It wasn’t fair.

  As Akhustal Palebane stalked through the jungle, slowly heading in the direction that bitch had hurled her precious warclub, that was the thought which she kept coming back to.

  It just wasn’t fair!

  Had she not been a great Chos? Had she not led her nation to prominence? No nation this side of the Divide—and maybe on the other side as well—could boast the strength Stragma currently possessed. Yes, there had been some hiccups, but that could be said about any large endeavor. In the end, they’d brought a world war to a close, plundered a wealth of supplies and riches, and largely put the Shells back in their place.

  Yet, for all of that, she’d been stabbed in the back—multiple times! It made her sick with rage just thinking about all the people who’d betrayed her.

  There was Fernfeather-hono, who had abused his role to rule against her at every turn. The Challenge alone was farcical. Allowing that bitch’s team to be filled with children and Shells was also a joke; there was surely no way that the Stragmans of old would have condoned such a thing. But ruling that she’d lost to that accursed woman just because of a technicality? It was utter crock!

  It wasn’t like Palebane couldn’t have descended like that. She could have gone ahead alone and reached the ground many hours in advance of that foreign bitch, but returning with your squad had always been an unwritten part of the rules as far as she or anybody else had always understood it. Abandoning those you led for your own gain was the mark of a terrible leader. Since when would their ancestors have condoned such behavior?

  But no, Fernfeather-hono said the opposite, and as the arbiter of it all, what he said carried the most weight. Akhustal wasn’t stupid. She knew what was really going on behind that bastard’s greedy eyes. Yet what could she do about it when so many had been swayed by his words?

  Knowing that the self-important opportunist was getting away with his little technicality-based coup made her want to bash his skull in. She should have done something about him years ago, but he’d had too much support and power as the most powerful non-Chos Hono. She’d never thought he would have the courage to try to pull something like this either. Realizing her blindness only made her all the more bitter.

  Then, there was that Otharian, Lord Ferros. He’d come with honeyed words of cooperation and mutually beneficial trade, helped heal her spouse, and even provided her an outlet for long-desired entertainment. Yet he’d quickly proven his words to be empty by sending that blasted woman to steal Stragma’s most irreplaceable resource not long after.

  He was not Stragman, so on some level she could understand it. But even so, she’d thought she’d understood him. From their conversations over Many, she’d thought him to be a leader much like herself, one who valued both the application and appearance of strength. From watching his interactions with that two-faced bitch from Eterium and seeing his anger and vindictiveness towards their unscrupulous dealing, she’d understood him as somebody who despised underhanded methods. Now, she realized he just hated being on the receiving end.

  Looking back, she could only feel disappointment at him and at her own foolishness. She’d let herself see too much of what she’d desired in him rather than take him for who he truly was. It made her want to claw her eyes out in frustration.

  And then... there was Caprakan. Her life partner. Her soulmate.

  She couldn’t understand it. The man whom she loved and who she’d thought loved her had gone out of his way to collude with her enemy! He’d risked his life to make her fail! And then... he’d had her kicked out.

  Before that bitch had exiled Akhustal, the woman had glanced Caprakan’s way and he’d nodded back. Akhustal had seen the doubt on her face, the reservation, her eyes asking, without a word, if he really wanted her to say what she was about to say... and he’d said yes.

  She still found herself fighting to not believe it. It was just a gut feeling born from a single subtle interaction, after all, but even so, she could feel everything inside her screaming that her interpretation was on the mark. As much as she didn’t want it to be true, the most important person in her life had betrayed her.

  It made her want to burn the whole world to the ground.

  Fuck rules. Fuck traditions. That crap had always been nothing more than a thin veneer obscuring how things truly worked. In this world, the strong dictated right and wrong, good and bad, first and last and up and down, and everything in between! In a sense, the strong defined reality itself for the weak beneath them! That was how it had always been and how it should still be!

  But now, those bastards said she had no power anymore—based on what? Their words? Could words stop a blade coming for your neck? No! Yet, they based their actions on their bogus words because they knew that they could not best her strength. Were they to oppose her in a legitimate way, they’d end up as little more than pulp beneath her club.

  The urge inside her to smash them all to paste was strong. She wanted to march back into that camp and teach them how weak they truly were and how little their opinions mattered in this world. But, there was just one snag to those desires—one very big, Monster-shaped snag.

  Akhustal believed in her heart that she was the legitimate victor of their stupid tree-climbing contest, and that it had been stolen from her by a treacherous conspiracy. But, when it came to another contest, she could not say the same. That woman had defeated her in their battle so utterly that there was no way for her to refute it.

  That loss stung as much as the political one, perhaps more. In all her life, she had never lost when she had truly put forth effort. When she went all out, nobody had ever been able to stand against her one-on-one.

  Until now.

  Akhustal had been so cocky about her chances, too. It had taken her all in their first, public battle, but she’d emerged victorious. Never had she thought that the foreign woman had just been humoring her. Never had she thought that she would suffer such humiliation.

  But in the end, if strength was all that mattered, Akhustal could not compete with the woman known as The Monster. Her claim was rendered moot by the interloper’s obscene might. That knowledge smoldered inside her like heartburn from a bad meal, but there was little she could do about it.

  Maybe she should simply be thankful that she was alive at all. That woman could have killed her at multiple points but had chosen not to. Maybe much of this rage and anger stemmed from her lifetime of constant victory. She didn’t handle losing well; Caprakan had always teased her so.

  Caprakan... that fucking bastard. How dare he...

  And, so it went, as it had gone since the end of the contest. Akhustal would cycle from rage to doubt to self-recrimination and back to rage, her emotions changing but never lessening. It went without saying that she hadn’t slept a wink, and her body ached with every step she took. Still, she pressed on.

  Before she could do anything about her predicament, before she could even bother thinking about what to do, she needed to get her club back. She needed it for fighting, obviously, but beyond that, she felt almost naked without it. She’d been lugging it around with her nearly all her adult life, after all.

  It had to be somewhere nearby. That witch had thrown it far, yes, and it had flown a long, long way, but eventually the wind would have stalled its momentum. Akhustal just hoped that it hadn’t settled in a tree somewhere. Though none of the surrounding trees could hold a candle to their guardian mother, they were all still giants standing thousands of paces tall. Large gaps between the many leaves and branches were the only hope she had against having to spend the next few days searching the canopy.

