It turned out that the prisoner had more force of will than I would have assumed when looking at him. The interrogation went later into the night than I would have liked, but I did finally get some information out of him. The location of the village was, at least assuming he understood the scale of the map, some ten to fifteen kilometers to the north-northeast of the cave. There were also other villages ever further eastward, and one was apparently coastal. Looking at the locations that he had indicated to me, I was puzzled. This island can't be that small, I thought, it would only be a hundred kilometers across from end to end at that scale. Just from what I've seen so far I would have already crossed a significant portion if that were the case. Perhaps he is unfamiliar with proper map scale.
I re-blinded and gagged the prisoner, then dragged some softer leaves inside to sleep on top of. The ground in the cave had gotten wet, and I had no desire to wake up covered in mud when I was not near a large creek to bathe in. After re-checking the prisoner's bindings for the third time, I laid down on the leaves, spear in my right hand and knife in my left, and let myself drift off. I was growing accustomed to the experience, but still found it odd how I could not force it to happen.
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As I slept, my mind placed me inside a dream. I was in a warbreed village with a population of perhaps one hundred. The cloning vats were located centrally, surrounded by wooden barricades and emplacements, and other quarters splayed out around them as was usual for villages of the same style. Blending in, I grabbed my rifle and began a patrol, chattering about something with the partner assigned to me. I kept smelling something burning as we walked, stopping to check the wood nearby for scorch marks. I wasn't really sure why I was bothering, my mission was to destroy the village of course, but something about the smell bothered me. Then, all of a sudden, I turned around to see the cloning vats on fire. The partner I was with turned to me, then with a single shove pushed me into the fire.
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I snapped awake and looked around, seeing that it was still nighttime outside. That was disturbing, I thought, though I felt nothing from the flames but warmth. I leaned up and stretched myself out, checking the leaves beneath me to ensure they were still mostly dry, then noticed a smell. Something burnt? I thought as I inhaled through my nose. Then my eyes drifted to the prisoner and I stood up so fast I nearly smashed my head on the roof of the cave. Where the prisoner had been before I had gone to sleep, now laid only a pile of burnt cordage, a blindfold and gag, and some bloodstains.
A quick examination of the area ruled out a predator eating him. There wasn't nearly enough blood for something like that, and besides that fact I would have woken up from the noise. The prisoner had liked to scream at the top of his lungs for only moderate injuries, so the thought of him having been dragged off by something like a genetically modified panther without wailing louder than a raid alarm seemed unlikely. If he were a physically normal variety of human I would have thought he was killed instantly and taken away, but from what I observed he was more than able to shrug off any injury which was not near-instantly fatal to him.
He definitely escaped, I thought as I looked at the burnt cordage, the question is how. I deliberately hadn't lit any type of fire in the cave for two reasons: I did not want to risk suffocating him and I did not want to give him a chance to burn through his restraints. Despite his weakness to pain, humans were well known for being able to ignore their survival instincts when rational thought was needed to preserve their lives. He could have easily rolled into a fire and let himself be burned only to regenerate afterwards.
Did I overlook something? I wondered, Did he somehow get a piece of flint and a piece of metal? In my mind I tried to picture how he might have burned his restraints, but from the angle that his limbs were tied it seemed impossible. The real concern isn't how he did it, I thought, it's where he is right now. The night was dark but the sky was clear, letting the moon shine down a good amount of light into the area to allow navigation. I stowed my knife and gripped my spear, walking out of the cave and searching for clues.
It didn't take long for me to find my first one: a sharp stone sticking out of the ground with blood splashed on and around on it. My nostrils couldn't tell if it was human from the smell, however all the animals that I had observed which were large enough to leave such a bloodstain without dying had hooves. I looked at the scene and moved further, finding a few bloody footprints pointing roughly north before the trail faded out. Of course he's trying to get back to the village, I thought with a mental sigh, despite it being the most obvious course of action he's not experienced enough to try anything else.
I followed the trail of my escaped prisoner across the rocky area and back into the forest, a distance of at least five kilometers. The tracking became easier once the ground had a layer of topsoil as the man was a complete amateur at covering his trail. The footprints were so deep and obvious that they might as well have been glowing in the moonlight to my eyes, and the space between them suggested that the man was running himself ragged. A surprisingly low amount of stamina, I thought, though I did partially starve him so perhaps that's the reason.
The trail wound on through the trees, twisting at turning seemingly at random. Eventually it stopped at the foot of a tree, with no obvious continuation anywhere. He climbed the tree? I thought, almost amused, What a completely bizarre move for an amateur. The tree in front of me had a trunk that was around forty-five centimeters in diameter at the base, growing gradually smaller towards the top. Its many branches stretched out to form a roughly ten meter diameter of coverage, with the tree itself being twenty meters high. It was difficult to see into the interior because of all the snaking limbs which crisscrossed all over inside it. Actually, this isn't the worst hiding spot, I thought.
