Chapter 194: 194: The First semester XVII

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The jungle did not begin so much as it happened to you. One minute there were sensible shrubs and a path that believed in directions. The next turn there were curtains of vine, tricks of shade, and the soft theater of leaves applauding their own secrets. John slipped under the first drape of liana, Fizz at shoulder height, lantern-bright and very pleased with his own stealth.

"We move like librarians," Fizz whispered. "Silent. Judging."

"Eyes first," John said. "Feet second. Hands only when we already know the answer."

They went in on a diagonal, skirting the better-trodden student trails. Third-class beasts were loud with their bodies even when quiet with their mouths: the scuffing drag where heavy plates skimmed bark, the scrapes where tusks practiced on saplings, the wrong hush that meant something with a belly had decided to nap in the exact worst place.

Fizz drifted to a knot of scratch marks and tapped them like a detective tapping clues. "I can see a... Big lizard," he murmured. "Stone on its back. Ego in its tail."

John crouched. The gouges rode low and wide, parallel as rails. A dusting of gray grit flecked the bark. "Stonecoil," he said. "They wedge themselves to sleep at noon. Heat makes them sloppy."

"Rude to roast at the table," Fizz said. "Let us not interrupt lunch. Let us interrupt digestion."

They found it wedged between two buttress roots, a yard and a half of armored monitor draped in slate-colored osteoderms, sides working slowly, tongue tasting the heat. Its eye slitted when John’s shadow brushed it. Fizz hovered above its head and made a very quiet, very cruel sparkle.

The Stonecoil surged.

It came up with that ugly, confident speed of things that trust tail and weight. The first whip would have taken John at the knee if he stood square. He did not. He was already a half-step left, already lowering his center the way he’d taught his body to do when the void tugged the world. He let the pull find the tail tip, not the knee.

The tail tipped early. Momentum asked the lizard an unanswerable question. The Stonecoil overspun, shoulder plating rasping a root, belly briefly exposed. John didn’t make a show of it. He palmed a rock the size of a fist and used the smallest piece of what lived in his chest —not a hole, not a blade, just an absence the size of a breath— at the rock’s face.

The impact struck with no echo. Plate dented. The monitor grunted, surprise more than pain. Fizz chose that moment to be brilliant and annoying. He snapped a line of dry leaves alight and whipped it like a ribbon in front of the beast’s eye. Heat without burn. Light without meaning. The Stonecoil blinked and bit air.

"Now," Fizz hissed. "Finish it John."

John stepped to the neck where plates overlapped like a badly stacked brick pile. He slid the hunting knife —a plain thing, honest metal— into the seam with a firm twist. No flourish. No speech. Pressure at the hinge, a pulse of absence to help the knife pass, a mercy of speed.

The third class Stonecoil thrashed once, twice, then ran out of reasons.

Fizz went solemn for two beats the way he did when the living stopped being. Then he brightened again, because bright was what he was built for. "Core retrieval," he announced in a whisper. "I will narrate."

"Do not narrate," John said, but he was smiling a touch as he cut. The core sat behind the sternum, a cloudy hexagon the size of a thumb pad, warm like bread. He wrapped it in a rag, logged the kill on the field slip with neat letters, and tucked both away.

"One," Fizz said. "We are a poem with numbers."

They moved deeper.

A third class Bramblehorn boar found them before they found it, which was rude. It came as a sound first —a rolling chest-drum through the brush— then as a stink, then as a triangular slice of tusk and temper. Its coat was a garden’s nightmare of twig and burr, thorn hard enough to sew someone you disliked into entirely the wrong garment.

Fizz snapped both paws out. "Left," he shouted, and hurled a glove of water at the boar’s eye. Not enough to drown, just enough to blink.

John did not stand his ground like a hero with bad instincts. He stepped aside like a boy who wanted to be alive at supper. As the boar hammered past, he planted one palm on the brute’s shoulder and gave it an inch of emptiness right at the joint. The leg buckled. Boar met root. Boar met the surprising idea that the world could move the wrong way.

Fizz skittered low and quick, laying a thin skin of ice not on the ground —no time— but on the boar’s own mud-slicked elbow. The next attempt at traction went very poorly for the beast. It skidded, scrambled, roared, and presented the soft notch behind its jaw for one twitch of steel and one breath of hush.

John did the necessary. Core to cloth. Cloth to pocket. Slip to log.

"If anyone asks," Fizz panted, "we performed a complicated symphony in five movements. Title: The Pig Who Should Have Chosen A Different Hobby."

John wiped the blade. "If anyone asks, we will be careful."

They didn’t dawdle over their cleverness. The jungle didn’t punish laughter. It punished standing still. A chorus of distant shouts and one scream that was mostly pride floated from the east. They went west.

They found Rhea Flame at a stream where the water slipped over a run of blackstone like glass remembering how to stand. She had taken the seam of her coat off and tied it at the waist. The red ribbon burned bright even in shade. Two third-class carcasses cooled in the shallows where she had made the river help. She held a skewered strip of something that had definitely once been meat and now pretended to be a snack.

Fizz smelled it from eight yards and developed an opinion. He descended with the gravity of a star. "Greetings valiant cousin of a man with unfortunate hair," he said grandly. "Is that for diplomacy?"

Rhea looked up, mouth pinched by habit into a line that only relaxed for competence or sweets. She flicked the strip toward him. Fizz caught it in his paws like a bouquet, and made a sound that could have started a small religion.

Rhea watched John over the top of the spark’s happiness. "You work clean," she said, chin flicking at the cores bulging the rag in his hand. "Can I join you?"

John’s weight settled onto his back foot. He hadn’t meant to be anybody’s story on the first day. Fizz resolved his hesitation by clapping crumby paws. "We accept," he declared. "Your ribbon is persuasive and your snacks are pro-level."

Rhea blinked once, then decided to file the spark under Problem Pleasant. "Fine," she said. "Two more before the second bell. West ridge. Boars and something that thinks it’s clever."

They moved as a three. Rhea’s fire wasn’t loud; it was disciplined. She cut heat like a calligrapher cuts ink, trimming air into lines that made sense. John liked her economy. She liked that he didn’t try to impress anyone. Fizz liked that she had a pouch entirely devoted to sweets which, in his mind, indicated judgment of character.

They took a third class Hisscat with a pincer of water and heat — Fizz conjured a shock of steam at its whiskers, Rhea stitched a fence of low flame, John reshaped what the ground meant for a step and invited gravity to be rude. The Hisscat’s core was small and smug. Fizz flicked it like a marble and almost kept it, then remembered points existed.

They pinned a Barkback deer against a run of rock where its long legs betrayed it. Rhea delivered the finishing heat with a small, precise flare that seared without setting the forest on the idea. John did not take the throat, because sometimes you let a teammate complete the sentence she had written.

The day bell rolled like warm copper through the leaves.

They were cutting back toward the staging ground with four new slips and the easy quiet of people who had not yet made a mistake together when shouting tore across the slope like cloth. It was not the thrilled shouting of first kills or the bog-brag of boys who had discovered a new way to be foolish. It was the flat, hoarse RSVP of someone being introduced to consequences.

Rhea was moving before Fizz could invent a pun. John was right behind, feet reading roots, breath counting itself. They burst through a curtain of pale fern into a matted clearing where a ridge-backed thing with too many teeth had decided a student’s coat tasted like victory.

Ray Flame was having the worst afternoon of his very brief career as a solo hunter.

He had done some correct things. He had burned the creature’s forward whiskers into stumps. He had blinded the right eye with a neat snap of ash. He had not remembered that predators are made of angles and that the left flank still exists.