The transition from the world of men to the world of Agano did not feel like a journey. It felt like an execution.
One moment, Mwajuma was suspended in the impossible, vertical waters of the Chozi la Ardhi. The next, the violet light of a bruised, alien sky exploded around her, and gravity—cold, ancient, and absolute—wrapped its invisible hands around her ankles and pulled.
She was falling.
The wind screamed past her ears, whipping her heavy, braided hair into a frenzy. Far below, obscured by a thick, sickly green mist, a vast canopy of impossible proportions stretched out like an ocean of leaves. But Mwajuma was not looking down. Her eyes were wide, staring up into the violet void, trapped in the nightmare she had just been ripped away from.
She didn't hear the wind. She heard the stuttering, mechanical roar of the German Maxim machine guns. She didn't smell the ozone of this new atmosphere; she smelled the sharp, metallic tang of cordite and the coppery scent of fresh blood soaking into the red dirt of Mapambazuko.
Baraka.
His name tore through her mind, a jagged piece of glass shredding her soul from the inside out. He had been her lover. The man who had whispered promises to her under the shade of the baobab trees. The man who had kissed her collarbone and sworn to protect their village. And he was the man who had looked her in the eye and brought the colonial army to her doorstep.
Jealousy. It had all been for jealousy. He had sold out her brother, Mwanamalundi. He had sold out the elders. He had sold out their future because he could not stand that the twins held the magic of the earth and the sky while he only held a spear.
But the betrayal was not clean. That was the worst part. If he had just been a traitor, she could have simply hated him. But in the final, chaotic seconds of the massacre, when the German sniper had drawn a bead on her brother, Baraka had broken. He had realized the colonizers did not view him as a king, but as cattle. He had thrown himself in front of the bullet.
Mwajuma squeezed her eyes shut as she plummeted through the alien sky, a raw, animalistic scream tearing from her throat. She could still see his chest exploding in a spray of crimson. She could still see him collapsing in the dust, his eyes finding hers across the battlefield, gasping out a final, bloody warning before the mortar shell hit the ground beside her and blew her into the pond.
He had broken her heart, destroyed her home, and then died to save her family, leaving her with a twisted, suffocating knot of love, hatred, and agonizing grief.
Men, she thought, the word tasting like ash on her tongue. They are poison. They love you, and then they burn your world to the ground.
The biting chill of the alien air finally pierced through her trauma, snapping her back to the present. The green mist was approaching fast. She was dropping at terminal velocity toward a dense, parasitic jungle. If she hit the canopy at this speed, the massive branches would snap her spine like a dry twig.
Mwajuma's eyes snapped open. The grief vanished, instantly swallowed by a roaring, incandescent rage.
She was a warrior of the 1920s, born in the shadow of Kilimanjaro. She was not a fragile maiden. She possessed the physique of a brawler—broad, powerful shoulders, thick biceps, and a core carved from years of intense labor and brutal combat. Intricate, geometric tribal tattoos wrapped around her dark arms and collarbone, marking her not just as a woman of her tribe, but as a weapon of the earth itself.
She refused to die here. She refused to let Baraka's betrayal be the end of her story.
She flipped her body mid-air, facing the rapidly approaching jungle. She extended her thick, muscular arms downward, spreading her fingers wide. She didn't use the intricate, spoken spells that her brother favored. She didn't need words. Her magic was primal, visceral, and fueled entirely by her dominant will.
She reached out with her mind, searching past the massive trees, past the tangled roots, diving deep into the tectonic heart of this strange new world. The soil of this continent—the Nation of Mizizi—felt different. It was incredibly dense, heavy, and thrumming with a dark, parasitic energy. But dirt was dirt. Stone was stone. And she was the Earth Mother.
RISE! she commanded with her soul.
Deep below the canopy, the jungle floor exploded. The sound was deafening, a seismic roar that shook the very air. A massive pillar of solid granite, twenty feet wide and hundreds of feet tall, erupted from the bedrock. It tore upward through the giant roots, shattering ancient tree branches as it surged toward the sky like a stone missile racing to meet her.
The timing had to be absolute perfection.
Mwajuma gritted her teeth, the veins in her neck bulging as the sheer gravitational weight of her own magic threatened to tear her consciousness apart. The stone pillar rushed up. She was falling down. The impact was seconds away.
Now!
Just as the soles of her bare feet made contact with the jagged top of the granite pillar, Mwajuma shifted the density of the earth. She didn't stop the stone; she fundamentally changed its nature. The solid, unyielding granite liquefied instantly, turning into a deep, thick pool of soft red clay.
She slammed into the top of the pillar. The clay acted as a massive, earthen shock-absorber. She sank deep into the mud, the kinetic energy of her terminal velocity rippling outward in a massive shockwave that blew the leaves off the surrounding canopy trees for a hundred yards.
The pillar groaned under the immense stress, cracking down the middle, but it held.
Mwajuma lay breathless in the center of the soft clay crater she had created at the top of the stone tower. Her entire body ached. Her muscles were screaming in protest, and her mana pool felt dangerously low. She lay there, staring up at the bruised purple sky through the gap she had torn in the canopy, gasping for air.
