Divine Milking System

Chapter 366: 366 | Terminal Velocity and Other Simple Plans

I didn’t look back. Looking back wouldn’t change the math. The clone was gone, dissolved into mana by a creature that was still tracking us through the smoke by scent and sound and the specific vibration of two heartbeats moving too fast through undergrowth too thick.

Blair’s breathing came in ragged gasps against my shoulder. The burn along her side was bad, the kind of injury where you could see layers of tissue that should remain interior, and every step jostled the wound in ways that made her breath catch. She’d set fire to an entire ancient forest because she was scared and couldn’t control the output of an ability that functioned on emotional regulation, and now she was paying for that decision in charred skin and melting composite material.

The ground ahead changed. The jungle floor had been sloping upward for the past two minutes, the gradient increasing with each stride until we were essentially climbing a forested hillside, and the trees were thinning as the soil turned from rich loam to rocky clay. The fire was spreading behind us, the glow painting the sky in colors that didn’t belong there, and somewhere in that inferno eight people I cared about were fighting for their lives in conditions that I’d helped create by participating in a gate deployment that should never have happened.

I keyed the emergency comm channel in my suit. Static. The dimensional seal was interfering with internal communications, reducing everything to interference patterns that my equipment couldn’t decode.

"Belle!" I screamed it into the burning forest behind us. "Naomi! Jordan! ANYONE!"

Nothing came back but the crackle of flames and the distant crash of falling timber.

"They’re alive." I said it to Blair because she needed to hear it, and I said it to myself because I needed to believe it. "Naomi’s Gold buff makes her a flying tank. Jordan’s shadows protect him from fire. Hikaru doesn’t need eyes to fight. Belle has Misato and the rest of the squad covering her. They’re alive, they’re moving, and they’re going to find each other and push toward the core because that’s what Misato trained us to do."

Blair’s ice-blue eyes found mine in the firelight, and for the first time since I’d met her, Blair Davenport looked at me without hatred or contempt or the complicated thing she did when she was trying very hard not to feel something she couldn’t name.

She looked at me like I was the only solid thing in a world that was actively trying to collapse.

"We find the core," I said. "We kill it. The gate opens. We go home."

"That simple." Not a question. Not sarcasm. Just Blair processing the only plan that existed and deciding whether to invest in it.

"I’m not going to die in here." I pulled her over a fallen trunk and caught her when the landing jarred her burned leg. "I refuse. I have a date with Aurora on Saturday and I owe Addison three coffee jellies and Belle stole my crew neck and Naomi’s dad needs a boat engine and Jordan hasn’t finished complaining about physical conditioning yet. I have too many people expecting me to walk back through that gate for me to die in some bullshit forest dimension because the FGRA can’t calibrate their goddamn sensors."

Blair made a sound that might have been a laugh if it weren’t wrapped in pain and smoke inhalation.

"And you." I looked at her because she needed someone to look at her right now, needed someone to see her as a person instead of a problem. "You’re getting out too. Your team needs you. Misato needs you. And I’m not losing our bet because you got yourself killed being dramatic with your fire."

"I wasn’t being dramatic." She actually managed indignation through the pain. Classic Davenport.

The trees ended.

One step we were pushing through thinning forest, and the next step there was nothing but air and a sound that registered before the visual could catch up. Water. Moving water, a lot of it, the bass rumble of something large and fast hitting rocks at terminal velocity.

A cliff.

The jungle simply stopped and the world dropped away into a gorge that plunged at least a hundred feet down through walls of black rock slick with mist. At the bottom, barely visible through the spray and the reflected glow of the burning forest behind us, a river tore through the canyon at speeds that suggested drowning was an optimistic outcome for anything that fell in.

A waterfall poured from a ledge sixty feet to our left, the water thick with dissolved minerals that gave it a faintly luminescent quality in the firelight, and the pool at its base churned white with enough force to break bones on impact if you hit it wrong.

Behind us, the injured leopard crashed through the last line of trees.

Its fur was burned in patches, one eye destroyed, the wound on its haunch still spreading with the black corruption of my Death Mark. But it was alive, and it was close, and the look in its remaining yellow eye communicated a very simple message. It had chased us to the edge of the world and it fully intended to follow us over it.

More yellow eyes appeared in the smoke behind the first.

Two more. Three. The ones that hadn’t been caught in the fire. The ones that had been smart enough to circle around Blair’s explosion and follow the prey that had separated from the main group. They formed a semicircle at the tree line, their bodies low and coiled, tails sweeping the ground in synchronized patterns that made them look less like individual animals and more like components of a single predatory system.

"Blair." I had her weight against my side, my arm around her waist, her blood mixing with mine where our wounds pressed together. The cliff edge crumbled slightly under my boots, sending pebbles tumbling into the void. The sound of them hitting water came several seconds later. "Can you swim?"

"Are you insane?" Her voice rose and cracked. "That’s a hundred-foot drop into a river that’s moving faster than—"

"Can you swim."

"I took lessons at the country club when I was—that’s not the POINT, Monroe, you can’t seriously be suggesting that we—"

The lead leopard tensed. Its remaining eye locked on us with the flat focus of something that had made its decision, and the muscles in its haunches bunched in the way that cats bunch before the final, killing spring.

I grabbed Blair Davenport with both arms and threw us off the cliff.

Blair’s scream followed us down into the dark.