Nine Gods, One Grudge

Chapter 4: Prey Turned Predator

The Hunter looked Roderick over the way a man looks at mud on his boot.

Bare feet. Torn trousers. Plastic wrap hanging in strips from a chest streaked with dried blood. A black hand. A stolen blade.

"This?" The Hunter tilted his head. "The Elder sent me across a realm gate for this?"

Roderick said nothing. He was counting distance. Twelve meters. Two trucks. One gap in the yard fence behind him, where the chain-link had rusted loose years ago.

"Speak, insect. Were you the one burning my evidence?"

"Your evidence?"

"The pit. The array. The people who saw." The Hunter shrugged the broadsword off his shoulder. "I was sent to sweep all of it. You're simply early."

He breathed in.

The air changed.

It pressed down on Roderick's shoulders like a hand. The rain around the Hunter bent sideways, and the fire behind Roderick flattened as if something enormous had exhaled over it.

Then the Hunter roared.

It was not a human sound. It came from somewhere deep in his chest, a low rolling thunder, and it rolled outward in a wave Roderick could see. The rain turned to mist. The windows of both trucks exploded inward. The warehouse's brick wall split from ground to roof.

The wave hit Roderick in the chest and threw him through the fence.

He hit the alley wall beyond it, bounced, and landed on his hands and knees in a puddle. His ears were bleeding. His new ribs held, but the impact had knocked every thought out of his head.

Behind him, gravel crunched. Unhurried.

Run.

Roderick ran.

He knew Sector 7 the way he knew his own scars.

Left past the noodle stall with its shutters down. Right into the gap between two tenements, so narrow he had to turn his shoulders. Under a hanging bundle of stolen power cables. Over a wall made of stacked tires.

Rook Street.

Above him, something landed on a rooftop hard enough to c***k the tiles.

Roderick pressed his back against a doorway and held his breath.

"You're quick," the Hunter called. His voice floated down from above, bored. "Rats usually are."

A shadow passed across the strip of sky between the rooftops. Then the tiles cracked again, farther left. He was jumping roof to roof, following the sound of splashing feet.

Roderick pulled his feet out of the puddle.

He had no chance in the open. That roar would kill him the second time. And he could not outrun something that jumped over buildings.

But the Hunter could only hunt what he could see.

[TIME UNTIL TOTAL COLLAPSE: HALTED]

Roderick stared at the word.

Halted. Not gone.

He did not trust it. He did not trust the Hunter's boredom either. A man who could flatten a warehouse with his voice did not need to chase anyone on foot unless he was enjoying it, or unless he wanted Roderick to run somewhere specific.

Every shadow along Rook Street suddenly looked like a waiting mouth.

Stop it. Think.

The tiles cracked again. Right side. Then silence. Then a crash, closer, from the right again.

Always from the right.

Roderick closed his eyes and listened to the next three landings. Right. Right. A pause, then a long leap, and the heavy thud of a man landing on his right leg first.

He favored it.

Black text flickered across his vision, slower than before, as if the core was thinking alongside him.

[OBSERVING TARGET MOVEMENT...]

[PATTERN DATA: 41%]

Roderick opened his eyes.

"You're learning him," he whispered.

The core did not answer. The percentage ticked up.

Halfway down Rook Street, there was a place every kid in the sector avoided.

The old laundry passage. A c***k between two buildings barely wider than a man, roofed by a rusted fire escape that sagged across the gap like a broken bridge. Sheets had hung there once. Now only the wires remained.

Roderick had carried Kael out of that passage with a knife wound in his leg, both of them fifteen and terrified.

He pushed the memory away and stepped into the gap.

Then he turned around, raised his voice, and shouted into the rain.

"Hey!"

Silence.

"You came across a gate to sweep up trash. So sweep."

Tiles shattered on the roof directly above the passage.

The Hunter stood at the edge, silhouetted against the smoke from the burning warehouse. He looked down into the narrow c***k and smiled.

