Haibu planted his boot against the nearest chest and pushed.
The woman stumbled backward, her oiled body slipping from his leg. The motion gave him six inches of space. Not much. Enough.
He twisted sideways, shoulders turning perpendicular to the wall, and drove his elbow into the face pressed against his neck. Cartilage crunched. The woman shrieked and released his left arm. Her secondary hands clawed at his shirt as she fell but found no purchase on the sweat-slick fabric.
His freed hand shot down to his belt. Found the knife's grip. The blade snapped open with a metallic snick that cut through their chanting.
"Cock, cock, co—"
Haibu slashed sideways without looking. The blade caught something soft. A scream replaced the word. Hot fluid splashed his forearm. Blood, or something close enough.
The hands holding his right arm loosened. Not much. Just a fractional relaxation of pressure as their attention shifted to their wounded sister.
Haibu ripped his arm free and lunged forward.
His shoulder hit yielding flesh. Massive breasts compressed against his collarbone, then gave way as the woman toppled backward. He didn't stop to see where she landed. His boots found the packed earth and he ran.
Three steps. That was all he managed.
Something coiled around his ankle mid-stride. A stinger, whip-thin and impossibly flexible, had hooked his leg like a lasso. His momentum carried him forward but his foot stayed planted. Physics did the rest.
Haibu hit the ground face-first.
His palms scraped against dirt. His knife skittered from his grip and disappeared into shadow. Air exploded from his lungs in a grunt. Before he could recover, weight crashed down on his back. Knees pinned his shoulders. Secondary arms wrapped his biceps. Wet heat ground against his spine, breasts so large and heavy they spilled over his shoulder blades on either side.
"Stay," the woman on his back purred. Her hips rolled, sliding that slick body against him in a rhythm that had nothing to do with restraint. "Stay. Need. Need cock."
More hands found his legs. His belt. Someone was working his zipper down with fingers that trembled with eagerness. A tongue traced his ear, then plunged inside, the sensation so violating and immediate that his entire body went rigid.
They were going to use him. Paralyze him, or just hold him down until exhaustion did the job for them. Keep him here in the dark, a living toy for creatures that wore human skin but had stopped being human somewhere in their transformation.
The flashlight still lay where it had fallen, five feet to his left. Its beam pointed uselessly at the ceiling. In its dim light he could see their shadows converging. Ten, twelve, more. All crawling toward him with that awful coordination, their movements synchronized by instinct or pheromones or something deeper.
His father's voice surfaced through the panic. Steady. Measured. The tone he used when teaching Haibu to track wounded leopards in tall grass.
You will panic. That's fine. But panic doesn't move. Panic freezes. So feel it, acknowledge it, then set it aside and do the next thing that keeps you alive.
Next thing.
Haibu's right hand was pinned beneath secondary arms, but his left lay flat against the ground. His fingers walked sideways, searching. They found something cylindrical. Smooth metal. The flashlight's body.
He grabbed it.
The woman on his back ground harder against him, lost in her own need. Her primary hands slid up his chest, groping, kneading. Her secondary arms tightened on his biceps. Her mouth found his neck and sucked hard enough to bruise.
Haibu swung the flashlight backward over his shoulder.
The aluminum body connected with something that gave a wet crunch. The woman's scream pierced his eardrum. Her weight lifted as she reared back, hands flying to her ruined nose. Blood, dark and viscous, poured between her fingers.
Haibu bucked.
The motion threw off the hands at his legs. He twisted onto his back, flashlight raised like a club. The beam swung wild and caught a woman mid-lunge. Her eyes reflected the light, iridescent and empty. Her mouth hung open, tongue lolling, a strand of saliva connecting her lower lip to her chin.
He swung again. The flashlight caught her temple. Her head snapped sideways and she collapsed in a tangle of limbs, both human and additional.
Haibu rolled, found his feet, ran.
The tunnel entrance was ahead. Twenty feet of packed earth floor between him and vertical escape. His boots pounded the ground. Behind him, the chanting resumed. Louder now. Furious.
"COCK. COCK. COCK."
Something flew past his head and hit the wall. A stinger, launched like a spear, embedded itself in the dirt an inch from the tunnel's mouth. Another whistled past his ear. They were throwing them, or firing them, or some goddamn biological mechanism he didn't have time to understand.
