Chương 118: Chapter 117 – Four Left Standing

The communicator stone sat cold and grey in Sam's palm for a long moment before he pressed his thumb into the groove and felt it warm. Duncan's voice came through thin and a half-second delayed, the way it always did through the stone, like he was speaking from the bottom of a well.

"Go ahead."

"Two missing out of Alder's Cross. Petra-Anne, Tomas. Full search, nothing found — no blood, no fight, no trail past a stand of birch a mile off the millrace." Sam kept it flat, kept it short.

"Same as the Fenn tracks. Same as Corren's gap. I don't think these are separate anymore, Duncan." A pause, longer than the stone's delay accounted for.

"You're saying three incidents."

"I'm saying I've stopped believing in coincidence."

"Understood. I'll get it to Natalia and Kalsar tonight." Another pause, shorter.

"Keep the patrol moving. Rushbrook's outer stretch still needs covering before the week's out, and pulling everyone back now tips whoever's doing this that we've noticed. Watch yourself."

"Always do." The stone went cold again in his hand, and Sam pocketed it and didn't say anything else about it to Voss, who was watching him from ten feet off with the particular patience of someone who knew better than to ask a Logistics Lead what he'd just reported and expected the answer to come when it was ready to.

They moved out at first light the next morning, eight of them now instead of ten, toward the outer stretch that ran along the treeline between Rushbrook's territory and the open, unclaimed woods beyond it. Nobody talked much. The two empty spaces in the column said everything that needed saying. They heard the fight before they saw it.

It came rolling through the trees a mile out — steel on something harder than steel, a scream cut short, a voice shouting orders that kept breaking apart into panic halfway through the sentence. Voss's hand went up and the whole line stopped dead, and for one held breath nobody moved at all.

"That's not animals," Orlo said, low.

"No," Sam said.

"Move." They came out of the treeline into a shallow clearing already gone to blood and mud, and Sam took the whole scene in within a half-second, before Candice was already moving without him — four people left standing where there should have been five, backs together in a ragged half-circle, one of them bleeding freely from a gash along the thigh and staying upright through sheer refusal, and three Kithren tearing into them that were built wrong for anything Sam had ever cleared off a patrol route. Shardbacks.

He knew the name from a bestiary sketch years ago and had never expected to see one outside it — heavy, boar-bodied things armored in jagged, crystalline plates that caught the light like broken glass, each one easily twice the mass of the untamed pack from three days back, moving with a coordination the wolf-hybrids' fake retreat hadn't come close to matching. Rare-grade, judging by the plating. These four should already be dead. They weren't, and Sam doubted that had anything to do with luck.

"With me!" Voss was already running, sword out, and the rest of the patrol broke into the clearing behind her in a ragged line that had no time to form up properly. Sam went in low and fast, lance leveled, and put the full weight of the charge into the flank of the nearest shardback before it registered a second threat had arrived.

The impact jarred up through both arms hard enough to numb them — the plating didn't crack, didn't even properly dent, and the beast rounded on him with a speed that had no business belonging to a creature built that heavy. Candice hit it from the side a half-second later, ice spikes aimed for the joint behind the foreleg where the plating gapped, and this time something gave — a crack, a stagger, the shardback's charge going wide and burying its tusks in the dirt instead of Sam's ribs.

"Joints!" Sam shouted, over the noise.

"The plates don't break — go for the joints!" Orlo took the warning and put his blade into the gap behind a foreleg on the second beast, and it screamed, high and furious, and rounded on him with enough force that only a shove from one of Rushbrook's newer recruits — a quick, quiet woman named Denna — knocked him clear before the tusks connected.

The shardback Sam was working turned faster than its bulk had any right to, and he caught the follow-up on the shaft of his lance instead of taking it clean, the impact driving him back three full steps and putting him flat against a fallen trunk before he found his footing again. Candice went for the same gapped joint a second time, and the beast finally buckled onto its foreleg mid-charge, snarling, dragging itself half-upright with the limb hanging wrong beneath it. It should have kept coming.

A wounded animal cornered in a losing fight didn't usually choose that moment to disengage. It wrenched itself back and away instead, putting distance between itself and Candice with a speed that had nothing panicked in it at all. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

Orlo's beast broke off a moment later the same way, Denna's blade having opened the same joint on its foreleg — not dead, not even close to dead, just done fighting a fight it no longer liked the odds of. The survivor with the gashed thigh finally went down, not from a new wound but from the old one catching up with him all at once, and one of the four defenders broke formation to catch him before he hit the ground, shouting words Sam couldn't make out over the noise of steel and screaming animals both.

