Chapter Thirty Six

It had taken them almost an hour before they even felt safe enough to leave the tree, to move independently, to act in a way that humans would, and not terrified prey animals clustering together, afraid of the dark. Even Anthan looked unnerved... largely because, unlike most times in his long career, he wasn't armed to the teeth, backed up by other experts, or... well, living in wartime. At least, that was Carza's amateurish guess. She became a cartographer in that hour, studying his face. Not the features - his stubbled, cleft chin, his moody eyes, the way his hair formed a sharp widow's peak on an artfully lined forehead (even his wrinkles just highlighted his best features, rather than distorting them). No, not those. She was focusing on his expression. Mapping it out. Charting every little crevice, plotting each subtle shift on a long graph in her head. He was the only one of them to have fought mutants on a large scale, to have engaged in this sort of situation. And if he wasn't going to mumble anecdotes the whole time, then Carza would have to study him. So far... he looked tense. Nervous. But not panicking. Maybe he thought he could escape if necessary, and so this plan was just... a little risk, really. Maybe, if he was alone, he could dive into that river and escape, somehow avoiding getting brutalised by the rapids. Maybe. Maybe.

Or maybe he was legitimately concerned by this mutant. Maybe it was something he'd never seen before... or seen far too often for comfort. Probably the latter. Carza wasn't going to arrogantly assume that this mutant was the most dangerous mutant ever created, brimming with power unmatched by any other, a terror from a thousand years ago that had lived by destroying all competition that came its way. It was... well, it was an eventuality. She went out into the wilds, she would find herself a wild, old-growth mutant which would treat them as it would treat anyone - as fleas to be picked from its back, morsels to be chewed on idly, or threats to be watched and evaded. They were, at the moment, the second. If they failed, they'd become the first. If they were successful... number three was their goal, to become bad enough for it to leave. And focusing on that goal helped Carza remain calm, even when she was considering following Anthan's imaginary lead and diving into the river. Because that might kill her, and the mutant would.

Right.

Plan.

They'd clipped their mutations - not a huge amount, but... well, there were areas she found hard to reach, that everyone found hard to reach, and no-one wanted to ask someone else to clip their backs, so... well. Carza flushed in embarrassment as Lirana helped her, leaning against the tree as a pair of shining scissors removed a litany of tiny skin tags from her back, while the other two remained firmly on their side of the tree, and made no other moves whatsoever. If they did, she'd hit them. Repeatedly. With her pistol. Specifically, with the bullets in her pistol. She'd shoot them, is what she was trying to say. Still, it was... humiliating to have her back clipped like this. Meant she had to come too close to indecency for comfort, but... if it saved them, then it saved them. Lirana spoke quietly as she worked, trying to distract Carza from the fact that a sharp pair of scissors were slicing into her, removing parts that... well, it didn't hurt, not exactly, but the rasp of scissors on flesh, the feeling of things detaching... it was enough to make her stomach twist in unsettling motions.

"...you don't need to do this."

"I do."

It was her fault. So it was her responsibility.

"...well, it's very brave of you."

"Thanks."

Her responses were curt - she just wanted to get this over with. Lirana grunted.

"Alright, you're done. I slapped some gauze over them. Now you do me."

Carza buttoned herself back up, returning to decency, while Lirana casually removed her shirt and leant against the tree for her own back-clipping. Founder... Carza had the luxury of not seeing her own back, and based on what she saw now, she was very thankful for that particular luxury. Mottled purples of contamination forcing its way to the surface, tiny knobs of flesh and... other materials. In some places, the mutations were becoming more defined, adapting to their environment - they should've clipped these things a while ago. For Lirana, they seemed to be differentiating into something between hair and scales, a protective, dead layer of mutations to... protect against more mutations. Which, surprisingly, still counted as mutation and thus ran into all the expected problems. One step down a slippery slope... and Lirana's back was a tapestry marking that step, and maybe a good few more.

