Xavier got to his feet the way a man climbs out of deep water—slowly, disbelieving that the surface would actually hold him.
His leg buckled immediately, slamming into jagged rocks.
Pain flared bright and white, sharp enough to make his vision pulse. If anything, it just woke him up more, but sometimes, being aware wasn't an entirely good thing.
He bit down on a sound and forced weight onto it anyway.
One leg, then the next. Both protested to different levels of effectiveness, but he could heed neither of their advice.
Until those advices would become demands—and even then, he would not be permitted to listen. The body, for once, would have to stretch as far as the mind decided; perhaps, even beyond that.
Standing still felt worse than moving.
Standing still meant feeling everything.
Walking meant sharp bouts of pain, but relief between motions.
The jungle waited—something it never did. And that was how he knew something was wrong… or would soon be wrong.
The only difference between one wrong and another in the jungle was which would bring about a correct death.
Mist hung low between the trees, softening their edges, turning trunks into looming silhouettes. As if a magic spell had been quietly cast, subtly creeping in, and it would swallow anything alive whole.
The ground breathed cold into his bare skin where his clothes had torn.
His wounds were not healing but he suddenly felt subjected to a debuff that would slow whatever perception of healing was happening in his semi-deluded mind.
As if he wasn't allowed even the comforts of his own thoughts.
Pine and rot and damp earth pressed into his nose. Sharp incense which smelled more like it wasn't meant to exorcise the humanity from the demon, than the demon from the human.
It smelled of true survival.
And Xavier was surprised to find that survival smelled familiar now.
Manageable like it never had before.
Like a deadly snake bite was an inconvenience rather than a life-threatening situation. Falling from mountain became rough massages, and broken bones were kisses when lips were accidentally bitten.
His perception had been skewed so much… too much.
So, as he limped toward the treeline, every step a negotiation, he got a bit careless, taking progress towards the mist for granted.
Once upon of time, perhaps yesterday or the day before it, each step had to be earned. He had forgotten that, however briefly.
One more. Just one more step.
Then he stopped.
Something was wrong.
Given—something was almost wrong, but this wrongness had layers, false knots, and dense outer parts.
The type of wrongness that didn't just cause you to choke, it came alive and clawed its way down your throat.
He inhaled again—deeper this time. His chest burned, but he forced the breath down.
It was his first breath of non-stale air in a while.
No stench.
No eye-watering, throat-searing reek of the ball he had ignited.
No chemical rot clinging to the air.
No invisible wall screaming stay away to anything with a nose.
His gaze dropped.
He wasn't staring at the ground—he was staring at the lump of flesh that had once been the goat. The goat that, despite countless stab wounds, had managed to crawl its way out of the toxic cloud of stench.
That would have been enough… but…but—
Chunks were missing from the goat—maws carved out of its stomach and hindleg.
Xavier didn't even need to question what had done the deed.
The goat's corpse was half-crushed into the soul where it had collapsed. Spent. Harmless. Dead and partially devoured.
Realization slid in slow and terrible as if a full revelation would come with a more immediate cost.
He had walked—limped really—too far.
Far enough that nothing stood between him and the open air.
Far enough that his own scent—blood, sweat, fear—had room to breathe again.
To travel beyond the bounds of the toxic cloud that had kept the predators away.
His eyes widened. His heart began to pound, hard enough to hurt.
"No," he whispered, already turning.
He forced his body forward, muscles screaming, aiming for the jungle like it was shelter instead of another kind of grave.
His breath hitched. His legs shook. He broke into something that almost resembled a sprint—shaky, determined, prancing forward inefficiently but with the span of a giraffe.
And he would have made it too—almost did. If he had just dove into the thicket instead of stepped.
He had learnt many lessons on the brink of this death. This would just be another one… if the death part could be avoided once more.
Impact erased the world.
Thought snapped like a rubber band stretched thin.
The time for reaction was gone—ferocity of the animalistic kind took its place.
Something slammed into Xavier from the side, pure mass and momentum.
The air was ripped from his lungs in a dry, useless gasp as he hit the ground face-first. Dirt filled his mouth. Leaves scraped his cheek raw, tearing open wounds that had barely healed.
His shoulder lodged between deep roots of a powerful tree.
This position, if not the pinnacle of one waiting for death, was infinitely close. Like a short prisoner dropping the soap in prison, only this was a matter of survival, and a bear, and the inability to rise from the ground.
Before he could roll, claws found him.
Not one weight.
Two.
They crashed into him with wild, uneven force—smaller than the bears he had imagined, but no less devastating.
Teeth snapped inches from his face. Hot breath washed over his skin, thick with milk and blood. He pulled his neck back as far as he could, roots protecting him as much as it was ready to snap his neck with one misaligned bodily rotation.
Cubs.
Young. Lean. Fast.
Strong in that reckless, untrained way that didn't know restraint yet.
