Nisha frowned, turning my words over in her head.
"It’s not that simple. It’s called a gate guardian for a reason. There might be sub guardians in the habitat, but I don’t think each of them would be as strong as the gate guardian itself."
I gave her a faintly disgusted look.
"What?" Her frown deepened.
"I an, that’s practically the sa thing. I’m saying the sa thing. This is too much work."
"Are you complaining while having fun?"
"Fun?"
She shrugged and folded her arms. "To it seed like you were having fun back there. I never knew you to be the chaotic type."
I let out an absurd chuckle. "You don’t know . At all."
Nisha’s gaze remained on for a long mont, sothing shifting behind her eyes. Then her honeyed voice crawled out.
"What if I want to?"
The words caught off guard. I’d seen this play out a couple of tis, especially in movies. The lingering look, the loaded question, the convenient proximity of danger loosening inhibitions. But I was unwilling to follow the script.
"Want to what? Anyways, no, I will not indulge you in such infidelity."
She scowled. "In... fidelity? Are you..."
"Cut the act, Nisha. I know you have a boyfriend, who knows maybe a husband in this Company. Either Tristan, Levi or Derry, it could be any of the workers, for all I know. I actually do not care so much, but I won’t help you cheat on them, whoever they are."
She stared at , lips slightly parted, as if I’d slapped her with sothing she genuinely hadn’t anticipated.
’Yea, never expected to get caught.’
I exhaled and turned away, glancing around the clearing.
"Anyways, this is not even the ti and place for such a discussion. We have to find out what is going on here."
Nisha didn’t respond. Not a word, not even after I’d essentially called her out. The silence sat between us like a third person as we started walking again.
We continued down the mountain path, descending after finding nothing on the summit aside from the aftermath of a vicious brawl. Sothing had chased the Huallapens from their territory, driven them into that stampede which led to their slaughter.
’Pitiful things. The bottom of the feeding chain cannot be an easy place to be. Don’t worry guys, I will avenge you all.’
The temperature in the woodland sat at a mild warmth, the kind most people wouldn’t notice. I noticed. I was more attuned to warmth than I was to cold, and this particular heat clung to the skin in a way that felt deliberate, like the forest itself was breathing on us.
The trees had tall, smooth trunks with sparse branches that only extended near the very top, each one reaching at least fifteen feet high. They sprawled across the forest in every direction, their canopies extending and blotting out the sky ceiling, forming another ceiling of their own. The trunks were white wood, pale and almost luminous, while the leaves above clustered in shades of yellow and brown that spread like a thatched roof over everything beneath.
I pushed my enhanced senses outward, sight, sll, and sound, stretching them as far as they would reach. I didn’t need Kassie to remind of that much.
’I miss Kassie... I wonder if it would have been possible for us to have sex again, if we entered a gate. Maybe my luck was in a gate.’
Feeling a bit Kassie-sick, I pulled on the link between us to reach out to her.
I scowled the next mont.
The connection was faint. The link was being smothered by a dense wall of spirit essence, thick enough that it felt like trying to whisper through a storm.
The only explanation, reasonable one at least, was that the spirit gate was intercepting my link with my summon outside it. The overwhelming flow of spirit essence in the surrounding environnt drowned out the connection like static drowning a signal.
’Hmm. If gates have so much spirit essence, I wonder if it’s possible to use them... if it was, Summoners and their Summons would be undefeatable in a gate.’
Of course, there had to be intricacies to it. Atmospheric spirit essence might contain contaminants, a mix of other properties that could poison the body rather than nourish it. There’d need to be a purification thod. But I had never heard of one.
’I should find out if it exists... it would be really convenient.’
I refocused on my surroundings and opened my hands, summoning Frostfang.
Nisha was already summoning her Cleavers, but this ti, not them alone. Her shadow thickened, pooling at her feet like spilled ink, and her beast summon launched out of it, pouncing on the ground with all four obsidian legs landing sturdy and wide. The creature had a nasty set of teeth that I didn’t wish for any of my body parts to be between, its eyes were pools of darkness, and its tentacles coiled through the air in lazy, searching arcs.
’Now that I look at this beast... doesn’t it look familiar?’
It took a mont for to rember, but I did.
’Voidlash Stalker.’
The creature I’d encountered before had looked like this, but with thicker hides and more vicious teeth.
’Could they be related to the sa family tree?’
I shifted my attention from Nisha’s beast to what was actually coming for us.
My enhanced senses had already caught it. Footsteps, sowhere in the treeline, heavy but asured. I could hear them clearly enough. I just couldn’t see anything yet. And there was sothing else, a sensation I couldn’t pin to any of my five senses, sothing deeper. A recognition that lived in the body, not the mind. The kind of thing you only develop after facing creatures that could kill you without effort.
My kill count wouldn’t fill even one dossier, so I couldn’t boast. But the few beasts I had managed to bring down would have killed anyone my rank, possibly my classmates combined.
They were strong. Level three Primal beasts were strong in a way that made the word feel insufficient, and the apex one... that one had been so ferocious that I’d had to sit back and watch Maggie deal with it.
So I knew what a truly dangerous abomination felt like when it was close.
It felt cold. It felt like dread had taken physical form and pressed itself against my ribs, wrapping around my heart, threatening to squeeze if it dared make a single beat.
A bead of sweat crawled down my temple before I’d even registered the fear.
Whatever it was, it was drawing near.
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