The ground took Proxy, and for exactly one second she remained as she was, her hand extended toward a space that had already decided not to contain anything.
It wasn't dramatic, which is to say it didn't try to be. It wasn't long either.
It was simply the precise amount of time required for her to notice something that should have been impossible to miss, and yet somehow required confirmation anyway.
And the slope it had vanished down was steep, wet, and so thoroughly indifferent to her rage that it might as well have been making a point about it.
She took one step toward the slope.
A suppressed shot arrived at the same time, as if asking if she didn't forget someone.
It came from the right, close enough that she felt the air shift against her ear.
She turned toward it rather than away, dodging reflexively.
At the corners of her vision, the undergrowth flickered, a shimmer pulling back into itself like a hand withdrawing from heat.
Six, maybe seven meters out.
By the time she had identified the direction, the operative was already repositioning. The jungle closed behind them without commentary, which felt rude, if not unexpected.
The fire in her chest that always had been there rose in temperature.
What she felt now wasn't it flaring but compressing, forced inward by two concurrent facts. The slope, and the thing that had made use of it.
She labeled the situation the way she labeled everything in this mode, which is to say, with simple and cold brutality.
He went down. The obstacle made sure of it. The obstacle is present. The obstacle must disappear.
Nyx moved after the shimmer.
She didn't quite expected her opponent to be waiting at the end of that direction, which would have been optimistic to the point of stupidity, but she moved because staying still only benefits camouflage, and she had no intention of hiding.
She entered the undergrowth at speed, pushing through with a weight her implants allowed her to disregard, and found what always followed movement like that.
The branches flickering, the ground remembering a footstep it had already passed by.
Four or five meters ahead.
The operative understood something important, which was that distance was their only real resource, and they were spending it with care.
Nyx noticed that.
Nyx did not care about that.
Underneath everything, like a current that refused to be interrupted, was the part of her that tracked Proxy the way gravity tracks water.
It pointed down.
Down was currently inaccessible.
The awareness of that sat in her chest with a patience she did not possess.
She had never been separated from him in this form before, which meant she had never needed a way to deal with it.
So her mind constructed one immediately, because it had no choice, a compass needle pointing toward something it was temporarily forbidden to reach.
Temporarily.
The suppressed pistol spoke again, from a new direction, ahead and to her left, as if testing whether she was paying attention.
This time the round found Nyx.
It clipped the outer edge of her left shoulder, tearing through fabric and then into muscle with heat that arrived before pain, because pain is always late on its own.
She turned into the contact, not as a reaction but as a continuation, because she had already been moving and the direction was confirmed conveniently.
She raised the SMG and fired.
One more burst. Three rounds.
The jungle absorbed them without objection and returned nothing.
The operative had already moved before her first round left the barrel.
Six rounds remaining.
She stood in the aftermath, in that quietness that follows failed confirmation, and allowed herself four breaths of concentration.
Simply because she understood her limitations with an accuracy that bordered on irritation.
She was not built for this type of fight.
She was built for the last two meters of a fight, for the moment when distance collapses and everything simplifies into close, violent quarters.
She was not built for pursuing something that refused to exist in a location, not through dense cover, not with a nearly empty magazine, not without network support, and certainly not without Proxy at her left providing coordinates in that flat, irritatingly reliable voice.
She was made to end things.
The thing in front of her was designed specifically to avoid ending.
The fire burned brighter.
She allowed it.
The shimmer appeared again, higher this time, using a gap in the canopy about fifteen meters to her right, moving through open air as if briefly acknowledging visibility.
Nyx tracked it and fired.
Two bursts. Six rounds.
The first burst she observed missing, which is to say she corrected for them too late.
The second she watched intersect the space the shimmer occupied at the moment she pulled the trigger, and the sound that followed was not vegetation.
Recognizable, in the way language is recognizable even when you're not trying to translate it.
Something reacted.
The shimmer broke from its line, faster now, retreating into the undergrowth with the unmistakable logic of someone prioritizing distance.
The camouflage still worked, technically, but under motion it revealed its own failure, the background unable to keep up with the foreground.
More importantly, the behavior had changed.
Nyx followed.
Not at maximum speed, because the terrain demanded respect and she had already witnessed the consequences of ignoring that demand. She tracked through displacement, through sound, through the small involuntary betrayals of a body in pain.
The shimmer flickered ahead at irregular intervals, withdrawing deeper.
The operative was looking for a place to wait.
They would not find one.
The trail terminated at an old root, thick, exposed, pale where time had stripped it clean. On that pale surface, three drops of blood had landed from above.
Nyx crouched, the empty SMG hanging from its sling, and regarded the drops with a gaze that bordered on obsession.
Then she touched the blood.
She brought her finger to her mouth before she had consciously decided to do so, which meant the decision had been made elsewhere, by something faster, something less concerned with permission.
What happened next was not visible to the naked eye.
It occurred beneath skin, between the tongue and the back of the skull, a small precise implant in a place there was no need to name. The blood came into contact with it, and from there it was mapped into a way that could be tracked.
Nyx's nose flickered in attention.
Her targeting overlay in her eyes changed color.
A deep, saturated crimson.
Her pupils contracted until they were almost gone.
It arrived as certainty, extracted from the molecular signature now present in her system, pointing into the jungle ahead and to the left with the same inevitability her internal compass used when it pointed to Proxy.
She let the empty SMG hang where it was and drew the knife.
She moved.