Chapter 54: Hunted

Dovin was not happy about this trip. For one, he hadn’t achieved any of the goals set out for him. The turn of events had been, to put it mildly, extremely disappointing. But the gift he’d left behind, while not enough to wash away the shame burning in his chest, had at least left him with a thin measure of satisfaction.

It wouldn’t last long. Not with the looks his retainers had been throwing his way since they’d fled the Storm Eagle mountains in such a hurry. He’d taken a risk they didn’t approve of, but what could they possibly say about it? He might be only the third son of a minor merchant family within the Ale kingdom, but his family held a crest, and worked closely with the royal house. That was exactly why he’d been chosen to "help" the Storm Eagles with their Lyndwyrm problem, and to take over the village once the dust settled.

Even after a conquest, the logistics of running those mines wouldn’t have been worth the trouble on their own. The ore found in the Storm Eagle mountains was unique to them, and the Storm Eagles alone knew how to forge it. But that knowledge was useless without Aura, and his family’s crest, modest as it was, with its handful of techniques, came nowhere close to matching what Kren had just done. Or had it been the bloodline that did it? Either way, an entire clan, not a scattering of families or an individual but a whole clan of people, had regained access to cultivation, and there seemed to be no diminishment or sacrifice required.

Even without killing the Lyndwyrm, if Kren had simply offered the bond, Dovin was certain the Storm Eagles would have leapt at the opportunity. The Ale delegation had never stood a chance.

Snap!

Something broke in the dark.

They’d traveled a full day from the mountains to reach the edge of the centaur forest. None of them were fool enough to cross a centaur settlement, much less a forested one, and certainly not at night. So they’d made camp here, close enough to the treeline that any other predator would think twice before approaching, but not so close that the fiercely territorial centaurs would find it easy to pick them off one by one. It would—

"I’m only going to ask this once."

Kren’s voice rolled out of the darkness, low and even, and Dovin shot to his feet. He watched as the young lion seemed to simply step out of the black itself, standing before Dovin and the rest of his party with nothing but a drawn sword in his hand. The campfire light caught his eyes, golden and ringed in blue, steady as a blade held at a throat.

"Which one of you attacked Jomin? And who gave you bastards permission to lay a finger on him?"

No answer came. Not with the way Kren had appeared out of nowhere, and not with the guilt written plainly across every face around the fire, or the not-so-subtle glances thrown Dovin’s way.

"I take it you’re the one with my answers, then." Kren’s gaze settled on him. "Very well. Give them to me, or I’ll take your tongue and get them out of you anyway."

Dovin’s eyes went wide. Of everything he’d prepared himself for, this wasn’t it. He’d been certain no one could catch up to them. Somehow, they had. How?

"What are you fools waiting for?" he screamed. "Attack!"

They never got the chance.

Aki swept in like a hurricane, a white blur that tore through the camp before the first retainer could finish drawing his blade. He had half-shifted on the run, his hands already elongated into curved, gleaming claws, his jaws stretched around fangs that caught the firelight like polished bone. The first retainer died with his sword still half out of its scabbard. Aki’s claws opened his throat in a single sweep, and the man’s startled gurgle drowned in the hot spray of blood that followed, painting the ground and the nearest tent black and red.

The second retainer got his spear up in time, and Dovin saw the Aura flare along the shaft, the thrust fast and clean and aimed straight for Aki’s chest. It didn’t matter. Aki slipped past the point like water around a stone, caught the haft in one clawed hand and snapped it clean in two. His other hand drove forward, claws sinking into the man’s belly and ripping upward through muscle, ribs, and lung. The retainer looked down at himself in dumb disbelief, mouth working soundlessly, before Aki tore his hand free and let his body fold into the dirt, still steaming.

The third man broke. Dovin saw it in his eyes, the moment courage gave out and instinct took over. He dropped his weapon and ran, sprinting for the treeline, shrieking for help that wasn’t coming. Aki didn’t even bother to chase. He crouched, coiled, and launched himself across the camp in a single bound, landing on the man’s back and driving him face-first into the earth. There was a wet, splintering crack as claws punched through the base of the retainer’s skull. The screaming stopped mid-breath.

The fourth retainer had been Dovin’s most capable guard, an Aura Awakening cultivator who’d survived two border wars and gutted more than a few feline slaves in his time. He fought like it. Dovin watched his Aura roil out in thick sickly waves, his twin short swords flashing in tight, vicious arcs, forcing Aki back a step, then another. For a moment, a single desperate moment, Dovin dared to hope.

Then Aki’s fangs closed around the man’s sword arm, and the hope died. There was a sound like a tree branch snapping, followed by a scream that tore up the night as bone gave way and the limb came free at the elbow. Aki spat the arm aside, drove a knee into the man’s ribs, and caught him by the throat as he doubled over. He lifted him clear off the ground, held him there, thrashing, for one slow, deliberate breath, and then tore his throat out with his teeth.

The body hit the ground like a sack of wet grain.

The silence that followed was somehow worse than the screaming. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the dark, an owl called and fell quiet. By the time Dovin truly understood what he was seeing, he realized with a lurch of horror that he was the only one left alive from his entire party. Four men, gone in less time than it had taken him to shout a single order.

He screamed. Whether it was fright or fury, no one could say. Dovin turned and ran, straight for the centaur forest. Whatever waited in those trees couldn’t be worse than what stood behind him, and in any case, he no longer had the luxury of choosing between the death ahead and the death at his back. All he knew was that he had to get away.

He made it five steps.

On the sixth, his legs simply stopped working. The next step, the one he’d meant to plant against the ground, never landed, because there was nothing there to plant it. He pitched forward into the dirt and only then, looking back over his shoulder, did he see what had happened. His legs, both of them, had been severed cleanly below the knee. They stood a few paces behind him, still upright for one grotesque second, before toppling over in the grass.

The pain arrived a heartbeat later. His scream tore through the night, raw and high and animal, until a heavy clawed foot came down between his shoulder blades and pinned him to the earth, crushing the breath from his lungs and cutting the sound off at its root.

"We should do this quickly," Aki said, his voice a low, rumbling growl as he stepped closer, blood dripping from his claws and from the white fur at his chin. "He won’t last long with both legs gone."

"That depends entirely on him." Kren’s voice came calm and quiet from somewhere above. "If he wants a chance to see another day, he’ll tell me what I want to know. And he’ll tell me quickly."

Dovin felt the first cold threads of despair pushing up through the haze of pain. There would be no escape from this. He felt Aki’s foot shift, rolling him roughly onto his back, and found himself staring up at a white-furred beast far smaller than many he had seen, but with a power coiled beneath that muscled frame that only a fool would ever underestimate. Blood ran down the creature’s jaw. It looked at him the way a butcher looks at meat.

"P-please, spare me! My family are merchants! What do you want? Is it money? We have so much money, we can give you any amount you name! Please... my legs..." Dovin sobbed.

Kren frowned, then knelt in front of him, deliberately placing those blue-ringed golden eyes directly in front of the snake-kin’s face, close enough that Dovin could see his own terrified reflection in them.

"Did Jomin beg for his life?"

Dovin’s mouth snapped shut.

He remembered, vividly, the way the young wolf had begged while he stabbed him again and again, the knife going in and out, the boy’s muffled sobs against the dirt. And somehow, a cold certainty settled in the pit of his stomach: whatever Kren and Aki had planned for him, it was going to be far worse than anything he had done to Jomin.

He swallowed hard, looked up at the Lion King kneeling in front of him, and said the only thing left to say.

"Please... mercy."

Kren smiled.

"Don’t worry. Everything is going to be just fine."