CHAPTER 4 — Prey

The creature didn't blink. Rijan wasn't sure it could. The pale gold eyes held him across the grey distance with a stillness that felt less like an animal and more like a decision already made. The feeding had stopped. The tail had gone motionless. Every line of the creature's body had reorganized itself from satisfied to attentive, and the difference between those two states, Rijan understood with absolute certainty, was him. = Run. = He ran. He didn't think about direction — direction required information he didn't have, and information required time he didn't have, so he simply pushed off from the dead tree and moved, ash exploding from under his shoes as he hit the open ground. Behind him, he heard nothing for two full seconds. Then he heard it. A dry, rapid percussion against the sand — claws, not footfalls — and it was already closer than it should have been. = Don't look back. Looking back costs a step. = He crested a dune and the soft sand swallowed his momentum, each stride sinking deeper than the last, legs burning with the effort of pulling free. He was losing speed and the sound behind him was not. He threw himself down the far side in a controlled fall, hit the trough between dunes, and kept moving. The ash-curtains that had obscured his vision for the past hour now worked against him, stripping his ability to read the terrain ahead. He was navigating by instinct and the thin logic of *lower ground moves faster*, which wasn't even reliable. His lungs were already complaining. His body — STR 3, AGI 3 — was not built for this. = Think. You can't outrun it. You watched it move. You know what it is. What does it want? = Predator. Territory or prey, he still didn't know. But it had watched the other man run for a long time before closing the gap. Which meant it was either playing, or it was patient, or — = Or it has a range. And I'm already inside it. = He changed direction without breaking stride, cutting left toward a region of darker rock he'd noticed during his initial survey. Rock meant uneven terrain. Uneven terrain meant the creature's low-slung gait might work against it, the same way its speed on flat sand worked against him. It was a thin margin. It was all he had. The rock formation emerged from the ash like a wound in the landscape — angular, dark grey slabs jutting upward at irregular angles, the surfaces cracked and old. He hit the first slope and scrambled upward, hands grabbing at edges, the rock biting into his palms. Behind him, the claw-sounds changed pitch. Shorter. More cautious. = It's slowing. = He didn't stop. He climbed higher, moving between two large slabs, squeezing through a gap that forced him to turn sideways and exhale. The gap was too narrow for the creature's width — he'd estimated its body at nearly a meter across — and the knowledge gave him half a second of relief before the terrain ended his footing entirely. The ground disappeared. He registered the drop a fraction too late. His right foot found nothing where it expected stone, his balance inverted, and then he was falling — not a stumble, not a misstep, a full uncontrolled fall into dark space. He had time to register that the rock formation had concealed a cavity, some kind of fissure or sinkhole, and then the edge of something solid hit his left side with a force that detonated through his ribs. He hit water. Cold — shockingly, completely cold — and moving. Fast. The current seized him before he could process the impact, spinning him once and driving him against a submerged rock that tore the skin from his forearm in a single clean stripe. He got his head up, gasped, and the tunnel or cave or whatever contained this underground stream was low-ceilinged and dark, the only light a thin, pale seam from the fissure above that was already moving away as the current carried him. He couldn't stand. Couldn't find the bottom. The current owned him completely. = Stay calm. Keep your head up. Don't fight it sideways. = His ribs were screaming. Every breath was a small catastrophe, the left side of his chest sending signals that suggested something had cracked — not broken, or he wouldn't be breathing at all — but cracked, which meant every movement from here would cost. His forearm burned with the specific, filthy sting of rock-scraped skin submerged in cold water. His shoes had filled and were pulling him down. He rode the current for what felt like minutes. The darkness was total in stretches, then fractured by thin light from cracks above, then dark again. He stopped trying to navigate and focused entirely on keeping his airway above the waterline, arms working just enough to correct his position when the current tried to turn him face-down. The stream shallowed. Gradually, then suddenly — the floor rose to meet him, the current spread thin over a wider channel, and Rijan found his knees, then his hands, then stopped moving and simply stayed there, half-submerged, chest heaving, cheek nearly touching the water's surface. He didn't move for a long time. Above him, somewhere through the rock and the ash and the grey sky, the creature may have still been there. He couldn't hear anything over the water. He had no way to know. He filed it under *currently unverifiable* and focused on the inventory of damage — ribs, possibly cracked, at least two. Forearm, lacerated. Both palms, abraded. No head injury. No loss of consciousness. Alive. = Alive. = The interface appeared without him summoning it. It materialized in the darkness of the cave like something that had been waiting for him to stop moving long enough to be seen, the pale blue light reflecting off the black water in rippling lines. But it wasn't his status screen. New text. A single header, then four lines beneath it, assembling one by one with the same unhurried deliberateness he remembered. // THRESHOLD CONDITIONS MET // // RESISTANCE SYSTEMS — INITIALIZING // // Mental Resistance — Unlocked // // Physical Resistance — Unlocked // // Pain Resistance — Unlocked // // Fear Resistance — Unlocked // He stared at it. Water moved around his wrists. His ribs sent their signals and he breathed through them, slow and measured. = Resistance. Not strength. Not speed. Not anything that would have helped me outrun it. = He didn't know what the resistances did in practical terms. He didn't know if they were already affecting him or if they were dormant until something activated them. He didn't know if they were visible to the creature above, or to other candidates, or to whatever was running this trial. What he knew was that they existed because something in the last ten minutes had pushed him past whatever threshold the system used to measure those qualities. Fear. Pain. The decision to keep moving instead of freeze. Something had been measured and found sufficient. = Sufficient for what? = The interface pulsed once more. A final line formed, slower than the others, as though the system itself was considering the weight of the words. // You have survived a fatal encounter. // Rijan looked at it for a long time in the dark cave, cold water moving past his hands, his ribs counting every breath. He thought about the man in the grey ash. He thought about pale gold eyes finding him across an open distance. He thought about twenty-seven percent. = It didn't say I was safe. It said I survived. Those are not the same thing. = Above him, somewhere in the ruins of that burnt and ashen world, something was still out there. And now it knew he existed.