  Akhustal slowed to a halt, leaning with one hand against the trunk of the nearest giant as she stilled her breath and focused on the sounds of the forest. There was some sort of commotion going on somewhere up ahead and to the right. Her ears picked up the sounds of multiple creatures, though she couldn’t get any more specific without more to work with. Seeking and tracking had never been her job, after all; her job had been to kill things after they were sought and tracked.

  Ordinarily, Akhustal would not have bothered to investigate whatever ruckus might be going down out there, but given the circumstances, she decided it might be worth checking out. And boy, was she glad she did, as what she found went quite beyond her expectations.

  In a small valley, three factions waged war. Two dozen striped lantha beetles, ten paces tall and twice as long, hissed with gleaming mandibles as they swarmed towards a flock of ten grigu. The grigu—flightless birds a good fifteen paces tall, with long, powerful legs, sharp talons on their clawed feet, and hooked beaks made to tear flesh—squawked and lashed out at a pack of five red-maned tellets. The tellets, their spiked tails thrashing, used the superior bulk of their twenty-plus pace tall, muscular canid bodies to ram their long, sharp horns into the carapaces of the lantha beetles.

  It was a total mess, and as Akhustal looked on, she couldn’t help but yawn. These creatures were just so... unimpressive. All three species were little more than scavengers, low on the ecological pecking order. Too weak to hunt for their own kills, they preferred to nourish themselves upon the remnants of their superior’s efforts, much like certain Honos she knew. They were entirely unremarkable on their own, but their impressions were only lowered when compared to the prize over which they fought.

  In the middle of the battlefield, large enough that it actually comprised most of the surface upon which the three groups fought, was the corpse of some large beast that she didn’t recognize. That she couldn’t say what sort of animal it had been was far more common than one might think. While some species grew to enormous sizes, especially the ones that lived in this area near Ruresni and around the Weald of Lords, many of the beings that grew to become behemoths started as much smaller and mundane creatures, only to mutate and grow to sizes that rivaled aforementioned lords of the jungle.

  Nobody knew what caused a beast to mutate, but once they did, they tended to begin growing to enormous sizes, while their physiology took several turns toward the illogical. Patches of fur interspersed with sections of reptilian hide, extra limbs growing in places and orientations that made little sense, multiple sensory organs popping up in strange spots, sets of wings with spans that often didn’t match the bulk of the animal, and many other different possible changes all combined to turn each mutated beast into something unique and uncategorizable.

  This particular mutated monstrosity had a thick, squat body covered with opal feathers, with six pairs of relatively stubby legs to move it from place to place. Duplication and redundancy seemed to be a theme with this one, as indicated not only by its four tails protruding from the rear but especially by the six heads on extra long necks sticking out the front.

  To call the creature pudgy was putting it lightly. For such an unwieldy configuration, the creature had seemed to have no problem finding food judging by the thick layer of fat that made its already stocky body into something so rotund that its shape bordered on spherical. That blubber had probably helped it survive a great many fights, but not today. At least a third of its torso had been smashed open, the organs inside turned into a mass of crusty blood and pulverized flesh. And, sticking slightly out of that mound of broken meat and bones was a single stick of wood.

  She’d found her club at last.

  The last time Akhustal had seen her weapon, it had been in the hands of that monstrous woman as she’d thrown it off toward the horizon. In an attempt to prevent her opponent from throwing her weapon away, Akhustal had increased its effective mass as high as she could manage—a mistake, in hindsight; making it as light as a feather would have kept it far closer. One aspect of her Observations that almost nobody knew, even those who knew she was an Observer and not a Feeler, was that object whose effective mass she altered would maintain that state for some time after unless she undid her change, with the alteration fading slowly over time. That meant that her club had kept the inertia of a small mountain the whole time it fell all the way to the ground.

  Looking up, she could trace the path of her weapon by the holes it punched through multiple wide leaves as it plummeted down like a meteor, each collision bleeding off much of the momentum but not enough to keep it from annihilating a whole third of this mutant when it finally reached the forest floor. She felt a twinge of pity for the grotesque thing; instead of a proper death in battle, it had succumbed in perhaps the stupidest way possible.

  Now that she’d found what she’d come all the way out here looking for, all that was left was to grab it. To do that, she’d have to make her way through the mayhem of thirty-plus animals, each many times her size, all going at each other. Easy.

  Bending down, Akhustal picked up a stone approximately the size of her head with one hand. Impromptu weapon acquired, she hopped and slid her way down into the ravine.

  It didn’t take long for the combatants to register her presence. Before she could even take ten steps forward, a beetle turned her way and charged, greeting her with an ill-tempered hiss. Akhustal didn’t alter her steady trek towards her prize, letting the insect rocket towards her at high speed until it was just in front of her.

  At the last moment, Akhustal ducked beneath the beetle’s snapping ebony mandibles while she swung her rock-holding arm forward, slinging the improvised projectile straight up. The stone, now with the weight of a giant boulder, punched through the creature’s thick carapace like it were little more than a thin piece of parchment and kept going, turning the inside of the scavenger’s head to goop on its way through and out the top.

  The beetle dropped on top of her, lifeless now that its central nerve cluster had been destroyed. Before its multi-ton body could flatten her, Akhustal lightened it and caught it with both hands above her head. People and animals generally could resist hers and most other forms of Observation. The trick was to kill them in ways where death was instantaneous, so she could immediately make use of the remains. That was why she’d aimed for the area where its brain—if something so dumb and instinct driven could have something developed enough to be called such—would be found.

  Quickly switching her grip to one of the larger back legs, she slung it over her shoulder and continued forward. One of the birds decided to try its luck next, and it fared little better. Akhustal swung her beetle corpse into the side of its head, mashing it to bits with a single strike.

  Unfortunately, this was where things diverged from her plan a little. The beetle’s leg, suddenly forced to withstand the massive centrifugal force of a full-grown Stragman titan, snapped off, sending the rest of the body flying off. Unfortunately, the grigu’s body also went tumbling off from the blow, leaving her with only a mostly hollow segment of insect leg the length of her arm to work with. This was why her club was so important; ordinary materials just couldn’t stand up to the stress!

