HUNTRESS

Enna drove her knife deep into the neck of the hunter. 

The blade passed through the muscles of his throat with ease. The serrated edges slid through the slippery wetness of his trachea, pausing only as it reached the notches of his spine. Enna flicked the blade in her hand, letting the wedges pull and tug on the bones. She gave gentle sawing motions until the head separated cleanly from the body. The scent of blood and death perfumed the air.

Enna appraised the cut. Clean and precise. Her blade, a rare slice of syvulrian steel, was as sharp as ever. Syvulrian had been an excellent investment, already absorbing the blood into the veneer of polished black. She loved living weapons, for all the eventual tedium of keeping them fed. The blade hummed happily, subtle vibrations traveling up the guard into her palms. Enna smiled, sheathing the blade at her hip where it continued to purr.

Enna lifted her prize by a fistful of dark hair. She carried it in a circle, spinning on the balls of her feet like a dancer. The waltz took her in a circle around the slumped body, thick globs of blood-ooze falling to the ground in a decorative, misshapen ring. She rotated for three turns, giving the head a healthy shake before she stopped at the feet of the dead man.

The body was slumped against a towering sporaclora. Their thick stalks had colonized the entire region, a veritable forest of fanning, translucent caps. Like fruiting sporophores, their canopy of gelatinous webbings hungrily devoured the light filtering in from above, and stole nutrients from the roots of Yggdrasil below. Filament networks ran through their caps, exposed like blood red veins pulsing in the transparency.

Enna placed the head in the lap of the dead man, and bent his arms to embrace it. Contorted expression of pain notwithstanding, it almost gave him the impression of contemplation. A headless horseman, resting for a moment under the shade of an alien oak tree.

Enna opened her bag and withdrew a pair of gloves, tongs, and two plastic vials. The first vial was a simple sanitizer. The second was filled with purple fluid, four immaculate red teardrops floating lazily within.

She plotted her next motions with extraordinary caution. The gloves went on, the tongs were grasped, and the vial was cracked open with agonizing slowness. Enna breathed carefully. She kept the vial far from her body. As the tongs dipped into the fluid, she grasped a teardrop like it might shatter into a million pieces. With a careful grip, she maneuvered the droplet into the mouth of the decapitated head. She pushed it between his teeth and gums, securing it in place in a wedge of soft tissue.

Enna retrieved a second teardrop. This one she pushed into the open neck of the limp body. She patted it down a few times with the tongs, pushing it against the exposed flesh of his throat.

She was just as slow and just as careful when she resealed the vial. Though excitement was already burning in her blood, she forced herself to move with calculation. The tongs, tainted by their exposure, were placed in the sanitizing container.

When all was done, her muscles trembled in anticipation. She gave a delighted clap, making short work of putting everything back into her pack. She secured the bag around her waist, and then she began to climb.

Enna picked a sporaclora parallel to the dead man. She grasped the white sensing hairs that ran the length of the stalk. Knotting them roughly around her fists, each was used as a handhold. Like the sticky, probing feet of a sea star, they clung to her skin as she touched them. Then they shivered and retracted. 

Climbing was quick work; as the hairs disappeared where she manipulated them, the stalk became a sleek and slippery thing. Her feet, bare, clung to that sleekness, using the natural traction of her skin to her advantage. Her body glided upwards with the ease of a spider. Testing, methodical, but agile and wholly confident.

Reaching the base where the sporaclora stalk met the cap, Enna thrust her claws upwards. She punctured the soft flesh, pushing deep and wrapping her fingers around the thick filaments inside. Clear fluid bled across her hands. She tasted something sweet upon her tongue. The filaments resisted, pulling away from her. Which worked well for her; the harder the filaments fought, the better it made her grip.

The last of the sensing hairs flinched away. Enna leapt forward, digging her claws deep and using the filaments to swing herself forward. Her upper body jerked, but the filaments held the weight of her body. Fully hanging now, Enna vaulted herself towards another filament, shredding the gelatin-like exterior to create her next anchor.

The final ascent was far less graceful. Reaching the edge of the cap, Enna gouged the sporaclora as deeply as she could. She scrambled wildly like a cat at the edge of a branch, using the claws in both her hands and feet for leverage. She emerged at the top - victorious but with a breathless huff, flattening her body out.