Slowly, she pulled herself up. She was covered in thick, reddish mud, her tattered colonial-era clothes clinging to her muscular frame. She crawled to the edge of her stone pillar and looked down.
She was in a nightmare of greenery. The Nation of Mizizi was not a normal forest. The trees here were impossibly large, their trunks thick as city blocks, their roots weaving together to create a multi-layered, parasitic labyrinth. The air was suffocatingly hot, smelling of rotting vegetation and sweet, intoxicating pollen. It was a savage, overgrown wilderness that felt alive and hungry.
Through the thick mist, miles away and suspended impossibly high in the upper branches of the largest trees, she saw the faint outline of a massive, floating region—a city built into the very canopy of the world.
That was where she needed to go.
Mwajuma leaped from the top of her cracked pillar, sliding down a massive, moss-covered root to reach the jungle floor. The ground here was spongy and unstable. Every shadow seemed to writhe with unseen life.
She stood alone in the gloom, her fists clenching at her sides. The adrenaline of the fall was fading, leaving behind the hollow, burning crater of her heartbreak. She thought of Baraka's blood. She thought of the Maxim guns. A low, dangerous growl rattled in her chest. She needed to hit something. She needed to break something, just as her world had been broken.
The jungle obliged.
The brush to her left rustled. It wasn't the scurrying of an animal. It was heavy, deliberate, and entirely devoid of stealth.
Mwajuma turned, lowering her center of gravity into a perfect, balanced fighter's stance. Her broad shoulders squared toward the sound. The tribal tattoos on her arms began to glow with a faint, pulsing amber light.
From the shadows of the giant, rotting ferns, the monster emerged.
It was horrifying. It stood over eight feet tall, a grotesque parody of the human form. Its skin was a sickly, mottled grey, stretched too tight over exaggerated, bulging muscles. Its jaw hung open, revealing rows of jagged, broken teeth, and thick, dark veins pulsed across its hairless scalp. But the most terrifying thing about the beast was its eyes. They burned with a chaotic, violent purple light—the visual manifestation of unstable, corrupted mana.
It let out a guttural roar, a sound that held no intelligence, only pure, localized agony and rage. The air around its massive hands began to warp and distort as chaotic magical energy gathered there, snapping and hissing like broken electrical wires.
This was a "Savage Man," though Mwajuma did not yet know the tragic truth of what it used to be. She only saw a monster. She only saw a target.
The beast lunged, throwing a massive arm forward. A jagged bolt of raw, unstable magical force tore through the damp air, aimed directly at her chest.
If Mwajuma were a scholar, she might have tried to read the magical frequency and erect a counter-shield. But Mwajuma was a brawler with a terrifyingly high Battle IQ. She didn't look at the magic; she looked at the monster's hips. She saw the beast plant its left foot a fraction of a second before it fired. She read the telegraphing in its massive shoulder muscles.
Before the blast even left its hand, Mwajuma had already pivoted.
She slipped beneath the chaotic bolt, letting the magic shatter the trunk of a massive tree behind her. In the same fluid motion, she closed the distance. She didn't retreat. She stepped into the monster's guard.
The beast roared, swinging its other massive fist down like a hammer to crush her.
Mwajuma stomped her heel into the muddy ground. Hard. The earth obeyed. A sharp, jagged spike of hardened limestone shot up from the soil at an angle, driving directly into the back of the monster's knee joint.
The beast shrieked as the stone pierced its thick hide, its leg buckling instantly. The massive, downward swing went wide, thrown off balance by the sudden loss of support.
That was all the opening Mwajuma needed.
She channeled her earth magic not into the ground, but into her own flesh. A thick, jagged gauntlet of dark, compacted stone rapidly formed over her right hand and forearm, fusing with her skin. She twisted her hips, driving all the power of her broad shoulders, all the weight of her dense muscles, and all the agonizing, burning rage of her broken heart into a single, devastating uppercut.
This is for Mapambazuko, she thought.
Her stone-coated fist connected with the underside of the eight-foot monster's jaw.
The impact sounded like a cannon firing in a canyon. The sheer kinetic force lifted the massive beast entirely off the ground. Its jaw shattered in a spray of dark, corrupted blood and shattered teeth. The monster flipped backward through the air, crashing into the thick undergrowth in a tangled, broken heap.
It twitched once, its chaotic purple eyes fading into dull, lifeless grey, and then it lay still.
Mwajuma stood over the corpse, her chest heaving, her breath coming in ragged, angry gasps. She looked down at her stone-covered fist, stained with the beast's dark blood. The stone cracked and crumbled away, falling into the damp soil.
She had survived the fall. She had killed the monster. But the fire in her chest was not extinguished. It was barely even stoked. She looked into the dark, oppressive depths of the toxic jungle, where the sounds of snapping branches and guttural roars indicated that the dead beast had not been hunting alone.
More of them were coming. Dozens of them.
Mwajuma rolled her broad shoulders, a dark, bloodthirsty smile creeping onto her lips. She wiped a streak of mud and blood from her cheek, her tribal tattoos flaring with bright, amber heat. Let them come. Let the whole world come. She had an ocean of grief to drown, and she was going to use their bones to do it.
She cracked her knuckles, the sound sharp in the damp air, and began to walk deeper into the Savage Wilds.