She fell forever—air ripping past, throat raw on a scream that never made it out. Something hard clipped the back of her skull, and the world blinked to black.
Cold water dragged her awake.
Selena surfaced with a ragged gasp, coughing stone-taste and iron from her tongue. The pool was ink-dark but for a scatter of glowstones winking from the cave walls like tired stars. She kicked for the nearest shelf of rock, fingers slipping on slick limestone until she hauled herself onto a narrow ledge and lay there, shivering more from adrenaline than cold.
Everything hurt. Muscles throbbed, skin felt bruised in places she didn't know could bruise—like she'd been fed through a blender and poured back out crooked. The ache pulled up an old memory: a second shift she shouldn't have taken, highway humming beneath bald tires, eyelids heavy as lead. She closed her eyes—and never opened them. The rumble strip roared, the guardrail flashed, and then metal screamed as the car went end over end because she'd fallen asleep at the wheel on the way to another job. Somehow, impossibly, she had crawled out and walked away.
Just like then, she was alive now. And, oddly, the water's bite didn't sink into her bones the way it should have. She hugged herself anyway, forcing air in and out until the tremor in her hands eased.
"Okay," she whispered to the cave. "Okay."
She tugged off her soaked outer layer and unshouldered her small bag, checking it by feel and then by sight in the glowstone light. Spell papers, intact—she plucked one marked with a fire seal. Rations, dry. A coil of line, a knife, a battered flask. Everything she'd brought had made it.
She touched the seal to the rock and breathed the syllables. A palm-sized flame bloomed, steady and obedient. She fed it a few splinters from a cracked crate washed up near the pool's edge and held her hands to the heat. Steam lifted from cloth and hair. She wrung out what she could, rotated garments by the fire, and let time do the rest. Hours slid by in the hush of drip-drip-drip and the faint, endless wind that sighed through the stone.
When she dressed again, the fabric was warm and only a little damp. The heaviness in her body had settled into something she could carry. She rolled her shoulders, tightened her straps, and set her jaw.
Hajime.
Not this time. Not if she could help it. She would find him before the abyss finished its work. She would guard what the fall tried to grind out of him.
She quenched the flame with a whisper and rose. As she moved, she scored the limestone beside each glowstone—shallow, angled slashes a tracker could read, but subtle enough not to broadcast her trail.
The cave breathed cool against her cheeks. Green glowstones freckled the walls in thick clusters, each one too faint alone but, together, casting a moss-colored wash over the floor. The light bled out before it reached the edges, leaving the walls darker and the ceilings patchy with shadow. This place wasn't carved by hand. Water and time had worried the stone into ribs and bowls, scallops and runnels—nature's handwriting everywhere.
Selena kept to the dimmer edge where the light thinned, shoulder close to the rock so her silhouette wouldn't jump out. In the gaps where the glowstones thinned, she slowed and listened—drip, drip, the soft scrape of her boot, the low hush of air passing somewhere ahead. She breathed through the tightness in her chest. Find him first. Everything else later.
After a steady walk the passage bowed left and opened into a cramped chamber. Three tunnels waited there, slick-lipped and breathing different kinds of cold. Behind her, the pool whispered. Ahead, three choices.
She marked the entry she'd just come from—two neat slashes—and lifted a hand, pointing as if conducting. "When in doubt… eeny, meeny, miny, moe," she murmured, tapping each mouth in turn. The corner of her mouth twitched. If only I had a Striker Sigma Five—roll it and let luck decide. Useless humor, but it kept the worst thought at bay: that she might never catch Hajime, that this second life could end before it truly began.
"Not luck," she told herself, and let her finger fall. She went still, listening to the stone, tasting the air, eyes narrowed in the green gloom as she chose.
The tunnel ran cool and green, glowstones clustering thick on the walls and thinning to pockets of shadow. Selena kept to those shadows, shoulder grazing rock, breath steady, footfalls careful.
