palm and her injured thigh had begun trembling from holding the same position. Kira finally exhaled.

"I hated that." Bjorn looked up at her.

"Understandably." Neither of them moved for another few seconds. Kira sat there a moment longer, then called up her interface again. Health: 95% She blinked and checked the note she had made before.

"Nine minutes," she whispered.

"Maybe a little under." Bjorn's ears tipped toward her voice.

"For the healing?"

"Yes." Her hand missed the notebook the first time she reached for it. She tried again. 93→94: ~12 min 94→95: ~9 min Observed recovery rate increasing. Possible causes: wound closure reduces ongoing loss / rest / Wraith Bind / Vitality effect / nonlinear Health display. Insufficient data to isolate. Kira read the intervals twice, pulse finally settling. The gap was already shortening enough that she could no longer treat twelve minutes as a stable rate, though she still had no idea why.

Her breathing steadied as she wrote. The wound still hurt, but the urgency had drained out of it by degrees. The throbbing had eased enough that she could think around it instead of through it. A pane flashed a moment later. Stealth - Common - Rank 6 Kira glanced at the Stealth increase.

"Apparently sitting perfectly still while terrified counts." Bjorn nodded.

"Fear does not make stillness less difficult." Another pane followed. Survival - Common - Rank 3"Survival too." Bjorn's ears tipped forward.

"Better." Kira glanced at him.

"Better than killing it?"

"Different." Kira checked the woods once more, listened, then leaned back against the cedar and let herself wait just a little longer. She wanted another look at the bone fox someday, preferably from much farther away and without an angry duskmaw mate nearby. Her leg was healing faster with each interval, and her new body was once again making something impossible look routine. She wanted one more tick. One more data point. Then she would move. When it came, it came faster again.

Health: 96% Kira stared at the number for one satisfied beat and wrote it down immediately. 95→96: ~7 min Recovery intervals shortening. Cause unknown. Need more injury data. Then, beneath that: Test whether Vitality affects initial delay and later recovery rate. She tapped the charcoal lightly against the notebook and smiled to herself.

"That," she said, "is extremely useful." Kira closed the notebook, tested the leg once more, and rose. She checked the branches before she checked the trail this time. Bjorn noticed.

"Learning?"

"Aggressively." She picked up the route west again and stopped spending Wraithfire on problems her feet could solve. Somewhere ahead, the delvers had gone beyond the last reliable trail. Kira followed, and the next time a mark in the mud caught her eye, she checked the branches before she crouched to study it.