THE BLOOD INK OF THE VALERIUS BLOODLINE

Chapter 4: Delirium and an Oath in the Mud

Raindrops falling from the cliff above felt warm, but they left an itchy, stinging sensation on Billy's neck. The drizzle in this wilderness smelled of rusted copper mixed with rotten spores.

Billy lay flat on his back in a pool of pitch-black mud, trapped at the bottom of a narrow ravine more than a dozen meters deep. Right beside him, the corpse of the Blight-Weasel lay stiff and motionless, the wooden branch still lodged straight through its right eye socket. The creature's thick black blood had dried, attracting flies the size of thumbs that buzzed noisily around them.

Billy tried to move his shoulder, but a jolt of pain immediately crushed the attempt.

"Kh... aarggh..."

Billy groaned for a long moment, spitting saliva mixed with bitter bile into the mud.

"Are... are you still alive, bastard?" Billy whispered hoarsely, slowly turning his head toward the monster's corpse beside him. "If you're gonna get back up... do it now. I can't punch anymore."

Of course, the monster did not move.

Silence.

Only the buzzing of flies and the patter of poisonous drizzle soaking his face.

Billy gave a weak snort, a bitter laugh slipping between his broken breaths.

"Great. The one time I win a fight, it's against a mutant sewer weasel."

He lowered his gaze to his own abdomen.

The torn fabric of his parachute jacket was soaked with dirty yellow fluid mixed with blood. Kuncoro's stab wound had reopened from the brutal impact of the fall into the ravine. The tissue surrounding the wound had swollen to the size of his palm, turned black, and radiated a heat that burned his skin.

Sepsis.

Billy knew the signs.

Once, an old homeless man beneath the Manggarai overpass had slowly died from a similar infected wound. High fever, foul-smelling pus, and a loss of sanity before his heart finally stopped.

His stomach suddenly convulsed violently, an unbearable cramp twisting through his intestines.

The ancient hunger that had been gnawing at his empty stomach since yesterday tore through him.

"I need to eat. I'll eat anything," Billy muttered, his vacant eyes scanning the narrow muddy walls of the ravine.

His gaze settled on the torn flesh of the Blight-Weasel's thigh.

The meat was blackish purple, giving off a pungent rotten stench that instantly made his stomach churn.

"No... if I eat your corpse, I'll die from poisoning before dawn," Billy muttered, shaking his head.

The muddy fingers of his left hand felt along the cliff wall beside his head.

On a chunk of rotting wood half-buried beneath the moss grew a cluster of pale blue mushrooms with translucent, slimy caps.

Billy stared intently at the mushrooms.

"Great choices," Billy whispered between ragged breaths. "Starve to death, die from the infection, or die eating alien mushrooms. What a fantastic life you've got, Bil."

With no time left to think, his fingers plucked three mushrooms.

They smelled strange, sour like vinegar mixed with mothballs.

Billy immediately shoved them into his mouth and chewed quickly.

"Ugh! That's fucking bitter!" Billy cursed, choking as he forced himself to swallow the mushroom's slime. "If they're cow-shit mushrooms, they should at least make me laugh! This tastes like wet chalk!"

Two minutes passed.

There was no feeling of fullness.

Instead, numbness began spreading from his tongue down into his throat.

Then the second night in Whisperwood Forest descended, swallowing the bottom of the ravine.

The next twelve hours were true hell.

A high fever slammed into Billy's brain like an iron hammer.

His body shook so violently that his teeth chattered uncontrollably, even though his skin felt as though it were boiling beneath scalding oil.

The freezing night air at the bottom of the muddy crevice transformed into a horrifying hallucinatory chamber, brought on by the mushroom spores mixing with the infection from his stab wound.

The stone wall before him began to pulse and breathe like a human organ.

"Cold... fuck, it's so cold."

Billy curled up in the muddy pool, hugging his knees.

His teeth chattered violently.

"Where's the blanket? Why is the flood shelter leaking like this?"

From behind the darkness and fog of the ravine, a thin shadow slowly took shape.

A ten-year-old girl wearing a tattered, faded floral nightgown approached him without touching the mud beneath her feet.

Her hands were thin and gaunt.

Her lips were pale blue.

Her eyes stared at Billy with an empty, deeply sorrowful gaze.

Laras.

His foster sister at the orphanage.

The little girl who used to give Billy half of her rice whenever he came home beaten and battered, before she was found frozen in the orphanage bathroom from an overdose of sedatives forced on her by Anton's network.

Billy jolted.

His breath caught in his throat.

"La... Laras?" Billy whispered shakily, trying to raise his paralyzed hand toward the apparition. "Ras, is that really you?"

The girl's figure crouched beside Billy.

