Warning: Legends are barred from invading neighbouring Partitions until local Hegemon is subdued.
Warning: Legends are barred from invading neighbouring Partitions until local Hegemon is subdued.
Warning: Legends are barred from invading neighbouring Partitions until local Hegemon is subdued.
No matter how many times Mandla pushed, prodded and even attacked it, the translucent barrier remained intact and in their way. They could even see through it, the road continuing on uninterrupted on the other side. It was like it had been randomly dropped there, arbitrarily cleaving the forest in two.
This is such bullshit!
They’d spent half the night on a long, nerve-wracking trek through a dark forest, only to come up against a literal immovable object trapping them in? It was a cruel joke.
The Legends couldn’t even pass a finger through the wall, while the Classless suffered no such restrictions, walking back and forth between the sides as everyone watched.
Giving up the futile task, Mandla went over to Kaveh and Nicola, who had opened up the map again.
“So? Any ideas?”
Kaveh ran a hand through his hair.
“This whole thing is designed to fuck with us, I swear. We could go north, follow the wall, and we would still reach the highway. Two problems though. We’d have to cut directly through the trees and this route takes us too close to the river. We don’t know what’s up there. I don’t want to escape the hyenas only to run into fire-breathing crocs or something.”
Nicola chimed in.
“We should go anyway. We have a better chance of meeting other people on a main highway, not to mention we told everyone that’s where we’re headed. If we just give up and turn around, people will lose faith in our leadership.”
Karl approached from the side, joining them.
“That might already be happening. A few of the Classless are rallying the others to take their chances and leave us.”
Nicola scoffed.
“They’ll be defenceless out there. There’s no way they’d do something so stupid.”
Kaveh looked concerned.
“We can’t let them leave, that’s suicide!”
Nicola shrugged.
“It’s their prerogative. But this smacks of a plan fuelled by desperation and fear. We’ll just tell them we’re going up to Hectorspruit to get them some weapons or something.
Kaveh frowned.
“But we’re not going there. We’re explicitly avoiding it.”
She shrugged again.
“Look, you can let them get themselves killed, or you can lie to them. They don’t need integrity right now, they need assurance. I get it too. I’d be scared out of my mind in this situation without my skills.”
Kaveh frowned harder, but didn’t say anything, clearly conflicted.
First the “tutorial”, now this? She’s too comfortable doing this.
Mandla made a note to keep an even closer eye on her. He didn’t even necessarily disagree with her solution, but instead of Kaveh being a good influence on her, she was a corrupting influence on his friend. He rejoined the conversation.
“How about a compromise? We’ll get some of the Support Legends to whittle some basic spears from tree branches and arm them. It’s not much, but it’s a sight better than having nothing to protect yourself. We’ll tell them we’re still going to the highway but if we can scout out Hectorspruit properly, we could swing by and grab something more substantial.”
Kaveh, looking relieved, agreed, along with Karl. Nicola rolled her eyes but agreed.
They sent the message out and, with everyone back on the same page, they started their trudge up north, following the wall.
The barrier did not follow any geographical or topological features. In some places, it passed through tree trunks unhindered. The sheer bizarreness of it got Mandla thinking.
So is the whole country divided up into these Partitions? The whole world? God, I miss the internet.
Not having any way of knowing how other people were doing grated on him, for all they knew walking next to a wall triggered a deathtrap. Still, having a bright blue guiding direction helped morale, as well as the fact that now they were only exposed on one side.
The eerie forest, its dark, oppressive silence only broken by the occasional hoot of an owl, had taken on a symbolic role in Mandla’s mind. It represented everything that had gone wrong since the screens started appearing. It represented death, doubt and despair.
It started getting to the others as well. They’d taken flight immediately after the horrific battle, with no time to process anything, and set a gruelling pace for anyone unenhanced by the system. People began seeing things in the dark, jumping at shadows and keeping the Ascendants busy investigating every blur that someone saw out of the corner of their eye. Still, they all knew the price of stopping. None of them were willing to pay the cost.
After long enough, with his view dominated by nothing but endless trees, Mandla even started questioning if they’d ever get out of the forest.
No, this isn’t how it ends.
He had killed monster hyenas. He wouldn’t be undone by some fucking vegetation.
“Road up ahead!”
