The rain came harder.
Why did I think this would work?
Snake looked at Blake beside him, shaking in the mud, and felt the particular weight of a failure that cost someone else. "I'm sorry, Blake," he said.
Jeffery reached down without ceremony and unclipped the chains.
"Tear them apart."
The hyenas lunged. Their eyes lit with that unnatural glow — not animals, the same corrupted weight as everything Jeffery controlled. They were Terrors wearing familiar shapes.
A smoke bomb hit the ground between them.
The hyenas passed through it without slowing.
But four figures were standing in the clearing.
Moto. Najo. Tanaka. Aemon.
Moto offered his hand. Snake took it, rising on one arm.
"So this is what you were fighting for," Moto said.
"What's it look like." Snake's voice was rough. Pride was a hard habit. "Greybeard wants payment in blood."
Moto looked across the clearing. Jeffery sat on the gasoline drum, unhurried, the dog at his feet. Kazuchi stood behind him as still as a feature of the landscape. The two hyena-Terrors circled.
"Why?" Moto said, to Jeffery.
Jeffery looked at him the way you look at something that asked a question it had no right to ask. He didn't answer.
The six of them settled back-to-back in the rain: Moto, Snake, Tanaka, Najo, Aemon, Blake.
"My left side is useless," Snake muttered. "We can't take all of this head-on."
"We split up," Moto said. "The big one is the—"
Aemon broke.
Not a decision. A reflex. The sight of Kazuchi in the dark triggered something older than thought, and he was into the treeline before anyone registered he'd moved.
A beat of stillness in the clearing. Jeffery looked at the space where Aemon had been. Then he raised two fingers and whistled.
The pack separated.
One hyena-Terror peeled left, crashing into the trees after Najo and Blake. The other sank into the shadows and followed Aemon's scent right. Kazuchi stepped forward into the clearing.
Moto, Tanaka, and the half-functional Snake braced themselves.
The forest erupted.
Blake's city shoes found no grip on the wet roots. The Terror behind them covered ground like it had been built for this, each leap closing the distance, the snapping of its jaws filling the space between trees.
Najo stopped. He stamped his heel into the mud. A wall of bedrock erupted from the ground and the Terror drove straight into it — the wall exploded, but it bought them a second.
"Go!" He shoved Blake forward. "Run! Don't stop!"
Blake stumbled ahead. Najo turned back.
The beast had recovered instantly, tearing through undergrowth, coming low and fast for his throat. Najo ran, leading it, tracking its speed against the distance to the tree line. He hit the base of an oak at a sprint, felt the ground through his foot, and launched a granite slab skyward — then kept running, up the trunk, momentum carrying him against the bark as gravity began to register the problem.
The hyena hit the tree below him, jaws splintering bark. Najo backflipped.
The granite slab was falling.
Upside down, he caught it and drove it into the creature's skull.
Crunch.
The mud received it. He brought a second slab down on top to be sure. Then he ran, found Blake, and without pausing for breath worked a square depression six feet deep into the earth. "Get in." Blake looked at it. "Get in." He covered it with a thick layer of earth, punched air holes, put his mouth close to the seam. "Stay silent. I'll come back."
He turned and ran toward the sounds of the main fight.
In the clearing, Kazuchi was not slowing.
Its hide shed Snake's vipers without registering them, the obsidian claws shredding the tattoos the moment they made contact. Moto worked the defensive side of his sword through the rain, using smoke to misdirect, but the water was a problem — his wide-range blasts needed dry air and he didn't have it. Every exchange was borrowed time.
Snake spat blood from a new cut. "It's not slowing down."
Tanaka moved at the edge of the fight, tracking the creature's patterns with the focused expression of someone who knows the answer is somewhere in the data and hasn't found it yet.
Aemon pressed his back against an oak near the cliff edge. The sounds of pursuit had stopped.
That was worse.
"I can't do this," he whispered, trembling. His breath came wrong. "Why does he always drag us into — I didn't agree to fighting monsters in—"
Alone, you're dead in seconds.
He needed help. Any help.
"Grillet!" He squeezed his eyes shut. "I need you. Now!"
Silence.
Nothing.
"Fine," he snarled, and the desperation behind it was fierce enough to feel like courage. "Then stay there."
He pulled the pouch of six-leaf herbs from his pocket and clicked his lighter. Sparks. No flame in the wet air. He tried again. Again.
The smell arrived before the sound. Not smoke — rot. Ancient, absolute decay, the smell of something that had been wrong for a long time. It curled around him from behind the tree.
The lighter fell.
He looked up slowly.
The second hyena-Terror filled the space above him, jaws inches from his face, its eyes burning with the specific malice of something that enjoys this.
Aemon ran.
It came after him like a wall. Branches tore at his face, his lungs burned, and the creature's breath was at his back with every stride.
The trees ended.
He skidded, heels throwing mud, pebbles tumbling off the edge into nothing. A sheer drop. The gorge below swallowed the sound of the falling stones before they landed.
The Terror lunged.
Aemon didn't think. He dropped his weight, caught the snapping jaws with both hands — fingers driven deep into the shadow-fur, arms shaking with the force of it — and felt his heels begin to lose the edge.
He was losing ground inch by inch.
Across the clearing, through a gap in the trees, Moto saw him.
Everything in him lurched. The arena. The boundary line. Aemon's back foot in the air. Not again.
He was too far. Kazuchi between them. No way there.
Aemon looked across the distance and found Moto's eyes.
Moto's fight with Lilly. The judo throw. Use the momentum.
He stopped resisting.
He pulled the Terror's head, shifted his hips, twisted his whole body into a roar — and threw.
The creature yelped as it went over the edge, the sound swallowed by the dark gorge, and then there was only the rain.
Aemon stood at the brink, alone, trembling and alive. He turned and found Moto across the distance, Moto who was still parrying Kazuchi's strikes without looking away, Moto who was watching him with a grin that was completely, genuinely proud.
Aemon's face did something complicated. The expression of a younger brother asking: Did you see that?
The green shadow materialised behind him.
Not smoke. Darkness — cold, solid, deliberate. Grillet emerged from him with a face twisted not into the usual bitter amusement but into something rawer and uglier than that. Pure, burning hatred. Aemon had rejected him. Aemon had survived without him. Aemon had used Moto's technique and won.
Grillet placed his hand flat against Aemon's back.
And shoved.
Aemon's scream tore through the night, echoing off the canyon walls as the darkness swallowed him whole.
The sound went down and down and didn't stop until it did.