Noe walked Cold Cry all the way back to the clearing where the fight had taken place.
Several Contestants resting on the ground got to their feet the moment the two of them stepped out of the trees, all eyes on Cold Cry. Two of them even came over to help.
Noe smiled and waved them off politely, then eased him down onto a flat stone.
The others gathered around, and someone offered up two bottles of water.
She thanked them, opened one and handed it to Cold Cry, then opened the other for herself and took a couple of sips.
"That demon was," Kimura started.
Noe nodded.
Word that the Three-Headed Demon was dead spread fast, and every eye turned to Cold Cry lashes had just saved all their lives; few looked ready to drop to their knees right there. Understandable, really. Most of them had already given up on surviving the night, and nobody had guessed someone like him had been in the crowd the whole time.
Along with the awe, there was something like relief settling over the group.
"How's Yuka?" Noe asked Akino.
"Much better. Just some scrapes. What about Cold Cry? Is he okay?"
Noe glanced down at him. The cold was already fading fast from his skin, but she shook her head.
Cold Cry looked up at the four or five worn-out faces in front of him. He remembered there being over a dozen people here when he'd gone off after the Three-Headed Demon. How had it dropped to this few, this fast?
"Is this really all of you left?"
"A few more went after that six-legged thing," one of them said, a little too pleased with himself, clearly hoping to impress Cold Cry.
He went quiet for a moment. "You should've let it run. One demon on its own isn't a threat. Chasing it wasn't worth it; this whole mountain is full of things nobody's mapped. Running off blind is how people get killed."
Every face in the group shifted at once.
How long had they been gone?
"About ten minutes."
He didn't say anything else, just stared at the ground, thinking.
The small crowd drifted back to their resting spots. Off to one side, three people cornered Kimura, asking whether they should go looking for the missing ones.
Kimura glanced at Cold Cry. In their state, they couldn't survive another round of being hunted. Nobody could decide, so in the end they agreed to wait a little longer.
Noe sat down beside Cold Cry and noticed his condition was actually getting worse as the cold left his body.
His haori, spotless minutes ago, was now dotted with red across the shoulders and back. The cold had likely frozen his wounds shut during the fight, and now that it was thawing, everything he'd taken was showing through.
He hadn't even noticed the wounds himself, but something was clearly wrong. A wave of dizziness and cold hit him all at once, and his grip on the water bottle wavered.
A thin line of blood traced down his pale cheek from his forehead.
"Cold Cry, you're bleeding?"
Noe pointed at his forehead, her face draining of color. Contestants nearby turned at the sound, and Akino came over from where Yuka sat.
Cold Cry couldn't hear her anymore. What was left of his focus was drowning in panic. He lifted the bottle, trying to clear his head with a sip, and before he'd even swallowed it, a mouthful of blood sprayed straight into the bottle.
The water turned red instantly. A stunned silence, then everyone rushed toward him at once.
The bottle hit the ground with a thud, blood spilling out across the dirt.
He sank to his knees, blood dripping steadily from the corner of his mouth.
"Cold Cry, what's wrong? Are you all right?"
Noe's voice shook as she gripped his arm and looked up at the crowd. "Is anyone here a doctor? Someone, please, look at him."
Everyone traded looks, faces going red with helplessness.
A moment later, Cold Cry raised a hand to signal he was fine and asked, weak, "What time is it? How long until sunrise?"
"A little past five," someone said. "About an hour left."
"Then from here on, we all stay together. At first light, we head up the mountainside and hold there until the assessment ends."
Everyone nodded.
What about the others?
The thought hit the whole group at once. Almost half an hour had passed since the search party left after the Spider Demon. If they weren't back yet
Kimura looked around the group. "I'll go find Eimi." She'd been the first to chase after the Spider Demon, and after everything they'd survived together this week, he wasn't leaving her out there.
Cold Cry paused, then said, "We'll go together. We follow their route down the mountain. If there's no sign of them by the time we reach the slope, we turn back."
Everyone agreed.
Akino helped Yuka along. Noe helped Cold Cry.
Yuka had come around fully by now, though her injuries still slowed her steps.
Cold Cry was in far worse shape than he let on. His final move, the Dragon Dance, had killed the Three-Headed Demon, but the impact had shattered his left wrist in the process. The Jumping Demon's earlier kick had left hidden damage in his chest, and the long, brutal fight afterward had aggravated it enough to bring blood up.
With Kimura leading, the group retraced the path Eimi and the others had taken across the clearing, up the slope, past the bare tree where the dead Contestants still lay scattered. Every face in the group turned grim at the sight.
At the top of the rise, they saw the other side of the mountain for the first time: a lake lying still under the moonlight, almost beautiful enough to belong somewhere else entirely, nothing like the horror the rest of the mountain had turned into that night.
They picked their way down the slope, scanning the ground for any trace of Eimi's group. Eventually someone found a broken bracelet wedged into a crack near the water.
Kimura recognized it as hers.
The broken clasp meant something had gone wrong. But there were no bodies anywhere in sight, just a mess of scattered footprints.
"The bracelet proves they were here, at least. Let's spread out and look for anything else."
The group broke into pairs and threes and started working along the shoreline.
"You think maybe she just dropped it while washing her hands?" someone asked.
Noe helped Cold Cry over to where the bracelet had turned up. They leaned in to look at the water, but it was too dark to make anything out.
A cold feeling ran up Cold Cry's spine; something was down there. Something bad.
He noticed thin, thread-like scratches carved into the rocks along the shore, all of them pointing toward the water.
What was in that lake?
What would it take to leave marks like that in stone?
He pulled Noe back from the edge and scanned the rest of the shoreline. The waist-high grass on every other side stood untouched, undisturbed, which meant whatever this was, it hadn't come from land.
"What's wrong? Why'd you pull me back?" Noe asked, confused.
Something's wrong here.
Something's very wrong.
"There's something wrong with this lake. We need to leave. Now."