[RATING MA 15+]
The fever came on the seventh day like a slow-motion apocalypse.
Sekitanki woke to find the world tilted at angles that defied physics. His shelter walls breathed. The stone beneath him pulsed with a heartbeat that wasn't his. Colors bled into sounds—he could hear the green of the forest, taste the chittering of distant insects.
His right arm had turned black.
Not metaphorically. Actually black. The infection had spread from the scorpion wounds like ink through water, discoloring flesh in patterns that would have fascinated him if they weren't killing him. The limb hung useless, swollen to twice its normal size, radiating heat he could feel without touching.
Sepsis, his mind supplied through the fever haze. Blood poisoning. Mortality rate without antibiotics: roughly 40%. With my immune system already compromised: higher.
He laughed. The sound came out as a groan. Even dying, he was calculating probabilities.
Sekitanki forced himself upright. The movement sent the world spinning—actual spinning, like being on a carousel made of nausea and prehistoric sunlight. He grabbed his weapons by instinct, muscle memory overriding consciousness.
Water. He needed water. The fever was cooking him from inside, burning through whatever reserves remained. Without hydration, the infection wouldn't even get the satisfaction of killing him. Dehydration would do it first.
The stream was half a kilometer away. Might as well be on the moon. He started walking anyway.
The forest had transformed during his fever. Or maybe his perception had fractured. Either way, the trees moved when he wasn't looking directly at them. Shadows detached from their sources and followed him. The mist—always present in the Carboniferous mornings—had gained texture, pressing against his skin like cotton soaked in formaldehyde.
Oxygen toxicity, part of his mind diagnosed. Hallucinations from hyperoxia. Visual and auditory distortions. Possibly temporal lobe involvement.
Shut up, another part responded. Diagnosing doesn't help if you can't treat. Both parts of him kept walking. The ground changed beneath his feet—became softer, wetter, sucking at his boots with hungry sounds. He'd wandered off the familiar path. Or the familiar path had wandered away from him.
He took another step and the earth gave way completely.
The fall seemed to last hours. Sekitanki tumbled through darkness that smelled of methane and rot, bouncing off walls that were too soft to be stone, too solid to be mud. Something between. Peat, maybe. Layers of compressed plant matter that had been accumulating for millions of years.
He hit bottom in an explosion of brackish water. Cold. Shockingly cold after the fever's heat. The impact drove air from his lungs. For a moment he couldn't tell which way was up—the water was opaque, thick with sediment, dark as ink.
Then his head broke surface and he gasped, coughing, treading water with one arm while the infected one hung dead. Where—he'd fallen into some kind of pit. A sinkhole, probably, where the peat layer had collapsed into an underground cavity. The walls rose six meters above him, slick and vertical. Roots dangled like vines. The opening through which he'd fallen was a ragged wound of dim light.
And the water around him was moving. Not current. Not waves. Movement. Something brushed against his leg. Something large. Sekitanki's fever-addled mind took three full seconds to process what that meant. Then adrenaline hit like lightning, burning through the delirium.
He wasn't alone down here.
The amphibian surfaced five meters away—a nightmare given form. Its head was the size of a coffin, flat and broad, with eyes that tracked him with calculating hunger. The body behind it moved with serpentine grace, powerful and patient.
Proterogyrinus. Or something like it. An apex predator of Carboniferous waterways. Three meters of muscle and teeth and evolutionary perfection designed to kill things exactly like him.
They stared at each other across the dark water. The amphibian opened its mouth. Rows of needle teeth glistened. Its throat pulsed with something between breathing and growling.
Sekitanki's weapons had fallen somewhere during the tumble. He had nothing but a useless right arm and a left arm that was already exhausting itself keeping him afloat.
This is it. Finally. The one I can't win.
But even as the thought formed, his grandfather's voice cut through: There is no fight you cannot win. Only fights where the cost of winning exceeds what you're willing to pay.
What am I willing to pay? Everything. Apparently. Because his body was already moving. The amphibian lunged.
Sekitanki dove—not away, but toward it. Under the snapping jaws, close to the body where its massive head couldn't reach. His left hand found purchase on slimy skin. He pulled himself onto its back.
The creature thrashed. Water churned into foam. They went under together, spinning through liquid darkness. Sekitanki held on with strength born from pure desperation, his infected arm useless but his left hand locked in a death grip on what might have been a dorsal ridge.
They surfaced. The amphibian rolled, trying to dislodge him. He shifted his weight, moved with the roll instead of against it, using the creature's momentum the way he'd learned to use everything's momentum—because he was too weak to fight force with force.
His hand found the eye. The massive, bulging eye. He drove his thumb into it. The amphibian's shriek was almost human. It thrashed violently, smashing against the pit walls. Stone cracked. Peat rained down. Sekitanki lost his grip and fell back into the water. He surfaced gasping. The amphibian was fleeing—actually fleeing, swimming for some underwater exit he couldn't see, trailing blood from its ruined eye.