"Alright back there?"

Carza blinked. Right. Lost in thought. Her work was quick, efficient, and marked only by the snip-snip of flesh parting, and the occasional grunt of pain from Lirana when the blades dug a little too deep. Once, Carza would've felt sick as a dog just looking at this, let alone doing it... but she'd changed. Just a little. Hardened to violence. She'd seen people scalped, brutalised, tortured, murdered... and at this point, pruning the mutations from Lirana's back was... well. Easy. Though, she couldn't help but notice that the pile she was forming was much larger than the pile formed from her own back. Quite a bit larger, actually... almost double the size, a pile of gleaming scale-hairs, patches of malformed skin, skin tags the size of her thumb... closer to boils, really. A little grave-mound of ugly flesh that went higher and higher... and Carza's worries grew. Was... Lirana alright? Rustlings from the undergrowth shattered her concentration, dragging her back to the present - was it close?

Was it here?

Was it reaching out again?

Her hand reached for her gun, quietly drawing it... not going down like a weak little rat, she was going out properly, guns blazing, screaming at the top of her lungs, and...

A bird whistled.

Was it a bird? Was it the detector? Or...

No. A bird.

Not a mutant, then.

...a mutant bird.

No, just a bird. Had to be. Must be. There were multiple others at the edges of her hearing... she was safe. Right, fine. Lirana was... buttoning up her shirt again, shivering in the cold.

"I... haven't gauzed them up."

"It's fine. I don't want to waste any time here."

"...alright. Me neither."

The men had been attending to their own clippings. They had a pile of contaminated waste-flesh, wrapped in a bundle of bloodstained clothing. The stuff Lirana had been wearing when she stabbed Kralat in the heart and finally, finally put him down for good. Anthan took over preparations, commanding the others smoothly.

"Alright, the wind's coming from..."

He peered, squinted, then licked his finger and held it up for a moment.

"...that way, so we need to make sure that we're standing downwind of you, and you need to be upwind of the mutant. The river means we know where it isn't, and I assume it's just... well, waiting for the chance to attack us when we're separated. Don't get me wrong, if it attacked now it could probably rip us all to pieces with very little difficulty, but it'd get shot a few times in the process. Would it survive? Yes. Would it enjoy getting shot? No. Would it rather put a little planning into this and come out of this encounter without bullet holes? Definitely. That's why we're still alive - it doesn't want to be hurt, to risk any of us getting lucky, to waste more contamination on recovering than it would get by consuming us."

He shrugged.

"Assuming it hasn't just given up - which I doubt."

Hull grimaced.

"...you're sure?"

"It took two bullet wounds. For something old and tough like that, that's annoying, but not crippling. And it'll want to make good on the time it's invested into following us."

Carza nodded firmly.

"Right. So... where?"

And a few minutes later, they'd found the spot. A clearing, not too far from the tree where they'd been huddling. The birdsong continued, the detector was keeping itself to a low moan from the blood splatter the creature had left behind... they were safe. Probably. The clearing was surrounded on all sides by high, gnarled trees, almost split in two by a fallen trunk covered completely in moss. Old-growth forest, with bushes occupying any space they could, trees growing where they pleased, and random weeds and grasses taking up the rest. There were no monuments out here, no odd stones... it was wild country, pure and simple. If anyone had lived here, it hadn't been for a very long time, and they hadn't left any real marks of their existence. Carza idly thought that she might be the first person to stop in this clearing for a long, long time - there was no real reason to stop here otherwise. It wasn't too large, but... it had one major advantage. It wasn't far from the river, so the mutant couldn't approach from behind. And it had proper cover downwind for her allies to hide in, while she walked out with her bloody bundle, soaked with drippings from the mutations they'd stuffed inside, and the oily, tar-like blood of the great mutant which ruled this part of the world.

