Chapter 13 : The Survivors
Shadowfang tracked the blood trail the way he tracked everything — nose to ground, body low, each step placed with the deliberate patience of a predator reading a story written in scent. Three Na'vi, wounded. One being carried. Moving northwest through secondary growth at a pace that said injured more than fleeing.
I followed two meters behind, avatar body bent under canopy that thinned as the terrain rose. The sanctuary's territorial awareness had dropped away a kilometer back — beyond the five-kilometer radius, I was blind. No buff, no hostile detection, no organism tracking. Just eyes, ears, and a borrowed set of alien senses still learning to cooperate.
The jungle smelled different outside the territory. Wilder. Unfiltered by the sanctuary's regulatory effect. Every scent hit raw: decomposing foliage, mineral soil, the musk of creatures whose territory we'd entered without permission. Shadowfang's hackles stayed at half-mast — not alarmed, but aware. His ears rotated in continuous sweeps, sampling the soundscape for anything that didn't belong.
The blood trail was three days old and weakening. Rain had dissolved the exposed droplets, but the subsurface deposits — blood that had soaked into soil and been partially metabolized by root systems — left a chemical signature Shadowfang could follow like a highway.
Two kilometers northwest of the sanctuary. Three. The terrain climbed into a ridgeline covered in low scrub and emergent rock. The canopy opened enough to see sky — Polyphemus hanging in the western quadrant, gas-giant bands catching afternoon light.
Shadowfang froze.
Not the patrol-freeze of territorial assessment. The kill-freeze. Every muscle locked, weight forward, tail rigid. Through the bond: a scent-image so vivid it was almost visual. Na'vi. Close. Alive. And the adrenaline-tang of someone who knew they were being hunted.
The arrow came from above.
Not aimed at me — at the ground in front of my feet, burying itself in soil to the fletching. A warning shot. Deliberate. Precise. The kind of accuracy that said I could have put this through your eye but chose not to.
I looked up.
She dropped from the canopy like a stone — three meters of controlled fall, landing in a crouch that barely bent the undergrowth. Knife already out. Not an RDA-manufacture blade — carved bone, Na'vi design, edge honed to a gleam that caught the filtered light.
The blade found my throat before Shadowfang could react.
Blue skin. War paint — ochre and white, smeared by days of running, half the patterns disrupted by sweat and rain. Yellow eyes so bright they burned, set in a face that was angular even by Na'vi standards, sharp enough to cut. Young — mid-twenties in Na'vi terms. Lean in a way that spoke of hunger rather than build. And the expression: not fear, not rage. Something colder.
"Dreamwalker." The word came out like a curse in accented English — functional but unpracticed, each consonant bitten off. "Are you here to finish what your machines started?"
The knife pressed. Not deep — a sting, a line of warmth below my jaw. The blade was sharp enough that the pressure was the message: I can open this at any time.
Shadowfang snarled. The viperwolf's neural filaments blazed amber-red, threat display cranked to maximum. Through the bond: kill-impulse, pack-defense, every predatory circuit screaming attack.
No, I pushed back. Hard. The command hit the bond like a wall. Stand down. Do not attack.
Shadowfang growled but held position. Teeth bared. Muscles coiled. A compromise between obedience and instinct that wouldn't hold forever.
"I'm not RDA military." My voice came out steady. Surprising, given the knife. "I'm a researcher. Avatar program. I followed a blood trail from my research sector."
"Researcher." She didn't move the blade. "With a viperwolf. That obeys you."
"Fair point."
"His name is Shadowfang. He's..." There was no word for it that didn't require explaining the system. "Bonded. To me."
Something shifted behind those yellow eyes. Not softening — recalculating. The knife stayed, but the pressure eased a fraction.
"Txe'lan." A voice from the undergrowth — older, male, strained with the effort of speaking at volume. "Txe'lan, stop."
Three figures emerged from behind a rock formation ten meters upslope. An elderly Na'vi male — tall even by Na'vi standards, hair white at the temples, leaning heavily on a staff carved from a single root. He supported a second figure: smaller, frailer, wrapped in layers of woven fiber that were stained dark at the midsection. And behind them, a young male — teenage, maybe — clutching a carved bone pendant in one hand and a spear too big for him in the other.
The elder's eyes found me. Found Shadowfang. Found the knife at my throat.
"He carries no weapons," the elder said. His English was better than the warrior's — slower, more formal, shaped by years of contact with humans. "And his creature does not attack without command. This is not a soldier."
The warrior — Txe'lan — didn't look away from me.
"All dreamwalkers serve the machines. Different uniforms. Same masters."
"Not all." The elder took a step forward. His breathing was labored — the jungle's humidity pressing on lungs that had been running for days. "Let him speak."
Txe'lan held the knife for three more seconds. Then she withdrew it — not sheathing, just lowering — and stepped back to a distance that said I can reach your throat again in half a second.
I touched the cut. Fingers came away blue. Shallow. The avatar body had already started coagulating — faster than human tissue, thicker clotting factors.
"Who are you?" I asked. Not the warrior — the elder.
"Atan'ite te Arewä Räläng'itan." He spoke his full name with the weight of someone who knew it might be the last time anyone heard it. "Of the Räläng clan. These are my people. What remains of them."
