Felicity's Beast World Apocalypse-Chapter 172: The Supremes Revenge (bonus)

Richard nodded and kept walking, visibly arranging the place in his mind into sectors, paths, and pressure points. It was almost comforting, in a way, that one man in this gathering still looked at a town and saw structure before danger or softness or scent.

They met the traveling settlement near what had once been a church hall and a public reserve. Fifty beast’s, maybe a little more, spread across temporary camp lines and patched vehicles, beast-kin of different types, armed enough to be cautious but not organized enough to be threatening at first glance. Their setup had the messy functionality of people who had kept moving because staying still had stopped feeling possible. Children. Elderly. Two men on a roofline lookout. Smoke from a cookfire. Enough life to feel almost civilized, which in the current world usually meant danger was hiding somewhere close.

They saw each other at the same time.

The settlement tensed first, weapons shifted up heads turned. Then they realized what they were looking at and the tension changed shape. Snow Team and company did not read as easy targets. They read as the kind of group prudent people tried not to insult unless they knew exactly who was standing behind them.

Felicity, because she was Felicity, responded to all of this by stepping half forward with immediate social instinct. "Hi."

Four of the women nearest the front visibly looked her up and down, took in the shirt, the men around her, the atmosphere of being cherished and escorted, and turned their noses up with such open disdain that even Voss blinked.

Felicity stopped it wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t even a full recoil. It was just a little pause, a small soft shift in her expression that probably nobody outside the immediate group would have noticed.

Richard noticed his hand flexed once at his side, he did not like it.

Neither did Voss.

Emma had already primed them all for this exact sort of reaction, for women who looked at Felicity and saw not a person but a threat, a distortion, something to resent on sight. Still, that did not make it easier to watch.

Before Felicity could decide whether to try again, one of the other women a smaller beast woman with russet markings down one arm and a face tired enough to still have kindness in it stepped forward and said gently, "Don’t mind them."

Felicity looked at her at once, relieved and hurt at the same time in a way that made Lucan move.

He shifted fully, panther body replacing man in a fluid rush, and before anyone could object he had nudged under Felicity’s hands and lifted her with easy certainty onto his back. She made a tiny sound of surprise and then settled there almost at once, hands in his fur, because at some point this had apparently become normal too.

Voss fell in on one side.

Richard moved to the other, posture easy but very obviously prepared.

The kind woman’s gaze flicked between them and then back to Felicity. "You’re not the first one they’ve looked at like that," she said quietly. "But you might be the first one with enough people around you to make it stupid."

That got a faint huff from Marx.

Felicity, sitting on Lucan’s back like this was a perfectly ordinary conversation, asked softly, "Why are they upset?"

The woman hesitated then, carefully, "Because women have been disappearing, and what women are left now are competing for stronger males, well those ones are."

That changed the air.

Richard’s expression hardened. Voss’s gaze sharpened at once, the lazy edge leaving him entirely. Damien, who had been quietly scanning the camp from the start, turned his full attention on the speaker. Even Shadow’s broad stillness changed.

"What kind of disappearing," Voss asked.

The woman looked back toward the settlement, toward the husbands gathering near the vehicles and the watchful women who had withdrawn rather than greet. "Some taken. Some going willingly, at least, that’s what their men tell themselves after." Her mouth tightened. "It’s been getting worse the farther west and south people travel."

Marx and Voss exchanged a look. The Supreme sat beneath that kind of pattern like rot under a floorboard. Neither man said it aloud in front of the camp, but they didn’t need to. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

They spoke next with the women’s husbands, or enough of them to get the shape of the problem. Wary men, tired men, men carrying too much fear in too small a social container. They admitted what they had to, missing women, broken camps, rumors about safe places that were not safe, talks of groups recruiting and other groups taking by force, stories that changed in detail but not in feeling.

"We were heading for Vineyard," one of them said. "Heard it was stable."

Marx answered before anyone else could. "Not right now."

That man frowned. "You know it."

"We know enough," Marx said thatanswer didn’t comfort anyone.

"It’s all right," another man muttered. "Not many places left to go anyway."

That line sat wrong because it was true.

Because Orange suddenly felt less like a temporary stop and more like a point on a narrowing map.

Felicity, still on Lucan’s back, listened to all of it with growing quiet. The earlier bounce had faded out of her. Not gone. Folded inward. Her fingers had moved deeper into Lucan’s fur without her noticing, and the subtle way he carried her changed too, something gentler entering the line of his shoulders as if he could feel each new piece of unpleasantness landing in her.

The kind woman looked at her once more. "Keep your people close," she said. "Especially the men who already know what you are to them."

Felicity swallowed and nodded.

Nobody liked how much that sounded like advice rather than warning.

They left not long after, with no clean promise to offer and no satisfying threat to make. Orange had become something else in the span of one conversation. The roads around it felt narrower. The faces of strangers felt more dangerous, the possibility that the Supreme’s reach was already threading through places they had not touched yet settled into the group like a splinter no one could remove on the march back.

Lucan kept her on his back.

Voss walked close.

Richard walked thinking.

They did not explain it in front of her, that part was deliberate.

Felicity sat comfortably on Lucan’s back, her hands resting lightly in his fur as she looked around the unfamiliar stretch of Orange with quiet curiosity, her attention caught on broken storefronts and overgrown streets rather than the conversation forming behind her. Lucan adjusted his pace slightly to keep her balanced, his tail flicking once as if nothing about the moment required attention, he could hear everything.

Voss moved a fraction closer to Richard, his voice dropping low enough that it blended with movement and distance. "We’ve dealt with something like this before," he said, not looking at him directly.

Richard didn’t turn his head, but his attention shifted fully. "Define ’like this.’"

Voss exhaled once, slow. "A man calls himself Supreme, strong enough that people stop questioning things when he speaks. Smarter than he should be and patient."

That was enough to change the shape of Richard’s focus.

"What did he do," Richard asked.

Voss’s jaw tightened slightly. "He took her."

Lucan’s ears angled back, just a fraction.

Richard’s gaze sharpened. "Took," he repeated.

"Yeah," Voss said. "Not just grabbed and ran. He tried to control her, tried to bend her into something that fit him you know mark her, keep her and cage her, turn her into... something that belonged to him." The words sat heavier than they should have.

Richard’s voice dropped. "And he failed."

"He’s alive," Voss said. "So not completely."

That was not reassuring.

"He didn’t get what he wanted," Voss continued, tone flattening slightly. "But he got enough to build something out of it a city, people and structure. All of it centered around the idea of her."

Richard finally glanced at him "centered... how?"

"Devotion," Voss said simply. "Control and obsession dressed up as purpose."

Lucan’s jaw flexed once.

Felicity shifted slightly on his back, unaware, her voice soft and bright. "That one has flowers," she said, pointing toward a broken balcony where something stubborn had grown through concrete.

Lucan turned his head just enough to look back at her, expression smoothing instantly. "Yeah," he said quietly, "it does."

She smiled, satisfied, and leaned forward again.

Behind him, the conversation continued.

Voss continued, "complete and utter delusion, it didn’t matter what we said or what she said, anything that went he would twist into being what he wanted to hear, hes about on league with victor or victor and Lucan together."

Richard let out a long whistle, "Right, that’s, that’s a lot to take in, so this Supreme is now collecting women to do what exactly?"

Marx butt in, "we don’t know, not a clue, but we know him and we know the structure of that city there were no women for months before felicity showed up, and now? not sure what they are planning. we just don’t want her to know."