Book 2: Chapter 16: Become The Hunted

  The rest of the team had returned at dawn, bone-tired and dirty, still laughing faintly about a near-miss with a territorial rock lizard they had stumbled upon near the village quarry, until they saw the smoke curling from the valley.

  The laughter died immediately. The squad crested the last ridge, and what they found silenced them all.

  The kobold settlement looked half-consumed. A landscape of burned huts, blackened carved totems, and blood soaking in the dirt. Warriors limped between tents in their duty to patch wounds and pile their own fallen friends and family members onto logs to be burned. Anyone could taste it, as even the air tasted different now. No longer the aroma of cooking mushrooms and meat, instead it was like the taste of scorched wood and defeat.

  They sat in silence, no one spoke until Allie finally stepped out of the healer's tent, her hands stained red.

  Cole’s expression darkened. “How bad?”

  Allie didn’t answer right away. She just looked at Alex, and he nodded grimly.

  “The Chieftain’s alive,” he said. “Barely.”

  Peter stepped forward, already pale. “And the others?”

  Alex’s eyes dropped. “All of us are okay, but the kobolds, all their Adept warriors… gone.”

  They gathered in the remnants of the central square. The fire pit was cold now, a ring of ash and grief. No one, not even the other kobolds wanted to light it again. Obby’s illusion body, which only Alex could see, rested on his shoulder. His weirdly proportioned body sat quietly, listening, watching.

  The mood was heavy, but no one left. Not even Tom-Tom, who had stopped chewing on a burnt stick long enough to sit perfectly still.

  “We did this,” Devon said softly. “Didn’t we?”

  Cole looked at him, frowning. “What? We didn’t bring the wolves.”

  “No,” Devon said, “but we upset the balance. When we killed those badgers. We took out an entire part of the forest’s eco system. That’s why it kept throwing the mosslings at us isn’t it? Didn’t you say the elves told you the forest only sent them after threats, Alex?”

  He mulled over Devon’s words. It was certainly a possibility. He had been attacked by the mossling before they eradicated the badgers, but it was also after they had already killed the Den Mother and its bodyguards.

  “Maybe, by killing all the badgers we...

  “-we removed a natural predator,” Peter finished. “That forest is a system. Everything doing its part. That balance was on a knife’s edge, and we kicked it.”

  The words hung there. No one denied it. Even Alex didn’t speak.

  Until Obby’s voice came, low and hollow through his mind. “You can retaliate. The alpha was weakened… but not dying. Something of that level, it retreats only when wounded badly enough to reconsider. If it recovers, it will return. And this time… there will be nothing left to stop it.”

  He knew that Obby was right. Further, Alex knew that he wanted to go after the wolf. To take that chance at a real fight, even if it was crazy. He remembered watching the wolf leave, it was slower, weaker, like it couldn’t fight at its full strength any longer. Which meant, there was a wild chance.

  “We can go after the wolf,” he finally said out loud.

  Tom-Tom made a sound that might’ve been a hiss… or a prayer.

  Lance tightened the strap on his gauntlet. “After that thing? Did you not see what it did last night? That’s insane.”

  “Wait,” Kate said suddenly. Everyone turned to her. She didn’t flinch, didn’t pace or raise her voice. She just looked at the wreckage of the kobold village, then back to the squad.

  “We made this mess,” she said. “Whether we meant to or not. And I’m tired of walking away when things get hard. Or having this so called-system telling me what I should or shouldn’t do. What I am or am not capable of. Aren’t you?”

  A pause.

  “We finish this. We fix it.”

  It surprised them, her most of all, judging by the way her lips twitched after she said it.

  Alex nodded slowly, baffled by the realization that it was Kate who was the one agreeing with his insanity. But as he looked around, he could see that everyone else had a new determination alighting behind their eyes. One by one, they all started to stand up with Kate as well.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Gear up. No stalling. Take what you need from the Alex-vault. Stock potions, sharpen blades, draw every last drop of essence into your cores. We move by noon.” she said.

  Eric clapped a hand on his shoulder. “We going headhunting?”

  Alex looked toward the dark line of the trees in the distance. Toward the place where the smoke still hadn’t cleared. Where a predator waited to recover, to strike again.

  “No,” he said. “We’re going to end something we never should’ve started.”

  Tom-Tom threw up his hands. “Finally! Glorious, reckless vengeance! Like true dumb humans!”

  “Wait,” Alex said. “What’s the “Alex-vault?”

  They looked down at Alex’s bracelet.

  “Fuck,” he held up the item on his wrist.

  Garret slapped him on the shoulder, “It’s for the greater good my man.”

  Everyone else just chuckled and stepped closer to him.

  ***

  The forest was quiet in the way a graveyard was quiet. Mist hung low, clinging to tree roots and branches like the draperies of old spider silk on the windows of abandoned houses on earth. Leaves crunched softy under their boots. The squad moved in a loose diamond formation, every step measured, every breath drawn in silence.

  It was Peter who spotted the first signs of the wolves' trail. He knelt beside a patch of overturned dirt, brushing ash aside to reveal claw impressions, wide, deep, heavily staggered. “Too far apart to be regular wolves,” he murmured. “Running at speed.”

