11.2
Owen lifted the deer-leader's chopped-up body from the ground, slinging her over her shoulder as he went to meet his boss.
Echo scrutinized every movement in every direction, and every single one seemed to sting every nerve in her body.
Everyone was her enemy, and everything they did was meant to hurt Eve.
Owen reconvened with Blake, who whispered something into the massive man's ear. Or were his words directed at the woman hanging over the man's shoulders?
Three deer appeared.
They literally appeared, as if they had teleported from the top of the wall to the bottom.
Echo squeezed Eve against her chest and turned her head, eyes bulging at this new attacker that had made her their target.
Why couldn't they just leave her alone?
The deer moved like bullets, but Jelani wasn't slow either.
By a hair's breadth, his knuckle duster, which he'd thrown directly off his fingers, hit the first beast in the largest bone of its front leg, forcing it off course and skidding onto its knees.
The others were a body's length behind, giving just enough time for Jelani to cover the gap physically and strike the first of the two in its ribcage, sending it flying into the other.
The animals' backs slammed into sharp fragments of metal in the earth, but their legs flailed around like machine guns and they spun back upright.
All three were back on the hunt, but speed alone wasn't enough to compete with their enemy's strengths. It only took three clean punches for him to drop them.
Enemies defeated, Jelani turned to where Echo's gaze was focused: the three people who shared the confines of the crater with them.
Blake gazed straight into Jelani's eyes, looking like a father who'd just been disrespected by his own son.
He half-laughed, half-sighed.
"Ahh, this sucks," he announced. "One thing after another."
Perhaps because her senses had been honed to such an extreme level, Echo noticed something… recognizable about Blake.
She stared at him even harder than before, hating him more than she ever had.
"Yes, Echo. I was worried you'd be the one."
Echo's eyelids finally found their weight again. Perhaps her eyes even narrowed.
"Silas Black."
The volume of her voice was so low that the words hardly left her lips, but Blake knew what she'd said.
A soft smile crept onto his lips.
"I am not Silas Black. Silas Black is Blake Stane."
Owen turned to Blake.
Without even needing to hear the man's question, Blake replied, "We'll leave. I made a mistake and wasted our time, but it's over."
But he didn't turn around.
"Do you want to come with us, Jelani? I'll give you access to every element that exists, and to every person worth learning from. I'm guessing your priority is to get stronger, isn't it? There would be no better environment for you."
Jelani's brow furrowed.
He didn't know anything. He didn't know why Blake was speaking to him in such a way, why Eve was so brutally injured, or who those strangers were, but if anything that Blake said was true, then it would be in Jelani's best interests to follow him, wherever he might be going.
Jelani's priorities had become clear, after all.
Get stronger. It was the only thing that mattered to him. If he couldn't protect himself, he couldn't protect anything.
And strength was objective. You couldn't take it or give it; it was something that was earned through the elements and through experience. Those two things were all that mattered–all that Jelani needed to hone his craft and make his life worth living.
At least, that was the case as little as 24 hours earlier.
Now, he knew who the woman named Echo truly was. He'd seen real beauty, and he'd seen real strength. It had come from something deeper–something that couldn't be faked, or created in a lab.
From seemingly nothing, she'd produced the impossible.
"I'll pass," Jelani finally answered. "Unless Echo's going with you."
When he heard this, Blake turned his back.
"Go dig your friends out of the dirt, Jelani."
"Huh?"
But Blake was already walking away, the strangers at his right and his left.
Hang on, Jelani thought. Wasn't that golden hat person dead a second ago?
The "golden hat person" Jelani was referring to was on their feet, walking with a lurch in their step. Their arm, which had been half blown away, was now only missing the fingers on its hand.
He scratched his head, wondering if it was his vision or his memory that had gone wrong.
"Go dig your friends out of the dirt, Jelani."
Nikki and Corvus.
The answer came to him so suddenly that he wondered at how he hadn't noticed they were missing.
He whipped around, scanning the sea of rubble for some signs of movement.
But there were none. How could there be?
The entire earth had been rearranged. Regardless of weight, every object had been lifted up and dropped back down. Beneath that million-pound sky, how could a human being have survived?
Jelani hadn't seen Echo's tornado of fury, but he'd heard it, and he'd felt it. He knew the level of sheer magnitude it must have been on, so he could only imagine the worst-case scenario as he dug with his bare hands.
What am I doing?
The crater's surface area was massive. It was so large that he might not have found them even if he searched until the sun set.
Luckily for him, that very morning was when he'd tapped so deeply into the element of growth and the living simulation of the world around him.
Within the realm of that gray, lifeless crater, he was confident that he could sense the soul of a living being.
He closed his eyes.
There. Somewhere to his right, two pinpricks of light appeared inside of his mind.
They were alive.
He turned, but the lives of one pair of comrades had been mismatched with the other.
It was Yumi, climbing down the rubble slide with Sasha slung over her shoulders.
Their clothes, and even their skin, was blackened, charred by the tongues of fire.
Jelani shook his head, telling himself to regain focus. Lives were on the line.
He reentered his simulation of the crater, gritting his teeth as he strained to recognize every tiny detail within it.
Then there was one, so faint that he could hardly detect it over the lives of tiny bugs and weeds that existed in the massive hole.
He bounded from foothold to foothold, mind always focused on the same exact spot.
Then he tore pieces of twisted metal away, exposing layer after layer as he dug deeper into the ground.