One latched onto his shoulder, jaws crushing down, not cleanly—testing, adjusting, learning how to hurt.
The other raked at his back, claws digging, tearing, hooking into muscle and fabric alike. The sound was wet and intimate, like hands plunging into mud.
Xavier screamed.
Not a word. Not a plea.
Just sound—raw, animal, torn from somewhere deeper than thought.
He thrashed, elbow connecting with fur, heel scraping against ribs.
His knife hand found nothing but air. His other arm burned where teeth chewed closer to bone.
Padding protected him for the most part.
A pocket everywhere meant rope, capsules, sharpened stones, and wooden tools injured him as much as his attackers—it also meant there was no shortage of things to use to fight. As long as he had the will, there would be a way to… maybe not survive, but to die a worthy death.
Pain stacked on pain until it blurred into something else.
He rolled, barely, enough to bring one cub under him.
It squealed—high, shocked—and that sound broke something open in him. It was genuine kid's cry—not unlike a human's, and even then, he did not like how fast his hands moved to do what needed to be done.
Sometimes for one to be considered human, hesitation was necessary. If not to prove to the universe, then to prove to one's self.
Xavier failed to prove it to himself in that moment.
He stabbed.
The blade went in shallow, skidding off bone.
He stabbed again.
And again.
Short, ugly thrusts.
No technique.
No thought.
Just don't stop. He couldn't stop.
The intention to kill had never manifested so completely, so unwillingly, and yet, so necessarily. For an instant, he realized he was born to be it—a killer. The realization faded as quickly as it came.
The cub shrieked and raked his face in response.
Claws tore across his brow.
Warmth flooded his eye—or from his eye.
He blinked red.
The second cub lunged, teeth closing around his forearm. Pressure spiked—then bone screamed. He felt it before he heard it, a dull, catastrophic crack that sent nausea rolling through him.
He roared and drove the knife down into the cub's flank.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Bubbled, bloody yells warred against whimpers—the sound would deceive anyone into believing the larger sounds were winning, but truly, the whimpers were as brutal as they were deceiving.
Blood sprayed hot and metallic, soaking his hands, his chest, the ground beneath them.
The cub thrashed, shrieked again, then bit harder, jaws locking as its body spasmed.
Wrapping his body around one cub, using its momentum to leverage himself into a shaky, one-hand, one-foot sideways standing position—
Something slammed into Xavier's side—hard enough to lift him, knife sent spiraling from his gasp.
He hit the earth again, ribs collapsing inward with a sound he would later realize was himself breaking.
He lay there, pinned, one cub convulsing over him, the other backing away, confused now, injured, bleeding from its mouth.
It cried out—not in pain, but in panic.
A thin, piercing sound.
A call.
Xavier's mind cut through the fog just long enough to understand.
Parents.
The wounded cub turned and bolted, crashing through brush, crying louder now.
The sound echoed, carried, stitched itself into the jungle.
The cub on top of him went slack—as much as he would have liked convince himself, there was no deluding himself into believing he had somehow wounded the cup bad enough to kill it.
Every stab felt inch-deep at best. And with the amount of shaking, imbalance, and lack of vision, every stab was like trying to win the lottery.
The cub's weight pressed down, heavy and wrong.
Its breath rattled once against his throat, then stopped.
Xavier lay beneath it, chest barely moving, knife buried in the root a meter away. Still, compromised as he was, he reached for the knife, gripped the handle with a strength that caused cracks in the wooden hilt; then, sunk it into the cub's neck for one final reassurance.
He couldn't feel his left arm.
His face throbbed, sticky and numb.
One eye wouldn't open.
And those were only things he could immediately tell were wrong with him.
Any internal bleeding, damaged organs, or even concussion could only be discovered later—if discovered at all.
The world tilted, dark at the edges, sound muffled like he was underwater again.
The jungle answered the call.
Not yet—distant, but coming.
A low, rolling sound moved through the trees, too deep to be mistaken for wind. Branches snapped somewhere far off.
Something large was moving with purpose.
And this time there would be no hiding from it.
Xavier tried to push the dead cub off him.
Nothing happened.
His body refused.
Muscles trembled, then gave out entirely.
He lay there, pinned beneath the thing he had killed, blood pooling warm against his skin, breath stuttering in shallow, uneven pulls.
It was as if his body knew he was already dead but his mind struggled with that realization, fighting against all fights to rise once more.
But it was a shout in the darkness—nothing was listening.
This wasn't survival as he had known it.
This wasn't hunger, or cold, or cleverness.
This was the dark edge.
The place where luck ran out and pain stopped being a warning and became an ending.
The finalities which even infinity could not outmaneuver.
His vision narrowed.
The sky above blurred into a pale smear through branches and mist.
Get up, he told himself, dimly. Get up or you die.
But his body did not answer.
Somewhere in the distance, the jungle roared.