Divine System: Land of the Abominations-Chapter 330: The First Gauntlet (2).

There were sounds from multiple directions that he catalogued without stopping — movement through undergrowth at a distance, something larger pushing through canopy to the north, the particular silence of a thing that had stopped moving because it had detected him and was deciding what to do about it.

He kept walking, slowly, taking inventory.

The outer Garden was not the Thornwood. The corruption here was older and had had longer to work, and it showed in everything — the bark of the trees was darker and in some places had fused with the undergrowth at the base, the canopy was denser and filtered the morning light into something greener and dimmer than it should have been, and the flora along the ground had the specific overgrown quality of plant life that had been responding to corrupted Ein Sof for long enough that it no longer looked quite like what it had started as. There were flowers he didn’t recognise at the base of several trees, their petals an unusual dark pink, and he did not touch them.

He found a position with his back to a large trunk and spent several minutes simply listening.

The thing that had stopped moving to the north started moving again, away from him, and resolved itself in his assessment as something large enough that he would need to choose his approach carefully rather than simply engaging. He set it aside. The undergrowth movement to his left was multiple things, small, moving together with the coordinated quality of pack animals — Brandors, almost certainly, given the habitat and the coordination. Grade F. One Seal each.

He had seven days. The calculation was straightforward enough: the base point allocation for surviving the full duration was worth having, but points from kills were cumulative and compounding, and seven days in a compressed, agitated outer Garden was a significant window if he used it correctly. He would not use it correctly by going after the large thing to the north on the first morning, and he would not use it correctly by staying near the entry point where every other candidate who had entered within a hundred feet of him was also currently establishing themselves.

He moved inward, not far — perhaps a quarter mile — and then moved parallel to the outer edge, northward, away from the entry concentration. The undergrowth changed slightly as he moved, the ground becoming softer underfoot, and after ten minutes he found what he had been looking for without specifically knowing he was looking for it: a natural depression in the terrain, shielded on two sides by the roots of trees large enough that the roots themselves formed low walls, with a clear sightline in both directions along the route he had taken.

He set the practice spear against the nearest root and took out the first of his rations and ate half of it, slowly, while the Garden continued to arrange itself around him in the way that living places did when they were deciding whether the new presence in them was significant or not.

Then he stored the rest of the ration, retrieved Gungnir from the Mark, unwrapped it, and set the practice spear in the place where Gungnir had been resting — against the root, in plain view, in case anyone passed and noted what he was carrying.

The spear’s weight shifted in his hands, settling into the particular slow drift he had spent months learning to read. He had not held it since the morning of the Assessment, three days ago, and his palms registered the familiar surface of the shaft with the specific quality of recognition that came from a significant amount of time spent doing one thing repeatedly, until the thing and the doing of it were no longer separable. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

He moved out of the depression.

The Brandors found him first, which was not a surprise — they were pack hunters and the pack had already been moving in his general direction, and he had simply stopped moving far enough away from them that their tracking had time to catch up. There were six of them, emerging from undergrowth to his right at roughly twenty feet, with the large-headed, thin-bodied proportions that made them look unbalanced until they moved, at which point the proportions resolved into exactly what they needed to be for what they did.

The nearest one stopped when it saw him and made a sound — a low, clipped thing, not quite a bark — and the others stopped behind it.

Nero did not wait for them to finish deciding.

He moved left and the spear came around low, the momentum carrying through the first one before it had fully registered that the situation had changed, and then he was already past it and the pack was reorienting, which took them a moment because pack hunters were coordinated and coordination required processing time when the expected sequence of events did not happen in the expected sequence. He used the moment. The second one came apart from the third, moving to flank, and he put the butt of the shaft into the third one’s face as it came forward and stepped into the second one’s line rather than away from it, which was the Crimson Crucible instinct asserting itself — commit, drive forward, don’t let them set — and the second one went down with the tip through the base of its neck while the third was still shaking its head from the butt strike.

The remaining three broke the encirclement and came at him together, which was what pack hunters did when the initial approach failed, and he stepped back twice to let them bunch and then stopped stepping back and went into them instead, and the spear moved in the circular patterns that Vane’s sessions had not been teaching him and that his body knew anyway, had always known, had learned from months of Gungnir before he had ever stood in the Red House’s arena.

It was over quickly. They were Grade F.