Leiya stumbled. Her boots caught on a slick root and she reached out to steady herself against a tree trunk. The wood felt unnaturally cold and brittle. Ahead of her, Kota kept moving.
He didn't look back and he didn't slow his pace. His movements were mechanical, driven by a desperate, silent momentum that seemed to pull him into the grey fog.
The forest around them was becoming a graveyard of stunted growth. Branches overhead twisted into jagged shapes that reached down like skeletal fingers. Every step was a battle against the damp, heavy air that felt like it was trying to drown them in silence.
"I think we're far enough. We need to stop," Leiya said.
Her voice was thin and raspy from the climb. Kota didn't respond. He continued to trek through the dense underbrush, his shoulders hunched as if he were carrying an invisible weight. The air around him seemed to warp slightly.
It was a subtle distortion that made the trees behind him look like they were melting. The pressure he was emitting was a low frequency hum. It made the very marrow of her bones ache with a cold, hollow dread.
She watched the back of his head, seeing how his hair was ragged and turning more white every day. He moved with a terrifying grace that felt entirely inhuman.
"Kota!" she yelled, her voice cracking as she grabbed his sleeve. He stopped abruptly. His body stiffened. He turned his head slowly, his expression distant and hollow as his gaze finally settled on her.
It was as if he'd been submerged in deep water and had only just broken the surface to hear her. He looked right through her for a long moment. The silence between them was heavy with the weight of the forest.
"What?" he asked. His voice was flat.
"We need to stop," she panted, leaning over with her hands on her knees. "I can't go further. I need a break. My legs are like lead, Kota. My chest is burning." Kota stared at her, his expression unreadable.
He looked at her not with warmth, but with the detached calculation of someone observing a necessary piece of cargo.
The growing darkness inside him made it difficult to feel the weight of their connection. He showed interest only because her survival was tied to his own movement. If she collapsed, he'd be forced to stay, and staying meant being found.
He scanned her face, noting the paleness of her skin and the ragged hitches in her breath. "You haven't eaten," he said. His tone was clipped. "We'll take a break. You need to eat something."
Leiya sank to the ground at the base of a large oak. She leaned her head back against the bark. The wood felt dead beneath her, a dry and crumbly texture that suggested the tree had been hollowed from the inside.
She pulled out a dry piece of travel bread and a bit of dried fruit.Her hands were shaking so violently that she almost dropped the food into the dirt. She watched Kota as he stood a few feet away, a dark silhouette against the white fog.
Her eyes followed the sharp lines of his face with a quiet, intense focus. Kota didn't sit. He stood with his back to her, closing his eyes and drawing his breath in through his nose. He was attempting to seize the jagged edges of the Yen that was trying to spill out like pressurized steam.
On his first attempt, he lost his grip. The energy recoiled violently. A massive burst of Yen exploded outward from his chest in a silent wave of negation. The ground beneath his feet instantly turned to grey ash.
Nearby saplings withered into skeletal remains in the span of a single heartbeat. The shockwave of rot was immense, a physical rejection of the living world.
Kota had instinctively angled the pressure away from Leiya, ensuring the wave didn't get near her. He felt the heat of the failure rising in his throat. It was a metallic taste that burned like acid.
Miles away, Kaola gasped. Her bow arm jerked as the signal flared like a beacon in her mind. The energy was so raw and jagged it left a bitter taste on her tongue. "I have him!" she projected to the twins."
A massive surge to the south! He's losing control! I can feel the rot from here!" But back in the clearing, Kota didn't let the failure stop him. He gritted his teeth, forcing his heart rate to slow despite the vipers of sickness in his veins.
He tried a second time. He visualized the black ink of his power being pulled into a single, tiny point in his gut. It was a singularity of void that consumed everything. This time, he was more successful since his sickness wasn't flaring.
He pushed the energy down with a cold, iron will.Suddenly, he essentially vanished from the sensory world. The distortion in the air vanished. The coldness retreated.He became a ghost, a hollow space where a person should be. Leiya watched him, her own tiny signature barely a flicker in the background.
Her Yen wasn't massive like most. It was so small and faint that to a tracker, she could easily come off as a small animal. Compared to the sun sized weight of Kota's power, she was barely recognizable. She was a moth fluttering in the shadow of a mountain.
She chewed her bread slowly, the dry texture sticking in her throat. As long as she could see him, she could keep moving. "My sickness," Kota muttered, looking at his steady hands. They were pale, the veins standing out like blue cords.
"It's not flaring at the moment. It's easier to hold it back when the blood isn't boiling. I can feel the silence now."
At the edge of the ridge, Kaola's face went pale. The flare she'd just been tracking disappeared as if it'd never existed.
She frantically adjusted the focal point on her bow. "They either stopped, or I've lost them entirely," she projected. Her voice trembled with fear and frustration. "I can't see Kota. He's gone. The entire sector just went dark."
The air behind her didn't just ripple.It tore with the sound of grinding metal. Hykee stepped out of the veil, his massive frame displacing the mist with a violent surge of pressure.
He looked like a shadow given physical, terrifying form. Lokee was perched on his shoulder, her expression a mask of clinical detachment.
"Lost him?" Hykee growled. The sound vibrated in Kaola's chest."
You just had a lock. How do you lose a walking nuke? He's a hole in reality, girl. You don't just lose something that big." "He's not there," Lokee whispered.
Her voice was like a razor blade. She scanned the valley below, her eyes narrowing as she peeled back the layers of the mist. "I don't see anything either. No distortion, no Yen leakage. Nothing. He's gone completely dark. It's a perfect suppression. Even the girl is gone. Her signature is too small to find in this fog. She's like a rabbit in a field of wolves, hiding in the tall grass where the light can't reach her."
Hykee slammed a fist into his open palm. The impact sounded like a thunderclap. "He's mocking us. He thinks he can hide in the damp and wait for the trail to go cold. He doesn't realize we're already in his head."
Back in the clearing,
Kota stood perfectly still. He was poised like a statue. The silence of the forest was absolute, but to him, it was deafening. He could feel the mask he'd built starting to crack at the edges. The weight of the void pressed against the insides of his skull.
Every second he kept the Yen suppressed felt like holding back a landslide with his bare hands. The sheer mass of the power threatened to overwhelm his focus. It was a heavy, oily pressure that wanted to explode outward and coat everything in sight.