She walked, silently and cautiously, into the clearing. Her pistol was heavy at her waist. The bundle was dripping freely to the ground, and she remembered how the detector had risen to a shriek when brought too close to the thing. Heavy clothes and a gas mask could only do so much, but... she knew that this needed to happen. Egg had been killed, torn away right in front of her. Hull could be next. And... and she was terrified of either him dying, or herself dying. A pointless little death, ripped away by something more powerful and idiotic than her. If she died here, if all of them died here, that mutant wouldn't change. It'd move on, do something else, never evolve or improve... it would just hunt in its territory until someone killed it, or it was forced to move away. It would never change.

...or was she just projecting?

Was it some kind of inheritor to the world?

Was humanity some strange, unnatural aberration to the natural laws of existence? Was the natural state meant to be animals busying themselves in their animal way, while contamination allowed for mutants to emerge, bizarre and freakish and unique, rampaging across the world and warring with one another - a second ecosystem, overlapping, underlying, and pervading all others. Their own little wars and changes, in violation of all conventional biology... one mutant had apparently launched a war against the entire continent, simply by being left alone for long enough in the right area. Humanity occupied little pockets of stone, islands around the great underground rivers. Some said the 'rivers' were an illusion. A bit of a joke, really - a way of stopping people from becoming too melancholic. Maybe the reality was that there was a great ocean of the stuff, seeping upwards at all times. The earth was hollow, and beneath lay a putrid sea where creatures mutated endlessly, into shapes no-one could fathom, vast enough to swallow the sky... and humanity were just clinging to their little islands of stability, hoping that the monsters wouldn't notice them. Fleas on the back of a great wolf.

She gulped.

And placed the bundle at her feet.

And waited.

The creature had seen her once. It had fed from her, once - it was familiar. And it was like a stray cat, coming close and nuzzling anything that fed it. She'd given it Sleepless, hadn't she? She'd given it scraps when it was needy?

Her teeth were clenched so tightly she was afraid of them simply snapping off.

Couldn't look back. No goodbyes, that made this all seem... final. Which it wasn't. She was going to get through this, go back, hug Hull, and then burst into tears. A thought kept going through her mind, though, beyond the mutant... and that was Lirana. She'd... been soaked in Kralat's blood. Her back had been nasty. It was an idle thought, and she was certain that others had thought it - which was why she hadn't brought it up. A distraction from something more important, but... she couldn't raise it. Anthan could, he was competent, he was skilled, he knew things. A rustling from the buses made her snap back to the present. The others must be bracing themselves... she licked her finger and stuck it in the air, testing the wild like Anthan had done. Nothing. She swivelled it a few times, and... it felt a little colder? Was that the point? Or was he just doing that as a good-luck charm? Was he laughing at her? No, no, the... yes, he had a point. The river was behind her, to the... south, she thought. And the wind was coming in from the south-east, carrying her scent into the forest. Her allies were in the north-west of the clearing, huddled behind bushes and trees, concealing themselves as best as they could, importantly, using their possessions and the plant life as windbreaks to stop the wind from carrying their scent. Ideal? No. But Anthan assured her it'd work. The creature had attacked them from the north-east, maybe the north... anyway.

She waited.

And hoped.

If things went wrong, then her allies would hurl the fuel over the creature and set it alight as best they could... but the ideal here was for the mutant to act like it had in the middle of the night. Taking her tribute, consuming it, and leaving.

Worked once.

...didn't even have proper correlation, she only had one incident to work on.

Best she could do. Running would just leave them exposed, tired, and the creature would easily catch up with them in the night, when their visibility would be limited. Either they confronted it now, or... well, or they died later. Because it'd already killed one of them.

She waited.

And waited.

No sound.

None at all.