  A tellet came at her from behind, forcing her to roll out of the way of a horn about to impale her. She flung the remnants of the beetle leg like a discus towards her latest assailant as she came out of the tumble, unfortunately finding it harder than she’d thought to get good velocity on it. The tellet yelped when it struck the side of its right hind leg, snapping it like a twig, but that was not enough to take the oversized mutt down for good.

  Running on fury and adrenaline, the furry beast pushed itself up on its three good legs and voiced its murderous intent with a low growl, its crimson mane puffing out to enlarge its profile.

  Keeping the occasional eye on the rest of the chaos around her, Akhustal backpedaled to gain distance. Having gotten turned around by the attack from behind, it also had the added benefit of moving her closer to her goal. Still, this situation had become far less simple than it had been just a few moments ago. The area around her held no potential improvised weapons that she could spy. No rocks, no branches, nothing—only roots, small plants, and trampled earth.

  Well... nothing but the occasional corpse, that is. Amidst the fray, she spied another dead beetle not too far away. This body was far more ruined than the one she’d killed, but it was more than just the fraction of a leg she’d had a moment ago, so it would do for the moment.

  The injured tellet closed in far more cautiously than the other animals, not just because of its ruined leg, but also because it now recognized her as a threat. She could see the wariness lurking behind the anger in the eyes of the large beast.

  The other animals, however, held no such views. Another lantha beetle decided it didn’t like her presence and came at her from the right, forcing her to turn her backpedaling into a headlong dive or be run over.

  Still unable to find a suitable weapon and with the carcass that was her goal still just out of reach, Akhustal turned to a desperation maneuver. Grasping a fern with both hands, she ripped it from the ground and flung it towards the beetle, which had spun around and had begun charging her again.

  As mentioned before, people and animals were basically immune to Observation directly affecting them while they were still alive; plants were a more complicated story, but most plants were resistant to it at the least. Even the weakest living plant would still take her minutes of focus to alter enough for a difference to be obvious. This fern was no exception.

  The earth clumped around its roots, however, was another story. The small lump of soft soil hit the bug right on the bottom of its jaw with a ‘whap!’. The dirt was too loose, too light, and too soft to do major damage even when enhanced, but it didn’t need to. The significant kinetic force knocked the beetle’s front end upward and backward, causing it to rear up on its hind legs. Unprepared and off-balance, the beetle tipped back and toppled upside down.

  Even with only three working legs, the injured tellet wasted little time capitalizing on the beetle’s misfortune, pouncing on its significantly softer underside and going in for the easy kill. That gave Akhustal enough time to reach the other beetle corpse and secured her another temporary weapon. The body was missing most of its head and part of the thorax, but that didn’t matter. She had a leg to grip and abdomen to swing like a flail. If she was more careful with her power and didn’t dial it up as hard, it would probably last a bit—

  Something caught her feet and Akhustal fell, spilling awkwardly onto the ground with the beetle landing on top of her. She’d already lightened the remains to be light enough to pick up, so it wasn’t like she was in danger of being crushed, but it was still an ungainly mass of insect twice her size. With a grunt, she pushed it aside and rolled onto her hands and knees.

  What the hell had she tripped over? The object was long, longer than she was tall, and about half as thick as her, too. It took her a short moment of staring at the thing—white and straight, with thicker, knobby ends and the occasional bit of meat still attached—before she realized it was a bone from one of the dead mutant’s giant fingers. The beetle had been covering it, which was why she’d failed to see it and tripped.

  Akhustal’s instincts, honed through decades of life-or-death battles, flared a warning. Reflex kicking in, she grasped the bone with both hands, spun around, and smashed it into the face of another tellet that had decided she looked like easy pickings. The beast’s head ruptured, spewing bits of flesh, brain, and bone everywhere and sending the rest of its twenty pace tall body hurtling across the battlefield.

  Akhustal gave the bone a quick inspection and smiled. No noticeable cracks or other signs of damage, even though she’d dialed its mass up very high. This was a bone from the massive beast the others all fought over, after all. It was used to bearing heavy loads. Now this... this was a worthy implement. It would hold up long enough for her to clean up this mess, at least.

  It didn’t hold up, it turned out, giving up the ghost six swings later, but that was still enough for Akhustal to get where she’d wanted to go. Then she had her sweet, sweet baby back in her hands, and it was time to teach these weak upstarts a lesson in judging a flower by its leaves.

  The other scavengers finally got wise to the truth by the time only a third of them were still breathing. Akhustal let them scamper off; there was no need to kill more than she needed now that she’d gotten what she’d come here for. Allowing herself a moment of rest, she sat down and leaned her back against the giant mutant’s side. Its body was still fairly warm to the touch.

  “Feeling a little better after off blowing some steam, I hope.”

  Akhustal’s head snapped towards the voice, her fists involuntarily constricting around her club. Squatting like a bird of prey on a roost, a certain person looked down at her from the top of the gully.

  “You,” she hissed, pushing herself to her feet.

  “Hey, Akky,” her life partner replied.

  “I didn’t think you would have the gall to show your face to me ever again.”

  “Well it wouldn’t be fair for me to not at least explain things now, would it?”

  “Explain? After what you did? I have an idea...” She threw herself into a headlong sprint, her long legs carrying her up the steep slope with great speed. “How about you explain to my FIST?!”

  Caprakan had already backed out of view, but it took her only a moment to reach his last position. He couldn’t have gone far.

  “Stragma needs to change, hon,” his voice called out from around a small twenty-pace-thick tree trunk, “and I was in the unique position to do it.”

  She rushed forward, rounding the trunk. “Shut up with your shit! I don’t want to hear it!”

  “It’s true! We should have erased the concept of the Shell generations ago!”

  There he was, crouched in a thicket of bushes just ahead.

  “I said, I don’t give a damn!”

  Stepping forward, she swung her club across her body, its hard shaft sweeping through the relatively thin but tough stems and right towards Caprakan’s shoulder. To her shock, he didn’t move a muscle, letting the weapon slam into him. Akhustal pulled back on the club’s mass at the last instant out of surprise, but it still hit hard enough to... splinter him into chunks of wood?