He reached the tunnel and jumped.
His hands found the first handhold. His boots scrabbled against the smooth wall, searching for purchase on the spiral ridges. The flashlight hung from his wrist by its lanyard, swinging wildly, throwing insane shadows across the tunnel's surface.
Below, they swarmed. A tide of oiled flesh and grasping hands reaching up toward him. Secondary arms extended further than human limbs should, fingers brushing his boot heel. He climbed faster. One ridge. Another. His shoulders screamed. His fingers burned.
The voices followed him up the tunnel, echoing off the walls until they lost coherence and became pure sound. Rage and hunger and desperate, mindless need compressed into a single inhuman howl.
Haibu climbed.
Haibu's fingers found the next ridge and pulled.
His arms burned from shoulder to wrist, every muscle stripped down to raw fibre. Below him the howling grew louder, the sound bouncing up the tunnel walls and compressing around him like something physical. A hand closed around his boot.
He kicked. Contact. The grip loosened but didn't release.
"HAIBU!"
The voice came from above. He looked up. A circle of dim daylight framed two faces leaning over the tunnel's mouth. Mutsumi, her dark hair hanging down, her face bloodless. Ayumi beside her, already reaching.
"Grab my hand." Ayumi's arm descended into the tunnel, fingers spread. "Now."
He was still four feet below them. The hand on his boot tightened again, and a second hand found his calf, secondary fingers wrapping around the muscle and squeezing with obscene strength. His boot scraped against the tunnel wall as the weight dragged at him.
"Something has his leg." Nozomi appeared beside Mutsumi, her own arm plunging down. "Grab us, Haibu-kun, grab us right now."
He reached up with one hand and caught Ayumi's wrist. Her grip clamped shut around his like iron. Her shoulder braced against the tunnel edge.
The creature below pulled.
Haibu felt his spine stretch. Ayumi's face contorted. She planted her free hand flat against the ground outside the tunnel and held.
"I have him." Her teeth were clenched. "Pull."
Mutsumi grabbed Ayumi's arm with both hands and leaned back. Nozomi grabbed Mutsumi around the waist. The three women pulled as one and Haibu rose two inches.
The creature below rose with him.
He looked down. She had both hands on his calf now, primary and secondary, all four fingers locked in a grip that was going to leave bruises shaped like handprints. Her oiled face tilted up toward him with that blank, hungry expression, iridescent eyes reflecting the flashlight beam. Her mouth was open. Her tongue moved.
"Come back," she said. "Come back down."
More hands joined hers. Another woman climbed the tunnel wall with mechanical ease, her secondary arms finding the smooth surface without effort, ascending toward Haibu's free leg with focused, terrible patience.
"Pull harder." Haibu's voice came out flat. "There are more of them."
Mutsumi made a sound that wasn't quite a word and threw her weight backward. Mami appeared at the tunnel's edge. She looked down into the dark and made a noise like a wounded animal, then grabbed Nozomi's arm anyway.
"Don't look down," Ayumi said to Mami through gritted teeth. "Just pull."
Mami shut her eyes and pulled.
Haibu rose another three inches. The creature below screamed and held. A second set of hands closed around his ankle. He could feel the tunnel wall scraping his knuckles, his shirt riding up, the cold air from outside pressing against his exposed stomach while the humid heat from below pushed against his legs. Two environments fighting over him. Two sets of hands with completely different intentions.
"My arm," Ayumi said. The word came out strained. "Haibu I cannot hold this angle much longer."
He looked down again. The second woman had both hands on his shin now. The first had shifted her grip upward to just below his knee. He was a rope in a contest between desperate women.
Misuzu arrived at the tunnel edge, assessed the situation in a single glance, and lay flat against the ground. She reached both arms down and locked her hands around Haibu's free wrist. Her manicured nails bit into his skin.
"I have the other arm," she said. "On three."
"Just pull," Nozomi said.
"On three." Misuzu's voice was immovable. "One."
The creature below shifted her grip to his thigh. Her secondary hands clawed at the tunnel wall beside his boot, anchoring herself, adding leverage to the downward pull. The howling beneath him multiplied. Others were climbing.
"Two."
