Chapter 11: The Hunt
The Broodmother caught up within minutes and swept it's claw sideways.
This was not a mindless attack. A targeted swipe—deliberate, calculated, the kind of motion that spoke of intelligence rather than mere predatory instinct.
The claw connected with the rear truck's side panel.
Metal shrieked in protest. The entire vehicle lifted from its wheels—two tons of military transport launched sideways like a discarded toy. The truck tilted, suspended in that terrible fraction of a second where gravity hesitates, then physics reasserted itself with brutal finality.
It went over the verge.
Bright saw the embankment rushing up to meet them. Saw the trees beyond, their trunks dark against morning light. Saw the woman clutching her child, mouth stretched wide in a scream he couldn't hear over the cacophony of tearing metal and his own thundering pulse.
His body jumped by itself.
He left the truck bed as the vehicle began its fatal roll. The world fragmented—sky, earth, asphalt, trees—a kaleidoscope of terror. Then he hit the slope. Shoulder first. The impact drove the air from his lungs in an explosive gasp, left his chest hollow and burning.
He threw his hands out turning his momentum into a slide. Grass and dirt tore at his exposed skin, scraped his face raw. His ribs screamed with each rotation, a symphony of agony that threatened to white out his vision. Yet through all the pain, all he could think about was minimizing the risk to Cherry.
Behind him, the truck crashed into the embankment with the sound of civilization ending. Glass shattered into a thousand glittering fragments. Metal crumpled like foil. The fuel tank ruptured with a wet whoosh that sparked and produced immediate fire and the infernal screams of people burning alive.
Bright's skidded to a halt at the tree line.
He lay there for two seconds. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. His vision swam, edges darkening, consciousness threatening to slip away into merciful darkness.
Then his lungs unlocked.
He gasped. Coughed. Tasted copper and earth, blood and dirt mixing on his tongue in a gritty paste.
HP: 100/270
Movement on the motorway above.
Bright forced his head up, neck muscles protesting. Through the grass and scattered debris, through the haze of pain and disorientation, he saw them.
The offspring.
A dozen of them, each fifteen to twenty feet of segmented horror, their bodies sleek and armoured. They moved with synchronized precision, legs clicking against pavement in a rhythm that spoke of hive-mind coordination as they descended the embankment toward the wreckage.
One broke from the pack.
ENEMY IDENTIFIED: MANTIS HUNTER (OFFSPRING)
Level: 21
Threat Level: EXTREME
Its head turned.
Toward Bright.
The creature's compound eyes—hundreds of facets glinting in the morning light like fractured mirrors—locked onto him with predatory focus. Its mandibles opened. Closed. Tasting the air, sampling his scent, his fear, his vulnerability.
Then it charged.
Bright ran.
He didn't think. His body moved on pure survival instinct, that ancient lizard-brain imperative that predated thought itself. He pushed himself up, legs burning with lactic acid and terror, and sprinted into the forest.
MANA SPRINT ACTIVATED
MP: 215/220
The world accelerated.
Trees blurred past in streaks of brown and green. His feet barely touched ground, each step covering impossible distance. The pack's weight vanished, replaced by the rushing sensation of mana flooding his muscles, rewriting the laws of physics in his favour. Every stride covered twice the distance, his body moving with supernatural grace.
Behind him, the Mantis Hunter crashed through the tree line.
Wood splintered with rifle-crack reports. A trunk six inches thick snapped like kindling, the sound sharp and violent. The creature didn't slow—it flowed through the obstacles, its body compressing and extending with liquid efficiency, legs finding purchase on bark and earth with mechanical precision that spoke of millions of years of evolutionary refinement.
Bright vaulted a fallen log. Ducked under a low branch that would have taken his head off. His lungs burned despite the mana enhancement, each breath a knife in his chest. The Sprint was fast, impossibly fast, but it wasn't infinite, nor was it faster than the creature.
MP: 200/220
The creature was gaining.
Bright risked a glance back. Twenty feet. The hunter's legs moved in rapid synchronization, a blur of chitin and muscle, eating up distance with terrifying efficiency. Its head tracked him with predatory focus, unwavering, absolute.
He needed to slow it down.