Voss's fight ran longer than either of the others — her shardback had learned faster than the first two, angling its good side away from her every time she closed, forcing her to work for an opening instead of finding one handed to her. She finally landed a hard cut across the same rear joint the others had taken, and it folded briefly onto three legs, favoring the fourth, before doing exactly what its packmates had done: pulling back rather than pressing an advantage it still technically held.

Sam circled the nearest of the two wounded shardbacks with Candice, looking for a finishing angle, and found instead that it had stopped offering one at all — foreleg tucked tight, presenting nothing but plating no matter which side he came at, backing steadily toward the treeline rather than charging, patient in a way no cornered animal had any business being. It's not trying to kill us, Candice said, mid-circle. None of them are. Not anymore. Since when. Since the first one buckled.

Watch — it's not looking for an opening anymore. It's looking for a way out that leaves it standing. The answer came a breath later, when all three shardbacks broke off at once — not fleeing, withdrawing, in a tight line toward the deeper trees, covering each other's retreat exactly the way the wolf-hybrids had three days back. Voss's sword caught the slowest one across the haunch as it turned, drawing blood, and it didn't so much as flinch out of formation to answer the hit.

It simply left, falling in step with the other two, and the three of them vanished into the treeline together like a unit completing an order. The clearing went quiet all at once, the kind of quiet that came from everyone breathing hard at the same time and nobody quite believing the fight was over.

"Report," Voss said, already moving toward the four survivors, sword still out, voice steadier than Sam felt. The woman who'd caught the wounded man looked up, and Sam recognized the look on her face for what it actually was — not just exhaustion, but the specific hollowed-out look of someone still catching up to the fact that she'd survived.

"We were five," she said.

"Lost Callum an hour back. Those things came out of nowhere, no warning, no scout report, nothing — they didn't even go for easy kills. Went for legs first. Wanted us slow. Wanted us alive long enough to—" She stopped, swallowed, started again.

"Long enough for something. I don't know what. They never finished it."

"They were waiting," Sam said.

"For what?"

"Something they didn't get to finish." He crouched by the man with the thigh wound, checking it properly now that the fight had stopped demanding all of him — deep, but clean. No artery. The man's color was bad, pale under the dirt, but his breathing had steadied since Sam first laid eyes on him, and that was worth more right now than anything Sam could say to make him feel better about it.

"You'll keep the leg. Might not thank me for saying so while it's still bleeding like that, but you will."

"Wasn't worried about the leg." The man's voice came out thin, half a laugh with none of the humor left in it.

"Worried about the thing that took it not stopping until it got the rest of me too."

"It stopped," Sam said.

"Rare-grade Kithren don't quit a fight they're winning. Something made that call for it." He looked to the woman again.

"Anything else. Anything they did that didn't make sense before now." She thought about it, visibly, and the effort of pulling the memory back into order took whatever strength she had left to spare on it.

"They circled us instead of rushing straight in. Like they were herding us somewhere, except there was nowhere to herd us to — we were already backed against the rocks. And the biggest one kept looking past us. Not at us. Past us, toward the trees behind, like it was waiting on something to catch up."

"Nothing came," Sam said.

"No. Nothing came, and then you did, and they left." She said it slowly, like she was only now hearing how it sounded out loud.

"You think we're the ones who scared them off."

"No," Sam said.

"I think we're the reason whatever they were waiting for decided it wasn't worth showing up anymore." Sam heard that and didn't say anything back right away. Something interrupted them, Candice said. Or someone. Maybe. Or something else did, and we just got the tail end of it.

Voss was already organizing the wounded for the walk back, calling for whoever had the cleanest hands to take the makeshift litter, and Sam straightened and looked once more toward the treeline the shardbacks had vanished into — empty now, silent, giving away nothing about whatever had commanded three Rare-grade Kithren to hold a kill for an hour and then walk away from it the moment reinforcements arrived.

He thought about the communicator stone sitting cold in his pack, and the report he still hadn't sent, and understood with a clarity that settled somewhere just behind his ribs that whatever he told Duncan next was going to sound a great deal less like caution and a great deal more like a warning. The walk back toward Rushbrook was slower than it should have been, the litter forcing a pace none of them were used to keeping, and it gave Sam more time than he wanted to sit with the woman's account of the fight.

Herded against rock they couldn't retreat past. Wounded deliberately, not killed. A pack that broke off the moment it stopped being convenient to keep fighting — the same clean discipline he'd watched twice now, from two completely different kinds of Kithren. Four survivors. Two names lost to whatever had taken Petra-Anne and Tomas without a mark to show for it.

A commander somewhere behind all of it patient enough to spend eleven common-grade lives just to watch a patrol respond, and disciplined enough to pull three Rare-grade Kithren off an easy kill the instant the numbers turned. Sam kept that thought to himself for the rest of the walk. Saying it out loud wouldn't change what was already coming, and he'd rather be certain before he handed everyone else a warning they'd have to carry alongside him.