Haibu pressed both boots against the tunnel wall and pushed. It barely helped. The smooth compressed earth offered almost nothing. But the small resistance kept him from slipping further while the women above held position.
"Three."
Every arm at the tunnel mouth heaved simultaneously. Haibu rose a full six inches in one savage pull. The creature below screamed. Her grip dragged against his jeans, fingernails tearing through the denim, and then found his bare skin beneath and dug in. He felt the skin break. Four lines of fire across his calf.
He rose another inch. She was screaming constantly now, a sound that had stopped being language entirely. The second woman dropped away, unable to maintain her grip against the upward momentum. The first held. Her primary hands. Her secondary hands. All four locked in the jeans material, knuckles white.
The denim tore.
A long ripping sound ran up the leg of his trousers and the creature's grip fractured. Her hands slid from fabric to ankle to heel to nothing.
Haibu came out of the tunnel in a single violent motion, all five women falling backward in a chain. He landed half on Ayumi, half on Mutsumi, the flashlight swinging on its lanyard and cracking against the floorboards. For a moment nobody moved. Just breathing. Ragged and exhausted.
"Block the hole." Haibu rolled off Mutsumi and got his feet under him. "Now. Whatever you found in those rooms, bring it here now."
Nobody moved for half a second. All of them still catching breath, still processing the sounds rising from below.
Then the sounds clarified. That chanting again, rhythmic and climbing, bouncing off the tunnel walls and growing louder with every second.
"COCK. COCK. COCK."
Mami screamed and scrambled backward on her hands.
"Move." Ayumi was already on her feet. She grabbed the nearest piece of furniture, a heavy wooden cabinet with its drawers long rotted out, and dragged it across the floorboards toward the hole. The scraping sound tore through the room. "Someone help me with this."
Mutsumi got behind the cabinet and pushed. Together they shoved it over the tunnel's mouth. The cabinet's base dropped two inches and wedged against the hole's rim, not sealing it but covering it. Immediately something hit the underside from below. The cabinet jumped. Both women threw their weight on top of it.
The hole was roughly a metre across. The cabinet covered most of it but left two crescent gaps on either side where pale hands immediately shot through, fingers spread and grasping, secondary arms following a moment behind and waving at the air with horrible eagerness.
"It's not enough." Mutsumi pressed down harder. "We need more weight."
Nozomi grabbed a warped wooden table from the corner and dragged it over. The table's legs stuttered across the uneven floor. She upended it over the cabinet, adding its bulk. The hands beneath still pushed. The cabinet shuddered.
"HAIBU." Misuzu pointed. "Do something useful."
He was already moving. The rooms Atsushi and Kazuhiko had gone to search were through a sliding door to his left, half off its track. He put his shoulder against it and forced it open.
Kazuhiko stood in the middle of the far room with a coil of rope looped over one shoulder, a rusted lantern in one hand, and a box of matches tucked under his arm. He stared at Haibu's torn jeans, the blood running freely from four parallel scratches down his calf, the flashlight still swinging from his wrist.
"The hole," Haibu said. "We need everything heavy."
Kazuhiko dropped the lantern and ran past him without another word.
Atsushi came out of a side room holding a rusted hand axe and a length of metal pipe. He looked at Haibu, then looked at the sounds coming from the main room, then looked back at Haibu.
"The hell is coming out of that hole."
"What do you think." Haibu moved past him. "Bring the pipe."
"Don't tell me what to—"
The cabinet in the next room lifted four inches off the floor and slammed back down. Mami's scream cut through the wall between them. Atsushi grabbed the pipe and followed.
Back in the main room, Kazuhiko had already upended a second table onto the stack. He and Mutsumi were both sitting on top of the pile, using their body weight as ballast, bracing their boots against the surrounding floorboards. The stack bucked beneath them with rhythmic force as the women below pushed upward in concert. A pale arm had wormed through the crescent gap and swept back and forth blindly until Ayumi stomped on it. It withdrew with a shriek.
"Another arm comes through, you step on it," Ayumi told Nozomi.
They found more furniture in the adjacent rooms. Haibu dragged a rotted dresser across the threshold, its drawers clattering out as the wood groaned against the floor. Atsushi dropped the pipe and grabbed the opposite end. Together they heaved it onto the growing barricade.
