[RATING MA 15+]
The sixteenth day began with silence.
Not the usual silence of predators hunting—that silence had texture, weight, the thug like pause before violence. This was different. Wrong. The eternal chittering that had become the soundtrack to Sekitanki's existence had simply... stopped.
He stood at the entrance of his shelter, bone spear gripped in his left hand, and listened to nothing.
The forest held its breath.
Every survival instinct he'd developed—paid for in blood and fear and desperate learning—screamed danger. When the prey animals went silent, when even the insects stopped their endless noise, it meant something apex was moving. Something that made everything else choose invisibility over existence.
Sekitanki's makeshift time machine components lay scattered in his shelter—two weeks of impossible work, quantum circuitry married to prehistoric biology through sheer desperate innovation. He'd been so close. Maybe days away from attempting a return jump.
But the silence suggested he might not have days. The ground trembled. Not earthquake trembling—rhythmic. Purposeful. The vibration of thousands of synchronized impacts. Like an army marching. Like a machine churning earth.
No. Not like an army. An actual army. They came from the east as the sun burned through morning mist.
The first wave emerged from the undergrowth like a living tsunami—ants. But calling them ants was like calling the ocean damp. Each one was the size of a large dog, mandibles like industrial shears, exoskeletons gleaming black-red in the filtered light. And there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.
A colony. Or a hunting swarm. Either way, they flowed through the forest like liquid death, consuming everything in their path. Sekitanki watched them advance and felt his carefully constructed survival strategy crumble.
You couldn't fight a swarm. Couldn't stab a thousand individuals. Couldn't reason with colony intelligence that operated on chemical signals instead of thought.
You could only run.
He grabbed what he could—the temporal core in a makeshift sling, his weapons, nothing else. The work of sixteen days abandoned in the space of three seconds. Survival stripping away everything except the next heartbeat.
Then he ran. The forest had become chaos.
Everything with legs was fleeing. Sekitanki found himself in a nightmare stampede—giant millipedes crashing through undergrowth, scorpions scuttling past him with unusual speed, even a centipede (smaller than the one that had destroyed his machine, but still massive) gave him barely a glance as it fled.
The ants didn't discriminate. They took down everything.
Sekitanki witnessed an arthropod—something beetle-like, armored, the size of a small car—get swarmed. Twenty ants covered it in seconds. Their mandibles worked in coordination, finding joints, exploiting gaps, dismantling it piece by piece while it still thrashed.
The sounds would haunt him forever. Chitin cracking like gunshots. The wet tearing of internal organs exposed to air. The creature's death shriek cutting through everything.
Then the ants moved on, leaving picked-clean bones, and Sekitanki ran faster.
His lungs burned. The oxygen-rich air that should have given him advantage instead made every breath feel like swallowing fire. His legs—stronger now after weeks of survival, but still human, still limited—protested with every impact.
Behind him, the swarm flowed. Relentless. Tireless. Patient in the way only colony intelligence can be patient. A dragonfly—one of the massive Meganeura—swooped low over the swarm. Predator seeing opportunity. Its mistake was landing.
Ants erupted upward in a coordinated strike. They covered the dragonfly in a living blanket, dragging it down through sheer weight and numbers. The insect's wings beat frantically, lifting dozens of ants into the air, but hundreds more replaced them.
It took less than a minute for the dragonfly to disappear beneath a churning mass of mandibles. Sekitanki didn't slow down to watch. The ravine appeared suddenly—a slash in the earth where peat had eroded, revealing ancient stone beneath. Twenty meters across. Maybe thirty meters deep. The bottom hidden by mist and vegetation.
Behind him: the swarm, now close enough that he could hear individual mandible clicks combining into a mechanical symphony. Ahead: empty air and a drop that would kill him if he jumped.
No choice. There's never a choice when survival is the only option.
Sekitanki didn't think. Thinking took time he didn't have. He just moved—running full speed toward the edge, legs pumping, temporal core bouncing against himself, bone spear gripped like a pendant.
His grandfather's voice, memory arriving in slow motion even as his body moved at full speed: In kendō, there is a moment called mushin—no mind. When thought stops and action simply is. That is when you transcend technique.
He hit the edge and launched himself into void. Time crystallized. He saw everything with perfect clarity: the ravine walls rushing past, ancient stone layered in geological epochs. The mist below hiding whatever waited. The swarm reaching the edge behind him, some ants tumbling over in their momentum, becoming falling shadows in his peripheral vision.
His body twisted mid-air—instinct born from weeks of desperate combat. The bone spear came around, point driving toward the ravine wall. Not to stop his fall—that was impossible—but to slow it.
