"The lion who hunts the rabbit often finds the wolf waiting in the brush; never mistake stillness for weakness."
"Well," Karg rumbled, his seismic voice shaking the loose leaves from the surrounding branches. "Look at what the Wild Hunt spat back out. The mountain midge."
He unhooked his cleaver from his belt, letting the heavy bone blade rest easily against his shoulder. The three giants behind him spread out, effectively cutting off my exits. They were looking past me, scanning the dirt for signs of Vora.
"We tracked Grul’s prize’s path," Karg said, taking a slow, earth-shattering step forward. "She came this way. You are going to tell me exactly where the traitorous daughter of the cliff is hiding, little rabbit. And then, I am going to break your legs and wear your scalp on my belt to prove to the Weaver that her obsession was nothing but fragile, useless driftwood."
Karg smiled, a jagged display of surprisingly white teeth, and opened his mouth to issue a command to his squad.
He never finished the sentence. I had heard enough, and gave a simple few mental commands.
The air in the clearing simply ceased to exist. There was no battle cry. There was no clash of weapons.
Pendra dropped from the canopy like a guillotine blade. She didn't land on the ground; she landed on the giant closest to my left. Her lower bladed limbs scissored through the Jötnar's thick, iron-hard neck as if it were wet paper. The giant’s head hit the ash before his massive body even realized it was dead.
The second giant roared, swinging a massive club. Pendra used the falling, headless corpse as a springboard. She shot forward like a spinning drill—a whirling streak of pale silk hair and dark chitin—and buried her hands directly into the second giant's chest plate. The kinetic force and spin of her strike shattered the massive ribs inward in a fountain of blood. In the next instant, she ripped her hands outward, tearing the giant's heart from its vascular moorings in a spray of arterial mist.
The third giant tried to turn to run, but it was already too late. Pendra landed softly on the dirt, her small but powerful, compressed legs coiled. She launched herself horizontally, closing the forty-foot gap in a fraction of a second. She landed on the giant's back, her obsidian claws sinking deep into his spine. With a single, brutal twist of her hips, she severed the Jötnar's spinal cord, making me wince slightly. The massive wall of muscle collapsed into the dirt, entirely paralyzed, choking on his own blood.
The entire sequence took less than two seconds.
Karg stood absolutely frozen in the center of the clearing. His bone-cleaver slipped from his numb fingers, hitting the ground with a dull, heavy thud.
In less than a blink of an eye, Pendra had him pinned to the ground. She had used the momentum of her last kill to rebound across the clearing, knocking the giant down with almost no resistance.
Two of her razor-sharp, chitinous forearms were fully extended, hovering exactly a paper's width from the surface of Karg's wide, terrified eyeballs. A single drop of blood from her previous kill ran down the edge of her blade and dripped onto Karg's cheek.
Karg did not breathe. He did not blink. The smug wannabe hunter of the Gem Cliff was entirely paralyzed by the sheer, overwhelming proximity of an apex predator he could not comprehend. He should have stayed as a wall guard, but that was not my problem. It would become his problem even more if I didn’t find the answers I wanted.
I didn’t really care what Vora had been running from, or why. I meant what I told Pendra, and I was not going to pass up on this chance to test my theory. Vora might not be as bad as the others, but she was still a tool to me just the same as she and the rest of the Jötnar viewed me.
Stepping out of my ruminations, I cleared my throat.
I stepped over the pooling blood of the first giant, my notebook open, and the stick of charcoal Pendra had found for me to use as a pencil poised in my right hand. I didn't look at the carnage. I locked entirely onto Karg, adopting the mild, impatient tone of an academic dealing with a slow student.
"I am looking for a specific creature," I said clearly, breaking away from the more academic style I normally used. "A sturdy and tough one that lives in, or close to, this region. Something that naturally survives under high pressure or crushing environmental weight. Your people have hunted this mountain for thousands of years. Where can I find something like this?"
Karg’s jaw trembled. His eyes were locked in a horrific cross-eyed stare at the blades touching his eyelashes. "The... the Great Boreal Snapping Turtle," he stammered, his seismic voice reduced to a pathetic, wet wheeze. "It sleeps beneath the black ice. It... it absorbs the weight of the frozen deep into its shell."
"A snapping turtle? Excellent, and you came up with that fast. Who knows? Maybe you might take something from this lesson after all,” I mused as I wrote down some notes. “Where can I find its home?"
"The black frozen lakes," Karg gasped. "Three days march to the north-east."
"North-east. Black ice." I jotted the notes down, the scratch of the charcoal loud in the silent clearing. I closed the notebook and slipped it back into my pocket, and then started to whirl the carbon stick between my fingers.
I looked up at Karg. I let the violet arrays on top of my hand flare, the truncated tetrahedra growing out slightly to give my hands a dangerous look that I would never put to physical use, but the giant didn’t need to know that, and the boiling/rotting flesh at the edges that constantly healed gave a nice touch.
"I am going to let you live, Karg. Not because I value you, but because I require a courier, and I have a funny feeling that you are smart enough to realize I am more than a rabbit." I stepped closer, my voice dropping the academic tone, replaced by something much colder. "Take a message back to the Cliff. Tell Weaver, your Elder, to make a choice."
I paused, letting the weight of the silence press into him.
"Tell him to join me and grow together, or agree to have his and everyone else's who won't follow meridians shattered and stay exactly as you have for the last ten thousand years. Any that resist will only make things harder, and they will be removed like trimming the fat."
I tapped Pendra’s shoulder. She smoothly withdrew her blades, folding them flush against her carapace with a metallic click. She picked up the fallen cleaver and stepped behind me, her golden eyes burning holes into the blade she held.
"Run back to your mountain, Karg," I said softly, radiating a shared sense of smugness with Pendra.
I was under no illusion that I was strong, but I was starting to understand what my goals and place were in this world. I was missing a lot of information currently, and didn’t even know how to properly cultivate, but it felt good to know we could at least deal with the giants without much issue. The problem was that this message I was sending back was about to spread through the world. There was a very good chance that some elders would start sharing the old ways they hid for the last 10000 years.
Karg didn't look back. He turned and sprinted blindly into the forest, crashing through the heavy brush with the panicked, graceless terror of a prey animal fleeing a forest fire.
I watched him go, the geometric arrays on my arm pulsing steadily in the quiet aftermath of the slaughter. We had our target, but I was in no hurry to reach it. Vora was in torpor, and would be fine for at least a year if we needed it. There was no point in rushing this. Increasing Pendra’s power, learning more about my marks, and finding more allies needed to be my main goal, or I was likely going to get caught off guard again.