The cabinet beneath shifted sideways an inch. A gap opened. Immediately a woman's face pressed through, oiled skin catching the dusty light. Her mouth worked soundlessly, tongue emerging to taste the air. Her eyes were vacant, iridescent, pupils blown so wide the iris had disappeared entirely.
Ayumi grabbed a loose board from the floor and jammed it down into the gap. The wood struck the woman's temple. She didn't flinch. Didn't pull back. Just kept pushing, her skull compressing against the board with awful flexibility, bones giving way like cartilage.
"They're not stopping." Ayumi pressed harder. The board bowed. "Mutsumi, what do we—"
The woman's secondary arms shot through beneath the board. Four fingers locked around Ayumi's ankle.
Ayumi yanked backward. Her boot came free. She stumbled, caught herself against the wall. The secondary hands continued waving through the gap, searching for what they'd lost.
"Cover it." Haibu scanned the room. A low shelf unit sat against the far wall, its wood swollen from decades of humidity. He crossed to it in three strides, gripped both sides, and tore it from the wall. The nails holding it gave with a shriek. He carried it back and dropped it lengthwise across the crescent gaps.
One of the hands caught between the shelf and the cabinet. The fingers splayed. A wet cracking sound. The hand withdrew, leaving smears of dark fluid across the wood.
More impacts from below. The entire stack jumped, but the added weight of the shelf and dresser held. Barely.
"There." Misuzu pointed at a door hanging crooked in its frame. "That door, get the door."
Kazuhiko and Atsushi moved together. They grabbed the door by its edges, lifted it from its rusted hinges, and hauled it over. The thing was heavier than it looked, solid wood despite its decay. They laid it flat across the top of everything else.
The chanting from below muffled. Not silent. Just contained.
Everyone stood motionless, staring at the barricade. Waiting for it to collapse. Waiting for those hands to find new gaps and tear the whole construction apart.
Nothing happened.
"Did it work?" Mami's voice came out barely above a whisper. She hadn't moved from where she'd retreated against the wall, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins.
"It's holding." Mutsumi still sat atop the pile, hands braced on either side of her hips. Sweat ran down her temples despite the cool air filtering through the broken windows. "For now."
Haibu examined the barricade's edges. The door covered most of the furniture beneath it, but small gaps remained where the warped wood didn't sit flush. He could see darkness through those cracks. Could hear the muffled chanting continuing in that same rhythm.
Haibu's lungs burned. Each breath tasted like copper and dust. He leaned against the wall beside the barricaded hole, feeling the vibrations travel through the wood where creatures pushed from below. His torn jeans stuck to the blood drying on his calf.
"We need to leave." Atsushi lowered the hand axe. "Now."
"Give us a minute." Ayumi straightened, wiping sweat from her forehead. "We just got that blocked."
"That's not the only hole."
The words dropped into the room like stones into still water. Everyone turned to look at him.
Misuzu spoke first. "What do you mean that's not the only hole?"
"I mean there's another one." Atsushi gestured toward the adjacent room with the axe. "Me and Kazuhiko found it in the back room."
Kazuhiko nodded slowly. "He's right. We saw it when we grabbed the supplies."
Nozomi's face went pale. She moved closer to Haibu without seeming to realize she'd done it. "How many are there?"
"Two that we found." Atsushi kicked at a piece of rotted floorboard. "Could be more. These houses are falling apart. We didn't exactly do a thorough search."
Mami made a small noise in her throat and pressed tighter against the wall. Her knuckles were white where she gripped her knees.
"Then we leave." Misuzu crossed her arms beneath her chest. "We block this one. So lets go!"
"We haven't found Chitose yet." Mutsumi slid down from the barricade, her boots hitting the floor with a soft thud. "That's why we came here."
"Yeah, well." Atsushi spread his hands. "She's not up here. And since nature boy did not bring her up with him. I doubt she is down their. Which means she's in another hole, and I don't see any of you volunteering to go back into another tunnel after what just happened"
Haibu's jaw tightened. The scratches on his calf pulsed with each heartbeat. He could still feel those hands locked around his leg, the obscene strength in fingers that shouldn't have been able to grip that hard. Could still hear the chanting echoing up from below.