The sporaclora cap rippled beneath her, displeased with her rude arrival. Inside the fluid cap, tiny serpentine creatures danced together and broke apart in a flurry of silver. They rushed towards the injuries she’d created and probed at them with their little mouths. They would heal the damage she had done. Hopefully before her hunt truly began; she had left a bit of a trail behind by climbing the sporaclora as she had. Observant prey would note the hairless stalk and damaged cap, painting a perfect trail all the way up to her.

But tonight’s prey wasn’t observant. Tonight’s prey was desperate.

Enna settled comfortably into place. Sitting cross legged, she opened her pack again and drew out her tools of choice. The first was a capsule of white gel. A de-scenting tonic that served a hunter well in a world of highly attuned noses. Enna had already applied a layer an hour prior, but the sweat of her labours ran the risk of lessening the effectiveness. She uncorked it, rubbing it deep into her skin.

As it dried she uncovered her second tool. A plain dart gun, designed to be lightweight and uncomplicated. The only significant modification Enna had made to it was a small loading chamber. It was within that chamber that she gingerly placed her third tool; one of the remaining red teardrops. Her fourth and final tool was the hunting blade, who had grown quiet at her side.

Enna settled onto her stomach, gun poised directly over the corpse.

Her guest didn’t keep her waiting for long.

She knew it had arrived not actually seeing it, or scenting it, or even some subtler vibration her senses could attune to. Rather, it was the shattering of sporaclora stalks that announced a new arrival. The creature was rushing, tumbling seemingly headlong into the sporaclora and shattering them. They fell like mighty trees, but hit the roots of Yggdrasil like wet pops of flesh. Enna watched the arriving chaos as a brewing storm, coming closer and closer. Translucent caps disappeared beneath their shared canopy, tumbling into nothingness.

For nine long weeks she had eagerly awaited the arrival of this prey. She had picked it from many potential matches, selecting for desirable adaptive tissue she might peel off and steal for herself. She did not know what the creature looked like - not truly. Her visions were the results of paw-print measurements, estimates from ravaged prey, gouge marks in root formations, a shed tooth or chitin. She could guess at the size of the beast, the weight it carried, and even the ferocity of character it possessed. But nothing truly compared with seeing it in the flesh.

There was a certain unique satisfaction in weighing one’s conjecture against the real thing. It burned, fire in her veins alongside the drum of her heart, as her prey surged into view.

The body was reptilian - a towering quadrupedal saurian, arched in the likeness of the ancient dragons. The long legs of a swift savannah-cat lifted the body high off the ground. It was covered in white fur, lined with thick blue and black patterns. A red dorsal fan ran from brow to tail tip, a rugged mountain peak lined by wicked spine-spears. Each deadly sharp tip burned and pulsed, dripping with organic matter and the promise of violence.

The head was hooked and warped. The snout and lower jaw were hard and protruded from the mouth like the horns of a rhinoceros beetle. Thick bladed teeth curved liplessly below, giving it a perpetual snarl. Each eye was a compound of four, glistening and rotating wildly in their sockets.

Most fascinatingly, and unexpectedly, Enna observed that the creature was flight capable. Or, at least, it had been. Thick joints erupted from each shoulder blade, like the forearms of a bat. But where the delicate membranes should have sprouted from each wing point, only tattered, bloody remnants of flesh hung.

Enna was delighted. She was correct on every count that mattered, and pleasantly surprised in ways that would not detract from her hunt. An Arbitrator. The beast was an Arbitrator.

Well. A former Arbitrator.

It bore the marks of expulsion. Easy to read, once you knew what you were looking for. Where strong sinew and muscle should have coiled, the flesh was limp and hungry. Starvation drew harsh lines across the barrel-shaped stomach and ribs. The beast had taken on a sickly patchiness - fur falling from the body in clumps. Enna could see clearly where some spines had been ripped out and did not heal - blood oozing slowly from fleshy humps filled with holes.

She wondered, briefly, what crime it might have committed. The ragged strips of flesh that hung from the wing bones told, in particular, a tale of deliberate torture. The remnants of the wings had been left there deliberately. They were festering and swollen, like bits of meat hung from hooks to draw flies. The creature might twist to gnaw at the flesh, but the head could only reach so far. It might contort and try to scratch away the rot, but the tendons stretched away from each forelimb, rotating in unison with every effort.

