Chapter 359: 359 | I Refuse to Lose Like This
He wasn’t wrong about any of it. The protocols existed because people had died, in the particular and systematic way that forces bureaucracies to generate paperwork. Void Gates ate teams. That was their entire function in the hunter ecosystem, to remind everyone that the Under didn’t play fair and sensor technology was exactly as reliable as the dimensional boundary conditions allowed it to be.
Which, right now, was not reliable at all.
I looked at the jungle pressing in from every direction. The trees were massive in the way that said centuries, not decades, of growth in an environment where mana concentration turned everything bigger and meaner and hungrier than its Earth-born ancestors.
The canopy formed a nearly solid ceiling sixty feet overhead, and what sunlight managed to force its way through arrived in thin shafts so narrow and so widely scattered that the forest floor existed in permanent green twilight. What reached the ground wasn’t proper sunlight anymore.
The canopy had filtered it, absorbed most of the spectrum, and the remainder painted everything in shades of sickly emerald and deep olive that made distances impossible to judge and shadows impossible to distinguish from solid objects.
Twenty feet ahead of me, the undergrowth was so thick I couldn’t tell where plants ended and darkness began. Visibility dropped to ten feet, then five, then a blur of green pressed so close I could count the veins on leaves the size of dinner plates.
The humidity hung visible in layers, heat haze distorting the air at chest height like the jungle itself was breathing out in long, slow exhalations that smelled like rotting flowers and copper. The temperature had to be pushing ninety degrees, maybe higher, and the moisture in the air was so thick I could feel it on my teeth.
This wasn’t a forest biome. This was the Amazon if the Amazon had been watered with concentrated mana for a few thousand years and developed opinions about visitors.
"I refuse to lose like this."
Every head turned toward me. Dante’s mouth was still open from his last sentence. Belle’s fingers were still wrapped around my forearm. Naomi’s staff still glowed at the tip, a single point of blue-white light in the permanent green twilight.
"I have things I need to do." The words came out flat, not heroic, not inspirational, just a statement of fact delivered by someone who was genuinely annoyed at the prospect of dying before finishing an extensive to-do list. "I have a date with Aurora on Saturday. I owe Addison three coffee jellies. Belle stole my crew neck and I want it back. Naomi’s dad needs a new boat engine. Jordan hasn’t finished complaining about the existence of physical conditioning as a concept. Misato’s mother still works for people who don’t deserve her. Hikaru has places to be that are not Japan."
I paused.
"I did not spend six weeks building a myself up and killing alpha monsters and clearing swamp gates in destroyed tactical suits just to die in a jungle because the FGRA can’t calibrate their instruments."
The forest swallowed my words and gave back nothing. Everyone was staring at me with expressions that suggested they’d heard something significant but hadn’t quite processed what it meant yet.
Blair’s perfectly maintained mask had developed cracks. Her red hair looked darker in the filtered green light, less aristocratic and more like something that belonged in this place.
No flames danced around her fingers anymore. She’d extinguished them at some point, leaving her hands empty and balled into fists that showed how hard she was working to keep them steady. The knuckles had gone white, sharp points of bone pressing against pale skin.
This was Blair Davenport. Her family owned enough of the American gate economy to buy several small countries. Her ability could turn concrete into slag and reduce opponents to ash before they finished screaming. San Nicolas Academy’s faculty had quietly acknowledged that she was the most lethal first-year student they’d enrolled in the past five years, possibly longer.
None of that mattered here.
The jungle didn’t give a shit about her pedigree or her flames or the fact that she was supposed to be untouchable. She knew it too. I could tell from the way she was standing, rigid and still, using sheer force of will to prevent her legs from betraying exactly how close she was to collapse.
"You think a speech changes anything, Monroe?" Blair’s voice came out sharp but thin, the kind of sharp that people used when the alternative was falling apart in public. "You think your little lottery kid motivation poster makes a difference when we’re sealed inside a dimensional space that professional hunters refuse to enter? You aren’t special. None of us are special. We’re ten first-year students who walked into a trap because we trusted sensor readings and a professor who thought it would build character."
"Vale didn’t know."
"Vale should have known! That’s his job! He’s supposed to be the strongest hunter on this faculty and he sent us into a Void Gate because it would teach us something about teamwork?" Blair’s voice climbed with each sentence, fear converting into anger through the specific alchemical process that Davenports appeared to have patented. "What exactly are we supposed to learn here? How to decompose efficiently? How to serve as nutritional supplements for whatever lives in those trees? Because I can already feel my educational horizons expanding, Monroe, and let me tell you, the view is spectacular!"
The sarcasm was good. Professional-grade, even. But the tremor running underneath it wasn’t sarcasm. That was Blair Davenport at nineteen years old staring at the possibility that her father’s money and her family’s influence and her perfectly tailored combat suit and her meticulously maintained red hair would mean absolutely nothing to the things watching us from the canopy.
"We need to move," I said.
"We need to find the core," Misato corrected from my left, her voice steady in the way that only someone who had made a career decision about being steady could manage.
Her clones fanned out wider, five copies of her creating a defensive perimeter that looked impressive until you remembered that each one operated at sixteen percent of her actual durability.
"A Void Gate seals when we enter and unseals when the core dies. Same rules as a normal gate, different everything else."
Comments