"We can't just leave her." Mutsumi's voice rose. "She's paralyzed. Alone. Being used as food for—"
"For wasp larvae, yeah, you told us already." Atsushi cut her off. "And that's horrible. Really. But what exactly is the plan here? We go down another fight off how many of those things, hope that Chitose is there, carry her back up while they're trying to pull us down again?" He looked at Haibu. "How'd that work out for you just now?"
Haibu said nothing. His torn jeans answered for him.
"We have to try." Ayumi stepped forward. "We can't abandon people."
"We're not abandoning her. We're surviving." Atsushi's voice hardened. "There's a difference. We stay here, we get fucked. We go down there, we get fucked. We leave, we maybe don't get fuck. That's the only thing that matters."
"He's not wrong." Kazuhiko's quiet voice drew everyone's attention. He stood near the door, rope still coiled over his shoulder, face unreadable. "I don't like it either. But we can't save someone if we're gone."
"So we just run?" Mutsumi's hands curled into fists. "That's your solution?"
"My solution is not getting attacked by wasp babies." Atsushi pointed at the barricade. "Or turned into one of those things down there. Or whatever the hell else is on this island. We regroup. Find the other survivors Nozomi mentioned. Get actual weapons, actual supplies, then maybe we can do something other than die heroically."
The chanting beneath the floorboards swelled momentarily, then faded back to its previous rhythm. Everyone looked down. The barricade held, but the sound was a constant reminder of what waited below.
"We rescued Mami." Ayumi's voice stayed level. "With less than what we have now."
"Mami was being carried through open air by something we could actually hurt." Atsushi shook his head. "Chitose is underground, surrounded by god knows how many creatures in their home territory. It's not the same."
Nozomi looked up at Haibu. "What do you think?"
Haibu studied the barricade. Watched the gaps where pale fingers had tried to force through. Thought about many tunnels they'd need to search. How many fights with creatures that couldn't be killed easily.
Atsushi was right. The admission tasted bitter, but facts didn't care about his feelings. He had gone down one hole blind and barely escaped. Chitose could be in any tunnel on this island. They could search for days and never find her. Could lose people in the process.
His silence stretched. Nozomi's hand found his arm, her grip tight enough to hurt.
"See?" Atsushi lowered the axe and turned toward the door. "Even survival boy knows it. We're done here."
"That doesn't mean we abandon her." Mutsumi stepped into his path. "We just need a better plan."
"Great. Make one." Atsushi moved around her. "While we're walking away from the death holes."
"Atsushi." Mutsumi followed him toward the doorway. "Listen to me. If we gather information first, figure out how many nests there are, where the wasps are concentrated—"
"Not my problem." He pushed through the broken doorframe into the overgrown clearing outside.
Mutsumi hurried after him, her voice rising. "We could use smoke to drive them out, or find their flight patterns, or—"
"Still not listening." Atsushi kept walking, stepping over rotted timber and dense undergrowth. "Feel free to play bug expert on your own time. I'm getting distance between me and those things."
Haibu moved to the doorway. Ayumi appeared beside him, watching Mutsumi try to reason with someone who'd already stopped caring. The other survivors filed out slowly. Mami stayed close to Ayumi. Kazuhiko kept the rope coiled, his eyes scanning the tree line. Nozomi pressed against Haibu's side, one hand still locked on his arm.
Misuzu emerged last, stepping carefully around the broken threshold in her boots. "He's crude, but he has a point. We're exposed here."
Outside, Mutsumi caught up to Atsushi again. "Just think about it logically. We know she's alive. We know approximately where she was taken. If we—" At that moment her eyes went wide as looked beyond Atsushi.
"Down." Mutsumi's voice cut off mid-sentence, dropping to a harsh whisper. "Everyone get down."
Atsushi stopped walking. "What are you—"
Ayumi moved first, grabbing Atsushi by the collar and yanking him sideways behind a moss-covered stone wall. The rest scattered, dropping low behind overgrown brush and collapsed sections of the abandoned houses. Haibu pulled Nozomi down with him into a depression where two walls met at a broken corner, the space barely wide enough for both of them. She pressed against his chest, her breathing rapid and shallow against his collarbone.