Silence, perfect and true... silence. The detector was switched off, to avoid startling it... so all she had was the slow decline in birdsong. All she had was the fact that no healthy creature wanted to be around a mutant... and she could understand why. Her skin had crawled when it came close to her, her biology rejecting its presence completely. She gulped, stared, and slowly placed the bundle down at her feet, stepping back from it. Give it space. Don't alarm it. No eye contact. Most mutants would leave you alone, if they were wild. Don't feed them, they won't hunt you. But if you were mutated yourself... then you became prey. Only reason mutants hadn't overwhelmed everything by now, really... why humanity hadn't been snuffed out in its cradle. Mutants simply weren't interested until a human ceased to be human. And at that point, their fellow humans weren't really interested in them either.

The stinking bundle rustled in the wind.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

And... in the forest, in the distance, something moved.

At first, it was just flashes of grey. Flashes of mottled rotten flesh, and vast dark eyes staring carefully at her. Something sniffing the air, tasting it with livid red tongues. Approaching from... from the north-east. It was coming at her from the right direction, it would have detected her scent, but it was avoiding her companions. Did it know they were there? Did it realise there was an ambush? Did it care? Or had it simply failed to notice their scent? She saw nothing of her friends, no idea if they were going to fight it...

The creautre moved.

Unlike last time... it had no luxury of the night, or of proximity. To get to her, it needed to enter the light.

And it did.

And Carza realised, then and there... precisely what had happened to some of the 61st Expedition from Mahar Jovan. The mad expedition, led by a uniformed psychopath, descending into horrors that were too horrible to be believed. She remembered the boneyard, where the creature had been eating, for reasons she simply couldn't understand. Why would a mutant eat corpses, long-dead corpses at that? Why would it go for something which couldn't have any contamination for it to harvest?

Maybe if it wasn't looking for sustenance. Maybe if it was looking for, say...

Armour.

The mutant emerged from the treeline, rearing up to its full height. Carza's heart almost stopped - and she certainly forgot to breathe. It was... perhaps it was quadrupedal, but if it tried she was sure it could go on two legs, or maybe six, or ten, or more. The grey flesh was everywhere, but... but it was obvious that the flesh was only the shell. Corpses. Human corpses, matted together with some kind red, pulsing matter that vaguely resembled threads. Woven into a suit of thick armour, so thick she had no idea what the real creature looked like... if it looked like anything at all. Maybe it was just those red threads, or... eyes. So many eyes. Each one dark. The corpses had been hollowed out from within, reshaped until she could barely tell where one began and the other ended, and eyes had sprouted from the centre of their skulls. Naked men and naked women, locals and foreigners. A mass grave that walked with terrible purpose and eerie coordination. Its four legs were made of compacted torsos, furling at the ends like the forearms of a gorilla, reinforced to prevent it from toppling over. Its own torso was made of entire bodies fused together, and something like a head rose from the central mass... an awful ornament of bones, a forest of twisted fingers, all of them making something that faintly, faintly resembled a deer's head and antlers. That was it, it was like a deer, or an elk, but... but made of human corpses sewn with red thread, melted and mutated until they barely resembled humans at all.

The remains of the 61st and the people who'd fought them. Infested and manipulated like puppets. The head had no eyes, but the torso and neck bristled with them. Arms folded away from the central mass, all of the grotesquely elongated, with mouth-seams running down them. This thing wasn't larger than her - it was larger than a house, it was a walking, shambling... thing that could've massacred the entire patrol from Krodaw by itself, could've charged into the centre of the Sleepless' camp and come away engorged with new dead, with more contamination. It walked forward, and she saw how it adjusted its legs as it went, spreading them a little wider, crooking them differently, all to reduce the sound it made. Absolute silence. No wonder it hadn't roared at them - it didn't even have a mouth, just jaws and sore-ridden tongues. It stalked over, towering and awful, staring at her with every eye it possessed... how was she meant to not maintain eye contact? Either stare at the ground and be blind to it, or... or stare at the eyeless head. The mass of bones and flesh that formed a kind of facsimile of a deer's skull, 'antlers' splattered liberally with old blood.

