The Wolf Pack

The red tag had dropped out of his vision somewhere in the middle of the morning.

Gesbiek had no idea what it had been. It had come to within ninety metres of him, thought about it, and gone off in another direction, and he had made a point of not investigating. There was a version of himself, he suspected, that would eventually get curious about things like that. He hoped to be considerably better fed before meeting him.

The afternoon light came down through the canopy at a steeper angle now, going gold at the edges. His body still felt wrong in the way that being well felt wrong. No ache in the gut. No burn in the shoulders. He kept waiting for it to come back and it kept not coming back, and every hour of that was slightly unnerving.

The forest went on labelling itself as he moved. Vines came up in blue where they would hold his weight and grey where they would not. A stand of Midnight Mushrooms flashed purple at him from twelve paces and he adjusted his line without breaking stride, which struck him as an extremely sophisticated thing to be able to do.

He crouched to look at a beetle trail running through the loam, and the back of his neck went cold.

Not a sound. Not a smell. Pressure.

He knew the feeling. He had felt it exactly twice in his life, both times when Chief Grolm walked past a gathering and the air itself thickened and got heavier to breathe. Dense mana pushing the ordinary out of the way to make room for itself.

This was that, except there was more than one of it, and the more-than-one was moving in step.

Gesbiek left the beetles where they were and went up the nearest oak.

He was twenty feet off the ground before he registered having decided to climb, claws into moss-slick bark, the new legs pushing him up the trunk in a way the old legs would have laughed at. He got flat against the trunk on a high branch and made himself into a shape the tree was already making, and slowed his breathing until it matched the wind.

Below him the ferns parted.

* * * *

Three of them came out into the open, and Gesbiek stopped breathing for reasons that had nothing to do with stealth.

Timber Wolves. Each one stood about four feet at the shoulder, roughly the size of a small pony, and their coats were not matted with moss. The moss was growing out of them, green clusters rooted directly into the hide, so that the animals and the undergrowth had come to an arrangement. Plates of something bark-like lay across their flanks and shoulders in overlapping sheets.

These were not Leaf Chickens. Nothing about them was going to charge in a straight line because a small soft thing was standing still.

The largest one came last, twice the mass of the other two, and Gesbiek's Analytical Sight arrived a moment behind his eyes and told him what he was already understanding.

The thing had three shards.

They sat along its spine in a row, evenly spaced from shoulders to mid-back, each one the size of a fist and glowing hard green. They pulsed in sequence. Left, centre, right. Left, centre, right. Not three separate lights doing three separate things. One rhythm, distributed across three points, the way a heartbeat is distributed through a body.

Nothing about that arrangement was accidental.

[ALPHA TIMBER WOLF]
[RANK: 3-GREEN (RESONANT)]
[THREAT: EXTREME | STATUS: HUNTING]

Level nine.

Gesbiek was Level 1. He had been Level 1 for about four hours and had been extremely pleased about it.

The second wolf carried two shards, one on each shoulder, pulsing left and right in alternation like something breathing. Level five. The third and smallest had a single shard set low on the spine, flickering thin and lonely by comparison, and was still very comfortably larger than anything Gesbiek had ever killed.

He looked at the Alpha's three lights, connected to one another by faint arcs of energy that made a slow triangle under the skin, and something came up out of a very old part of his memory.

* * * *

A storm night, years back. Rain coming down hard enough to make the tent hide sound like a drum, and Gesbiek very small and very frightened underneath his grandfather's cloak, which smelled of herbs and old goblin.

"Are the wolves out in this?"

"Everything is out in this. Rain does not stop appetite." Zog had shifted to get the bad leg comfortable, which was a project. "Listen. If you take nothing else from me, take this. Beware the beast with many lights."

"Lights?"

"On the body. In the back, the chest, the shoulders. Count them before you do anything else. Always count them first." The old goblin held up one finger. "One light is a spark. You can put a spark out with your foot, if you are quick and you do not mind losing the foot." Two fingers. "Two lights are a fire. A fire will burn you. Sometimes you can walk around a fire."

He held up three.