  That motherfucker.

  “What is it that every young Stragman is taught about Shells? Why is their treatment justified?” his voice continued from a bit further around the tree. “They’re weak. They’re cowards. They are a burden on the nation. That’s how it goes, but most of that is now false and the rest doesn’t matter anymore! It’s time we recognized that and changed things to reflect how things really are!”

  “That’s nonsense! Our ways are what have kept us alive! We can’t just go changing them on the whim of a long-haired fool!”

  A rustle behind her. She spun around and lashed out, her bludgeon just barely passing above his head as he threw himself back.

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” he told her as he weaved around a flurry of swings, each strong enough to pulverize bone but not strong enough to kill—she wanted to be able to take her time with him once she got a hold of him. “Sure, a Shell is weak—in a fight, at least. I won’t claim otherwise. But, Stragma has gotten so strong now that it doesn’t matter if some of us can’t fight. We’re organized, we’re smart, and we know how to handle just about anything in the jungle.”

  “Only a fool underestimates the forest! Now, stand still, you coward!”

  “Ha, like I’m gonna just let you hit me!” he laughed, spinning away from a downward strike. “But Akky, you know that the Kukego to Krose migration is historically the most dangerous of the four. They made it to Krose three days ago, and crossed the final two-thirds of the way without a single Hono present, since every one had to come with us. Even with only Flegs and Blous, they report that only twenty-seven people died, and thirteen of them weren’t even from beasts but from a random sinkhole that opened under some tents!”

  Spears of wood shot from the trunk to her right, forcing her to sway back and nearly trip over an exposed root that had grown higher behind her back. She stumbled, but managed to regain her footing before toppling over.

  “It was only a generation ago that we would lose several thousand people on that march and call it a great success,” he continued. “Now, we barely lost anyone! Think about how incredible that is!”

  “So what, abandon the teachings of the past because of a single fluke?”

  “It’s not a fluke! All our traditions and societal structure came from back when our ancestors were just starting out, but we’re not a handful of scattered tribes just trying to live another day anymore! We’re a nation of millions now! A force to be reckoned with! Twenty-seven deaths, Akky, just twenty-seven without any of our most powerful fighters there to hold the line! If we can manage all that with over a million Shells deemed too weak to fight, does their weakness even matter anymore?!”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Akhustal had never lost in a fight with Caprakan—when trying, she’d only ever lost to one person—but beating him was always a challenge. The man was as slippery as they came and knew how she fought better than anybody save herself. Add in that the forest was his optimal fighting environment, filled with plant life to twist for his purposes, and he could give her a hard time in ways no other Stagman could.

  Normally, she would relish such a fun time, but right now, she was far too angry. All she wanted right now was to bash his face in.

  “Who cares?!” she snarled. With a lightning-quick series of blows, she herded him into a niche in the side of a trunk that twisted its way towards the sky. “This is about more than what burden we can bear without problems! It’s about the principle of it! Why should lily-livered deadweights deserve the rights and respect that the productive and courageous of us, the ones who earn our place, have?!”

  The ground beneath her writhed with roots trying to grab her feet, but she avoided them deftly—he wasn’t the only one wise to their partner’s tactics; the only reason he’d caught her up on Ruresni was because she’d never thought he would betray her like that. Damn, she really needed to bash him good.

  “But, how much of a burden are they, really?” he shot back. Leaping up over her strike at his knees, Caprakan grabbed hold of a branch that suddenly grew out from the trunk around him and pulled himself up. A second branch shot out just after and he leapt to that as well, climbing out her range. “Don’t they do the sort of work that’s so important that the country largely shut down when they stopped doing it? The sort that the others don’t want to do? Sanitation alone... I heard it got so bad in the caves that you had to conscript Flegs to temporarily fill in, and that they almost mutinied over it. Could a caste that isn’t contributing have that much sway over our lives? No, of course not!”

  One after another, branches grew out of the tree, each higher than the last, all combining to form a rough escape path up the trunk to the massive, thick branches high above. There was no chance in this world that she would allow that to happen.

  “So what? None of that matters if they’re still cowards! That’s why they’re called Shells in the first place, isn’t it? Because they have no courage inside them, making them lesser than the rest of us!”

  Winding up, she lightened her club as far as she could, then swung with all her might, hiking the weight to max just before it struck the tree. A mighty tremor ran up the trunk, each branch shaking violently as the vibration rose past it. Caprakan didn’t even have time to react before he found himself thrown off his feet fifty paces above the ground.

  “‘Above all else, the Shell’s greatest sin is cowardice. To treat them as we do others would dishonor everything Stragma stands for.’ You said that, Caprakan! You, just last year! And now you’re suddenly trying to undermine the system we’ve all relied on for as long as this country has existed?! It’s nonsense! What in the stars is going on with you?!”

  “I just realized that Shells are not cowards, is all,” he called back.

  “What?!”

  One of the many vines hanging down broke free, swinging into her partner’s path so he could grab hold as he fell. Wrapping his hands around its rough green hide, he began to climb. The vine decided to help as well, the whole of it seeming to retreat up toward the canopy.

  That cheating bastard...

  “After everything they’ve done, can you still call them cowards?”

  Grabbing hold of the same branches that her spouse had been using just moments ago, Akhustal began to climb after him. Being taller and with longer reach, she was able to move from one branch to the next without needing to jump, which meant she could go faster. But, that just meant that she arrived at the top branch more quickly, yet still with a good three quarters of the way to go to the start of the canopy.

  “What nonsense are you blathering now?”

  Briefly, she considered just climbing the trunk like she had Ruresni—the craggy bark had more than enough handholds—but decided it would take too long. Unlike other people, she had another, much faster way up as long as she was willing to deal with the cost, and boy was she willing today.

  “You know it takes courage to face down your foe in battle, and that’s when you have the strength to come out victorious,” he called down from the rising vine. “How much courage must it take to stand up to a foe when you don’t even have the strength to fight? When you know that your foe wants to thoroughly break you, both mentally and physically?”

