Forty-Seven

"It's weird seeing the sun," Kon said as they reached the edge of the plateau. For two days they had kept moving, a sense of doom trailing after them. Kon was exhausted, tired in a way that went far beyond just the physical realm. It was a soul deep weariness that he feared he would never alleviate.

Diur was hardly in any better shape. Her eyes were slits as she leaned against a tree to look at the sheer cliff side. A weak beam of sunlight lanced through the thin edge of the storm and she stood there, absorbing the light with her chin tilted up to feel the sun on her face.

"It feels good," Diur whispered. The warmth of the day slowly baked them as they stood together. Kon glanced backward into the forest, seeing nothing out there. There was still a feeling of dread though. It was out there, something was chasing them. They had noticed it deep into the first day, the feeling of being hunted.

A crawling sense of eyes on the back of their necks.

"It's still behind us," Diur said. She looked over into the forest with hooded eyes, struggling to stay awake.

"It has to be that D-Grade," Kon said. It was the only thing that made sense after Alice and the packmaster had thrown themselves at each other. Diur had told him that the ripples of their fight would scare anything weaker than them away. They had run withose ripples, finding nothing obstructing them as they reached the edge of the plateau.

Only the peak D-grade would have been able to move through the area without an instinctive urge to run from the duel between them. Only it would have prowled behind and could hunt them with ease. It was a hanging tension between them, filling the air as they ran without cease, never able to distance themselves.

"I agree. I just don't understand why we're alive," Diur said.

"Wounded? The packmaster fought it when Alice led it into the camp," Kon offered. He walked to the edge of the plateau and looked down. Far down was a floor of green vegetation that stretched as far as the eye could see.

"He was wounded too. Burning his own cultivation to try to kill Alice," Diur said.

"All that black lightning shit around him? It smelled terrible," Kon said.

"Yes. At least I think that's what that was. I've never seen it before, but that's what it should feel like. He was cannibalizing himself for a temporary boost."

"Think it'll follow behind us? As we go down?"

"It has our scent. These things can become vindictive as they increase in grade. The growth in intelligence along with power can create a petty creature."

"We have to go down now then," Kon said. The words were a pain as he said it, his body was ready to collapse and the thought of crawling down a cliff face was the last thing he wanted to do.

"Yes. Catch your breath and we'll work our way down. I don't feel its presence close by and the cliff might slow it down," Diur said hopefully. Kon pulled his pack off and went through it, looking for anything that he could find to help him scale down. The holopad was in there, packed away in the center and wrapped in clothes. Kon checked it, looking through the files and seeing his pictures and video of the crystal door covered in runes.

He flicked through the next screen and froze. It was a picture of a carved rune on the ground. A caption had been written on it, in the corner away from the strong, graceful lines of the rune fragment.

"Reinforce. Put it on your spine."

His stomach fell out from under him. That burning feeling in the back of his nasal cavity and his tear ducts was all the warning he got. A hot tear slid across his dirty cheek as he looked at that holopad.

"Kon?"

"She knew. She knew we were being hunted. She left the next rune for me in the holopad," Kon whispered. His fingers flicked to the next image and it was the same rune, but from a different angle. A dozen pictures all from different angles so he could see every inch of the fragment.

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His fingers flicked again and he froze. His breath literally clung to his chest, stopped in his chest. He kept going through dozens of pictures and videos and he quickly turned it off. Kon's mind reeled as he carefully turned off the holopad and tucked it back into his pack, wrapped in rags. It was suddenly so precious he couldn't imagine losing it.

"Kon?"

"She knew," he repeated.

"If she did, she was even braver than I thought. The packmaster was stronger than she was, at least before his wounds. She didn't run. She could have abandoned us with ease and likely survived." Kon chuckled darkly as he looked up at Diur as he refinished packing his bag.

"I think she was looking forward to that fight. Did you see that smile on her face as she fought him? She was alive in that moment," Kon said. Diur nodded slowly.

"She lived on the edge."

"Are we already using past tense for her? We don't know," Kon said, angry suddenly as he looked over at his friend. She looked abashed, turning to look toward the ground before slowly shaking her head.