The arms were for its prey.

The horns were for its competitors.

She couldn't say why she knew that. Just guessing. But it made sense, somehow.

It advanced... and stopped. The eyeless head loomed over her, and she could feel the other dozen eyes locked on her thin form, which was barely avoiding shaking like a leaf. She stepped back, still not making eye contact. Go on, take the bundle. Take it. The thing didn't move - but she could hear arms unfolding, mouth-seams opening, the travesty opening itself wide for a meal. Would it try and get her too? Or just snap her neck because it was... well, more convenient than hunting her at a later point?

She stepped back again...

And heard the bundle being torn to pieces by hungry mouths, contamination consumed to fuel growth towards... no goal at all.

It was old as the forests. It dwelled in its dark spaces, was greeted by reverent silence wherever it went. Its stench filled the air - woodland decay and syrup-sweet corruption. Rotting flesh and power, boiling her Carza's nose until she had to start breathing through her mouth, just to stop from throwing up. And it wore as armour the latest atrocity the forest had witnessed. What had it worn before this? Villagers, thrown out as sacrifices? Random animals? Other mutants? Plant matter? Did it have a body at any point? Was it some strange animal mutated, or a human from centuries ago, changed into a hulking monstrosity... and so altered by the experience that it couldn't even care. There was no humanity in those huge dark eyes now, at least. Nothing but a vague animal hunger and a mild animal apathy which made it willing to kill her friends one moment, and then eat from her hand the next.

Come on. Throw the damn fuel.

She stepped backwards again.

Her eyes flicked involuntarily... and she saw something in its back. No, not something. Someone. Egg. His body, already gaining a grey tint to it... stripped of clothes, and fusing with the others. Eyes gone, skull absorbed, entire structure reorienting to serve as more armour. She was glad she didn't look for long - if she saw some expression of pain or fear on his face, an expression of regret... she'd probably have broken down entirely. Gotten him killed. At least she'd avenge him, somehow. The others... they were at a range where they could run, if this thing decided to attack them while burning, she'd be the one to get gouged to death, the others... they'd be alright. They could run, and the creature would leave to lick its burns and sulk, content to ignore the prey that bit back. Moss was dripping from its antlers... centuries old. Generations.

The creature finished its meal...

And its head twitched, as if detecting something.

It twitched to the north-west.

And a second later...

The fuel canister tumbled, end over end...

And a rifle shot cracked.

Perfect.

Carza leapt backwards, drawing her gun as she went, while fire washed over the creature. She wanted to hear it scream, wanted it to pay for what it did to Egg... it didn't make a sound. Only a quiet rumbling as flesh adjusted. Her eyes widened - she was making eye contact now, taking in the full scope of the thing. The flames were sticky, clinging to its dead flesh. Jellied fuel, the sort they used to burn mutants to death in the Great War... belching out fat, acrid clouds of smoke, and waves of heat so intense she could feel her skin drying out, pore by pore, felt her hair adopting the consistency of straw... droplets of the stuff rolled away to splash on the ground, sending up cadet infernos. A ring of fire surrounding the mutant on all sides. It didn't speak. It didn't roar. It didn't do anything to signal pain - she doubted it could even feel pain at this point. And to her horror... it walked forwards. It strode through the flames, advancing towards her, flesh burning... her gun shook in her hands. It hadn't been hurt.

It hadn't even been hurt.

The dead flesh was moving outwards, shuffling along the torso, bulging to accommodate the flames... shivering to displace the liquid fuel. The fire continued to rage, of course - and its light turned the entire clearing into sunset, overpowering the dim light of the silver sun behind its fields of grey clouds. Long shadows stretched from the creature, the sun of a cruel solar system where she was being inexorably dragged inwards. She was going to die. She was going to die, and it was at the antlers and/or many arms of an enormous mutant she'd been too damn stupid to run away from. Should've jumped in the river, tried to survive the rapids, washed ashore somewhere else, begged another group of Sleepless to take her prisoner, please. She needed to be taken prisoner, it would help her survive so damn well, this thing didn't take prisoners, well, by a given definition.