  Bracing herself with her right hand against the tree, she set her feet, moved her weapon to her left hand, and began to swing that arm in a circle. The club swung up and down, round and round, quickly gaining rotational speed as she lowered its weight to the lowest she could manage. Then, once she’d gotten it whirling as fast as she could, she took a deep breath, waited for just the right moment, and gave the oversized stick the mass of a mountain.

  Instantly, the club went from swinging around her to soaring upwards, its gigantic mass dragging her along for the ride. Akhustal let out a grunt of pain as her arm was nearly ripped from its socket, but she held on.

  This technique was so tricky and dangerous that she rarely decided to pull it out. Only in special occasions and dire circumstances, like her first fight in the arena with their new Chos, would she dare; the potential for disaster was just too high to risk it. If she mistimed the inertial switch even just a little, she’d find herself flying off in some wrong direction, with potentially nowhere to go but down.

  But, even if she did pull it off correctly, her arm and shoulder paid a heavy price from the tremendous acceleration at play. Already, her shoulder ached with pain, but she wasn’t going to let that stop her today. She’d used her left arm for that reason, so when she made it up to the top, her swinging arm would still be in top condition.

  Akhustal’s momentum petered out quicker than she’d hoped, but she’d made it up a third of the way. Lightening the club again, she grabbed onto the tree with her right arm and found a foothold for her right foot. Then, hanging off the trunk by that side, she started spinning her left arm again.

  “Our guards are not known to be gentle, especially with Shells,” Caprakan pressed on, climbing faster now that she was closer. “And yet, thousands of Shells chose to stand up against them anyway! They chose to fight in their own way, even when faced with the guarantee of agonizing pain, gruesome injury, and even death! Tell me, Akky, can you really call anybody capable of such courageous actions a coward?”

  The pain was far greater this time, but she held on as the inertia dragged her upward. By the time she grabbed hold of the tree again, she was three-quarters of the way up. Just one more would do the trick.

  “It doesn’t take much courage to face death when you know it will not be permanent,” she countered.

  Her husband laughed. “The words of somebody who has never had to face imminent oblivion. Death is not so easily disregarded, hon.”

  The third time around, Akhustal’s left shoulder gave in. She let out a grunt of pain as her left shoulder dislocated with a loud pop, but held on through willpower alone as she rocketed skyward for the last time. The arc of this last ‘throw’ carried her up close enough to the nearest true branch for her to grab onto the bark and fling herself onto it just as her soon-to-be ex—in more ways than one—leapt off his vine and landed just a few paces away.

  “Speaking of imminent oblivion, why don’t you set down the club and let us just talk this out?” he said, slowly backing away.

  “Why don’t you stop jumping around and take your punishment like a proper warrior?” she shot back. Her left arm hung limp. She could move it if she needed, but it wouldn’t be right until she could get it popped back in. But that was just fine, she thought as she transferred her weapon back to her dominant hand. She’d fought with only one arm plenty of times. “You don’t have to worry, dear! Now that I’ve heard your arguments, I’m feeling a little more forgiving, so I’ll only break every single bone in your body!”

  In all honesty, there were potentially some convincing arguments in what he’d said so far, but she was in no state to dispassionately mull over it all—not that she likely ever would regardless. All of it was poisoned by the fact that it had come from the mouth of the man who’d betrayed her. He could have said that there were three moons in the sky and she would have decided to believe there were four just because he’d said it.

  But none of that really mattered to her right now, anyway. She wasn’t furious at Caprakan because he suddenly thought Shells deserved full respect. Her hatred came from a much more personal beef.

  “I think I’ll pass, thanks,” he replied, stepping back.

  She stepped forward to match him. The branch was large, easily forty paces across where it emerged from the trunk, just like all the trees and branches in the area around Ruresni. Though its surface was craggly and uneven, the overall level of plant growth was significantly lower up here than on the jungle floor. That, plus the limited area to stand on, meant less ways for him to stay out of her reach. It was only a matter of time now before she caught the crazy bastard for good.

  Life, however, has a way of making fools of the mighty and the meek alike. Before she could take another step, a sudden darkness fell over them both, triggering well-honed reflexes that caused them both to immediately drop what they were doing and dive to the side. No ambush predator came dropping down on their heads, but a look upward informed them that weren’t yet out of danger.

  Having read and listened to many stories of the lands beyond the forest, Akhustal had once heard about a strange water-bound beast known as an ‘octopus’ that was nothing but a head with eight to ten arms protruding from its bottom. Looking up now, that was the first thing to come to her mind as she took in the gargantuan mutant above them.

  This beast resembled the animal from the story in cursory ways, yes. Like the legendary octopus, it had a huge, bulbous head that looked more like a balloon with a dozen randomly placed eyes than a proper skull; long, thick tentacles that grew from the base of that head; and a single mouth at the center of that base where each of its squiggly arms converged.

  Things started to differ once you got beyond abstract generalities. This monstrosity had far more than ten tentacles—she didn’t have time to count, but there had to be at least fifty. An octopus was also supposedly no bigger than a man, while this thing was so large that it was currently hanging from not just the tree branches above them but also another tree adjacent to the one they stood on, its vast body bridging the large gap between the two giant plants with ease. It had to be at least five hundred paces—no, maybe closer to a thousand, even—from one end to the other.

  That massive size was reflected in all of its features. Each writhing tentacle had to be a good twenty paces thick, with a tough, rubbery hide that seemed to shift color as she looked at it. And then there was the mouth, a gaping circular hole filled with row after row of hooked, talon-like teeth that seemed less designed to stab and slice flesh as they were to hook it and drag it further in towards the next row until there would be no escape.

  It was one ugly bastard, to be sure. She’d never seen anything like it. Only the strongest beasts managed to grow to that level of stature, and Stragma went out of its way to learn their territories and habits, so she was surprised she hadn’t heard of it before.

  In another circumstance, Akhustal would relish slaying it, but she had bigger grubs to grind right now. The mutant, however, did not seem to care for her priorities. Instead of going down to munch on the still-fresh carcass below, it wrapped more tentacles around the branches near them and half-slid, half-swung itself fully above them. It let out a low rumbling... well, it wasn’t the usual roar or the less common hiss that she’d expected but more like a honk, yet its malice came through loud and clear regardless. And even if it hadn’t been, the tentacles lashing out towards them said all that needed to be said.

