The Kite

There was no warning, because there was nothing to warn him about.

The Analytical Sight flagged hunters. It flagged anything that had settled on him as an outcome. It did not flag a goblin walking a patrol line through his own territory in a foul mood, because until that goblin looked up, nothing in the world had made a decision about Gesbiek at all.

He was crouched ten feet from the cobalt beetle with the flint half-raised, working out the angle on the ganglion, when the roar came across the ravine.

It was not a battle cry. It was not a challenge. It was the sound something makes when it has been waiting a very long time and has just been given what it wanted.

Gesbiek came round on his heels.

Fifty-two metres away, on the wrong side of the world, Snarl was standing at the cliff edge with his chest lit up like a second sun.

[SNARL | 1-BLUE | LEVEL 15]
[STATUS: HOSTILE]

Blue. Not the ember-blue Gesbiek remembered from the Sludge Pits. Denser, harder, brighter.

Snarl had been busy too.

The whole shape of it arrived at once. Nobody had tracked him. Nobody had spent three weeks reading his trail through the Danger Zone, because nobody had been looking. Blue-tier warriors swept the outer boundary because that was the job, and Snarl had been doing the job, and then he had glanced across a chasm no goblin had ever crossed and seen a grey silhouette crouching in the glowing ferns with light leaking out of its chest.

Gesbiek watched the recognition happen at fifty-two metres.

Confusion first, which was fair. Wrong zone, wrong creature, wrong everything.

Then the confusion burned off, and what was underneath it had been there for a while.

The exile had been a sentence. Gesbiek was supposed to have been opened up by something Green-tier before sunset on the first day, and forgotten by the second, and that was meant to be the end of the matter. Instead the matter had gone on being open, and it had clearly been sitting somewhere in Snarl's chest ever since, small and hot and impossible to reach.

Gesbiek raised one hand and waved. He was not entirely sure why. Some part of him had simply decided.

Across the ravine, something in Snarl came apart.

* * * *

He uncoiled a length of woven vine from his belt, the kind every warrior carried for hauling carcasses, and his breath was coming hard and it had nothing to do with effort.

Gesbiek watched him tie it off around a dead Ironwood root that hung out over the drop, and understood what was about to happen roughly one second before it did.

Snarl could not fly. Snarl could not jump fifty feet. What Snarl could do was swing.

"No," Gesbiek said, to nobody. "That will not work."

Snarl backed up to give himself a run, and his shard flared, and he came at the edge at a sprint and threw himself off it.

The arc took him down into the dark with a war cry going ahead of him, and the Analytical Sight ran the trajectory without being asked and produced a result Gesbiek did not need explained. Too fast. Too aggressive. There was going to be an impact.

There was.

Snarl hit the cliff wall below and to the left of where Gesbiek stood, and the sound of it came up through the rock and into his feet, and he heard ribs go from fifteen metres away.

He waited for the grip to fail. For the fall and the eight seconds and the end of the problem.

Instead the blue went brighter.

Damage absorbed. Pain switched off somewhere it did not need to be felt. Snarl let go of the rope entirely, and got both hands into the rock face, and began to climb.

Not carefully. Fast. His fingers went into dirt and stone like driven spikes and he hauled a body that weighed three of Gesbiek straight up a vertical surface at a speed that made no sense at all.

Gesbiek stood at the top and watched, and revised something fundamental.

He had spent an afternoon and a piece of his sanity crossing this ravine. He had needed a flaw in the world to do it. And a Blue-tier warrior in a temper had solved it with a rope and roughly nine seconds of effort.

The end of the world was not a fixed location. It moved depending on who was standing at it.

A hand came over the cliff edge and found solid ground.

Gesbiek ran.

* * * *

The blue undergrowth took him in, and his Agility carried him through it faster than anything in the Green Zone could have managed, and behind him the sound of pursuit did not fall away at all.

[41m]

Of course it did not. Level 15 against Level 5, and every one of Snarl's levels bought with Blue-tier meat while every one of Gesbiek's had been scraped out of beetles.

[34m]

There was something else in it too, something no number was going to hold. Snarl was not running down an enemy. He was collecting on something. Every stride said the same short sentence, over and over, and it was not about the clan or the patrol or the territory.

[29m]

Straight-line running ended one way and Gesbiek could see the shape of it from here. Forty seconds, perhaps fifty, and then a sword through his back while he was still deciding what to do.

He needed the terrain to fight for him, because nothing else was going to.

He threw the Analytical Sight wide open at a dead sprint, and the forest turned into a map.

Left: a cluster of red markers, close together. Vipers, nesting. Not enough. Snarl would go through a viper nest and be irritated by it.

Right: a field wearing warnings he did not have time to read properly, some kind of raw mana bleeding up out of the ground. That would probably stop Snarl. It would definitely stop Gesbiek, who would reach it first.

Ahead: heat. A great deal of heat, banked and slow, coming from under a fallen Sequoia.

He made the System open the tag.

[IRON-FUR BEAR | 3-GREEN (RESONANT) | LEVEL 11]
[STATUS: HIBERNATING]

Three lights.

