The Dragon Emperor of Another World: Awakening of a Legend

CHAPTER 8: Crimson Hunt

The tunnel let them out onto the jungle road a mile south of Dasi's wall, and the three men in the tunnel came out after them, and for four days after that the jungle was a place where they were followed.

Never closely. That was what wore at Ethan. The pouch would go cool against his hip, and when he stopped and turned and looked, there would be nothing behind them but green—vines as thick as his arm, leaves the size of doors, a steaming dimness that swallowed everything past thirty paces. Then they'd walk on, and an hour later the pouch would go cool again.

They got past a warband of goblins on the second day by wading through a bog full of slimes rather than taking the dry path the goblins were watching, and came out of it with their boots full of something that fizzed. On the third they climbed around a camp of the same goblins at night. Neither of these things lost them the men behind.

On the evening of the fourth day, crouched under a thicket of ferns that glowed faintly along their veins, Celestia lifted her head and breathed in through her nose.

"Blood," she said. "Not ours."

Ethan reached down to the pouch and thought show me, and it answered—a thin, cold prickle across his palm, three points of it, back along their trail. Sharp and clean and moving in step. Not beasts. Beasts didn't walk in step.

"Same three," he said.

"All the way from Dasi." Her lip curled off one fang. "They've killed something to keep up. A goblin sentry, by the smell."

Ethan looked back along the trail for a long moment, and then around them, at the jungle, and something in his head clicked over and began to run.

"Okay," he said slowly. "I've got a plan."

---

The plan was an old one, older than this world. You didn't fight the thing that was chasing you. You led it into the thing you'd already found.

A quarter mile off the trail there was a goblin outpost the jungle had eaten—a stockade of rotted logs, a collapsed watchtower, huts gone green to the roofline. They'd skirted it that afternoon, because the whole clearing inside the stockade had been heaving, softly, with slimes. Water slimes the size of washtubs, earth slimes like lumps of wet clay, nested in every doorway and on every roof, dozing.

"We pull them," Ethan explained under his breath, as they worked. "The slimes. We bring the Syndicate in right on top of them, the slimes wake up, they go for whatever's closest. We don't have to touch the Syndicate at all. The jungle does it."

"You want to set a trap made of a trap," said Celestia.

"Basically."

She considered this. "Good," she said.

They laid a trail for it. A strip torn off Ethan's cloak, snagged on a thorn at head height where a tired man would see it. A clean bootprint pressed into the mud of the stockade gate. Celestia spat a lick of dragonfire onto an overhanging branch inside the clearing, where it smoldered and sent up a thread of smoke. Ethan knelt by the gap in the stockade on the far side—the obvious way out, the way anyone who suddenly wanted to be elsewhere would go—and took a rune trap from the pouch's new node and pressed it into the leaf mold, where it sank out of sight.

Then they climbed a tree at the edge of the clearing and waited.

It didn't take long.

The three came in through the gate just as the light went—quick and quiet, black leather armor, masks over their faces with the scorpion picked out on them in dull red. They moved well. They moved like people who had done this many times, and for whom it had always gone as expected.

The first one stepped into the middle of the clearing, looking up at the smoking branch.

The ground stood up around him.

Slimes poured out of every doorway and off every roof and up out of the mud itself—dozens, sluggish and then not sluggish, humping across the ground in a wet, silent wave. He was good. He cut the first two in half in one stroke. Each half became a slime. He cut those. There were more of them afterward than before. He was still cutting when they closed over his legs, and then his waist, and then his sword arm went down under a water slime and did not come back up.

The second one sprang backward toward the far gap in the stockade, the obvious way out—and the ground there exploded upward in a burst of vines, thick and green and glowing along their length with red fire-sigils, and wrapped her from ankle to throat, and lit.

The third ran. He ran the other way, out through the gate they'd all come in by—straight into a goblin patrol that the noise had brought trotting down the trail to see what was happening. The last Ethan saw of him from the tree was a jagged spear going in under his ribs and out through his back.

Then it was quiet. The slimes settled. The vines burned down to a sullen glow. Somewhere off in the trees, goblins argued in high voices about what they'd caught.

Ethan dropped out of the tree. "Three fewer problems," he said.

It sounded wrong as soon as it was out, a line from somebody else's mouth. He walked over to the gate anyway.