  Akhustal rolled out of the way as a tendril slammed down nearly on top of her. The rope of flesh, still as wide as she was tall even near the tip, sent tremors running through the branch when it hit, threatening to knock most people off their feet. Not her, though. Years of experience and training kept her upright and nimble.

  “Well?” she asked, taking a swing at the monstrous appendage.

  “Well what?” Caprakan called back from somewhere behind her.

  Her club hit the tentacle with a wallop, the monumental force causing it to lose its grip and bending it forcefully back before it could wrap around the branch. Akhustal frowned. She’d expected to feel some sort of bone inside, like how tails had a bunch of little bones all in a row inside them, but it had felt like there weren’t any bones in there at all. That was just wrong. What’s more, the flesh had sort of... bent and stretched when hit in a way that worried her.

  “Aren’t you going to finish? Weren’t you going to enlighten me to your profound reason for getting me kicked out of my home?”

  “What? Now?!”

  Another tentacle came at her from the front, and she batted it aside, but the cord of meat kept coming, forcing her to jump to the side.

  “Don’t think you can get out of it this easily!”

  Another blow, another tentacle suddenly flung backward... yet seemingly unharmed. Was she doing any damage at all?

  “...I just wanted you to be happy.”

  Akhustal came to a stop, her mind going blank at his words.

  “Happy.”

  “Well—”

  “You colluded with my enemies, tore me from my throne, had me thrown out of the only home I’ve ever known, and generally just ruined my entire life ALL BECAUSE YOU JUST WANTED ME TO BE HAPPY?!”

  Another tentacle tried to wrap around from the bottom and strike her from behind, but Akhustal wasn’t having it. This time, she brought her bludgeon crashing straight down like a meteor, crushing it between her weapon and the sturdy, rigid wood they stood on. At last, this seemed to do actual damage, yet even as the flesh tore open, yellow ichor spewing forth, the beast’s strange body composition still somehow rebounded much of the blow back, throwing her into the air.

  “YES! Akky, you’ve been angry and miserable every day since I returned! Even before then, it’s not like you ever enjoyed being Chos in the first place!”

  Plummeting back down, she hit the damaged section again, and finally, the tentacle broke apart with a rewarding squelch. “What nonsense are you spouting now, you fool?!”

  “Don’t pretend you ever liked it! You used to complain all the time about how much you hated all the meetings and talking and whatnot! Stars above, you foisted so much of that on Tepin that she was practically Chos already! The only part that ever made you happy was the fighting!”

  The mutant let out another honk filled with pain and rage, unwinding a large number of its arms that had been looped around higher branches and sending them her way.

  “That’s not—”

  “Come on, Akhustal! Do you think I’ve been living by your side this whole time without paying attention? I know you better than anybody, Akhustal! You didn’t become Chos to live a life of logistics reports and management!”

  Dashing under one appendage, she smashed a second one out of the way, then flipped over a third.

  “What would you know!? I became Chos because it was what I wanted! It was my right and my destiny!”

  “And my mother has two heads! The only reason you ever became Chos in the first place was because you thought it was what you were supposed to do, not because it was your dream! Because the Chos is always the strongest Stragman!”

  Three came at her at once from different angles. Akhustal swung at the one on the left, bashing it out of the way, then used the rebound to swing back and do the same to the one on the right, before leaping atop the final one coming from behind and slugging it from above.

  “And what’s wrong with that?! I am the strongest!”

  “What’s wrong is that the position doesn’t suit you anymore, but you just can’t see it! You’ve gotten stuck in your ways! I did this to help you in a way you couldn’t do yourself!”

  “HELP?! HELP?! YOU BURNED DOWN MY LIFE!”

  “I SET YOU FREE!”

  The tentacle writhed beneath her, its end folding up to try to roll up around her, and she jumped off before she lost her balance, giving it another whack on the way down.

  “The shackles are gone, Akky! No more responsibility wrapped around your neck like a leash! You’re free to go wherever you want out there and find all the fun this place can’t give you anymore! The world outside is chaos now! There’s fighting everywhere!

  “Eterium is filled with gangs of bandits that what’s left of the government can’t keep under control! Gustil has a dozen battles a day between all the different sides trying to gain as much control as they can! You could even travel all the way to Kutrad and take on the giant flying lizards that took over if you want—I hear they’re unimaginably strong and—AAAHHHH! Shit!”

  Looking her husband’s direction, she found him dangling from a tentacle wrapped around his arm, which was quickly pulling him skyward.

  “Don’t touch him, you bastard!”

  Before she could even think about what she was doing, Akhustal hurled her weapon at the tentacle holding Caprakan, its weight as high as she could put it. Maybe it was because she rushed, or perhaps her balance was thrown off slightly due to her dislocated left arm, but her aim was not true; the big stick flew right past him and the tentacle holding him and into the mutant’s gaping maw.

  In a way, though accidental, it was the most effective thing she could have done. Her club, now with the mass of a mountain, rocketed directly down its gullet, the power sending it smashing through whatever it had for a digestive tract and into the part of its head where its brain had to be. The head stretched like putty, and for one interminable moment, Akhustal thought that it might somehow withstand the great force and send it back her way. But, at last, physics prevailed and the club burst out from the other side.

  The beast’s main body seemed to deflate like a waterskin with a rip in it. The only noises it made as it died were the release of air from its mouth and the sound of its dozens of arms unwrapping from the tree branches as they lost their strength.

  Akhustal’s feelings of victory evaporated in an instant as the mutant’s massive form went limp and began to plummet towards her and the branch she stood on. Backpedaling out of the way, she just barely managed to avoid the twisting, chaotic tangle of rubbery limbs, but that turned out to be not enough. The gigantic beast slammed into the branch on which she stood on its way down, the impact shaking the bough so violently that it threw her off before she knew what had hit her.