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As I debated whether to climb the tree and fetch the man, I noticed that one of the tree's thicker limbs passed very close to a neighboring tree. Curious, I walked over to that tree and looked around the base, finding a trail of footprints going north that led away from it. Clever, I thought, maybe I underestimated him. Glad that I didn't have to engage in tree-climbing in the dark I walked onward, only to flinch out of the way of a blow with a stone axe that cut just in front of my face.
“Jhae gow npoyt!” the man screamed as he swung my stone axe at me from the bushes. His blows were clumsy, but he knew how to put his weight behind them. Unfortunately for him, I had far more close combat experience than he did and was able to deftly move out of the way of each of his strikes, causing them to hit nothing but air. This enraged the man further and he redoubled his efforts, swinging like a madman and roaring incoherently.
“Stop,” I commanded, jabbing the butt of the spear above one of his blows and striking him in the ribs with it. The man flinched backwards, clutching his chest with his free hand for a moment and baring his teeth at me.
“Jheyy sehpeyzm yaal...” the man hissed through gritted teeth, looking unsure on his feet, “wahm tverzay...” I was quite at the end of my patience with the man's theatrics. Even on a human who couldn't regenerate the strike I had done was barely enough to fracture bone, yet the man was acting like I had just stabbed him. Holding my spear up, I took a step towards the man. His gritted teeth turned to a grin and I knew I had made a mistake. The man swung at me again from a much closer range, and I had no choice but to fall backwards into a roll to avoid the blow. As I got to my feet I just barely tilted my body to the side in time to avoid my own axe. The man had thrown it at my head, and avoiding it caused me to tumble back down into the dirt because of my lack of footing.
That was stupid, I thought as I got to my feet, watching the man start sprinting away, if he was a warbreed I wouldn’t have avoided that. Damn it, I was just thinking that I was underestimating him too. For a moment I thought about some of the older infiltration unit patterns who had started to break down and be unable to work, but put the thought out of my mind and started chasing after the man. I'll run a systems check as soon as I finish this mission, I told myself.
For all of his speed, I was faster. The man knew the terrain better though, and used it to his advantage, cutting through bushes and over uneven outcroppings with practiced ease while I had to spend extra effort to maintain my speed. We're back in the area he's familiar with, I thought, we can't be far from the village. The trees began to get less dense, and soon we were running through a nearly open meadow. My speed advantage was winning out, gaining me distance, but I knew that it was only a matter of time until the man found what he was running towards.
“Shih! Shahvn yao!” the man began yelling, waving his arms around wildly. Damn it all, I thought as my mind sped up, calculating my options. He can't be as durable as the deer, right? I thought quickly, there's no way, that deer outweighed him by thirty kilograms at least. It should work on him. As I ran, I drew up spear arm up, holding the spear horizontally. I judged my distance, then drew my arm back and planted my foot. With one great heave I sent the spear flying through the air as fast as I could.
“Shahvn ya-AAAAH!” the man screamed out, his words turning into a screaming gurgle. I ran towards him as fast as I could and found him doubled over, spear protruding from his chest and covered in blood. “L-ler...” the man coughed, spewing out yet more blood onto his hands and chest. He grasped pointlessly at the spearhead, trying to force it out of himself and barely managing to budge it. His movements were growing weaker by the second, and soon his hands weren't so much grasping as flailing. At least his heart is in the same place as a normal human's, I thought, recognizing the symptoms of rapid internal blood loss from the innumerable times I had seen it before.
“You've been a great deal of trouble,” I said to the man as I drew my knife. “Worse, I don't know just how well you can regenerate. Now I’m going to find out. Humans such as yourself often try to be unconscious for what I'm about to do.” The man's eyes widened as though he understood me, and I crouched down to begin my work. The knife slid across the man's throat and he tried to struggle, but soon he accepted his fate and went limp. The flesh tried to heal itself back together weakly but my cutting technique outpaced it, eventually severing the man's head from the rest of his body. I held the head up high, letting the blood drain out of it, and was slightly disappointed that he didn't grow another.
I extracted my spear and dragged the man's body back across the open field into the more heavily wooded area. By pure chance I came across my axe, which was still unbroken and embedded in the soil. Setting the man's body down near a tree, I hastily used my axe to slice him all over. To someone who isn't a forensic expert, this should look like an animal attack, I thought. To complete the effect I chopped off one of his legs and both of his arms, then scattered them around the area along with his head. By the time anyone finds him the decay will have erased any trace of my involvement.
Climbing up the tree next to the man's body, I found a cradle of branches to lay in and closed my eyes. There was still some night left, and I needed a full sleep cycle for what I was going to do when I awoke.