The clearing smelled of iron and forest damp, which was a combination that generally meant someone had been having a busy morning.
Broken trees at the perimeter. Trunks snapped at mid-height, the breaks clean rather than torn, which said the force had come from a specific direction at considerable speed. The ground between the trees was interesting in the way that ground becomes interesting when it has been recently decorated with things that used to be walking around under their own power. The blood in the clearing was not entirely red. Some of it was green. Some was purple. The bodies that had produced these colors were large and roughly humanoid in the way that a costume is roughly humanoid: the proportions adjacent to human without committing to the details.
At the center of the clearing, standing over the most recent specimen with his hands behind his back, was Tserriednich Hui Guo Rou, fourth prince of Kakin.
The creature in front of him was alive and had chosen not to be on the ground with the others. It stood approximately two meters tall, built in the way a human architect would build a fighter if the architect had also had significant input from an insect: thick jointed limbs with the exoskeletal structure of a beetle, a head that was mostly human but compacted, the features of a forty-year-old man pressed into somewhat less space than they usually occupied. It was covered in blood, most of it not its own.
"Better than the squad commander," Tserriednich said, assessing the clearing. "The movement, the damage output." He didn't phrase these as compliments. He was cataloguing. "But the three direct guards the queen produces naturally are stronger. Genetically restricted to protecting the king, from what I understand."
The translation device buzzed with the queen's response, rendered in flat electronic syllables: "The three guards...born only for the king...strength comes from...instinct to protect him..."
"Written into the biology," he said. "So the restriction is the source of the strength. Interesting." He considered this the way he considered most things: as a problem with a solution he hadn't located yet. "For now, the current output is acceptable. I'll want more of them eventually."
He glanced at the private soldier monitoring the instruments. The soldier gave a small nod: no brainwave emissions from the beetle-creature. No receiving either. The queen had been instructed and the instruction had held.
"You," Tserriednich said to the beetle-creature, "will be called Beatle."
The creature moved.
It didn't run. Running was an approximation of what it did: one moment it was standing in front of the prince, the next it was eight meters away under a root formation, holding something small in both hands and putting it in its mouth with the focused attention of an animal that had identified food and was acting on the identification without further reflection. The cracking sounds were audible. Blood ran down its chin.
"I was speaking," Tserriednich said. His voice had gone very quiet.
Beatle swallowed. "Something hostile came close," it said, in a voice that was mostly human and slightly not. "Small. Rodent."
The private soldiers processed the sentence.
A wild rat. Hostile.
Tserriednich's eyes moved across the treeline with the unhurried speed of someone running a calculation. Most of his soldiers were still trying to determine whether the concept of a hostile rat required tactical response. He had already moved past that to the question of what the hostile rat had been.
He raised his hand. The soldiers raised their weapons, applied optics, fanned their attention across the perimeter.
And Tserriednich closed his eyes.
The aura in his body consolidated inward, every external surface drawing down, the particular quality of Zetsu performed by someone who had learned Nen late and understood its mechanisms only recently but understood them with the single-minded thoroughness of someone who had made the subject his entire focus for six consecutive months. His consciousness reached toward the Nen beast that had formed from him, that insect-winged thing that was the shape of his accumulated character, and stepped into it.
The world stopped.
The blood running from Beatle's mouth was suspended three centimeters from its chin. The soldier to his right had shifted weight forward onto a foot that was no longer falling. A mosquito, threading between two leaves at the clearing's edge, had its wings fixed in mid-beat, the precise angle of the downstroke preserved. The air itself had simply ceased to be in motion.
Five seconds. Physical time. In this space he could move freely, a pure aura structure in a world where matter had temporarily agreed to behave.
The Nen beast flew.
Up and above the canopy first, gaining the perspective of height, and then angling toward the section of treeline that Beatle's consumption of the rat had pointed toward. He covered the distance in under a second, moving the way things move when nothing around them is moving in response.
Two figures in the forest, approximately sixty meters from the clearing edge, frozen mid-crouch.
The Nen beast circled them.
One was a woman in civilian clothes: late twenties, heavyset, the specific musculature of someone who had trained with weapons for years. She was crouched with her weight forward, attention aimed at the clearing, the controlled stillness of someone who had learned to move quietly as a professional rather than recreational skill. There were callus patterns on her palms consistent with firearms use.
Not immediately interesting.
The other one was younger, wearing a wig that was very slightly misaligned, and had a face that Tserriednich recognized.
He had seen this face through binoculars. Through the windows of moving vehicles he'd detoured around. In intelligence reports from his own early-warning ability that had flagged this person as a persistent presence in his vicinity over the past several months. The face of someone who had been trying to find him and had been, until now, competently denied access.
In the frozen world, unable to speak, the Nen beast's consciousness managed the equivalent of a flat statement: so you've finally arrived.
He searched the boy quickly and thoroughly. No identification. No documentation. Nothing that would clarify who he was working for or what specifically he wanted.
The absence of documentation from someone this persistent was itself information.
Tserriednich turned his attention back to the woman. There was something about her eyes.
He leaned the Nen beast closer.
The eyes of the woman were stopped, like everything else in the frozen world. Iris and pupil fixed, the arrested physics of a body that had been told to wait indefinitely. But for one fraction of a second, something in the quality of them registered differently. Not movement. Not activity in the mechanical sense. Something behind them that gave the impression of being present rather than merely paused.
He pulled back.
That was impossible. The time-stop was absolute: everything in the material world, including the consciousness of every organic creature in it, was suspended. It was what made the ability useful as prediction rather than mere reaction. There was no mechanism by which a person's awareness could persist through the freeze.
Unless.
The Nen beast returned. The world resumed: blood fell, foot landed, mosquito completed its downstroke. The sound came back in a wave.
"That direction," Tserriednich said, pointing. His voice was controlled. "Beatles. Bring me their heads."
Beatle was gone before the sentence finished, a blur and then a blood-trail across the forest floor.
The private soldiers moved in its wake, weapons raised, professional, trained for abnormal situations even when this one exceeded their previous definition of abnormal.
Something flew back.
It was Beatle's head.
The rest of Beatle arrived separately, dropped at the clearing edge by a hand that released it without visible ceremony. Ellie Abby's face looked at Tserriednich from sixty meters away with an expression of complete professional calm. Wind was already moving around her in the specific pattern that meant she had decided direction of travel.
"Stay where you are," she said, pleasantly.
She was already gone before the sentence ended, riding the wind straight toward him, the distance dissolving in the time it took his soldiers to realign their weapons.
Tserriednich closed his eyes.
The grinding sound began, low and rhythmic, like a disc finding its groove