The point struck stone and caught. The spear bent but didn't break. Sekitanki's momentum swung him into the wall—impact driving air from his lungs, his grip on the spear slipping.
He fell the last ten meters and hit water.
Cold. Shockingly cold after the humid air. The impact stunned him, drove him deep, turned the world into dark liquid confusion. For a moment he couldn't tell up from down, couldn't remember why he needed to surface, couldn't—his head broke water and he gasped, coughing, alive. The ravine walls rose on either side, narrow slices of sky visible far above. The swarm had stopped at the edge—he could see them massing up there, dark shapes against green light, but they weren't following.
Too risky. Even colony intelligence knew better than to leap into unknown depths. Sekitanki treaded water with his good arm, the temporal core still somehow strapped to his forearm, and started laughing. The sound echoed off stone walls—manic, broken, triumphant.
He'd survived. Again. How many times can one person survive before survival becomes its own form of madness? The ravine river carried him downstream for what felt like hours.
Sekitanki stopped fighting the current after the first kilometer, let the water take him, conserving strength. The walls gradually lowered. Vegetation returned—ferns and club mosses creating a canopy that filtered already-dim light into deeper green.
When he finally dragged himself onto a muddy bank, the sun was setting. Or what passed for sunset in the Carboniferous—a gradual dimming of already-filtered light until darkness became complete.
He lay there on his back, staring at a sky he couldn't see through the canopy, and took inventory. The temporal core: intact. Miraculous, but intact.
His weapons: lost. The bone spear had stayed embedded in the ravine wall. The chitin blade had fallen from his belt during the plunge.
His body: new injuries layered over old ones. Ribs that might have re-broken. His shoulder dislocated from the impact with the wall. Cuts and bruises too numerous to count.
His mind: still here. Still processing. Still stubbornly insisting on continued existence. Sixteen days of work. Gone. Back to nothing except the core.
The despair should have crushed him. Should have been the final weight that broke whatever stubborn thing kept him moving. Instead, he felt something else rise up—something forged in blood and pain and endless desperate fighting.
Rage. Pure, clean, focused rage at the universe that kept trying to kill him. At the forest that saw him as nothing but prey. At the cosmic joke that had stranded a genius in prehistory with nothing but his wits and refusal to die.
"Fine," he said to the darkness. His voice was hoarse from screaming, from running, from breathing air too thick for human lungs. "Fine. You want me dead? You'll have to try harder."
The forest didn't respond. Just kept being ancient and alien and utterly indifferent. But Sekitanki was done being prey.
The scorpion found him at midnight. He heard it coming—the scratch of chitin on stone, the patient clicking that preceded attack. His body moved before conscious thought, rolling sideways as the stinger punched into mud where he'd been lying.
No weapons. No spear. No blade. Just his hands and the refuse-to-die stubbornness that had become his defining feature. The scorpion lunged again. Sekitanki dove toward it—inside the reach of its stinger, under the arc of its claws. His left hand found the junction between its head and thorax. His right arm, still weak but functional enough, wrapped around a leg.
They crashed together into the mud.
What followed wasn't combat. It was something more primal. More desperate. Sekitanki's teeth found soft membrane and bit. Tasted ichor and wrongness. His fingers dug into joints, exploiting every weakness weeks of killing had taught him.
The scorpion thrashed. Its tail whipped wildly, catching him across the back—no venom this time, just blunt force that cracked already-damaged ribs. But he didn't let go. Couldn't let go. Because letting go meant dying and he'd decided dying wasn't acceptable.
His hand found a rock. Brought it down on the scorpion's head. Again. Again. Again. Until the thrashing stopped. Until only his own ragged breathing remained. Sekitanki rolled off the corpse and lay in the mud, covered in blood and ichor and rain that had started falling without him noticing. He'd killed a prehistoric scorpion with his bare hands and a rock.
No technique. No weapons. Just animal desperation. This is what I've become, he thought. This is what survival requires.
And somewhere in the wreckage of who he'd been—the prodigy, the genius, the empty vessel—something new was being forged. Something that could look at impossible odds and spit in their face.
Something that refused to end until it chose to end.
Sekitanki Hankō suru hito—survivor, killer, stubborn impossibility—dragged himself to his feet in the Carboniferous night and started walking. He didn't know where he was going. Didn't know if he'd ever rebuild his machine. Didn't know if survival was even worth the cost anymore. But he was walking. Still moving. Still refusing the only certainty this world offered. And that would have to be enough.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Time Core"]