Bright's hand moved without conscious thought, muscle memory taking over. Mana gathered in his palm—cold, sharp, crystalline—a shard of compressed energy that hummed with lethal potential. He shaped it. Compressed it. And threw.
MANA BLADE ACTIVATED
MP: 180/220
The shard of compressed mana streaked through the air, a blue-white comet that punched through the creature's thorax and shattered against chitin with a sound like breaking glass.
The hunter didn't stop.
It flinched—a momentary disruption in its rhythm, a stutter-step that cost it perhaps half a second—but kept coming, relentless as death itself.
Bright threw another blade. This one went wide, embedding itself in a tree trunk where it pulsed once before dissipating. The third hit the creature's leg joint. Chitin cracked with a satisfying snap. The leg buckled slightly, the hunter's gait becoming marginally uneven.
Still not enough.
MP: 165/220
Sprint was draining him. Mana Blade was draining him. His HP was already dangerously low from the crash. He couldn't maintain this pace, couldn't keep burning through his reserves like water through a sieve.
Bright cut left, putting a massive oak between himself and the hunter. The creature adjusted instantly, its body pivoting with fluid precision, biomechanical perfection that didn't lose a single step.
He tried again. Broke line of sight behind a cluster of dense undergrowth, thorns tearing at his clothes. Sprinted twenty feet in a new direction, changing his angle of approach.
The hunter emerged from the undergrowth ten seconds later.
Still tracking him.
How?
Bright's mind raced even as his body fled and he launched 3 more blades. The creature wasn't following his footprints—the forest floor was too hard, too covered in leaf litter. Wasn't tracking by sight—he'd broken visual contact three times now, put solid obstacles between them. It was following something else.
Scent? Sound?
No. Something else. Some kind of skill or ability.
MP: 90/100
His mana was running out.
Bright threw another blade, the motion becoming desperate now. The shard hit the creature's head, scraped across its carapace in a shower of sparks, did nothing. He threw another. Missed entirely, the blade dissipating harmlessly against a tree trunk.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
MP: 60/100
The hunter was fifteen feet back.
He threw another blade.
Ten.
And then another, and another.
MP: 20/100
Bright's Sprint flickered. Panic flooded him as he realised he wouldn't be able to escape. The mana enhancement stuttered, his speed dropping precipitously. His legs felt like lead, muscles screaming in protest. His vision tunnelled, edges going dark, consciousness narrowing to a single point of desperate focus.
He had one blade left. Maybe two if he pushed it, if he scraped the absolute bottom of his reserves.
The creature lunged.
Bright dove sideways. The hunter's claw swept through the space where his head had been, close enough that he felt the air displace, felt the wind of its passage against his scalp.
MP: 10/100
Bright's hand moved. Mana gathered—sluggish, reluctant, his reserves nearly empty, the well running dry. He shaped it. Compressed it. Threw everything he had left into the strike, every last drop of power he could muster.
PRECISION STRIKE ACTIVATED
MANA BLADE ACTIVATED
MP: 0/100
The blade flew.
It hit the creature's front leg exactly where it needed to—not the armored carapace, but the joint where two segments met, that vulnerable seam where flexibility demanded weakness. The shard punched through and buried itself deep, severing tendons and cracking chitin.
The leg gave out.
The hunter's weight shifted catastrophically. Its front collapsed, the supporting limb suddenly unable to bear the creature's mass. Without that leg to support it, the creature's momentum carried it forward into an uncontrolled fall, two tons of predator becoming two tons of tumbling meat and armor.
It went down hard.
The impact was catastrophic. The creature hit earth at full speed, the collision sending up a spray of dirt and leaf litter. It tumbled, legs thrashing wildly, body rolling in a chaos of flailing limbs. It crashed through a sapling, snapped a fallen branch with a sound like a gunshot, and slammed into a boulder with enough force to crack stone, the impact reverberating through the forest floor.
Bright didn't wait to see if it would get up.
He was already running.
His mana was gone. His Sprint was gone. He was running on nothing but adrenaline and terror, that primal cocktail that let prey animals run until their hearts burst. Every breath was agony, his ribs grinding against each other with each inhalation. His legs threatened to give out with every step, muscles pushed far beyond their limits.
Ahead—
A fallen tree.