Such was rarely the way of the Yggdrasil. Misery in life was considered a greater sin than relief in death.

If she expected that the creature might indulge her, as opposed to immediately attempting to eat her, she might have asked. But if Enna had any doubts that this creature would kill her on sight, they were promptly crushed the moment her prey found the dead man.

It exploded. Jaws cracked impossibly wide, it practically collapsed upon the body. Shredding and snarling, deep guttural sounds in the thick vocal chords, it devoured every bit of human flesh it could shove down its throat. The long snout-horns caught and dug into the ground as it tried to get the teeth closer and deeper. It was less a matter of eating, and more a matter of annihilating the flesh before it. The creature descended over the upper torso, neck bulging outwards as it tried to swallow everything in one go - armour, clothes, and all. It tilted as the seabirds do, a full gullet wrapped around a meal.

Enna had speculated that her mark might be faring poorly, but the abject hunger was quite the sight. Perhaps gluttony had been the reason it was expelled as an Arbitrator.

She waited.

Were her quarry human, she could have expected to wait a mere minute. Often less. With an Arbitrator, even a former one, it was unclear how long she could expect to stay in place.

Enna was as patient and still as the situation demanded. The frenetic buzz of excitement could course through her veins as much as it liked, so long as she kept still and unseen. The latter was, perhaps, a bit easier than the former. As the little serpents healed the sporaclora cap, the filaments expanded and clotted. Like broken blood vessels, dark fluid pooled at the bottom of the cap. It obscured Enna from view down below, and she had been careful to angle herself away from a direct line of sight.

Just as they passed the two minute mark, the creature began to move strangely. It was not immediately apparent to Enna that it was strange - the whole of the creature and mannerisms were foreign to her, after all. But the twitching that ran from head to tail-tip was a gradual change.

By the third minute, the creature had clearly also realized that something was amiss. The hooked head tossed back, limbs scratching at nothing in particular. It slipped from mindless hunger to a peculiar shake. It thrust its head from side to side, as if trying to shake off water.

Then it began to scream.

This, finally, was the confirmation Enna had hoped for. She felt a glimmer of pride as the shrieking grew in pitch and tone. The sound garbled and rasped, like the beast was shredding metal within its throat.

The beast recoiled. She could see it clearly now as it threw itself into the sporaclora across from her. The forest shook. The spines along the creatures back locked and loosened, flinching against unseen threats. It split its jaws wide, and a barrage of thick mucus, blood, and unidentifiable fluids were violently expelled in a splash of red and brown.

Her glee ended at roughly the same point that the stench of bile hit her. Revulsion threatened to tighten her throat. What erupted from the mouth of the creature was far more than an evening human snack. She could only begin to guess at what kinds of unpleasant, rotting things it had been scavenging to produce an odour like that.

The creature scrambled wildly, paws slipping and sliding the stinking mess of slimy fluid it had created. Its body heaved, making the motions of vomiting again. Enna pressed a hand to her face, breathing in the scent blocking fluids that still coated her skin. Her target, most spectacularly, keeled over and began to vomit up the dead man like a distressed snake.

Good thinking on the part of the creature. But it would not be enough to save it.

Enna lined up the dart gun, gently clicking the loading chamber into place, aimed, and shot her quarry. The teardrop dart struck just as the headless body was violently expelled, sinking deep into one of the flesh cavities that had once housed a spine.

The combination of bodily exertion and existing pain muted the feather-light touch of the dart. The creature didn’t even flinch. It tilted forward, retching up a mulched up ball that Enna could only assume had been the head.

There was a moment of reprieve. The beast merely stood, wracked by tremors. It panted fiercely, spittle oozing from its open mouth. But if the creature thought it had escaped by spitting out a bit of bad food, it was sorely mistaken. The pain would mount with time. She had only to wait for as long as it took to overwhelm the creature. Direct input to the bloodstream would work faster than contact through eating. A minute. Two, perhaps.

The encore of shrieks was like a sweet symphony. Ear-piercing at this proximity, maybe, but infinitely rewarding. Manta-shaped animals took flight from the thick clusters of roots overhead. Her mark went wild. The raised spines along the back of the creature twitched and bulged. The flesh throbbed around the spines like flexing mouths, swelling to an angry red. Thickened bands of retinaculum snapped, connective tissue breaking, and, at last, the rooted sinew drove upwards. Under pressure, a single spine was spat out.

