Once they vanished, he climbed down with agonizing slowness, praying no orc would appear to intercept him. His feet hit the ground with a knee-stabbing jolt, but he didn't falter, he bolted instantly into the undergrowth.
A low branch whipped across his cheek, drawing blood, but he didn't look back. He ran with a desperate, singular focus toward the cave, the Biochip's mapping function guiding him with a phantom blue trail layered over the rotting leaves. His eyes locked on the glow, breath sawing in his throat.
He stopped. "Three minutes," he told himself. "No more."
Choosing a tree with peeling bark, he stripped away the wet layers and lashed them into a crude, sturdy box. Near a deadfall, he found a thick plank, sun-dried gray despite the surrounding decay, and wedged it into the bottom.
It was a heat barrier. If the wood held, the damp frame would only hiss and steam against the basalt. He would find out soon enough if the craft meant anything.
Minutes later, he reached the man's corpse. It lay exactly where he had passed it earlier, untouched by wild animals, broken and half-stripped, the remaining cloth on itwas stiffening with its dried blood.
Without hesitation, Aris crouched, tore the fabric from it, and wrapped it around the joints of the box, binding them tight as his hands moved with a stranger's efficiency. He did not let himself think about the texture of the fabric or the person it had once belonged to, and finally twisted the last strip into a crude handle.
Then, with his other hand, he simply reached out, closed the man's eyes, and rose.
Half an hour later, he reached the Dakota fire hole, box in hand. The Biochip's scan confirmed the basalt had passed five hundred degrees; the air above the pit shimmered, the heat pressing against his face before he even crouched.
He recoiled, kicking soil into the hole until the last ember was smothered. Even buried, the stones glowed a deep volcanic orange, the heat radiating against his bare feet like an open oven door.
Using makeshift tongs of green wood, he took out the rocks one by one from the hole, each jaw hissing as it closed around the stone and steaming where it gripped the stone. One by one, he laid them smoking on the ground. When all seven lay there, he returned to the waterfall and gathered clay, carrying it back in cupped palms.
He crouched and smeared the stones with the thick clay, the mud hissing and bubbling on contact, vitrifying into a crude glassy shell. Steam scalded his knuckles, but he worked faster, each stone wrapped in its own insulating crust, the heat still bleeding through, blunted and manageable.
He jammed the stones into the box. Even through the damp wood and the dead man's cloth, the heat punched outward, searing his forearms. For one suspended second, the warmth felt like a rescue.
He sprinted back to the cave and plunged into the pool. The cold swallowed his legs, his waist, and then his chest in a shock that locked his jaw and stole his breath. It was the same cold killing Lilly, and it bit deepest where the stones had just bruised his skin with heat.
He pushed forward, one arm raised, holding the box high like a holy relic. His legs churned against the weight of his soaked clothes, each kick a struggle, but he did not let the box waver.
The waterfall thundered ahead. He angled for the weak point the Biochip had mapped, lunged through the veil, the falls battering his shoulders for one violent second, then released him. He stumbled into the cave, gasping and momentarily blind in the sudden dark.
Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The roar of the falls faded to a muffled hush behind him, replaced by the sound of his own exhausted breathing echoing too loudly in the empty dark cave.
The box's heat throbbed against his ribs through the damp cloth, a comfort he clung to as he waded deeper. Then he saw Lilly. Her small silhouette lay on the stone floor, curled tight and still clutching the bamboo container of orc blood.
He dropped the box and strode to her, knelt, pressed a palm to her forehead, and the heat he felt there made his blood run cold. She was shivering in a way that was hardly a shiver at all, a faint tremor rippling across her shoulders, dying, rippling again, each wave weaker than the last beneath his hand.
"Shit. Fever." His voice echoed in the cavern.
"Dammit, Lilly. Not now."
The Biochip flickered as he lifted her.
[Core Temp: 39.4°C and climbing | Pulse: 122 bpm | Early-stage systemic infection detected]
But he didn't need its confirmation. Her skin burned against his, her head lolling against his shoulder as he carried her toward the warmth of the box. He placed her gently on the floor and stripped two outer layers from his damp cloak, spreading them over the floor.
It was a pathetic mattress, but a barrier against the cave's floor nonetheless.
He laid her down with aching gentleness and turned to the stones. Using his knives as makeshift tongs, he nested the clay-wrapped heat around her. One at her feet. One to her left. One to her right. He placed the remaining four with obsessive care—seven stones in total—adjusting them inch by inch until they formed a cocoon of radiant warmth in the freezing dark.
Slowly, the violent tremors subsided into low shudders. He kept the scan active, watching the numbers flicker, refusing to settle. Minutes passed. Finally, her breathing steadied into a shallow, regular rhythm. He let out a breath that felt as though it had been trapped in his chest since the moment he'd left her.
"One crisis delayed," he mumbled, his eyes studying her sleeping body. But he knew it was not solved. The hypothermia was still there, waiting at the edges of the warmth, as patient as the dark.
He turned to the bundle of herbs at his left. Sorting them with frantic precision, he discarded the poisonous ones and kept the nourishing stalks clutched in a tight fist. He wrapped them in a strip of cloth and strapped the bundle securely to his waist.
At the waterfall's curtain, he glanced back. Lilly's eyes were open, just barely, a thin sliver of a gaze fixed on his silhouette against the silver light. Then her lids slid closed again. She was asleep before he even turned away.
He pushed through the waterfall, swam to the edge, and moved through the bushes like something that did not want to be seen. He stayed low to the ground, his eyes tracking every shift in the canopy above. He spotted a bowl-shaped knot of deadwood and claimed it without stopping, lashing it to his waist with a twine of fabric as he vanished back into the depths of the undergrowth.
