Chapter 3: First Hunt

Hours passed in the dark of the crevice, and with every passing moment, the hollow ache in Koda’s gut turned to agony.

This wasn’t ordinary hunger anymore.

It had started to steal the strength right out of his limbs. His claws trembled when he flexed them. His legs, still bruised from the earlier chase, had begun to feel distant, as if they belonged to someone standing several feet away.

’If I stay here,’ he thought, watching the purple fog curl past the crevice mouth, ’I’m going to die.’

The thought landed harder than he expected. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was true; plain, unglamorous, and completely unconcerned with whether he was ready to face it.

He had survived a pack of scavengers and a winged beast twice his size, and every single time, survival had meant running, hiding, and shrinking down into something small enough to pass unnoticed.

But hiding forever wasn’t survival. It was just a slower version of the axe, before death.

’Cowardice doesn’t keep you alive here,’ he thought, with new conviction and realization. It just means you die weak instead of quick.

He had arrived in this place as prey. If he wanted to see another day, he needed to stop being something worth hunting and start being something that hunted back.

With newfound belief, he set out to hunt. His life as a predator has begun...

An hour later, he found a beetle-thing digging through a stretch of loose black gravel at the base of a shallow ravine.

It was a bit smaller than the scavengers, roughly the size of a hound, its carapace was a dull, oily black that caught what little light spread through the smoke overhead. Twin mandibles that were serrated and glistening, worked methodically through the gravel, snapping at something buried beneath.

Grubs, perhaps, or whatever passed for food this far down in the dirt. It moved in short, jerky bursts: dig-dig-dig, pause, dig-dig-dig, pause. The rhythm repeated over and over with the mindless patience of a dumb creature.

Koda didn’t rush, despite the growing hunger.

He dropped low instead, letting his belly nearly brush the black soil. He allowed his new feral instincts to take over; his scales seemed to dull further against the dark ground, activating some faint camouflage he hadn’t known he possessed, while his movements slowed to match the wind curling through the ravine.

Downwind. Quiet. Patient.

He watched it for what felt like ten full minutes. In that time, he learned its rhythm. Three beats of digging and one beat of stillness, its head lifting just slightly on that fourth beat before dropping back down to work.

’Now,’ he thought on the third beat, and moved.

He lunged from behind the rock in a single motion; no hesitation this time or clumsy stumble. His legs uncoiled and launched him forward with the same explosive force he’d felt during the chase, except now he was the one closing the distance instead of trying to escape it.

The beetle-thing whirled at the last instant, mandibles snapping wide as a startled hiss tore out of it. It noticed the threat a second too late to counter it properly.

Koda’s old human instincts kicked in beneath the panic; weight on the back foot, lean away from the strike zone, and he pulled back just enough that the mandibles clacked shut on empty air, an inch from his throat.

Then he closed the gap, slipping inside the reach of those jaws where they couldn’t fold back to bite him. He drove his claws straight down into the soft, unarmored joint where its head met its thorax.

SHRIEK!

The creature screamed and thrashed violently beneath him, spraying hot green hemolymph across Koda’s face and forearm. But he held on tight.

He didn’t know how he maintained his grip, only that letting go now meant giving it room to strike back, and some animal part of him understood that far better than his mind did. The thrashing grew wild and desperate, legs scrabbling against the gravel, until, all at once, it stopped.

The beetle-thing went still beneath him.

Koda remained frozen over the body for a long moment, chest heaving, green blood dripping off his claws and pattering onto the black stone.

The guilt of killing overwhelmed him at that moment. Sudden, nauseating, it rose up his throat almost making him vomit.

’I just killed it. I actually just...’

He never finished the thought. Before it could fester, a thin stream of mist began leaking from the wound at the creature’s throat. It was black, shot through with faint threads of violet, wispy and light as it curled upward like smoke off a snuffed candle.

His claw reached out and closed around the drifting mist.

It didn’t resist or scatter.

Instead, it coiled up his arm with eager speed, sinking directly into his scales without breaking the surface. There was no wound or resistance; it was pure absorption, like water vanishing into dry ground.

Warmth flooded through his body a half-second later. A gentle warmth that spread from his forearm into his chest and down into limbs that had been trembling with exhaustion moments before.

The ache in his legs eased, and the gnawing hollowness in his gut dulled. Even the torn skin at his shoulder from the winged demon’s talons, pulled tighter, the edges of the wound knitting a fraction closer together, as though something inside him had reached over and quietly begun repairing the damage.

Koda went rigid, his breath catching in his throat.

’What... what was that?’

He knelt there in the gravel for a long time afterward, staring down at his hands. His claws were still slick with dark green blood, faintly trembling, though now he couldn’t tell if it was from exhaustion or something else entirely... Excitement, probably.

Something had entered him; he was certain of that much. He could feel it even now... a faint ember of warmth settled within.

It didn’t hurt. If anything, it felt like the exact opposite of pain: a strange, unfamiliar sense of fullness, as though a part of him that had been starving far longer than his stomach had finally been fed.

He didn’t no what it was, nor could he describe it. But he understood that whatever had just happened mattered immensely.

Koda stared down at his bloodstained hands, and for the first time since waking up in this literal hellhole, he was curious.