*Three lights are a storm, Gesbiek. You do not fight a storm.*

"I am not going to fight it," he said, and his voice came out in pieces around his breathing. "Grandfather. I am not going to fight it."

[24m]

He adjusted his line and went for the cave.

* * * *

The entrance was ten feet high and twenty across, framed by the root plate of the dead Sequoia so that it looked like a mouth, which Gesbiek chose not to dwell on.

He could see the shape inside. A mass in the dark, rising and falling slowly, and three green points set along its spine glowing faintly even in sleep. Left, centre, right. Left, centre, right.

Twenty metres out he scooped a rock off the ground without breaking stride. Granite, about a kilogram, sharp on one face.

Fifteen. Behind him Snarl was hacking through ferns rather than going round them, which was faster and told Gesbiek everything about the state he was in.

Ten metres. The breathing in the cave was audible now, deep and slow, more felt than heard.

Five.

Gesbiek threw with everything a Strength stat of 2 could produce, which was not much, but the target was enormous and asleep.

The rock cracked off the bear's snout.

For one full heartbeat, nothing.

Then two yellow eyes opened in the dark, and a growl started somewhere below hearing and came up through the ground into Gesbiek's legs.

He cut hard left at the last possible moment, pivoting on the new legs without losing a stride, and ran parallel to the cave mouth instead of into it.

Snarl did not cut left.

Snarl came into the clearing at a full sprint with his sword up and his eyes fixed entirely on the small grey thing he had crossed a ravine to reach, and he did not see the cave, and he did not hear the growl as anything other than forest, because he was not in the forest any more. He had not been for some minutes.

The Iron-Fur Bear came out of the dark like a hillside that had decided to move.

Eight feet at the shoulder on all fours. Twelve hundred pounds. Fur that was closer to bristled iron than hair, and three shards along the spine flaring up together into a triangle that made the air in front of it shimmer.

Snarl skidded. Gesbiek saw his face change, and it took about a quarter of a second, and it was a quarter of a second too late.

The paw came round in a flat arc and took him across the chest.

The sound of it went through the clearing and into the trees. His sword left his hand and went end over end into the undergrowth, and Snarl went with it, twenty feet through the air, and hit a trunk and stopped hitting things.

The bear roared. The growl had been a courtesy. This was not.

Then it charged.

Gesbiek did not stay to watch. He was fifty metres out and still accelerating, and the fight came to him as sound and as heat signatures moving at the edge of his sight.

Snarl was fighting. The blue came up bright and stayed up, and he got the sword back somehow, and he put everything he had into an animal that was regenerating faster than he could damage it behind a field that ate three quarters of every blow.

It was not a fight. It was arithmetic with claws in it.

Gesbiek heard him scream once. It had rage in it, and pain, and underneath both of those something that had not been in Snarl's voice at any point in five years.

Then the sound stopped.

* * * *

He kept running for another thirty seconds, then jogged, then walked, and finally crawled into the middle of a stand of glowing bushes and made himself small in the way he had been making himself small since he was old enough to walk.

He waited.

The roaring settled into grumbling. Something heavy was dragged over ground, and then over stone, and then the cave went quiet.

Fifteen minutes. Twenty. The forest went back to its own business by degrees, insects first, then wind, then something calling to something else a long way off.

Gesbiek let his breath out and discovered his hands were shaking badly enough to be interesting.

Snarl was dead.

He turned that over and waited to feel something enormous about it.

Five years of it. Buckets kicked out of his hands. Food taken off him in front of an audience. The trench. The boot on his back at his grandfather's cairn. The promise, delivered at close range in the fog, about what would happen the next time they met outside the pits.

And Snarl had meant that. That was the part Gesbiek kept coming back to, sitting in a bush forty metres from a bear. Nobody had ordered this. Nobody had even asked. Snarl had seen him across the width of the world and had gone over a rope into an eight-second drop with cracked ribs, because a runt he had personally sentenced to death had failed to comply.

Nothing in Gesbiek had ever been that important to anybody.

There had been no duel. No speech. No moment where he stood over the body of the goblin who had made his childhood a matter of endurance and said something worth remembering.

There had been a rock, a sleeping bear, and a hard left turn.

[ACHIEVEMENT: KITING MASTERY I]
[+5% MOVEMENT SPEED WHILE FLEEING COMBAT]

Gesbiek read that twice.

Fleeing. The System had watched him engineer the death of a Level 15 warrior with a piece of granite and had filed the whole performance under running away.

He started laughing, quietly, into his own knees, and it went on longer than it should have and had a slightly wrong edge to it, and he let it run until it stopped on its own.

All that hate. Five years of it, banked and kept and carried across a ravine at considerable personal cost.

And it had been the most useful thing in the forest, once it was pointed in the right direction.

Gesbiek wiped his face and got up, and brushed blue pollen off a tunic that was mostly holes, and looked back the way he had come.

The bear had what it wanted. The clearing was quiet.

Somewhere back there, in the ferns, a cobalt beetle was still going about its evening, worth fifteen percent and entirely unaware of any of this.

He went to find it.