The sound reached them first. Not the helicopter thrum of the wasp that had taken Chitose, but something higher pitched. A mechanical buzz that vibrated in Haibu's teeth, punctuated by rhythmic wing beats that displaced air in visible waves through the canopy leaves.
Then she emerged through a gap in the trees.
Her body gleamed black and yellow, the coloring sharper than the first wasp, almost luminescent where sunlight caught the segmented abdomen. She was smaller than her than the other had been, more compact, her humanoid torso lean and athletic rather than curved. Her face held the same beautiful structure, high cheekbones and full lips, but her features were sharper, foxlike. Her eyes were massive compound spheres that caught the light and split it into fractured rainbows. She wore no clothing. Her breasts were modest, firm, sitting high on a ribcage that showed defined muscle beneath the chitin plating that armored her sides. Her secondary arms hung relaxed at her sides, clawed fingers flexing with each wing beat. The stinger protruding from her lower abdomen was thinner than the first wasp's, wickedly curved like a scimitar blade.
She flew with casual grace, weaving between tree trunks without slowing, her flight path lazy and meandering. Wings twice her body length caught the air in powerful strokes that bent branches below her.
Misuzu crouched beside a rotted beam, her manicured hand pressed over her mouth. "Is that the same one?"
"No." Mutsumi's voice came from somewhere deeper in the brush. "The markings are different. Wrong number of stripes. Different wing shape."
"Then it's one of the sisters." Kazuhiko kept low behind a collapsed section of roof, rope still coiled over his shoulder. "The first one said there were more."
Mami made a sound like a wounded animal, her small frame curled tight behind a broken water trough. "There's more of them. Oh god, there's more of them."
Atsushi shifted behind the stone wall, raising his head just enough to track the wasp's flight path. "You see? You fucking see? This is exactly what I'm talking about. We stay here, we're surrounded by these things. We leave, we maybe survive. That's the choice."
The wasp drifted closer to their position. Fifty feet. Forty. Her compound eyes swept the clearing below with mechanical precision, those faceted surfaces catching every angle simultaneously. Haibu pressed flatter against the broken corner, feeling Nozomi's heartbeat hammering against his ribs.
"We can't fight this." Atsushi's voice gained confidence, like he'd found solid ground beneath his argument. "We can't plan around this. We run, or we end up like Chitose. Those are the options."
"She's right above us." Ayumi's whisper barely carried across the space. "Nobody move."
The wasp hovered directly over the clearing now, her wings creating downdrafts that kicked up dust and loose vegetation. Her head tilted, surveying the abandoned houses with inhuman stillness. The stinger at her abdomen dripped something clear and viscous that pattered on the leaves below.
Then Kazuhiko spoke, his voice flat and careful. "She has someone."
Everyone's attention snapped back to the wasp. Haibu adjusted his angle, peering through the gap where wall met ground, and saw it.
The wasp's secondary arms held a male figure against her torso. The boy's head lolled back over one of her arms, his body limp and pliant. His shirt hung open, torn down the middle, exposing a lean chest that moved with shallow breathing. His pants were still on but unzipped, hanging low on narrow hips. The wasp's primary hands explored his exposed skin with methodical slowness, fingers tracing the lines of muscle, circling his nipples, dragging down his abdomen. Her mouth worked against his throat, tongue emerging to taste the sweat on his skin while her hips made small grinding motions against his thigh.
"Better them than us." Atsushi's voice held forced indifference. "Whoever that poor fuck is, at least it's not—"
"Does he look familiar to anyone else?" Ayumi squinted up at the hovering figures. "I can't see his face from here, but something about—"
"Oh come on." Atsushi turned to scoff at her, his back still pressed to the stone wall. "You're not seriously suggesting we—"
His voice died.
His eyes went wide, fixed on the figures above. His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again without producing sound. The hand gripping the axe went slack, the tool sliding from his fingers and hitting the ground with a muffled thump.
Haibu followed his gaze. The wasp had shifted her grip, rotating her captive slightly. Sunlight caught the boy's face through a break in the canopy.
Blonde hair with the distinctive undercut. The silver ear piercing glinting in his left ear. Lean build, same height as Atsushi, wearing torn clothing that matched the school uniform.