A flicker of motion—long ears, scythe-thin legs—stopped her cold. A Kickmaster Bunny ghosted across the passage ahead, all tendon and knives. She flattened against the darkest wall, heartbeat hammering in her throat, and didn't breathe until the thing whisked past and vanished between ribs of stone.
She waited—ten, twenty, thirty breaths—then eased forward again.
The passage opened by degrees into another junction. From a distance she counted more mouths branching away, light pooling green at their thresholds. Then the prickle hit—the feeling of eyes.
They gleamed from one tunnel: a matched set, low and pale.
White wolves. Only two.
Selena's muscles coiled. Then she did the stupid, necessary thing—she turned and ran.
The wolves came on at once, nails ticking on stone, their howls bright with pleasure. Great, she thought, breath tight but mind cutting paths. Running for my life already. Didn't even make it that far. Eyes or mouth—anywhere else would barely scratch them with what she had. She needed a drop, a choke point, a—
There. The narrow shaft she'd skirted earlier, a black throat in the floor with a lip of rock along one side. She slid to a stop with the hole at her back and pulled her knife, knees loose, hands open.
"Come on," she breathed.
The first wolf launched, jaws wide. Selena dropped, rolled with its weight, and pistoned both legs up at a right angle. Its own momentum did the rest. Claws raked her as it went past—three lines burned across her cheek and along her left side—and then the animal spilled into the dark and was gone.
No time to watch it fall.
The second wolf checked, clever eyes narrowing. It darted in lower, fangs angling for her forearm. She gave it what it wanted.
Teeth slammed down. Pain flared white-hot. Her chain sleeve flashed with stored magic and came apart under the bite, links snapping instead of bone. The fangs still punched through, leaving deep, round wounds that pulsed with heat.
Selena drove the knife up inside the wolf's mouth, burying the blade past palate into the narrow corridor between brain and spine. The animal convulsed, and a crackling field burst over her skin—its lightning magic flared desperate and lethal. It should have cooked her where she stood. In those few seconds she shoved harder, feeling the point find purchase in the soft hinge of life.
The light died out of its eyes.
She wrenched free, staggered back from the dead weight, and realized she was shouting—raw, victorious sound bouncing around the stone. She clamped her jaw shut, listening. Nothing answered but the drip of water and the blood in her ears.
Move. Clean. Seal.
She hurried to the pool she'd passed, knelt, and washed her face and arm, working grit and wolf-spit from the wounds until the sting eased. From her kit she tore gauze and wrapped her cheek, then sterilized a needle in a flame and sutured the two deepest punctures in her right arm—the canine bites—hands steady by sheer will. She packed the rest with clean cloth, bound it tight, and flexed. Pain, but usable.
When she finished, the adrenaline drained out of her at once. She picked the darkest corner the glowstones couldn't reach, tucked herself small with her back to stone, and let her eyes close.
"Hold on, Hajime," she whispered to the cave. Then sleep took her, light and listening, the knife under her palm.
She woke with a start, mind fogged, trying to stitch the last thread of memory together—wolves, teeth, lightning. The stink of blood brought the rest back. Outside her little nook the stone was slick and dark where she'd killed the second wolf. The body was gone. Drag marks raked the floor, deeper than a wolf could make, and a set of broad pads overlapped her scuffle—something bigger had taken the kill.
Her heartbeat climbed. She forced it down—four slow breaths in, four out—then crawled to the pool. Cold water on her face cleared the grit from her lashes; a long swallow settled the shake in her hands. When she straightened, the look in her reflection was steadier.
"Back to it," she murmured, and went to find her friend.
She almost missed the turd until her boot slid on the slick edge of it. The reek hit a heartbeat later—hot metal and rot—and she rocked back against the wall, swallowing hard. No time to gag. She tore a strip from her sleeve, twisted it, and plugged both nostrils. It helped in the same way a broken umbrella helps a storm.