The Räläng. I'd been right — the clan from the expanded materials, the warrior people whose territory had been cleared for RDA mining operations. In the outline of this world's future, they were supposed to be survivors. Remnants who connected to the protagonist's network and became foundation citizens.
Except in the outline, there hadn't been a dying elder wrapped in bloodstained cloth.
The frail figure Atan'ite supported was a woman — older than him, smaller, with the kind of stillness that living things don't achieve without great effort. Her eyes were closed. Her breathing was a shallow rasp that I could hear across the distance. The bandages at her midsection were saturated — dark blue blood, Na'vi hemolymph, soaking through layers of field dressing.
"Gunshot wound," I said.
"Three days ago." Atan'ite's voice didn't waver. "RDA survey team. They came with bulldozers. We were told the area was designated for resource assessment. They did not assess. They cleared. When we did not leave fast enough..." He gestured to the elder woman. To the jungle behind them. To the absence of thirteen other people who should have been standing here.
Sänume — the young one — made a sound. Not a word. A broken thing that lived in the space between grief and shock. His hand tightened on the carved bone pendant: whale-rib, maybe, or something Pandoran. Polished by years of handling. A family object. Someone's history.
"Seventeen clan members, three weeks ago. Four standing here. The math is RDA ammunition and bulldozer tracks."
Shadowfang's aggression had faded. The bond carried something new from the viperwolf — recognition. Pack creatures understood what it looked like when a group was broken. The alpha who'd lost his own pack to a fallen branch read the body language of four survivors carrying their dead weight through hostile jungle, and the growl in his chest softened to silence.
The elder woman coughed. Blood flecked her lips. Atan'ite caught her weight as she sagged.
I had a healing pod at the sanctuary. I had a regenerative field that could accelerate recovery. I had system resources that might — might — make the difference between this woman living and dying.
But the sanctuary was three kilometers south. The woman had a gunshot wound three days old. And Txe'lan was standing between me and any possibility of help, knife in hand, watching for the first sign of treachery.
"I have a place." The words came out before the plan finished forming. "South. Hidden. A grotto with... healing capability. It's not much, but the wounded — she needs more than field dressing."
Txe'lan's knife came up. "You will not take us to an RDA facility."
"It's not RDA. It's mine." I met her eyes. Held them. "I know that means nothing to you. I know a dreamwalker's word is worth less than the air it takes to speak it. But she—" I nodded toward the elder woman, "—is dying. And I've buried enough already."
The words came from a place I hadn't expected. Not calculation. Not strategy. The memory of Max Patel sitting on a stool, telling me James Chen's body was cremated per standard protocol. The weight of a death I'd inherited from a man I'd never met, whose face I wore like a mask every day.
Silence. The jungle breathed around us — clicks and calls and the distant rush of water that might be the stream feeding the sanctuary's grotto.
Atan'ite looked at the elder woman. At Sänume, shaking. At Txe'lan, rigid with distrust.
"We go," he said.
Txe'lan's jaw tightened. "We do not know—"
"We go." Atan'ite's voice carried something that wasn't volume — authority. The specific weight of an elder who had survived enough to recognize when stubbornness crossed from strength to suicide. "If he means harm, we die here or we die there. If he means help, she lives. The choice is simple."
Txe'lan lowered her knife. Didn't sheathe it. Took point without another word, checking sightlines through the undergrowth with the efficiency of someone who'd been running rear guard for three days and hadn't slept in longer.
I moved to Atan'ite's side. Helped him lift the elder woman — her weight was nothing in the avatar's arms, a fragile assembly of bone and muscle that weighed less than Shadowfang — and we started south. The young one, Sänume, fell in behind us. His spear pointed backward, covering our retreat from threats that might not be there but that three weeks of running had taught him to expect everywhere.
The carved bone pendant swung against his chest with each step. Someone's memory, carried by the youngest survivor.
Shadowfang ranged ahead, nose working, checking the trail. Through the bond: the wolf's instincts repurposed — not hunting prey, but guiding pack. New members. Strange-smelling, injured, frightened. But moving together, and for a pack creature, together was the first requirement of safety.
Three kilometers to the sanctuary. The elder woman's breathing grew shallower with each hundred meters. Txe'lan moved through the jungle like a ghost — silent, watchful, her knife hand never relaxing. And Atan'ite walked beside me with the steady gait of someone who'd been walking toward something for a long time and had finally found a direction.
The waterfall appeared through the treeline. The grotto's bioluminescence pulsed behind the curtain of water — welcoming, or warning.
Txe'lan's hand went to her knife.
"It's safe," I said. "I promise."
Her expression told me exactly what a Räläng warrior thought of dreamwalker promises.
Author's Note / Support the Story
Your Reviews and Power Stones help the story grow! They are the best way to support the series and help new readers find us.
Want to read ahead? Get instant access to more chapters by supporting me on Patreon. Choose your tier to skip the wait:
Noble ($7): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public.
Royal ($11): Read 17 chapters ahead of the public.
Emperor ($17): Read 24 chapters ahead of the public.
Weekly Updates: New chapters are added every week. See the pinned "Schedule" post on Patreon for the full update calendar.
Join here: patreon.com/Kingdom1Building