"Cornered yourself."

"Come find out."

The Hunter jumped.

He came down exactly the way the core had mapped him. Weight on the right leg. Sword raised high above his head, because in a gap this narrow, there was no room to swing it sideways.

A single downward cleave. The only attack left.

Roderick had already thumbed the switch on the high-frequency blade.

He swung it upward, not at the Hunter, but at the two rusted brackets holding the fire escape to the wall.

The humming edge cut through both like wet paper.

The fire escape dropped.

Three hundred kilos of iron slammed into the Hunter mid-fall, crushing him sideways against the wall. The broadsword's downward arc hit the collapsing rail and screamed along it in a shower of sparks, missing Roderick's skull by a hand's width and burying itself in his left shoulder instead.

The pain was white. The blade stuck in bone.

The Hunter snarled, pinned under the wreckage, one arm free, dragging the sword out of Roderick's shoulder. His chest swelled. He was drawing breath for the roar.

[PATTERN DATA: 100%]

[ADAPTIVE MIMICRY: AVAILABLE]

[COST: COUNTDOWN WILL RESUME]

There was no time to be afraid of it.

Yes.

Roderick's body moved on its own. He dropped his weight onto his right leg, the same way the Hunter always landed, the same coiled spring of hip and knee. He did not know the technique. His muscles borrowed it.

[TIME UNTIL TOTAL COLLAPSE: 08:00]

He poured everything into the black hand and squeezed it into a fist so dense the rain hissed and vanished around his knuckles.

He struck the Hunter in the throat.

The roar never came. Something cracked beneath his fist, and the black threads burst from his knuckles into the Hunter's neck and down into his chest, searching.

They found something there. A second heartbeat. Hot, wild, alive, curled like a sleeping animal behind the Hunter's sternum.

Roderick devoured it.

The Hunter's eyes lost their slits. Then their light.

Power hit Roderick like a flood through a broken dam. It was rougher than the talisman, gamey and hot, tasting of blood and wet fur. His muscles cramped. His bones ached as if they were being stretched. The wound in his shoulder knotted itself shut with a burning itch.

[ENERGY ABSORBED: BEAST-TYPE CORE]

[QUALITY: MODERATE]

[HOST PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES: INCREASED]

[TIME UNTIL TOTAL COLLAPSE: HALTED]

Roderick slumped against the wall and slid down until he was sitting in the wreckage beside the corpse.

His heart was beating too fast. Not from fear.

From appetite.

He looked at his black hand for a long time.

The ring was on the Hunter's right hand. Dull silver, carved like coiled scales.

Roderick did not touch it at first.

It was too easy. A killer from another realm walks into Sector 7 wearing his treasure openly? He turned the Hunter's hand over with the tip of the blade, looking for wires, runes, anything that would bite.

Nothing.

He pulled it free and slipped it on.

[SPATIAL STORAGE DETECTED]

[SCANNING CONTENTS...]

Images unfolded behind his eyes like drawers sliding open.

Stacks of heavy gold coins stamped with a beast's skull. Dark robes embroidered with silver thread. A crest shaped like a clawed hand. A slab of black stone etched with a gate symbol.

[ITEM: REALM-CROSSING PASS]

A sealed scroll bound in red cord.

[ITEM ANALYSIS FAILED]

[CAUSE: SEAL RESTRICTED]

And a small crystal sphere, glowing softly.

It was still active.

Roderick focused on it. The sphere expanded to fill his vision, and suddenly he was looking at a crowded hall of gold pillars and white flowers, packed with people in silk.

Music. Applause. A live broadcast.

At the center of an altar stood a woman in a gown the color of fresh milk.

She was smiling the same smile he had loved for eleven years.

A priest lowered a crown of golden thorns onto Evelyn's head.

"Rise," a voice boomed across the hall. "Saintess Candidate of the Beast Throne."

Kael stood at her side, applauding.

The date stamp in the corner of the projection read tonight.

The time r******w.