  Time seemed to slow down for Akhustal as she plummeted towards her end, her mind working overtime to come up with some way to stop her fall. The tree’s trunk was too far. Several thick vines were much closer, several so close that she could grab them if she were just a pace or two closer, but they were all still woefully just out of reach. If she’d had her club on her, it would have been a simple fix to use it to adjust her trajectory, but no... she’d thrown it away to save the life of a man she’d told herself she wanted to kill.

  She was going to die. Strangely, the realization of this did not bother her; she felt more resigned to it than anything. It was a shame she couldn’t go in some other way more befitting her, but there was no use in lamenting that now. For all the fury that had saturated her every waking moment, she felt strangely calm now that the end was here. She didn’t mind. All that was left was to watch her quickly approaching demise.

  At least, so she thought, until one of the closest vines twitched, twisting out to ensnare her by the leg. With her speed, it didn’t quite succeed at fully arresting her fall, but it was enough to let her reach out and grab it with her one good hand. Even that did not stop her, but as she held on for dear life, she soon slowed down enough that she no longer had to fear for her life when she got to the bottom... which was a good thing, because the vine terminated twenty paces above the ground.

  Akhustal hit the ground hard and awkwardly, tumbling forward after landing until coming to a stop in an uncoordinated mess splayed out on her back. She would get no points for her landing, but she didn’t mind. Coming out of this with her life was more than enough of a prize given the alternative.

  She didn’t have the energy to move anymore. Not for a while, anyway. All she could do was lie there, her lungs heaving for air, and take in the scene.

  Not far away, to her right, lay the convoluted mess of tendrils that made up the beast’s corpse. Truly, it was a gargantuan thing, and bizarrely resistant to her methods. She was lucky to have killed it in the accidental way she had, because it would have taken her a good while to think of such a plan on her own.

  And if she’d been taking it on by her lonesome, and if it had committed all its tentacles to going after her, it would have likely turned into a battle of attrition. Would she have survived then? Probably, but she couldn’t say that with the certainty she usually would.

  Something caught her eye amid the snarl of limbs. A hint of movement, small enough that she almost didn’t notice it at first. Then, a hand emerged from beneath one of the immense cables of flesh, followed by an arm, and then a head. Slowly, painfully, Caprakan pulled himself out from under the dead beast’s corpse, until he finally staggered to his feet.

  The man looked like Akhustal felt: bruised, beaten, and exhausted. One limping step at a time, he dragged himself towards her, until, finally, he stood by her feet, looking down at her with tired eyes. Then, as if he’d reach the end of his rope, he toppled over and fell alongside her.

  For the longest time, neither of them spoke a word. Akhustal, for her part at least, found she had nothing left inside to say.

  Eventually, however, Caprakan broke the silence.

  “Have you ever felt total helplessness, Akky?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, no matter what you could ever do, your fate is not in your hands.”

  Akhustal thought about it for a moment.

  “Kind of. When you were captured and I couldn’t do anything to save you except agree to Pyria’s demands. I... it tore me up inside.”

  “Haaaahhhhh... that’s something, I guess. But... it’s different when it’s another’s wellbeing. When it’s yours—your safety, your life, your fate—that is entirely at the mercy of somebody else... words cannot describe the terror that fills your every waking moment. The desperation. You become something that is almost not a person. Or, at least, I did.”

  “Caprakan...”

  “When they put me in their torture facility, I went in with my head held high. I was... haughty. I knew that what awaited me would be terrible, but I also knew that I would never give in to those bastards no matter what. Even if I had to resist through sheer willpower and spite, I would give those sniveling monsters fits of frustration. I didn’t even last four days.

  “They began by cutting into me, burning me, breaking bones... they had a seemingly endless repertoire of techniques honed through the centuries of their long, twisted existences. They did it all to me on that first day, and it was truly agony unlike any I had ever felt. But, then, they just... stopped. They left me with a brutalized, bleeding, and broken body, but my spirit remained resolute. I had won the first battle, I told myself. But what I had not realized at the time was that was how they always started their victims off. It was all part of their procedure.

  “Much, much later, one of them thought it would be fun to gloat and spell out how they did things. The first time, they expose you to every sort of pain they can. They carve and stab and burn all the different ways they are going to hurt you into your body. And then, they leave you alone. They let the memories of it all sink in, so that your body knows what will follow the next time they come. More than what they do to you, their initial goal is to introduce you to the fear of what they are going to do to you, to put that fear inside you and let it take root.

  “And it took root within me. It started slowly, little more than a murmur in the back of my mind, but soon enough it was an alarm bell ringing in my head every time I heard the telltale sounds of the torturers coming to visit me. They did that on purpose too, always making certain specific noises when they got within earshot—three taps on the door, the chime of a small bell when it opened... They do it to make you associate those sounds with impending agony, to trigger an uncontrollable panic response in your body when you hear it, and it works. By the light of the Mother Tree, does it work.

  “It wasn’t long before the sound of that little ding would set my heart pounding, my breath shaking. Not a knife, not a scalding-hot iron, but the simple ring of a bell was all it took to send me into panic and overwhelming dread. Even in the middle, before I fully lost myself and still had a few drops of fight left in me, my body did not care to listen to my mind. It was like they had robbed me of half of my existence.

  “I was afraid. So very afraid. And, in the end, it was not the pain that broke me but that fear that had taken root and which grew greater with every flick of the scalpel and twist of the screw. And it was that fear that consumed me.

  “When they were torturing me, I would have done almost anything to make it stop. But, before they tortured me, I would have done literally anything at all to keep that agony away for even a few hours. And, I did. I sold out my country and my friends. I debased myself to their amusement, stomping upon my own pride to follow their humiliating commands. If they had told me that if I killed you, they would leave me be for just a single day, I would have taken your life without a second thought.

  “And yet, beyond all that, a deeper, more powerful fear still reigned supreme. I had one way out, if I could just find the courage to take it. They thought they’d deprived me of every last mite of my agency, but they never knew about the seed behind my heart.

  “Do you remember, back when I was young and hotheaded, how I’d declared that I would accept death before dishonor? How I’d put that tiny seed inside me, for when the time should ever come when I would need it to end my life? How you’d called me a fool for it? It’s still there, so small and well-hidden that they never found it.