The spine sliced through the air like a javelin. It moved so fast that she couldn’t even see it. But she did see where it sunk deep into a neighbouring sporaclora cap. It ruptured so many layers of the blood-filaments that the cap immediately turned a cloudy black.

She heard the wet squelch of a second spine detonating, but couldn’t tell where it had landed.

A third spear struck the cap to her left. And, just as she was inching forward to better observe her prey, another pierced the tip of her own perch. It slid past her eyes, skinning the air before them so close that she could blink and her eyelashes would touch it. Her cap pitched and flooded with black. She could feel the organic warmth of the spine as it flexed and trembled.

Her prey had shed four spines. Enna swept an assessing eye over it. She was going to need her pretty little mark to expel all nine spines before moving to the next stage.

Reloading the dart gun with the final teardrop was risky at this point. Besides, the cumulative effects of her venom hadn't been proven. Time from exposure? Sure. But she couldn’t say for a fact that her mark would experience an intensification of pain just because she dosed it with more.

The gun still had a storage of darts. Pinpricks of pain, at best. Sedatives that could kill a human. But an Arbitrator? Unlikely.

Enna tilted the gun, following the movements of the creature as it threw itself against the ground. It scraped itself frantically along the root earth, as if it could skin the pain from its body. She doubted the beast was capable of sensing individual sources of pain at this stage. That would be like being pinched when your entire body was on fire.

Could she trigger the spinal expulsion through a reflex of some sort? She eyed the spinal humps critically. Perhaps.

Enna aligned her gun with a spinal hump that still housed a spine. She clicked the secondary ammunition into place. Aiming for the swollen red flesh rimming the spine, she took the shot.

Her little dart hit the exposed meat and made a hooked puncture wound. The flesh wrinkled. Pulsed. And spat out the spine.

Glee rippled through her as the spine sailed into the forest and disappeared. She aimed for another spine, timing her shot carefully for a moment when the creature angled away from her.

Success! Only three spines remained.

Her fingers curled over the trigger.

The beast turned its rolling eyes upon her.

She froze.

Somewhere, beneath the ravages of pain and hunger, there was an intelligence that looked back. It sent a cold thrill through her. To be seen in those deep, reflective eyes. It knew the source of the pain it felt, even if it could not determine how she had inflicted it.

It was never meant to see her. Let alone recognize the threat she posed. But it did.

It came for her with a vengeance.

Her heart pounded. The monster charged. She whipped to her feet, taking only the gun with her. The beast connected with the stalk as she reached the edge of the cap. The entire plant tilted and fell away just as she coiled the muscles of her legs. Her body surged forward like a taut spring releasing, all else collapsing behind her in a rumble that shook the ground.

She connected with the closest cap, tucking and rolling, but not stopping.

The monster pursued below, her hellish shadow, shredding the world in an effort to reach her.

Enna heard a spine whisper past her, puncturing into the sporaclora like a needle in clear water. She grinned. She darted left, then right, zig-zagging in nonsensical patterns. She doubled back over, leaping behind the beast and sprinting to give herself the window of opportunity she needed.

Enna crouched at a hole in the canopy. She aimed her gun at the mark as it scrambled for purchase, redoubling its efforts to pursue her. She shot. The dart connected with a matted clump of fur below the spinal hump. Failure.

The creature screamed. Enna stood, and sprinted away. Her mark was weakened, but enraged. She leapt for a cluster of darkly clouded caps.

The monster howled. But the sound retreated, moving away from her.

Enna risked a glance back only to find that the beast had changed focus. Instead of pursuing, it was shredding the sporaclora stalks around it.

Enna darted across the canopy, putting some distance between them. Just enough, but not so much that she would lose sight of it. The beast was moving from stalk to stalk, tearing everything down.

It couldn’t mean to attempt to destroy the advantage of her height; there were far too many stalks. But it was intent. It wanted those sporaclora dead. It was as if it had completely forgotten about her.

Had the pain driven it to madness?

It didn’t matter, really. If it was giving her a window of opportunity, she was going to take it. Before the creature could clear its head Enna aimed the dart gun. She tried to get into place for a good shot. But the beast kept moving, claws like hot knives through the buttery stalks.