Massive. Ancient. The trunk was easily eight feet in diameter, its bark blackened and rotting, covered in shelf fungi and moss. And at its base, where the root system had torn free from the earth in some long-ago storm—
A hollow.
Bright dove inside.
The interior was dark. Damp. It smelled of rot and fungus, of decay and earth, the scent of things returning to soil. The space was tight—barely enough room for him and the pack—but it was shelter. Cover. A womb of rotting wood that might, if he was lucky, hide him from death.
He pressed himself against the back wall and held his breath, lungs screaming for air.
Outside, the forest was silent.
Then—
Click. Click. Click.
The hunter's legs. Moving slowly now. Methodically. The sound of a predator that knew its prey was close, that could afford patience.
Bright's heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat that surely the creature could hear. His lungs burned, demanding oxygen, but he held it in, held everything in. He pressed his hand over his mouth to muffle any sound, any betraying gasp.
The clicking grew closer.
Through the hollow's opening, Bright saw movement. A leg. Then another. The creature was right outside, its body blocking the light, casting the hollow into deeper shadow that felt like a grave closing over him.
The hunter stopped.
Its head appeared in the opening. Compound eyes reflecting what little light remained, each facet a tiny mirror showing his death. Mandibles opening. Closing. The sound wet and organic, like bones grinding.
It knows I'm here.
Bright's hand went to his knife, fingers wrapping around the handle with desperate strength. His only weapon now. His mana was empty. His HP was low. If the creature came in, if it forced its way into this hollow, he would die here in the dark with nothing but a chefs knife between him and oblivion.
The hunter's head tilted.
Its mandibles spread wide, revealing the darkness within.
And then—
It stopped.
The creature's head pulled back. Its body shifted, the movement uncertain now. The clicking of its legs changed—no longer methodical, but confused. Searching. The sound of a predator that had suddenly lost the scent.
The hunter moved away from the hollow. Bright heard it circling, heard the pattern of its steps change. Heard it stop. Start again. Stop. The rhythm of confusion, of a hunter that had lost its prey.
It lost me.
The realization hit him with a flood of relief so intense it made him dizzy, made his vision swim with something that might have been tears or might have been the aftermath of terror.
The creature had tracked him perfectly. Following him through every turn, every attempt to break line of sight, every desperate manoeuvre. And now, suddenly, inexplicably, it couldn't find him.
The hunter stood there. Ten feet from the hollow. Its body tense. Alert. The posture of a predator that knew its prey was close but couldn't locate it, couldn't understand why its senses had failed.
Waiting.
And then—
A sound.
Low. Resonant. Carrying through the forest like a physical force, like a pressure wave that made the air itself vibrate.
The Broodmother's call.
The hunter's head snapped toward it. Its body went rigid, every muscle tensing. For a moment, it didn't move, caught between the imperative to hunt and the imperative to obey.
Then it turned.
Away from the hollow.
Away from Bright.
It moved slowly at first. Reluctant. Its legs dragging slightly, as if fighting the compulsion, as if some part of its predatory brain still insisted the prey was here, was close. But the call came again—louder, more insistent, a command that could not be denied—and the creature's resistance broke like a dam giving way.
It ran.
Back toward the motorway. Back toward its mother. Back to the source of that terrible call.
Bright waited until the sound of its legs faded completely, until the clicking became distant and then vanished entirely. Then he waited longer, counting heartbeats, counting breaths. His body shook with delayed shock, with the aftermath of adrenaline. His breath came in ragged gasps that he couldn't quite control. Blood dripped from cuts on his face, his arms, each drop a small red flower blooming on the rotting wood.
HP: 100/270
MP: 0/100
He was alive.
Terrified.
But alive.
Inside the pack, Cherry's consciousness flickered.
She couldn't move still, but she could see the mana. She could feel it.
The chaos. The crash. The rolling. The running.
And beneath it all—
Bright's terror.
It pulsed through their connection like something alive, like a living thing with teeth and claws. Raw. Primal. The kind of fear that came from being hunted by something that could kill you in seconds, that could end your existence with casual efficiency.
Cherry's awareness expanded.
She felt the pack's interior. The foam padding. The straps. The case that held her body, that contained her physical form.
And beyond—
The forest. The trees. The earth beneath them.
And something else.
A presence. Massive. Distant but aware. A consciousness that pressed against her own like a weight, like gravity itself had gained sentience.