Her voice sounded gentle, echoing directly inside his skull.

"Big Brother Billy, what are you doing here? Why are you covered in mud?"

The tears Billy had held back since the night of the execution on the Ciliwung suddenly spilled down his face, washing through the dried mud coating his cheeks.

"I... I failed, Ras," Billy sobbed, his chest heaving with painful gasps. "The flash drive... the evidence against those bastards... they threw me into the river. I couldn't avenge your death. I'm just street trash that lost."

Laras's figure smiled faintly.

Her hand, cold as ice, reached out and stroked Billy's feverish forehead.

"It's okay, Big Brother. It's so peaceful here. No thugs chasing you anymore. Nobody goes hungry. Just sleep, Billy. Close your eyes. Laras will stay here with you."

The touch felt so real.

So soothing.

The temptation to surrender crept into every cell of Billy's body.

The pain in his abdomen seemed to disappear, replaced by a sweet, heavy drowsiness.

All he had to do was close his eyes once.

All the suffering in his life, the poverty, the beatings from thugs, the hunger on storefront steps, and this gaping wound would finally end forever.

Just sleep, Bil.

What's the point of waking up again?

Nobody is waiting for you in either world.

Billy's eyelids grew heavy, slowly sinking halfway shut.

"Sleep, huh? Sounds pretty good," Billy whispered, his voice nearly swallowed by the ringing in his ears.

But just as his eyes were about to close completely, another image flashed through his mind.

Kuncoro's sneering face as he drove the knife into his abdomen.

Anton laughing mockingly behind the window of his luxury car.

The sound of the thugs' boots kicking his body into the foul sewer water.

"You orphaned brat playing hero... say hi to the devil down there."

A burst of wild anger suddenly exploded in Billy's chest, burning away the haze of sleep that had nearly swallowed him.

"No," Billy hissed.

"Big Brother Billy?" Laras's soft voice called again.

"No! You're not Laras!"

Billy roared hoarsely, throwing his eyes wide open with a bloodshot, feral stare.

"Laras would never tell me to die like a mangy dog in a gutter!"

The girl's shadow suddenly cracked.

Then it shattered into a cloud of green mist that was swept away by the wind through the ravine.

Billy gasped for breath, tears mixing with sweat and blood as they ran down his face.

His anger was no longer merely the survival instinct of a street kid.

It was pure rebellion against a fate that had been crushing his head into the ground since the day he was born.

"Listen to me, whoever owns this damn world!"

Billy screamed toward the stone cliffs above him, his hoarse voice echoing through the silence of the night.

"I'm not dying here! You threw me into a ravine, poisoned me, stabbed me in the gut, but I'm not going to die as some nameless corpse!"

With the last strength his anger could give him, Billy dug the torn fingers of his left hand into the muddy ground.

He slowly pulled himself forward, dragging his infected abdomen out of the cold pool and crawling onto a dry rocky ledge along the cliff wall.

Every inch of movement tore at his flesh, but Billy refused to stop.

"I'm... gonna... live," Billy hissed through chattering teeth, driving his fingernails into a crack in the limestone until they bled. "I'm gonna live, you bastards... until I find out why you threw me here."

His battered body finally managed to rest against a drier stretch of stone.

There, beneath the limestone overhang that shielded him from the drizzle, Billy sat hugging his knees, enduring the fever burning through his head for the rest of the night.

He refused to close his eyes for even a second.

Dawn slowly broke through the narrow gap in the ravine.

The green fog began to thin, replaced by faint golden rays filtering down through the forest canopy above.

Billy's fever had not completely subsided, but the numbness in his tongue was gone.

His body was terribly weak, dehydrated, and battered, but he was still breathing.

He had survived the cursed night alive.

Billy released a long, trembling breath and rested his head against the cold limestone wall.

"I'm still breathing," Billy whispered, a tired smile curling across his cracked lips. "See that, Kuncoro? This street dog still doesn't wanna die..."

CLICK.

An extremely faint, sharp mechanical sound rang beside his ear.

Billy's smile instantly froze.

Before he could turn his head, a thin whistle of wind shot from the bushes at the edge of the cliff.

WHOOSH!

A black shadow flashed through the air and stopped exactly half a centimeter from his face.

Billy's eyes widened in rigid terror.

The tip of a triangular arrowhead made of pitch-black obsidian, sharpened to a razor edge, rested coldly between his eyebrows.

The pungent, metallic scent of paralyzing poison drifted from the arrowhead.

At the other end of the tightly drawn longbow stood a tall, slender figure balanced soundlessly on the branch of a fallen tree.

Their gray cloak fluttered gently in the dawn breeze, and a pair of cold silver eyes stared at Billy from beneath the hood without the slightest trace of pity.