Like a cry of “Land!” after a shipwreck, relief visibly washed over the group at the news. Mandla quickly made his way to the front of the column, eager to see their destination.
A smile already growing on his face, he ran up, past the slower Legends and Classless, finally seeing an end to their ordeal.
He burst out of the treeline like he was being chased, taking in the now open view. Anything taller than a bush had been cleared from the space between the forest and the multi-lane road, and the other side of the highway was rolling grassland. There were no more trees.
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They’d made it.
----------------------------------------
Joining the other Ascendants in an impromptu council, Mandla sat on the concrete highway barrier in the middle of the road. The rest of the group had set up on the grassy side of the highway, building the skeleton of a large ramshackle shelter from discarded branches, that they covered with the canvases of the tents they’d taken. Most of them were asleep, trying to recover from the day’s horrors.
Jesus, it’s only been a day.
A day since the world changed. A day since humanity dropped off the top of the food chain.
The four Ascendants were among the few who’d declined to rest, instead staying up as sentries, as their enhanced bodies weren’t even tired yet. Mentally though, the downtime was crucial. It allowed them to think about the future, instead of having to focus on immediate problems.
At the forefront of the issues they needed to discuss was the message that appeared whenever one of them touched the barrier.
Mandla broached the topic.
“So we all agree that we’re fucked, right? If I’m understanding this message correctly, somewhere within this cage is a Hegemon, and we’re meant to subdue it.”
Nicola nodded.
“Subdue obviously means kill. The hyenas are the strongest thing we’ve seen, maybe we’re meant to kill the alpha hyena.”
Kaveh shook his head.
“They’re also the only thing we’ve seen. Assuming the forest is hyena territory, everything else is going to be somewhere on this plain. There could be some super bird or something that we don’t even know about.”
Karl agreed with him, nodding along.
“Ja, for all we know this entire Partition is carved up between different predators. We can’t start thinking we’re home free.”
Mandla leaned in.
“And let’s not forget that we’re all first Rung. The hyenas fucked us up and they might not even be the toughest thing in this place. We need a way to get stronger without risking death every time.”
After discussing the various problems they faced, the Ascendants split off. Karl and Nicola went to reassure the few Legends and Classless that couldn’t sleep, staring with terrified vigilance at the treeline, while Kaveh tried to teach Mandla the art of [Janna].
All throughout the rest of the night, the boys practiced unceasingly, their tireless physiques allowing Mandla to progress much faster than he would normally.
The coming of the dawn saw a shift in the general vibe of the large group. After getting some sleep and waking up to see they really had left the forest last night, the entire mood was uplifted.
Bags were opened and food was munched as the young Legends prepared for the new day.
The Ascendants found Mandla pensive, staring silently at the blue barrier blocking them from the rest of the route. They gathered around him in their spot in the middle of the twilit highway.
“Yo Mandla.”
“Aweh?”
“You look like a bitch.”
Mandla laughed.
“What the fuck, Kaveh?”
Nicola looked up at him with an eyebrow raised.
“Yes, what did you mean by that, Kavvy?”
He backed away, palms raised, visibly panicking.
“Nothing, nothing, I was just lightening the mood. It’s not a gendered insult, you see, we use ‘bitch’ to refer to anything that-”
Mandla couldn’t hear the rest over his hearty laughter. Seeing Kaveh frantically trying to explain himself to Nicola was a needed injection of normalcy. Things had completely changed, but they’d also stayed the same. It affected him deeper than he thought it would.
We will survive. We will survive. And one day, we’ll thrive.
The Ascendants had agreed the previous night to start scouting the area out as soon as light hit, so they could take a few Legends with them. They split up, with Mandla and Kaveh taking Jacob and Andrew, following the wall north, while Nicola and Karl took the other two [Heavy Swordsmen] and walked parallel to the road in the opposite direction to the wall. They’d get as far as they could in a few hours, then turn back and meet up by noon to see which direction looked most promising.
Striking out as soon as the sun crested the hills, the four boys made their way across the grasses.
“So. Jacob… I don’t think we’re that familiar.”
The [Light Swordsman] looked back at Mandla, surprised.
“Uhh yeah, I guess. I wasn’t invited to your party directly, I came with Monametsi Lundi as a plus one and well, shit happened.”
Mandla chuckled.