  Henry crouched beside him, tapping a torn patch of bark with two fingers. “This one passed through here… injured. Limping, but not slow. Blood on the left hindpaw.”

  Alex raised an eyebrow. “How the hell are you two the best trackers?”

  Peter just grinned faintly. “Used to go bow-hunting with my uncle. Henry?”

  “I listen more than I talk,” he said.

  The answer was fair enough. They pressed on.

  Hours passed under the dim canopy. They stopped only when they found fresh kills, ripped apart boars, half-eaten and left to rot. Markings nearby showed territorial scraping, a warning from the pack: this was their ground now.

  Which meant they were on their trail for certain. The alpha was close.

  Within the hour the team had spotted the first few straggler wolves. It was nearly a day since the kobold attack, so their wounds hadn’t fully healed. But everything was still superficial on most of the beasts that they spotted. Only minor gashes, burns or spell wounds. None of them were the Adept Tier alpha.

  But they couldn’t just ignore the smaller beasts. Sneaking past them would mean leaving threats at their rear. And the wolves could pick up their scent and alert the pack at almost any moment. So they had to take them out.

  Alex signaled them all to pull back, putting a few hundred yards of distance between the beasts and themselves before they stopped to talk an strategize.

  “Ambush lines here,” Zach whispered, scanning the undergrowth. “We flush ‘em into the narrow wedge between those hills. Funnel them right to us.”

  Lance cracked his knuckles. “Leave a few for me.”

  Kate scoffed, drawing her sword. “Don’t trip on the rocks again, hero.”

  They sprang the trap five minutes later.

  A trio of Mortal-tier wolves broke through the trees, lean and scarred. The squad burst from hiding in two groups. Eric, Zach, and Allie from the high ridge with ranged suppression, Lance and Garret in the low brush drawing attention. Devon activated his glyph trap as they crossed the midpoint, slowing the beasts in a shimmer of violet light just long enough for Zach to land a perfect shadow bolt, and Cole to finish one with a brutal hammer swing.

  One down.

  Kate rushed in behind another and severed a tendon with her blade, dropping it to the dirt before Holly slit its throat with a clean drag of silver.

  Two down.

  The third tried to flee once it had seen its two kin were swiftly slaughtered right in front of it. It turned tail on the spot and bolted back into the treeline like a coward, but it didn’t get far.

  Henry’s halberd struck down like a bolt of quiet lightning. He gave it no flair or flourish, just cold merciless precision. As it ran past the tree Henry had been hiding behind, he separated the wolf’s head from its body mid stride.

  Three.

  They all regrouped quickly and quietly. There were no celebrations, no call-outs of experience drops. Just breath, sweat, and momentum.

  This repeated a few more times. The team finding a group of wolves, and then systematically taking them out with an ambush. It became a grim and bloody routine as they all ventured deeper and deeper into what was essentially enemy lines.

  There was the worry that the stench of all the blood would eventually alert the pack to what they were doing. But Alex didnt let them slow down enough for that to matter. It didn’t take much encouragement or convincing on his part, Kate’s speech had instilled a blood-lust in all of them.

  Six groups, six ambushes, twenty dead wolves. Then they found the den.

  The clearing at the base of the ridge was pitted with old bones and black stone, the place glowed with a sickly aura in Alex’s aether sight. A nest of arcane corruption. Runes were etched into the earth pulsed faintly, drawing in wisps of dark energy from the surroundings like water through a floor drain.

  The alpha laid at the center. Even while heavily injured, its presence was towering. A pressure of immense aether rolled off its body into the surrounding area. It was a chilling sort of pressure, radiant with cold fury.

  Its coat was darker now, patches of fur gone to reveal layers of living arcane etchings across its ribs and spine. Wounds crisscrossed its body from its clash with the chieftain, one leg dragged behind, one eye was bleeding and swollen shut, but its presence was no less oppressive.

  And despite their attempts to sneak in unnoticed, it saw them. It did not run. It lowered its head, teeth bared, aether and blue-purple flames coiling from its shoulders like smoke.

  Devon inhaled sharply. “Gods. It’s drawing power from the den, those lines in the rock under it’s body.”

  Obby pulsed against Alex’s mind. “He’s right. That place… it’s a convergence site. Natural flows of aether meet here. Whatever that stone is, it was probably made by some other intelligent species, and they either died, or the wolf killed them.”

  How does it know what the glyphs do though?

  “It doesn’t need to know. It can feel the gathering of aether, and it can draw on it. That’s all it needs. As an Arcane Beast, it can gather energy naturally. That stone there is just an accelerant for it.”

  He cursed under his breath and quickly explained Obby’s observations to the team, pretending they were his own, of course.

  “So we shatter it and take the thing down, lure it away like we did the smaller ones?” Eric said, cracking his knuckles.

  “No,” Alex said, stepping forward slowly. “We kill it here. On its throne.”

  Kate smiled a face grim resolve. “Good. I was hoping we’d ruin its day.”

  The alpha didn’t seem patient enough to let them all keep talking among themselves. It let out a low, keening growl, flames rising higher on it’s body, and the air turned hot around them.

  At last, the battle was coming.

  And this time?

  No one was running away.