The bodies it wore as armour looked pretty damn imprisoned.

And as she watched... some of the bodies were leaking a putrid blue liquid from their vacant eye sockets that extinguished anything it touched. An adaptation spread outwards quickly. It had coolant. Something to suppress the fire, something to repel the thing that was meant to kill mutants.

She stared... her hands shook... her knees quaked...

And she raised the gun.

Not going out crying.

She'd go out screaming. And crying.

The gun kicked like a mule, and she almost fell down from the sheer shock of it. The bullet dug into the creature, and it... twitched, just a little. She fired again. Again. Her hearing faded, replaced by yet more tinnitus... one, two, three, four, five, six... six apocalyptic explosions right next to her damn ear, and none of them did more than leave weeping black pustules on the creature's hide. It continued to advance, twitching its head and arms eagerly. Why was it being so slow, why wasn't it...

It was luring out the others.

Would they protect her? Would they? Rifle fire was clattering out, but none of it stopped the creature.

She had a sudden vision of Hull charging out, howling, whirling a bag around his head like a flail, anything to distract the thing. It was an animal - at its heart, it was lazy. It wanted others to do work for it, wanted to save as much energy as possible. Why hunt, when the prey could come to it? Why hunt, when it could be fed by a mass of idiots? Why bother doing anything unless it had to? So it stalked forwards, slow and deliberate, vast dark eyes almost mocking her with their depth, their apathy, their mild interest in seeing her dead. Couldn't even work itself up. And the fire continued to lick over it, so very much fire, all of it...

And then Egg gave his final gift.

First, sacrificing himself to the thing, giving them crucial moments to fire back, to drive it off instead of pushing the assault. Convinced it to spend time armouring itself further by making themselves annoying.

And now...

He'd been wearing ammunition when he died.

And based on what she saw... he'd hidden it. Under his shirt. Under his clothes.

And the creature hadn't removed them.

The fire ignited the bullets.

And they exploded outwards. A hail penetrating inside the creature's hide, some of the bullets lancing outwards to scar trees, but most... most going inwards. Into its core. Into whatever it was protecting by forming this natural armour. An attack from within, and this time, it hurt. The creature actually reacted, shifting violently, red threads lancing outwards from the body, detaching as quickly as possible as it tried to remove something that was actually hurting it. And Carza... had no more bullets. Nuts. Right. What to... oh. She moved before she could think, right as an enormous grey, burning foot slammed into the ground near her, the creature writhing angrily as it tried to shed itself. It had the wherewithal to orient itself away from the people firing at it from behind cover, and it ignored Carza completely. The red threads would emerge from the body of Egg, and would burn in the fires surrounding the creature, causing it more pain. But it was still accomplishing something - slowly, surely, it was removing this part of its armour, adjusting its movements, all in absolute silence, and...

And Carza saw an idea.

It would heal. It would find a way of surviving. And then it would kill her.

The gnawing in her stomach had escalated to a scream. A ravenous chewing in her guts that demanded she act. Because if she didn't, she was going to die. Hull was going to die. Lirana and Anthan were going to die. Egg's death, Cam's death... both in vain. All she'd been through would've been pointless, being imprisoned, killing Kralat, everything would have had no purpose whatsoever and she might as well have stayed on the streets chewing coca leaves if she was going to die so young. She'd have had more fun, and her mind would've been so blissed out that she wouldn't even miss the lack of proper emotional or intellectual fulfilment. And now... now she could hear Hull. The big idiot, he was running out, he had... he had his own pistol, he was bellowing, firing wildly, the creature was turning towards him in irritation...

And Carza grabbed what lay in front of her.

A burning stick.

A very big burning stick.