She crouched, found a flat stone, and began to scoop from the outer rim so she didn't have to touch it skin-to-filth. The first smear went across her boot, a black sheen that crawled up through the laces. Her mind tried to bolt. She grabbed it by the scruff and shoved it somewhere safer.
Jurassic Park. The thought arrived like a lifeline thrown into sewage. There was a kid who did this. Covered himself in dinosaur leavings and walked right past teeth. She dragged the stone along her shins. The stink ballooned. And then—cut to the next scene—he's spotless. How? Where's the hose, the ten-minute sob in the shower? Where's the part where you can't stop shaking because it's under your nails—
She gagged, paused, pressed her tongue to her teeth until the spasm passed. "Survive," she mouthed, silent. Humiliation's cheap. Breathing's not.
Boots done. Shins done. She skimmed a fresh layer onto her waistband, shoulders, the seams that would carry her scent. Every new smear was a slap. Hollywood lies. Editors with mercy. Costumes you can swap. I got the real version. Her eyes watered beneath the glowstone light; she blinked them clear and kept moving, because stopping made the smell bigger.
She left her face mostly clean—two ugly streaks along the jaw where breath might leak. Then, because prey smells like hair, she striped the ends of hers with two fast, vicious passes. The filth went tacky as it met fabric and skin, an ugly second heartbeat wherever it touched.
Just a minute, she bargained with herself while her hands kept working, automatic. Give me a minute to be a person about it and then I'll be trash again. She laid her palm to the stone wall, felt the cold, and counted the green veins above her like seconds: one, two, three, four, five. The counting shrank the panic until it fit behind her ribs.
Ahead, something heavy moved: claws rasping softly over rock, a low, damp huff of breath. The air thickened with musk and wet fur.
She lowered herself to the floor, loose-limbed and boneless, a heap no hunter would bother with. A paw planted near her calf. A muzzle dipped, tasting the air above her neck. Hot carrion breath washed her skin.
She didn't breathe. Didn't think. Let her heart crawl instead of pound.
The beast rumbled—uncertain—and then the tail-whisper of fur brushed stone. Then it padded on.
Only then did she let the air out, a leak through fabric. She wiped the stone on already-ruined pants, set it down, and rose to a knee, small as she could make herself, slick and nameless. Monsters hunt scent, not pride. Pride can come back later. She tested a thread-thin breath through the cloth plugs.
Okay. Movie magic without the magic. You're invisible now.
She slid deeper into the green-lit maze.
Hunger bit first. Then thirst. She rationed water to sips, sucked damp from her sleeve, licked condensation from quartz ribs. Days—or something like days—passed in a slow grind of steps and notches carved by her knife. Twice the bear's bulk thundered past so near it brushed a wind over her skin: the gouge of its claws in the walls, the sour musk of it, the way the stone seemed to flinch. Each time her stink-slick disguise bought her a miracle.
Rations dwindled. The pain in her belly turned sharp, then hollow. Thoughts came loose at the edges—Hajime's face in the flicker of glow, a laugh that wasn't here, the feel of a trigger under a finger she didn't have a gun for. Once she woke from a stolen doze with warm wet soaking her shoulder and the unmistakable ammonia sting in her nose. Something had lifted a leg and marked her as nothing. It knocked her mood into a pit she had to claw out of with both hands.
She kept moving. Because if Hajime had already found the bear, if he'd stood alone before it and fallen or hardened into something she feared… then every step she delayed was a step she'd never catch.
At last—after another bend, another breath held while something large prowled a cross-passage—she smelled copper clean through the rot. Not hers. Fresher. She found it a moment later: a scatter of droplets flung in a rough arc, dark against pale limestone. Nearby, the stone wore a cut so straight it could have been drawn with a ruler, and below it, a neat, geometric nick—one of his telltale marks, the kind transmutation left when done in a hurry.
"Finally," she whispered, a smile breaking through the grime. Found you. Or at least your trail.
She touched the mark, then glanced down the corridor where the blood led. "Now I just need the cave you made for yourself," she said to the stone, and followed.