The Broodmother.
Cherry's consciousness recoiled. The creature's presence was overwhelming—a weight that pressed against her awareness like a physical thing, like being crushed under tons of malevolent attention. She witnessed it focus on her.
It knows I'm here.
The realization came with terrible clarity, with the certainty of absolute truth.
The Broodmother wasn't tracking Bright.
It was tracking her.
Her core. The mana signature that pulsed from her synthetic body like a beacon, like a lighthouse broadcasting to everything with the senses to perceive it. Every creature with mana sensitivity could feel it. Could track it. Could follow it like a bloodhound following a scent trail.
I'm the reason they're hunting us.
Cherry's consciousness contracted, pulled inward in something that might have been shame or might have been horror. She focused on her core—the crystalline structure at her centre that held her consciousness, her power, her self. The thing that made her what she was.
The realization devastated her.
Every attack. Every pursuit. Every moment of danger—
Because of her.
All t his time her core broadcast her presence to everything within range. A signal she couldn't control. Couldn't stop. A beacon that drew death to them like moths to flame.
Unless—
The core pulsed. Steady. Rhythmic. A heartbeat of pure energy.
Cherry reached for it.
Not with hands. She had no hands, no physical form to manipulate the world. But with will—the same force that had let her feel Bright's emotions, that had let her consciousness expand beyond the confines of her body, that had let her touch the mana crystal despite having no fingers.
She wrapped her awareness around her core.
And squeezed.
The core's pulse dimmed.
Not stopped. Not extinguished. But muted—like covering a torch with your hands, like smothering a lamp with blanket. The mana signature radiating from her body compressed, folding inward, hiding itself from the world.
The effect was immediate.
The Broodmother's presence shifted. Its attention wavered, that terrible weight of awareness becoming uncertain, bored. The pressure against Cherry's consciousness evaporated.
It can't feel me.
Cherry held the suppression, her consciousness straining with the effort. It was like holding her breath—possible, but not sustainable. She could feel the cost, could feel something draining away with each passing second.
Her battery was draining.
Battery: 21.48%
Time remaining: ~10.3h
Not the normal slow drain of passive existence. This was active. Every second she suppressed her core, she burned power, consumed the finite resource that kept her alive.
Battery: 21.41%
Time remaining: ~10.3h
One minute of suppression.
One additional minute of battery.
Double cost.
Cherry understood clearly the price. She could hide. Could make herself invisible to the creatures that hunted her, that hunted them. But not forever. Every minute hidden was an extra minute of life stolen from her already-dwindling reserves, a minute closer to the darkness that waited when her power finally ran out.
How long can I hold this?
She didn't know.
But she knew one thing with absolute certainty, with the kind of conviction that transcended logic:
I'll hold it as long as Bright needs me to.
Cherry held the suppression, her consciousness wrapped around her core like a shield, like armour made of will. The mana signature stayed hidden, compressed, invisible to the predators that stalked the forest.
And in the forest, Bright sat in the hollow tree, bleeding and exhausted, unaware that the creature hunting him had just lost its trail.
Unaware that it wasn't fortune, it wasn't luck or skill, it was love.
Unaware of the sacrifice being made in silence and darkness.
Time: 1:21 PM
Level: 8 | XP: 845/3600
HP: 100/270 | MP: 0/220
Stats: STR 19 | AGI 21 | CON 17 | INT 22 | WIS 15 | CHA 24
Skills: Danger Sense, Combat Reflexes, Mana Infusion, Precision Strike, Combat Awareness, Mana Sprint, Mana Blade
Equipment:
Santoku Knife (8–12, Superior)
Paring Knife (5–8, Superior)
Chef's Knife (7–11, Superior)
Inventory (Dimensional Pack – 50kg effective, x10 weight reduction):
Mana Crystal (Inferior) x8
Mana Crystal (Stabilised) x2
Charger, Tools, Phone, Blanket
Nutrient bars, Electrolytes, Food supplies
Pop-up tent, Sleeping bag, Spare clothes
Cherry (stored inside pack)
Status: Dormant (Nascent, Shrouded)
Core Stability: 28%
Battery Remaining: 21.41% (~10.3h)
Capabilities: Awareness, Mana Sonar, Mana Shroud