One dart bounced harmlessly off of the flank. Another hit a sporaclora just above one of the compound eyes. The thing was fast. And rushing away from her. Enna tried to maintain their comfortable distance, but the beast kept moving.

She was bracing for a leap between two dense clusters of sporaclora when the cap beneath her folded. Enna landed the jump, scrambling around, expecting the beast to have somehow rounded on her. But it wasn’t that. Her mark was still in front of her. She could see the edges of the long tail whipping ahead of her.

The sporaclora behind her had simply vanished.

She watched with horror as another sporaclora, of its own volition, folded and shrunk into the roots of Yggdrasil below. Then another. And another. Just like the tendril-stalks, they fled the danger around them.

The forest was disappearing.

Enna cursed. Her mark wasn’t mad. It was clever. And she was not prepared for ground-combat with this thing.

Despite the fact that it was out for her blood, it had earned her appreciation. Half dead from starvation, mad with pain, and it was still fighting strategically. She couldn’t say for a fact that she would be faring as well were she faced with the same conditions.

New plan. No time to second guess it. This turn, it was Enna chasing the beast.

She flew across the canopy. Caps disappeared, sometimes just before she leapt to them. She bounced on the balls of her feet, catching herself before she vaulted onto a vanishing cap. Her breathing grew harsh. Enna was fast and nimble, but she wasn’t built for pure endurance like this.

Her mark was below her. The deadly game was on.

The monster tore apart her sporaclora. As it fell, she darted left. The new cap immediately began collapsing. She darted right. The creature intercepted, clawing that cap and the one next to it to pieces. Enna leapt back, nearly losing her balance. The monster pursued. The next sporaclora cluster was far, almost too far to reach.

Two spines remained. One at the front. One at the back. Deadly, venom laced spikes that could easily kill even a hunter like her. Spines that the monster was evidently keeping close as a trump card. It knew her game.

Her left foot caught for a moment, and the sporaclora she was standing on plunged towards the ground. Enna kicked off in alarm, barely reaching the canopy in time to pull herself up. Her gun fell from her hands to the root floor. The new cap was folding inwards. Exertion scraped her lungs dry and red. The monster closed in.

No time to consider it. Instinct took over. Drawing her blade, Enna leapt. But not forward. Not back. Down. She plummeted towards the beast, catching it by surprise. Assault from above. Already locked in the motions of a pounce, it rose to meet her. Her feet connected with the thick blades of its shoulders, just behind a spine. Pain rocketed up her body, folding her as both she and the monster dropped to the ground. Hard. Red and black flared in her vision, blinding her for anguished milliseconds.

Girl and beast were frozen for tiny fragments of time, minds rushing to process what their bodies had experienced.

Enna recovered faster. Perhaps it was the blessings of her mutations, the natural agility of her brain - but more likely the lack of poison meddling with her mind. She locked her legs around the beast and brought her sylvurian blade down on the exposed flesh around the spine in front of her. Again. Again. She was like a madman savaging a hunk of flesh.

The monster took off like a wild horse. It bucked and arched and violently thrust itself forward. Dimly, her awareness spoke to her. It couldn’t roll. Not completely, not with spines remaining. Blessings and curses.

Her legs held a stranglehold on the creature. It spun, nearly flinging her from it. Inertia squeezed her stomach and disorientated her. Her instincts shrieked a warning. The spine behind her flexed. Aimed directly at her. Seconds flashed. She yanked her body to the left, bending backwards. The creature howled. The spine pulsed and exploded. She could taste the heat of it as it launched just past her head.

Outrage shook the ground as the monster writhed. It collapsed the lower half of its body, back limbs reaching the backs of one of her calves. Hind-claws sunk deep and shredded skin, muscle, and bone. Enna screamed. She brought her knife down on the remaining spine. She felt it wrinkle and ripple. Grasping it in a death grip, Enna tore it from the flesh hump.

She spun it in her hands and turned it on the beast. Wielding it as her spear, she drove it deep into the hump of the beast. It howled. She howled. Pain and blood, human and monster, mingling on the root floor.

The monster collapsed.

It was still alive. She could hear the ragged gasps like heaving breaths through water-logged cloth. Wet, desperate suctioning in an effort to fill damaged lungs.

It could still kill her.

Enna did not move from her position. But she grasped the head by the upper horn snout, forcing it back. And, for the second time that day, she drove her blade deep and severed head from neck.