Sekitanki floated there, too exhausted to feel triumph. Too feverish to process what had just happened. He'd fought a prehistoric amphibian with his bare hands and somehow survived.
I'm losing my mind. I must be losing my mind. Sane people don't fight giant salamanders. But insanity was just another luxury he couldn't afford. Climbing out took an eternity. The walls were slick with algae and moisture, offering few handholds. Sekitanki's infected arm was completely useless—he might as well have been paralyzed from the shoulder down on that side. His left arm shook with exhaustion. The fever made distances lie—the opening looked close, then impossibly far, then close again.
He climbed anyway.
Used roots as ropes. Jammed his boots into tiny crevices. Pulled himself up centimeter by centimeter with his working hand while his body screamed in protest.
Halfway up, his grip failed. He fell two meters, slammed into a ledge he hadn't noticed, felt something crack in his ribs. The pain was distant. Abstract. His body's damage reports filed away for later consideration. He started climbing again. The third attempt got him to the top. He crawled over the edge and lay there in the mud, breathing through broken ribs, watching the canopy spin overhead.
I'm going to die, he thought with odd clarity. The infection will kill me. Or the fever. Or the next predator. Or the one after that. This place will win eventually. But not today. He forced himself to his feet. Swayed. Steadied. Started walking.
The weapons were gone. Fine. He'd make new ones. The shelter was somewhere in that direction—he thought. Navigation had become guesswork. But guessing was better than nothing.
One foot. Then the other. Repeat until death or destination.
He found the stream by accident, stumbling through undergrowth and emerging at its bank like a drunk tourist. The water looked brown. Probably contaminated. Definitely unsafe.
Sekitanki fell to his knees and drank anyway. The liquid was warm and tasted of minerals and rot. He gulped it down, felt his stomach rebel, kept drinking. Dehydration killed faster than bacteria. He'd take his chances.
When he finally stopped, he sat back and looked at his reflection in the slow-moving water. A stranger looked back. Gaunt face covered in mud and dried blood. Eyes sunken and fever-bright. Hair matted with plant matter. The remains of his lab coat—once white, pristine, the uniform of a respected researcher—now just black rags hanging from skeletal shoulders. He looked like a corpse that had forgotten to die. Is this what I wanted? he asked his reflection. Is this what I was chasing? The reflection didn't answer. But somewhere in those hollow eyes, Sekitanki saw something he'd never seen before.
Not meaning. Not purpose. But presence. He was here. Fully, completely here. Not thinking about tomorrow. Not dwelling on yesterday. Just existing in this moment—broken, infected, hallucinating, but alive in a way he'd never been in his pristine laboratory.
The emptiness was still there. Would always be there, probably. But he'd learned to carry it differently. Not as a wound, but as space—room to become whatever survival demanded.
A shadow passed overhead.
Sekitanki looked up and saw the dragonfly. Not the one he'd killed—larger. Much larger. Its wingspan had to be eight meters, maybe nine. The biggest he'd ever seen, probably ever to exist.
It circled once. Twice. Ancient compound eyes reflecting his broken form. Then it flew away, disappearing into the canopy as if deciding he wasn't worth the effort.
Even the predators thought he looked too pathetic to eat. The thought should have been humiliating.
Instead, Sekitanki laughed. Really laughed—the sound echoing across the prehistoric stream, mixing with chittering insects and distant wing-beats and all the sounds of an ecosystem that didn't care if he lived or died.
Fine, he thought, struggling to his feet with his one working arm. Fine. I look like death. I feel like death. But I'm still here. And I'll still be here tomorrow. He started walking back toward his shelter, if he could find it. Each step was agony. His vision swam. The fever burned behind his eyes like fire. But he was walking.
Still moving. Still refusing to be another layer of peat in the endless accumulation of time. He found the shelter at dusk—or it found him. Either way, he collapsed inside and lay there as darkness fell. The night sounds started. Chittering. Wing-beats. The dangerous sounds of things hunting other things.
Sekitanki listened to it all with eyes half-closed, fever turning the sounds into music. A symphony of survival. Of life refusing to stop despite the universe's indifference.
I understand now, he thought as consciousness began to fade. This is what I was missing. Not happiness. Not fulfillment. Just this—the struggle. The fight. The refusal. I was empty because I'd never fought for anything that could actually defeat me. His eyes closed.
Somewhere in the darkness, something large moved through the undergrowth. Stopped outside his shelter. Sniffed the air. Sekitanki's left hand—the only part of him still capable of movement—closed around a sharp stone he didn't remember picking up.
The creature outside chittered once, then moved on. Not tonight. Not yet.
Sekitanki Hankō suru hito—prodigy, survivor, empty vessel learning to be full—surrendered to fever dreams of Tokyo rain and prehistoric sunlight, and somehow kept breathing through it all.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "Human Mind, Prehistoric World"]