“Yeah, shit did happen. I actually haven’t seen much of Monty with all the craziness going on, how’s he holding up?”
Jacob grimaced.
“Not that well. He’s a [Farmer], so he’s been feeling pretty useless. The fight with the hyenas yesterday really fucked with him, and I don’t know how to help, especially since I missed it.”
As they traversed the grasses, Mandla got to know Jacob better. He’d already known Andrew by association, as the man was on the under-20 national rugby team and a few of his teammates had gone to high school with Mandla, Kaveh and Nicola. Jacob hadn’t seemed particularly exceptional in the time Mandla had known of him, but his mother had instilled in him the lesson that almost everyone had some hidden value, he just needed to dig deep enough to exploit it. Anyone could be useful as long as you were patient.
The group saw their first animals at a distance. Kaveh had jumped and pointed, excited to finally see something that wasn’t a hyena. It was a small herd of zebras, but like none they’d ever seen before.
Clumped together like they were, the zebras’ stripes seemed to undulate, shift and twist in mind-bending ways, making it impossible to distinguish a single zebra from the group. Just staring for too long made Mandla’s eyes hurt.
After being forced to look away, the boys continued walking along the wall and began seeing more and more recognisable, but altered beasts. Giraffes with armoured necks. Wildebeest with intricate networks of horn adorning their heads. Trees started dotting the landscape as well, massive thorny acacias with spreading crowns that by all rights shouldn’t have held up under their own weight.
The landscape had completely changed from what it had been before, and the fauna and flora along with it. It seemed Mandla’s earlier thought that the terraform had only affected natural things was right.
In a way, it made perfect sense. If the goal was to make the world more competitive, removing what could be argued as the human “habitat” would be antithetical to that.
Taking in the sights, the boys kept plodding along, making sure to keep as low a profile as possible. They’d stuffed Andrew and Jacob’s armour with grass to stop them from giving the group away, but it seemed a futile effort.
More and more of the beasts they passed perked their heads up at their passage, following them with their eyes as the boys gingerly walked past.
It was like they were all linked somehow. The unnerving show was straight out of a horror film, all the way down to synchronised head movements. The fact that they were all herbivorous animals was not lost on Mandla. He thought back to the strange disorienting effect he’d encountered when running back from the cabin yesterday.
This is the second time weird shit like this is happening. Can the animals use skills as well?
The mutations he’d seen in the wildlife so far had been wildly implausible, but technically biologically possible. But he wasn’t sure if that was where it stopped. After all, humans were technically animals and here they were doing outright impossible stuff like creating weapons from thin air and healing wounds with nothing but a laying of hands. What was stopping other animals from doing the same?
Mandla was getting that niggling anxious feeling again.
“Yo Kaveh.”
“Yeah what’s up?”
“I’m getting a bad feeling. Let’s turn back.”
Kaveh chuckled.
“Why, are the stares of grass munchers getting to you?”
Mandla responded completely seriously.
“Yes.”
Hearing his tone, Kaveh looked back to see Mandla’s deadly grim face.
Frowning slightly, he nodded.
“Okay, let’s get back then.”
The group turned around, and began retracing their path along the wall. This didn’t stop the awareness of their presence spreading. Even as they all started sharing nervous glances with each other, silently agreeing to pick up the pace, the phenomenon only grew bigger, with entire herds now following their egress from the grasses.
Soon, it seemed like the entire plain was looking their way, each animal standing stock still, simply silently watching the boys run. The boys, in a full-fledged panic now, broke out into a sprint.
As Mandla and Kaveh were deliberately slowing themselves down so Andrew and Jacob could keep up, they noticed it first.
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud.
The ground shook with a thudding sound as their teeth chattered in their skulls from the vibrations.
Glancing back, Mandla’s eyes widened in shock.
“Guys, you’re gonna want to hurry the fuck up.”
Because far behind them in the distance, galloping furiously after them like a horse, was an elephant the size of a house.
The behemoth was as tall as a giraffe, but with all the bulk that comes from being the world’s largest land animal. As the boys put on a final burst of speed, trying to lose it in the horizon, Mandla risked one last glance at their pursuer. Lucky he did too, because a new notification dinged in his view.
Identified: Local Hegemon – Earthquaker Elephant
“Shit.”