The goblins had taken what they wanted from the third man and gone. He lay on his back in the path with the spear still in him, and his mask had come half off. Under it he was young. Younger than Ethan—eighteen, maybe, with a thin, uneven attempt at a mustache and a spot on his chin. His eyes were open and looking at nothing.

Ethan's right thumb was moving against his thigh. Pressing down on nothing, again and again, on a button that wasn't there, the way you'd hammer at skip on a cutscene you didn't want to watch. He noticed it after a while and made it stop.

He crouched and closed the boy's eyes. The lids didn't want to stay shut. He held them until they did.

Behind him, Celestia said, "You fight smarter than you used to."

He didn't turn around. "Is that a compliment?"

"A rare one." Her voice was even. "Don't get greedy."

She'd been looking through the burned woman's things. She came and held something out to him: a square of good heavy paper, folded small, singed at one corner. On it was a drawing—quick, competent—of a suit of rune-cut plate, and a sword hilt, and a small satchel covered in stitching. Beneath it, a number, and nothing else.

"That's a lot of money," Ethan said.

"That's a very great deal of money." She turned the paper over and held it to the last of the light. Pressed into it, faint, was a watermark—a tower standing on a harbor wall. "And this is Avelline paper. Somebody in Avelline wants what you're carrying badly enough to pay that for it."

---

Night came down fast under the canopy. Even Celestia's eyes started losing things.

"We need somewhere with one way in," Ethan said.

They walked until the trees broke against a rocky bluff, and found, behind a curtain of hanging vines, a crack in the rock that opened into a cave—half natural tunnel, half some older thing, collapsed and weathered, the stones at its mouth dressed square by tools. Celestia laid her palm against the wall.

"Old magic," she said. "Asleep."

The pouch glowed faintly as they went in, and Ethan found he could feel the shape of the cave around him—its throat, its bend, its dry, dead end—as if it had drawn him a map on the inside of his skull. It was dry and cool and utterly quiet. No bones. No droppings. Nothing had lived in it for a long time.

They lit a rune lantern and set it on a flat stone. Ethan sat on a boulder and worked his gauntlets off and flexed his fingers, which ached down to the knuckle. "Today," he said, "was brutal."

Celestia unbuckled the Darkmoon cuirass, set it down with care, and leaned back against the cave wall with her eyes closed, and let out a long breath.

It came out of her faintly lit. A little shimmer of fire on the air, as breath shows in the cold—and for just a moment, in the lantern light, before it faded, it was violet.

"Your fire's a different color," Ethan said.

Her eyes opened.

"It's the ring," she said. She reached out without getting up and turned the lantern down until the cave went amber and dim. "It's still settling."

He nodded. It made sense. She'd only had the ring four days.

"You held your ground today," she said, after a while. "Even with the goblins."

"And you didn't scold me once."

"I'm evolving."

He laughed, and she smiled with her eyes shut, and then there was a quiet.

He lay back on the cave floor on his cloak and watched the shadows move on the ceiling. After a time she came and lay down near him. Close, not touching; there was a hand's width of cold air between his shoulder and hers.

"You're warm," she said.

"You cold?"

"No."

She moved over the hand's width anyway. Her head came down onto his shoulder, very lightly, as if testing whether it would hold. He didn't move. He didn't breathe much, either.

"I used to think," she said, very low, "that I'd die somewhere nobody knew my name."

He thought about what to say to that. Nothing he thought of was any good. The lantern ticked as it cooled.

"I know your name," he said.

She was quiet so long he thought she'd gone to sleep.

"Yes," she said, into his shoulder. "You always did."

---

The morning brought no peace.

It came up out of the valley below the bluff in the grey before dawn—a roar that shook grit loose from the cave roof. Not a goblin. Not any one beast. And behind it, a moment later, a chorus of snarls: deep, overlapping, answering one another.

Ethan was sitting up with his heart slamming before he was awake. Celestia was already on her feet at the cave mouth, her eyes lit.

"Chimeras," she said.

"Plural?"

She listened, head tilted, counting. "Six. They're hunting." A pause. "Together."

He looked back at the cave. Its one throat. Its dry dead end.

"This place has one door," he said.

"Then we don't stay in it." She was already buckling on the cuirass. "We go up."