Zoe followed behind Eve, keeping up, just barely. She was worried that what they were doing was useless,more worse, dangerous. No, not just worried. She was terrified. The creature had let most of them go once. And that could either mean that it would ignore them, or that there was an actual brain behind it. And Eve didn't know which one scared her more.
Their only real hope of defeating the thing was if they somehow tricked it into a trap that was strong enough and fast enough to kill it. Or, you know, off a cliff, or something. That might work.
However, if it had even a baseline intelligence, like, say, enough to follow an instruction as intricate as retrieving one person from a group, then it likely wouldn't just fall into something like that. It would take a bit more work.
But the other option was that it had simply not cared enough to bother with the rest of them. And that meant that they were completely powerless before it. A wild thing had enough instincts to know that if it had a chance to take out something that might be a threat, it might as well take it. So it didn't consider them dangerous. Unless something about the creature's nature made it ignore all instincts, which was possible.
And if it was intelligent, it might even be able to set a trap for them, which Zoe definitely wanted to avoid. It wouldn't even be difficult. All it had to do was step off of the main path into the trees once it noticed them, and then jump out and defeat them again.
Cracked fists, even with all of them together, they hadn't even touched the thing. Zoe had tried, after she had seen Zoe and Michael fall, but she had hardly been able to see it.
"Eve!" Zoe called again. The other girl seemed determined to ignore her. So Zoe tried Luke.
"Luke! Please tell her to stop," Zoe begged. "She's being stupid and putting all of us in danger? Besides, what if it decides to kill Michael when it seems us?"
That got her to stop. Zoe ground her heels into the packed dirt of the path, skidding to a halt herself as Luke and Kane both slowed and stopped without any visible effort.
Cracked skull perfectionists.
Eve turned, frowning.
"Is that even possible?" She asked Luke. Luke nodded slowly, thinking. Zoe knew his thinking face. It was her third least favorite, right under his "You should be better, Zoe" one. She had recently added her own name to the description of it, because she had realized a little while ago that he didn't actually use it on anyone but her.
"It is possible," Luke said after a pause. He had lost his thinking face a while ago, but he enjoyed making Zoe wait in suspense. At least, that was what Zoe thought. He acted like it enough for it to be true.
"So, what do we do?" Zoe asked pointedly. "We need a real direction. If we are going to go save Michael-"
Eve's head snapped towards her, her frown deepening. She didn't often frown. Scowling and smiling were regular expressions for Eve, but frowning was not. At least, not that Zoe had seen. She was a very emotional person, and it took something that caused distinctly more mixed feelings to get her to frown. Basically, Eve had an exaggerated version of a normal person's emotions. If how something specific made her feel was strongly negative or strongly positive, even if there were some small reasons for it to be the opposite one, she would immediately jump to the extreme, and if there were only small reasons, she wouldn't care. So there had to be strong emotions, both positive and negative, for Eve to frown like this.
Zoe knew this, or rather, she assumed this, because of other people she had met who had similar behavioral patterns. There was always something so basic at the core of every person. For some, it was just more hidden than it was in others.
Zoe looked at Luke. She still couldn't figure him out. No stereotype, no box that she considered ever seemed to fit him. She would think that she had it down, and then he would do something so distinctly against the character she had thought that he was that it was impossible to ignore, and Zoe would be back behind square one. She knew nothing about the boy that was supposed to supplement her guard.