"She fought a cultivator at a higher level than herself without her armor. I don't want to discount her. But she would have found us by now." Kon didn't say anything about that, just inched closer to the cliff side and looked down. Roots burst from the edge of the cliffside, shooting out of it and offering plenty of handholds.

Diur sighed and did something with her tattered robes to cinch them close and put the scabbard of her sword through a trailing piece of a belt. With ease she grabbed at the roots and started to scale down without another word. Kon watched as she quickly worked her way down.

The roots were thin and fibrous underneath his hand as Kon grabbed at them. They were sturdy, holding his weight as he dug his toes into the cliff. Bits of rock broke off as he wedged his feet in. His shoulders started to burn as he went down. A cold wind slashed at him, plucking at him to threaten him to pull him free of the side of the cliff.

Kon could feel the empty air under his heels, the weight of space waiting to embrace him in its cold, transitory, grasp. It would swallow him whole, leave nothing behind and it beckoned to him. He risked a glance downward toward Diur and saw a glimpse of her as she descended, far below him.

"She's really fast." Even with the increases in his strength from the body cultivation he couldn't keep up with her. Not yet.

Using that rune to help Diur had stripped him of vast quantities of his strength and it had slowly come back. There had been an unspoken fear that it wouldn't. That his one time use of the power that fueled his body would be spent and never return. His rune had slowly sent power back into his body over the last few days as they ran.

It had filled his body with strength before it had gone to his other runes. It was something that he was going to have to keep an eye on. If he had to have a fully charged body before his runes would activate, it could become an issue.

"Kon!" Diur's voice took him out of his own mind and he looked down. The Ulmna woman had found a small ledge and was resting on it. Kon followed the path of least resistance until he reached her after ten minutes. She was pressed nearly flat against the cliffside, head craned up to look at the edge of the plateau.

The ledge only went out a few inches in space, just enough for half of Kon's foot to rest. His shoulders groaned in relief as he stood there and looked up like Diur had. He was shocked to have gone so far down. The top of the cliff was a long way up, thin, ethereal wisps drifting up there partially obscuring the edge of the plateau.

It didn't obscure the wide, broad, chitinous face that stared down at them. A dozen crimson eyes stared down at him. Kon met its gaze and the distance shrank away in an instant as an overwhelming presence crashed into him. It was like standing in the middle of the battlefield when Alice and the packmaster had gone to war.

"We have to keep going," Diur groaned next to him. The words snapped him out of his trance. Kon began to scramble down, fear fueling him as he scrambled downard. Diur was right behind him, flying down the cliff side with ease. She passed by him in a blur as the monster started to crawl over the edge of the cliff.

Vibrations rattled through Kon's body as the entire world shook suddenly. His fingers went numb suddenly, clenching spasmodically to the edge of a handhold. Rock crumbled under his right hand, breaking away from him as he held himself there, with only one hand.

Kon's toes scraped against the rock, searching vainly for a ledge. The abyss beckoned, calling to him. The monster was slowly walking down the face of the cliff, a half hundred legs churning as they grabbed the cliffside with ease. It crawled downward as it came toward them. Diur shouted at him, an indistinct cry to hurry it up.

"Not like this." Kon slammed his free fist into the cliff, stone breaking apart as he wedged his hand back into the cliffside. With both hands in the stone he had the leverage to wedge his feet, finding the small toeholds. A chittering echoed above and he looked back up to see the creature had halved the distance in a second. It slowed when his eyes met it, all its many legs freezing as it stopped in its tracks when their eyes met.

"It enjoys this. Our fear. Hunting us."

"Move it!" Diur yelled below him. Kon kept his pair of eyes on the many crimson orbs as he scaled down blindly. The D-grade moved slowly as they kept glaring at one another. A malevolent sense of glee hit Kon as he kept moving down, the bug monster's power hitting inundating him. It projected so much strength that he couldn't comprehend it, a sense of despair started to bubble in his gut.

"We're almost there Kon. Keep going!" the words broke through the staring match, stirring the D-grade to life. Its legs picked up speed and it rapidly crossed the distance toward him.

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