Chapter Eight – The Road to Mirth
The forest thickened the farther north he went.
Roots clawed across the earth like the fingers of buried giants, and the canopy pressed low, dripping with moss and shadow. The air was damp, metallic, charged with unseen eyes.
[Environmental stability: Declining.]
[Detected biomass signatures: multiple.]
The AI chip's voice flickered in his skull, precise and patient, a pulse against thought.
Leylin adjusted his path without slowing. Each stride was deliberate ..not the stumbling of prey, but the silent cadence of a predator who understood he was not trespassing, but claiming.
Something stirred ahead.
A rasping breath. The crack of a branch.
He slid into stillness, weight distributed over the roots, every sense reaching. The chip's data spilled like light across his mind: Quadruped. Dense musculature. Aggressive gait.
He didn't wait for confirmation. Instinct surged, cold and electric. He was already moving when the beast emerged.
It tore from the shadows, a lupine mass plated with bone across its shoulders, scarred hide stretched over raw power. Its jaws yawned wide enough to swallow his head.
Leylin moved aside like water slipping past stone. His arm snapped upward — not claws, not yet, but fingers honed to a predator's point. They raked across the creature's throat.
Hot blood steamed in the cool air. The wolf staggered, gargling, before his hand closed and tore.
The essence came eagerly. He fed.
The world tilted on its axis, colors deepening to impossible shades, sounds unraveling into single threads he could pluck one by one. His breath came easier. His limbs felt less like borrowed flesh and more like extensions of his will.
[Essence absorption complete.]
[Neural response time: +6%.]
He wiped his mouth, though the copper tang clung stubbornly to his tongue. "Next."
....
By midday the forest began to thin, bleeding into a plain of fractured earth and half-buried stones. The ridges loomed in the distance, their slopes dark with shadow. Beyond them ... a whisper burned into his stolen memory ...lay Station Mirth.
But the plain was not empty.
He felt them before he saw them. Footsteps carried wrong against the soil, a pattern of weight and hesitation. His head turned, and there they were: a loose crescent of humans threading their way across the broken land.
Eight in all. Scarves over their faces, armor scavenged from half a dozen corpses, rifles so patched they looked ready to fall apart. Blades hung from belts, chipped but sharp enough to kill.
They didn't see him at first. Predators rarely notice when they have already cast themselves as hunters.
[Detected threat cluster.]
[Engagement probability: 94% favorable.]
[Estimated duration: 23 seconds.]
The chip was wrong.
It took him eleven.
The first died without sound ... a twist of the neck, spine snapping like dry wood. The second screamed, which only helped him. Fear disordered the group. They swung rifles wildly, loosed shots into trees and stone, but he was already among them, a shadow with teeth.
A blade grazed his arm. He let it. Pain was information. His counter was final: ribs shattered inward, heart collapsing in a spray of heat.
He didn't take them all. That was waste. The leader ... a man marked by the way the others glanced to him before charging ..he fed on.
The essence was different. Not the raw, clean power of a beast, but flavored with panic, heavy with memories. Adrenaline burned bitter on his tongue, threaded with fragments of thought.
Voices echoed in the haze: "Hold the ridge, the towers must remain unseen—"
A half-lit map burned across his vision, blurred but clear enough to mark trails, outposts, a trade station two days west.
Information, drawn from marrow and fear.
He let the corpse fall, eyes narrowing as the others broke and fled. He didn't pursue. Sometimes survival was a sharper wound than death.
[Essence absorbed: 67 units.]
[Total reserve: 403.]
The AI marked the fleeing survivors as unfinished threats, probabilities of return. He dismissed the alerts with a thought. They were beneath the curve of his hunger.
---
By dusk, the land shifted again. Rock gave way to soil veined with metal, the air dense with the tang of iron. The ridgeline rose before him, its shadow bleeding long across the plain.
And there — rising from the land as though the earth itself had tried to swallow it but failed — were the towers.
Station Mirth.
They jutted jagged and grey, half-crumbled, windows dark and hollow like sockets of a skull. Around their base, the remnants of walls leaned outward, broken teeth in a giant's jaw.
The sight struck something deep, half-memory, half-instinct. He saw flashes of restraints, heard the rasp of scalpels on steel trays, smelled the antiseptic sting that masked blood.
The chip hummed, registering proximity.
[Objective within range. Recommend reconnaissance before entry.]
Leylin's lips curved. The smile was not kind. "No. The hunt is nearly over."