Snap!
Footsteps. He dropped to the damp ground, lying sprawled, ears straining against the roar of the falls to identify them. For long moments, he studied their rhythm. There was a lightness to them that felt somehow familiar.
"Humans?" he thought. "Goblins? Something else?"
He peered through the bush, his body coiled like a spring. Two figures were walking from the right, navigating the uneven ground. As they drew closer, their faces came into focus.
So. These two.
His eyes widened as he recognized them instantly—two of the men who had beaten Rill to death. For one heartbeat, anger flared in his chest, threatening to override his logic. Then he crushed it down, burying the emotion beside everything else he refused to feel.
His eyes moved with clinical speed, cataloging their gear: coarse tunics, bamboo water containers, bows, and the small deer-like creature slung by its hind legs. They were hunters; armed, but distracted.
Their belongings ignited a cold spark of greed in him, a secondary flame to the simmering heat of vengeance.
Without a conscious command, his fingers closed around a heavy branch. He held his breath, his gaze narrowing to a lethal focus.
The men stopped talking. One paused to rub the back of his neck, glancing over his shoulder at the deep shadows; the other squinted into the green gloom of the brush line.
They felt a primal pressure of a predator's gaze, but saw only wood and bushes. The forest looked back at them as it always did: empty, indifferent, and still. They knew orcs didn't bother with silence, and they measured their fear by that logic. It was a mistake.
When they passed his hiding spot, he lunged. The stick connected with the first man's skull—a wet crack, a stumble. The second hunter snapped his head around, his expression shifting from dread to recognition to fury in the span of a heartbeat. Not an orc, but a fellow human; that realization seemed to embolden him as he threw a desperate fist.
Aris was already moving. The Biochip's scan overlaid the man's silhouette in flickering blue:
[Dodge right.]
He sidestepped, letting the punch sail past. The deer carcass slung over the man's shoulder acted as an anchor, dragging his balance wide.
Aris dropped the stick, closed the gap, and drove an uppercut into the man's jaw.
[Second target entering range. Kick incoming. Move back two steps.]
Aris recoiled. The first man's bare feet swept through empty air. Before he could recover, Aris drew a crude knife and leaned in—one motion. Eyes fixed on the throat.
He drove the blade in, then wrenched it out. The man collapsed, clutching his neck, trying to suppress the spray of blood with terrified eyes.
The second man staggered upright. Saw his companion. Saw the blood. Fear bloomed in his eyes, and he turned to run.
Aris already had the second knife in his hand.
Four steps. The man made it four steps before the knife found the left side of his neck. He kept running, four more steps, blood spraying, before his legs folded and he collapsed.
He stood over them and watched as they writhed for a while. Then they stopped.
He crouched and began. First, the bow—an old wooden bow. He stretched its string. "Good," he mumbled, then turned to the arrows. Nine in total from the two men, their tips simple iron. He patted their bodies, and his hand hit something.
He parted the robes, and his eyes landed on a knife, longer than his three and better quality, even without the Biochip to confirm it. He slid it into his belt beside the others, now dried, then began removing their clothes, their pouches, the dried meat wrapped in cloth. He stripped them to their skin.
Moments later, their belongings lay in a heap to the left, and his gaze drifted back to the naked bodies. He dragged them to the undergrowth, one by one, leaving only a dark smear on the leaves and the ground.
The deer lay where it had fallen. He heaved it onto his shoulder, gathered the remaining items into one of the hunters' robes, bundled it tight, and carried everything back.
Before the waterfall, he stashed the loot in the brush and surveyed the area. Minutes passed. Nothing moved. Satisfied, he began ferrying the haul inside; the deer first, then the weapons, then the bundled robes. Three trips. By the end, the loot lay piled against the western wall of the cave.
He took the two dry robes and approached Lilly. She lay exactly as he had left her, unconscious, the faint tremor still rippling through her shoulders.
He triggered a scan. [Vitality: 0.3 | Status: Stable/Critical]
"Good. The stones worked," he exhaled, the tension in his shoulders finally dropping an inch. "Not better. But not worse."
He stood over her with the dry cloths in his hands, and a hesitation came, unbidden, as his eyes fell on her damp clothes. Should I? He shook his head, a flash of self-disgust crossing his face. She was dying by degrees in wet garments, and he was standing there worrying about decency.
He crouched and began stripping away the wet fabric, working with clinical haste, eyes locked on his hands. He pulled the dry robe over her head, eased her arms through the oversized sleeves, and laid her back down.
The fabric swallowed her small frame; she looked like a child dressed in her father's clothes. He smiled, then turned to the next task.
He grabbed one of the bamboo containers from the western wall and poured out the water. Then he wrenched the wooden board from the box that had carried the hot stones, laid it on the ground to form a small workspace. He retrieved the bamboo container with the orc blood and sat before it, the herbs in his hand.
"Prime," he said, laying them out on the board. "Optimize a concoction recipe for hypothermia. Use these herbs."
[Initiating task... Generating recipe...]
[Estimated time: 1 hour 45 minutes.]
"One hour forty-five." He rubbed his eyes. "Too long. But we have no choice."
He looked at the herbs, strange and unfamiliar, their scent not so different from those of Earth, or at least, what he could recall. "I wonder how effective the herbs of this world will be in the hands of Prime," he mumbled, his eyes turning to the bamboo with the orc blood. "Guess I have to put its analysis on hold."
[Commencing analysis.]
He sat back against the wall and slowly closed his eyes.