"Three lights are a storm, Gesbiek. You do not fight a storm. Nobody fights a storm. You run, boy. You run from the rows of death and you do not look back to see how far it is behind you, because that is time you are spending on looking."

"What if there are four?"

"There are never four." Zog said it flatly, the way he said the things he was certain of. "Three is where a colour stops. A beast takes a fourth and it does not get a fourth, it gets one of the next colour instead, and everything it had turns into that one and it starts again at one."

He put his three fingers down and held up a single one.

"That is the part nobody in this clan understands, because nobody in this clan can count past their own chest. One blue beats two green. Not because blue is grand. Because that one blue was three green, and it ate whatever it ate to get there."

"So counting is not enough."

"Counting is first. Colour is second. A goblin who learns the second and forgets the first walks up to two green thinking he is safe because they are only green." The bad leg shifted. "Count them. Then read the colour. Then decide, and decide fast, because a thing with three of anything is already deciding about you."

"What if I cannot outrun it?"

"Then you will have died running, which is better than the alternative, which is dying while standing there counting."

Gesbiek had thought, for years afterwards, that this was a story. Old goblins told stories. Rows of death was the kind of phrase that went in a story.

Twenty feet above a 3-Green Alpha, watching three fist-sized shards pulse in a line down its spine, he revised the assessment.

Zog had never seen anything from the System but one word over his own head. He had worked the whole thing out anyway, by watching, and then compressed it into something a frightened child could carry.

Not bad, for a crippled gatherer nobody had bothered to bury.

* * * *

The System had more to say about the triangle.

[RESONANCE ACTIVE]
[DEFLECTION: 75% | FIELD RADIUS: 0.8m]
[REGENERATION: +15% PER MINUTE]

Gesbiek read it twice, and understood that the arithmetic was worse than he had thought.

Three shards were not three times one shard. They were close enough together to talk to each other, and the talking made a circuit, and the circuit made a field. Anything he threw at that wolf would give up three quarters of itself before it reached fur. Anything that got through would be repaired while he was still deciding what to do next.

It was not a harder fight. It was a fortress with legs that healed itself between blows.

He asked the question he did not want the answer to, and the answer came at once, because the System had no sense of occasion at all.

[GESBIEK (LVL 1) vs ALPHA (LVL 9)]
[WIN PROBABILITY: 0.00%]
[ESTIMATED TIME TO DEATH: 1.7 SECONDS]

One point seven.

He had spent longer than that deciding whether to eat the beetle.

There was no clever way around a number like that. The Lag Spike had not been a technique. It had been the System falling over under stress and taking physics with it, and he had no more control over it than a goblin has over a sneeze. Even if he could summon it, two frozen seconds would not be enough against something that healed while he was swinging.

The Leaf Chicken had been the tutorial. This was whatever came at the end of the book.

* * * *

The pack had not come out into the open for his benefit. They had cornered something.

A family of badgers had gone to ground under a mass of root, and the wolves went about the extraction with an economy that Gesbiek found more frightening than any amount of snarling.

The Beta went left. The Runt went right. Neither of them was told to.

The Alpha stood in the middle and did not move, and every so often its ear twitched, or its weight shifted an inch, and one of the others adjusted. That was the entire command structure. No barking. No posturing. Two small signals a minute, and a hunt that ran like something rehearsed.

The Beta's claws came up glowing, trailing green in the air, and went through tree root the way a knife goes through a thing that is not root. Splinters went everywhere. Inside the burrow the chittering climbed and then began to sound different.

A badger broke from a side exit and the Runt was already there. One catch, one shake, done.

Then the Alpha came forward, and everything else stopped.

It cracked the corpses open with its jaws and took the 1-Green cores out of them and swallowed them whole, and Gesbiek watched the green light travel down its throat and disperse into the network on its back. The triangle flared and settled.

The Beta ate second, and took the next largest.

The Runt did not eat. The Runt stood at the edge of the kill it had made and waited, and it went on waiting, until the Alpha made a small rumbling noise in its chest, and only then did it come in for what was left.

Gesbiek watched all of it from twenty feet up.