  “The whole time, I had a way to end my suffering, to free myself from those days of terror and remove the power Pyria held over you. I knew how she was using me as a hostage. It was obvious she would do so, even if she hadn’t told me herself about all the things she’d made you do. I could have fixed it all with a single thought—just let the seed germinate, stab its roots through my heart, and it would all be over.

  “But I couldn’t do it. Despite everything, after endless days of terror and torment, after having fallen so low that I would scarcely have defined myself as a living being, the prospect of oblivion caused my soul to shrink away. Because I am a coward.

  “I wish I could forget everything that happened to me from those days. I wish I could have gone to our Earthling and let him just wipe it all away. But, I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t allow myself to forget the truth of what I am. What we all are.

  “The truth is that we are all cowards, Akhustal—every last one of us, deep down. Most of us have simply had the good fortune of never having to realize it. And so, when I came back, when I saw what had happened here while I was away, I could not help but act on it. How could I denounce those beneath me for cowardice when I am the greatest coward of them all?”

  Akhustal looked over at this man whom she’d known for so many long years. She took in his empty stare, his trembling hands, his irregular breaths, and realized that she’d been a failure of a partner. She’d focused so much on his physical trauma that she had neglected to properly help him with the trauma that came in other forms.

  It wasn’t like she’d been blind to his mental and emotional wounds, but he’d steadily returned to being the man she’d loved as his body had healed, and she’d clung to that as proof that everything was alright. The thought that it was only a facade had never crossed her mind—or perhaps, she’d purposely avoided the thought, so eager had she been to get the old him back. A total failure.

  She reached over and took his hand in hers, giving it a gentle squeeze. The trembling softened, though it did not go away completely. “You’re not a coward,” she told him.

  “Hmmm.”

  He didn’t believe her.

  Letting go of his hand, she slid her arm beneath him—not an easy thing to do on her back with just one arm, but made a bit easier by a small depression in the ground—and heaved him on top of her. Be it from physical or emotional exhaustion, Caprakan didn’t resist.

  She held him close against her chest, feeling for the first time in ages just how much smaller and lighter he was compared to her. Most everyone was smaller and lighter than her, but her life partner had never been large even compared to most Honos—at least, not in stature. The way he’d made up for it by being larger than life in other ways had always been part of his appeal. Seeing how that part of him had shrunk pained her.

  “Would a coward climb the Mother Tree, at tremendous risk to his life, to help people he barely knows? Would a coward rip apart his personal life, smash apart his family, for little more than his beliefs? No. Not to me. You might be obnoxious, my love, and foolhardy, and, after the last few days, maybe even be downright mad, but a coward? No. Never, no matter what happens.”

  She felt something inside him snap, and the next moment, Caprakan was weeping into her chest, his whole body shaking with silent sobs. He wrapped his arms around her and held on with the desperation of a man barely hanging from a branch a thousand paces high in the middle of a windstorm, and she returned his distraught embrace with one of her own, holding him as tight as she could, as if he would just vanish from her grasp if she did anything else. It wasn’t long before she felt herself start to cry as well.

  It wasn’t long before they both ran dry, neither of them having much left inside. Still, neither of them moved. Akhustal, for her part, didn’t feel like changing anything in that moment. In some ways, she felt closer to him now than ever before.

  Still, all good things had to come to an end eventually. This time, it was she who broke the silence.

  “So, this is it, huh. I head out tomorrow or something?”

  “I think so.”

  “I still have trouble wrapping my head around it. Everything is going to be so different.”

  “If you have to, just think of it as a very long, mandatory vacation.”

  “Vacation, huh?”

  “Yeah. I’ll make sure you have plenty of funds, so just go have fun out there. Live it up. Find what you’ve been looking for. What this place cannot provide you.”

  “And where would you be this whole time, huh? You gonna come with?”

  “There’s still some things I need to take care of. Tepin is going to need my help dealing with all the unrest that’s bound to sprout as soon as word gets out. But once things are looking more under control, I’ll be right behind you. Who knows what ludicrous situations you’d get yourself into if I left you unsupervised for too long, yeah?”

  Akhustal pulled his face level with hers and the next thing they knew they were kissing each other for the first time in what felt like seasons. Though she felt like their relationship had irrevocably changed, with some of the fiery passion of their earlier life now muted, it felt deeper now, fuller than it had ever been. And why wouldn’t it? After this, she understood him on levels she’d never even seen before.

  “So, I suppose this is it,” her lover said once their lips parted.

  “Yes, I need to go find my club, again,” she signed. “But before that, one last thing.”

  “Huh?”

  Before he could react, Akhustal rolled over, trapping the smaller man beneath her huge, muscled form. With her left arm still out of commission, she had to rely on her legs to keep him from squirming out, but that was fine. She didn’t need two arms. All she needed was one fist.

  Winding back, she slugged her husband in the mouth as hard as she could.

  “W-wha—?” he sputtered, spitting blood.

  She socked him again.

  “You never asked!”

  Caprakan brought his hands up to guard his face, but she drove her punch through anyway.

  “You didn’t even try to convince me! What if I had agreed?”

  “Y-you wouldn’t have agreed! I know you!”

  Wham!

  “You think you’re the only one who can change?! Why am I the only person who gets labeled stuck in her ways!”

  Wham!

  “I’m not some old crone! I can learn new things and change perspectives too!”

  Wham!

  Finally, she lowered her arm and pushed herself to her feet.

  “It hurts that you didn’t even trust me enough to listen to you. It hurts a lot,” she told him, taking a long look at her hubby’s battered face. Though he was bloodied and missing a few more teeth, she knew he was still conscious. “I think you should take your time fixing things here before you come chasing after me. If you’re lucky, by then I’ll be having as much fun as you claim I will, and I’ll be feeling more forgiving.”

  Caprakan moaned in response, which was good enough for her.

  “I love you too, honey.”

  With her piece said, the former Chos walked away to go search for her weapon for the second time in a few hours, leaving her groaning, unmoving partner alone in the middle of the jungle.

  It would likely take him hours before he could move much again, and days before he was fully healed from the whole ordeal, but she didn’t worry. Akhustal Palebane didn’t marry a wimp. He would survive.

  And, despite all that had drastically and suddenly changed, so would she.