Blood Vines
The earth remembered violence.
Moyan felt it through his bare soles—the residual tremors of something massive moving through the jungle's heart. The trees here grew in spirals, their trunks twisted into unnatural corkscrews as if some giant hand had wrung them like wet cloth. Even the air tasted wrong, thick with the metallic tang of ozone and something darker, something rotting.
Jian Luo limped beside him, his sonic dagger now emitting a constant low whine that kept the corrupted vines at bay. The weapon's grooves pulsed with the same rhythm as the jungle's artificial signal—a fact neither of them acknowledged.
"Behemoth's close," Jian Luo muttered, wiping sweat from his brow. His pupils had dilated to black pools, swallowing the iris whole. "Can't you hear it breathing?"
Moyan could. The sound wasn't air through lungs, but roots tearing through bedrock, a wet, grinding rhythm that set his teeth on edge.
Haiyu raised a fist, halting the column. Ahead, the jungle opened into a clearing that shouldn't exist—a perfect circle of petrified flowers, their stems fused into jagged spikes pointing inward like the ribs of some long-dead beast. At the center lay the source of the tremors.
The Rootheart went very still in Moyan's spine.
"Oh," it whispered. "It's grown."
---
The Behemoth wasn't a single creature.
What crouched in the clearing was an amalgamation of flesh and flora, its six segmented legs armored in bark-like plating that oozed sap where the joints flexed. A dozen spinal columns—some human, others disturbingly elongated—fused together to form a swaying tail that ended in a cluster of eyeballs. But worst of all was its head, or what passed for one: the hollowed-out torso of an Iron Sky warrior, his ribcage split open to reveal a pulsating mass of glowing roots where internal organs should be.
Yanmei hissed through her teeth. "That's no natural behemoth. The Sect's been feeding it their prisoners."
The creature's tail-eyes swiveled toward them in unison. The ribcage mouth opened, and what emerged wasn't a roar, but words—distorted, wet, unmistakable:
"Lin. Kainan."
Haiyu's hands flew: "It knows your scent."
Jian Luo's dagger slipped from his fingers. "Oh fuck. It's not a guardian. It's a watchdog."
---
The Behemoth moved faster than anything that size should.
One moment it crouched motionless; the next, its tail smashed through three ancient trees, sending splinters the size of spears raining down. A rebel screamed as one impaled his thigh, pinning him to the ground.
Moyan reacted without thought. His gravity knife flashed upward, carving a crescent of distorted space that sent the next volley of debris veering sideways. The effort sent white-hot pain lancing through his skull—the data storm's aftermath still lingering—but he held the field steady.
Jian Luo grabbed his arm. "The eyes! They're—"
A sonic blast cut him off as Yanmei's arrow found its mark, detonating one of the tail's eyeballs in a shower of vitreous fluid. The Behemoth recoiled, its howl shaking the canopy.
"Now!" the Rootheart urged. "While it's blind on one side!"
Moyan charged.
---
The clearing became a nightmare ballet.
Haiyu danced between the Behemoth's legs, her daggers seeking the soft gaps in its bark armor. Yanmei's arrows found purchase in the remaining eyes, each explosion of sound buying precious seconds. And Jian Luo—
Jian Luo changed.
His pupils swallowed the last remnants of white as he scooped up his fallen dagger. When he moved, it was with unnatural grace, his steps perfectly synchronized to the jungle's artificial pulse. The blade's whine climbed to a shriek as he plunged it into the Behemoth's hind leg, not to wound, but to resonate.
The effect was immediate.
Vines burst from the creature's wounds, their tips splitting open to reveal tiny, blinking sensors. The Behemoth convulsed, its ribcage mouth vomiting a torrent of corrupted data streams that solidified in the air like ghostly serpents.
"Subject. Designation. Lin."
Moyan's knife met the nearest data-serpent in a shower of sparks. The impact sent a jolt up his arm, and suddenly he was elsewhere—
---
A memory not his own:
The Celestial Vine Sect's inner sanctum, where the Oracle knelt before a massive root structure. Not the Rootheart, but something older, its surface carved with spiraling sigils that hurt to look at.
"The Warden sleeps," the Oracle intoned. "But the Serpent gnaws at its chains."
Then the vision shattered as Haiyu's dagger found the Behemoth's true weak point—the Iron Sky warrior's skull still embedded in its chest. The bone charm around Moyan's neck flared white-hot as she struck, its energy fusing with the gravity knife's field in a concussive wave that sent the creature crashing to its knees.
Jian Luo was there in an instant, his corrupted dagger poised for the killing blow.
"Wait!" Moyan grabbed his wrist. "It's trying to—"
The Behemoth's tail struck like a whip.
---
Moyan woke to silence.
Not the absence of sound, but the wrongness of it—the jungle's artificial pulse gone, replaced by a deep, rhythmic thrumming that vibrated through the earth. The Behemoth lay dead, its carcass already being consumed by the very vines that had sustained it.
Haiyu crouched beside him, her face streaked with blood and sap. Her signs were slow, deliberate: "Jian Luo's gone. The dagger took him."
Yanmei limped over, her bowstring snapped. "The Behemoth was guarding something." She pointed to where the creature had fallen—a hole in the earth, its edges lined with those same spiraling sigils from Moyan's vision. "Your father's path."
The Rootheart stirred uneasily. "Not a path. A back door."
Moyan touched the bone charm at his throat. The Serpent's Ouroboros symbol felt suddenly heavier, as if weighted with secrets.
Somewhere in the distance, the jungle began to scream.