A furious scream exploded from her mouth. All the tension and stress of the last few days, the feeling of the dead fingers on her face, the feeling of being stalked, hunted, terrorised by something vaster than her.

Well, know what?

Screw it.

And like last time... no idea what she was saying. But it was surely vulgar. Somehow, she didn't care.

Had a plan.

She jumped, and leapt from the trunk in the centre of the clearing. Her feet slipped on the moss, she almost went down... but she kept up, using the stick to stabilise herself. The creature was barely paying attention to her. She was beneath its notice... no, screw it, she was below no-one's notice, she was Carza vo Anka, and she had a degree in anthropology and linguistics. She was good at essays, passable at exams, superb at research, a consumer of fruitcake, a smoker of cigarillos, and she was going to massacre this thing. She leapt once more, a desperate bound - if she failed, she'd die. If she succeeded, she might still die.

She realised the latter part while she was midair.

Too late.

The flaming spear plunged underneath the segment of exposed armour, piercing deep, spraying liquid, burning fuel over the insides of the creature. Motion rushed around her, the world dissolved into swirling colours, and all thought of bravado vanished as Carza found herself... well... hanging from the end of her stick as the creature jerked in every direction to dislodge it. Arms peeled away from the central mass, trying to grab at the stick... but the damage was done. A brief image played behind her eyes - hanging on for dear life, riding it like a mad hero from a bad theatrophone play. Then she remembered... she was a scholar. Her most well-developed muscles were her brain and her typing fingers. Not her arms. Those had the consistency of dry breadsticks. With a yelp, Carza was flung across the clearing, landing in a tangled pile of limbs and bruises, stars bursting in front of her eyes... but the stick was in. The fire had spread. The creature writhed, and she saw bodies peeling free as the thing retreated its inner mass in a flurry of blazing red ribbons. A shadowy mass, what passed for an internal form, was moving from the torso upwards, ot the neck, where bones could shelter it. The 61st Expedition was dying all over again... and to her relief, Egg's body was one of those which fell to the ground.

That felt right. Felt just. Felt like she'd paid him back, somehow.

...still dead, though.

Carza stumbled to her feet, barely cognisant of the world around her... her gun was still around, somewhere. And the mutant... the neck burst from the torso, leaving it to die. Bones rearranged, flesh readjusted... the neck was still longer than her entire body, and it had enough flesh to be thicker than a tree trunk. No legs, it simply... simply slithered over the ground, remaking itself, growing faster with each passing second. The misshapen head cracked, and a single dark eye stared outwards... and it lashed.

A scream escaped her lips. No words this time.

Hull was launched into a tree as the enormous snake-thing cracked like a whip. The mutant writhed, shivered... and a second later, began to slither away. Ignoring the others completely. Carza ignored it, or rather, any threat it presented. She just ran forwards, grabbing a... a... right. A burning arm. One of the things from the original body. Already fallen free, stiffened to the point of being useful as a club - the bones inside were plentiful, and without an intelligence to guide them they had locked into place. She swung it around her head, screaming at the top of her lungs, madness dancing in her eyes. Not him. Not him. The snake creature was leaving them. Done - they'd dealt enough damage, it wasn't going to risk losing everything over a handful of bodies. It could return later for its old torso, scavenge from some mass graves to make up the difference... she didn't care about that. It had hurt Hull, she could see him lying limp as a ragdoll... and it was turning to him, maybe it would kill him, decide to get started early, she couldn't read its mind.

Her screams turned into words as she began to thrash at the retreating creature, all thoughts of self-preservation dimming, even if a part of her was still wailing that this was an awful idea. It was. But she didn't care. She lashed at the thing with the flaming arm that was, she realised, almost as long as she was tall. The snake creature turned its attention from Hull, and the tail snapped again... she caught it with the arm, almost falling on her rear in the process... and then continued to smack it with its own arm.

And she did it articulately.