Akira Satō hung limp in the wasp's arms while she molested him thirty feet above their heads, her clawed fingers sliding beneath the waistband of his partially unzipped pants, her mouth working against his collarbone with obscene hunger.
"Akira."
The name fell from Atsushi's mouth like something fragile. Soft. Almost questioning, as though saying it aloud might unmake what he was seeing.
The wasp banked left, her wings catching air, carrying Akira's limp body deeper into the jungle canopy. Her secondary hands slid lower, cupping between his thighs through the torn fabric. Her hips rolled against him in that same rhythmic grind, her massive compound eyes reflecting fractured light while her mouth worked his neck.
"Akira."
Louder this time. Atsushi pushed away from the stone wall, rising to his full height. The wasp didn't react. Just kept flying, kept touching, kept grinding against the boy in her arms with mechanical persistence.
"AKIRA!"
The scream tore out of him raw and desperate. He bent down, grabbed the hand axe from where it had fallen, and ran.
His boots pounded the overgrown ground, crashing through brush and rotted timber without slowing. The wasp disappeared behind a dense section of canopy. Atsushi followed the path of disturbed branches, axe gripped in both hands, his entire body angled forward like he could close the distance through sheer force of will.
"Atsushi, wait—" Ayumi started to rise from her hiding spot.
"What happened to running away?" Misuzu's voice cracked across the clearing, sharp with fury. "What happened to 'we can't save anyone, we have to survive'? That was your fucking logic five seconds ago."
Atsushi didn't stop. Didn't turn. His voice carried back over his shoulder without breaking stride.
"Screw you, bitch."
Then he was gone, swallowed by the jungle undergrowth, the sound of his pursuit fading into the distance.
Misuzu stared after him, her mouth open, rage coloring her face. "That absolute—"
"We have to go after him." Haibu pushed himself up from the corner, dislodging Nozomi from where she'd pressed against his chest. His torn jeans caught on broken wood but he yanked them free. "Now."
"Are you serious?" Misuzu whirled on him. "You're going to follow that hypocritical piece of—"
"He's running blind toward something that will take him." Haibu started across the clearing, tracking Atsushi's path through the disturbed vegetation.
"Then let him fucked." Misuzu's voice went cold. "He just spent ten minutes telling us how stupid it would be to go after Chitose. Now he's doing exactly that for his little boyfriend, and you want us to—"
"Yes." Haibu didn't slow. "That's exactly what I want."
Kazuhiko emerged from behind the collapsed roof section, rope still coiled over his shoulder. He stared after where Atsushi had disappeared, his expression dark.
"This is going to get people taken." His voice came out flat. "You know that."
"Probably." Haibu reached the tree line and paused, listening for sounds of movement ahead. Footsteps crashing through brush. Atsushi's ragged breathing. The mechanical buzz of wasp wings. "Come anyway."
Kazuhiko's jaw worked. He looked at the abandoned houses behind them, then at the jungle ahead, then back at Haibu. His shoulders dropped half an inch.
"Fuck." He adjusted the rope coil and started walking. "Yeah. Alright."
Mutsumi scrambled up from her hiding place, leaves stuck in her hair. "I'm coming too."
"Of course you are." Misuzu's voice dripped venom. She kicked at a piece of rotted timber, sending it skittering across the clearing. "Because heaven forbid anyone in this group exercise basic survival instinct."
"Then stay here." Ayumi pulled Mami up from behind the water trough. The smaller girl's legs shook badly enough that Ayumi had to support most of her weight. "Nobody's forcing you."
"Oh, so I can stay alone in the death house surrounded by holes full of creatures?" Misuzu gestured violently at the building behind them. "That's my option? Stay here by myself or follow you idiots into another fight we can't win?"
"Those are the options." Haibu stepped into the jungle. "Choose."
He didn't wait for her answer. Just moved forward, following the obvious trail Atsushi had left. Broken branches. Crushed undergrowth. Boot prints in soft earth. The boy had made no effort at stealth. Every step screamed his presence.
Behind him, he heard the others falling into line. Mutsumi's quick footsteps. Kazuhiko's heavier tread. Ayumi helping Mami through the brush. Nozomi staying close enough that her shoulder kept brushing his arm.
Then Misuzu's voice, bitter and furious.
"This is so fucking stupid."
But her footsteps joined the rest.