The strong ate first. The less strong ate next. The weakest ate when permitted. And a thing with no light at all did not appear in the arrangement anywhere, because it was not part of the arrangement.

He was, he realised, currently below the Runt.

That should have stung more than it did. What it actually produced was something closer to relief. To the Alpha he was not even prey. Prey implied worth chasing. He was ambient. He was the sort of thing that happened in a forest.

Which was, at this precise moment, the single most valuable quality he possessed.

* * * *

The wolves finished and began to sniff the air, and the shards on their backs brightened as mana went into noses that had not needed the help.

Above them, a branch shifted in the wind and made a small sound.

The Alpha's ear turned.

Gesbiek's blood went cold in a way he could feel travelling. The yellow eyes came up, narrowed, and began to search the canopy with an attention that was not animal.

Moving meant noise. Noise meant one point seven seconds.

He engaged the new legs and did not climb down, because climbing down meant putting vibration into the trunk of the tree the Alpha was currently interested in. He went sideways instead.

The blue lines came up ahead of him, marking a path through the canopy: which branches would take his weight, which would announce him, where the wood was thick enough to swallow a landing whole.

The nearest usable branch was on the next tree, eight feet out. Inside his range. Barely.

Below, the Alpha took a step toward his trunk.

Gesbiek jumped.

For a moment he was in open air with nothing under him, and time did the strange stretching thing again, and he could see the bark of the target branch in absurd detail, every moss cluster, the exact width of the place his claws needed to be.

They found it. The branch bent and held.

He did not stop. Branch to branch, landing only on the blue, the forest going past underneath in green and brown, and thirty feet along he froze mid-step on a thick bough and became part of the tree.

The Alpha was scanning the canopy. Its nostrils worked.

Three heartbeats. Gesbiek did not breathe and did not blink.

Then the Alpha growled, low, and the sound went down into the forest floor and came up through the wood into Gesbiek's feet, and the other two wolves went tight and ready without being asked.

The wind changed.

Forty metres east, a deer that had been holding perfectly still through all of this finally ran out of nerve and detonated out of the ferns.

Three heads snapped round at once. Bigger meat, larger core, and running, which settled it.

They went. Moss and muscle and bark plate at a speed nothing that size had any right to, breaking through undergrowth like weather, and inside a few seconds the forest had closed behind them and there was only the sound of it going away east.

Gesbiek held on to his branch and offered the deer his sincere and permanent gratitude.

Wherever it was going, it was going there as a hero. An unwitting hero with poor timing and roughly forty seconds left, but a hero all the same.

* * * *

He waited until the noise was gone. Then he counted ten more heartbeats, because gone was not a number he trusted yet.

He travelled through the canopy for another five minutes and took a route that doubled back twice, in case the pack thought better of the deer, and only came down when the red zone had dropped entirely off the edge of his sight.

Then he got into the hollow of a rotting log and let his hands shake.

They shook for a while. He let them. The adrenaline went out of him in stages and left him hollowed and cold and very, very small in a very large forest.

In the dark of the log he put his fingers on the Grey Shard and traced the crack.

It was warm. It had been warm since the chicken. And it was wider. Not much. A fraction. But he had spent his whole life looking at that stone and he knew exactly how wide it had been yesterday, and the silver in it pulsed against his fingertip like something under a shell that had begun to take an interest in the outside.

He had learned three things today and he lined them up carefully, because he did not want to have to learn them twice.

One light was prey. Two lights were a serious mistake. Three lights were the thing his grandfather had spent a storm night trying to make sure he never met.

The ladder was not evenly spaced. Each rung was further from the last than it looked from below.

And a pack was not three animals. It was one animal with three bodies, and the smallest of them was dangerous only because of the other two.

Somewhere out in the Darkwood there was a solitary creature with one light in it, going about its business alone.

Gesbiek was going to find it before it found him.

The hunger had come back while he was in the tree. Not the old one. The old one was dead and buried under a green core. This one had arrived after the meal rather than before it, and it did not want food at all.

He lay in the log and waited for his hands to stop, and thought about how many rungs there were, and how much of the forest was made of them.

One core at a time.