The two freed men ripped the armor off the fallen guard. They moved with desperate, starved urgency. They stripped the gear like men who knew they only had seconds before the world ended again.
Armor first. Chest piece, helmet. Just enough to confuse a glance from a distance. Don unbuckled the oversized chest plate he had borrowed, wincing as the bruised muscle in his shoulder protested. He handed it to the larger of the two men without a word.
The big man took it, nodded once, and strapped it on with quick, practiced tugs. Within moments, both freed men were armored. They picked up discarded crossbows and stepped into patrol positions.
Will watched them. Good soldiers, he thought. Someone trained them.
He reached into his belt pouch out of habit. His fingers found nothing. He closed the flap and turned his attention back to the camp.
The captives dragged the unconscious guard roughly into the cage.
The captive women closed ranks around him immediately. They moved with fierce, maternal desperation, pulling the children to the back. They used their own bodies to shield the kids from the bars.
One woman, older than the rest, dark-haired and sharp-eyed, physically steered the group. She kept a protective hand clamped onto the nearest child's shoulder. She caught Will watching her from the mud.
"We're coming with you," she said. It was a line drawn in the dirt.
Will looked at the cage. Terrified kids pressed against their mothers. Two battered, starving men stood guard outside. It was a logistical nightmare that would slow them down and get them killed.
"Okay," Will said.
She let out a shaky breath, nodded once, and turned back to her people.
Curtis had been watching all of this from his corner of the cage. He looked physically sick. When Will stepped up to the bars, the actor started talking immediately. The words tumbled out in a panicked rush, desperate to rewrite the last twenty minutes.
"I thought you were dangerous, Will," Curtis babbled, his hands raised in surrender, his eyes darting wildly. "The soldiers looked legitimate. Organized! I thought they were the kind of authority the new world needed. I was trying to protect everyone. I panicked. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. If you could just—"
Will clenched his jaw. He watched a man make the exact same calculation wrong, for the same reasons, arriving at the same disastrous conclusion with complete sincerity. He had felt it in the cul-de-sac when Curtis announced he was calculating entry angles on a fight he hadn't participated in. This was larger. More personal. He kept his expression blank.
He is not stupid, Khan said privately. The ancient conqueror's voice carried the flat assessment of a man who had commanded ten thousand men and learned to categorize them accurately. He simply does not know how to be afraid correctly.
What does that mean? Will thought.
Some men, when frightened, calculate. Some men perform. He performs. He is not calculating at all. The performance is the only tool he has. He reached for it in the hollow and handed us away. He is reaching for it now from inside a cage, offering you an apology scene instead of a solution. Khan's tone remained utterly detached. He has always been rewarded for the performance. He does not yet understand that this world scores differently.
Will filed the observation. The anger shifted into something closer to a problem than a verdict. He looked at the liability sitting in the dirt and decided what to do with it.
Don drifted a few steps away from the cage, catching Maddie's attention with a subtle wave of his hand. When she stepped over, he leaned in close, keeping his back to his brother.
"He's going to blow our cover," Don muttered, his voice tight.
Maddie glanced toward the cage. Curtis was still talking, his voice climbing an octave.
She walked over to Will. "He needs to be gagged."
"Don, please," Curtis begged, pressing his face to the bars.
Maddie ignored him. She grabbed a strip of torn fabric from a discarded supply crate. "Gag him."
They tied Curtis's hands and forced the cloth into his mouth. They shoved him down next to the unconscious mercenary. Curtis's eyes above the gag were wide and weeping, but nobody addressed it. There was no time to coddle him.
"I need to tell you something," Allison whispered. She stepped up beside Will.
She wiped a smear of dark mud from her forehead. Her breathing was shallow. Her hands trembled slightly. Will noticed the sweat beading on her neck, realizing she had been burning her stamina the entire time.
She explained it in short, exhausted bursts. In the Tutorial, she had discovered she could ask the earth to move. It required deep concentration and physically drained her.
"I started the moment you decided to stay," she said. "You didn't ask me to. I just saw the approach angle from where I was standing. I thought if this goes wrong and they walk back through that entrance, we're going to need somewhere for them to go. Down, I mean. I needed them to go down."
Will looked at the tarp covering the ground between the treeline and the camp entrance. He looked back at Allison's pale face.
"How long did that take you?"
"The whole time you were getting shot at," she said, managing a weak, lopsided smile.
I like her, Khan murmured, a rare note of genuine respect in his ancient voice. I have always liked her.
Will, Maddie, and Allison took their positions. They knelt in the open dirt, keeping their heads bowed. The two freed men flanked them, gripping their crossbows. The cage sat where it had always sat.
Three sets of footsteps crunched through the brush from the north. They were unhurried, laughing about something.
[Skill Improved: Predator's Instinct (Passive)]
[Rank F → Rank F+]
[DEXTERITY: 14/20 (+1)]
The lieutenant stepped into the clearing first.
He looked over the scene. Three people kneeling. His men stood on guard over the intact camp. He missed the trembling in Don's hands. He failed to see the blood on Maddie's knuckles.