"Do! Not! Touch! Him! You! FUCK!"

Oh.

She was being vulgar.

Oh well.

The creature had, evidently, decided that neither she, nor Hull, were worth wasting time on.

And with a derisive twitch...

It left. It had arrived in silence. It departed in silence... and significantly lighter. Carza watched it go with wide eyes, her hands shaking from sheer, unmitigated tension... she couldn't believe that it had left. She couldn't... couldn't...

Hull.

He was staggering to his feet.

Carza dropped her new arm.

And lunged at him. He squeaked in alarm as she jumped at him, wrapping him up in the tightest hug she could possibly muster, planting small kisses all over his face, clutching him like he was about to vanish into the forest with that thing. His squeak turned into a cough of embarrassment, and a few mumbles of 'get off' and 'stop it, you damn spider monkey'. She ignored him, and by the time the others joined them... she was wrapped completely around him, checking him for any injuries, any bruises, any splashes of mutagenic blood, anything that could possibly indicate ill health. He was bruised, that was certain... but he was alive. Nothing snapped, nothing severed, nothing lacerated, nothing missing. Hull had given up fighting her off. Good. It wouldn't have worked anyway.

The clearing was on fire.

They could've died at a dozen different points - if the creature had approached from the wrong direction, if it'd decided to ignore the parcel and get right to killing them, if Egg hadn't been wearing bullets, if Egg's bullets hadn't been left behind during his absorption, if the creature had charged instead of walked, if the creature had decided to stick around and fight them instead of ignoring them as more trouble than they were worth, if the creature had sliced Hull instead of crushing him, if the creature had decided to take Hull, if the creature had done a thousand little things...

They'd been lucky.

They'd been inconceivably lucky.

And somehow, all she could think was this:

"Hull?"

"Hm?"

"...what did I say?"

"Uh."

"When I charged. What did I say? I can't remember."

"...it was quite rude."

"I can handle it."

Hull hesitated.

"...you said 'I'm going to teach you my language so you can understand all the ways I have fucked your mother, your aunt, and your daughter, assuming they're not the same person, you cervid...' uh... right, 'you cervid cunt'."

She blushed.

"No I didn't."

"You did. Well, you did more, but... I'm not repeating it."

"Shut up."

"...alright."

She nestled into him, making sure that he was still here.

That all of this was still real, and not some terrifying hallucination.

Anthan and Lirana were here, but she barely noticed them, how they were snickering to themselves... until a realisation struck home.

"Anthan."

"Hm?"

"Where were you?"

"Shooting at it."

"You couldn't-"

"If I charged, I'd die. I was aiming for its vulnerable points. Driving it into a frenzy."

Lirana nodded rapidly.

"He was. I was too. Promise."

Carza stopped for a moment, losing interest in their excuses. Excuses were for sane people, for sane situations, nothing like today, nothing like this moment in time where she, Carza vo Anka, a scholar of no renown, had jumped from a trunk and embedded a flaming spear into that creature. She needed a smoke... she needed to bloody well smoke. Cigarillo, yes, she had... where were her matches? Oh, crumbs, they were back...

She glanced at the burning arm.

And quietly lit her cigarillo from the burning remains of the forest-god which had almost killed her and her entire party. No-one was seriously wounded, no-one was... that was a lie. Egg had died, Hull was bruised to hell and back, and all of them were still in danger. If it came back... if it dedicated itself, overpowered its own animal nature in favour of brutish revenge, she'd be dead. All of them would be.

The others were staring at her.

Well.

Let them.

She wanted a damn smoke, that's what she wanted.

And far above, as the flames rose higher and the day drew on... the clouds began to break.

The evermorning came to an end. And strips of ragged pink cloud began to waft through the sky like victory banners.

"Well."

She began.

And gave up.

Nothing else to say. They were alive. Egg was not. The creature would leave them alone.

They lived to see another day. And at this point, that was the best she could possibly ask for.