"Funny," the lieutenant said to his men, a smug edge carrying across the quiet clearing. "Things have a way of finding their way to me regardless."
One of his cronies laughed. The other produced a cigar from a pouch on his rig. It was actual, pre-System tobacco. An impossible luxury.
They lit them. They walked toward the kneeling figures, entirely confident they owned the world.
They stepped onto the tarp.
The earth simply ceased to exist.
All three men dropped. The two guards screamed, vanishing instantly into the sinkhole Allison had hollowed out.
[Mana Depleted. Earth Manipulation entering cooldown. Severe physical exhaustion applied.]
She immediately dropped to her hands and knees in the dirt, blood trickling from her nose. The magic grounded itself in harsh physical reality as her body paid the absolute toll for manipulating the terrain.
The lieutenant reacted mid-fall. His arm shot outward to catch the edge of the pit, but the limb elongated. The flesh and bone stretched with a sickening, wet tearing sound. It morphed like thick rubber as his System skill engaged.
His hand clamped around a thick tree root at the edge of the pit.
His fingers gripped.
The root held for a single heartbeat.
Then, it splintered. It wasn't a clean break. The wood groaned and tore under the sudden weight, snapping with a sharp crack.
The lieutenant dropped into the dark.
Will stood up, walking to the edge of the pit. He looked down at the three trapped men groaning in the dirt twenty feet below in the pitch black.
Well, Khan said quietly. Aren't you lucky.
Don't jinx it now, Will thought.
The rest of the group converged at the edge of the pit. The two freed fighters gripped stolen crossbows. Don nursed his bruised shoulder. Maddie leaned on her new sword. Allison swayed slightly on her feet but smiled as she wiped the blood from her lip. The women and children crept cautiously out of the unlocked cage.
Will looked at them.
This morning he had woken up face-down in the moss with a ruptured eardrum and an empty quiver. He had possessed a folding knife, two tutorial rations, and a conqueror who had reviewed his memories and found them wanting.
Khan remained silent. The math was finally adding up.
Then, the roar hit.
It came from the south. It was a mile or two away, but it didn't sound distant. It sounded like something that was exactly as far away as it chose to be, and might choose differently at any moment.
The massive, guttural sound completely halted the adrenaline high of the victory. The ground beneath their feet physically shuddered. A frequency below human hearing rattled Will's molars and made his stomach pitch.
Every bird in the canopy had already gone silent. Now, the insects went too. The sudden, dead quiet in a forest that had been growing wildly for a hundred thousand years was suffocating.
"We need to move," Will said.
They marched north. The entire group of twelve dragged stolen gear and terrified kids through the brush. They were loud. They left a clear trail. They were everything a survivor was not supposed to be. Will would have to figure out how to keep them alive later.
The big man fell into step beside Will. They walked shoulder-to-shoulder, the silent understanding of their handshake solidifying with every mile.
After a few minutes, Will asked where the slavers had been heading before the ambush.
The big man kept his eyes on the dark trees. "A rally point. A hideout. The lieutenant's plan was to contact their base, figure out our coordinates, and haul the captives back to the facility."
"What facility?" Will asked.
The big man recited it exactly the way it had been beaten into him. "The Protected Autonomous Continuity Installation for Future Integrated Civilization."
The group walked in silence, the sheer absurdity of the corporate acronym hanging in the humid air.
"The what?" Maddie asked, wiping sweat from her neck.
The big man repeated it. Slower this time.
"Did he say Pacific?" Don asked, his voice tight.
"I think he said Pacific," Allison confirmed, looking back at Will.
At the back of the group, Curtis made a muffled, frantic sound. He was still gagged and half-carried by the second freed captive. Nobody checked on him.
Will looked back once at the dark forest behind them, thinking of the furious lieutenant trapped at the bottom of the pit.
Then he looked north toward whatever had made that roar. He looked at the twelve people walking around him. They were bleeding and trusting him to keep them breathing. He tightened his grip on his bow.
Khan, Will thought, his mind sharpening into focus. Looks like we have some interrogating to do.
Finally, Khan rumbled, the dark, electric warmth of a man returning to a bloodsport he loved bleeding through the synaptic bridge. I have been waiting all day for something I am genuinely good at.
Please don't make it weird.
I make nothing weird, boy. I make things honest. These are not the same thing.
The roar didn't come again.
Which was almost worse.
Then Will smelled it.
It wasn't the rot of the surface jungle. He had been breathing that for hours. It was something older underneath it. It was a scent exhaled from the same fixed point for a very long time. It was animal and territorial and close in a way the roar hadn't been.
He stopped walking.
Tyson stopped half a step later. The big man's nostrils flared. His eyes moved to the tree line on their left. It was not the direction the roar had come from. It was the opposite direction. Already here. Already ahead.
Khan, Will thought.
Yes, Khan said, his voice stripped to its coldest register. I smell it too.
It didn't roar to announce itself. It roared to move us.
The silence in the jungle thickened.
We walked exactly where it wanted us to go.