Unchosen Champion

Tzultacaj heaved himself across a bottomless rocky ravine, scrabbling in the dirt for a moment before securing a grip. He swung his leg up and hauled himself over the opposite side as soon as his fingers stopped sliding. In one motion he snatched his axe from the ground and took off running. He picked up speed, like a stone rolling downhill before driving into the thinning coastal forest ahead. He held his ancient weapon near the broadhead blade with just one hand, focused on fleeing instead of fighting for once in his life.

Retreat was hardly in his nomenclature, but even he recognized that single-minded action-oriented combat would lead to his inevitable demise against the unending forces of mana. He had no destination planned, he was just trying to get as far away from his allies as possible. The hope of giving them a chance to regroup and escape to Lighthouse territory was his only goal.

The thick mountainous rainforest had given way after he crossed elevated plateaus and cold mountain peaks. Eventually, he found himself traversing a diluted rocky woodland that was covered in thickets, demonstrating the extreme distance he had already covered when compared to the environment where he had started. He could sense the coast was near, though their expedition into the interior had brought him all the way to the Black River in the Amazon. If he had made it this far, then his much faster allies had to have found safety in allied outposts.

Unfortunately, if he wanted to shake his pursuers, he would have needed to develop a different set of skills during the assimilation. He wasn’t built for escape, but completely leaving the monsters behind would have ruined his plan anyway. Instead, his durability was key.

The core forces of mana on the continent needed to follow him and not Mateo, Juliana, or Sierra. If he could run circles with the primary alien threat at his heels, that’s what he would do, but at some point he was sure he would need to stop and fight. They were still acting with the hope that the Eradication Protocol was time limited, but that they were enacting such desperate schemes so soon was obviously a warning of what was to come.

He winced as the consequences of their emergency plan made themselves felt. Blood dripped from his wounds, stinging each time debris brushed against his skin and brittle branches reached out to ensnare him. He clenched his jaw, wiping away the expression as he locked the pain away. A death on behalf of the Jaguar Sun and for the Lighthouse was acceptable so long as he extracted a sufficient price from his killers.

He lowered his shoulder and plowed through a tangle of dry branches, not wasting any time with dodging and weaving, but also making a racket and establishing a clear trail for his enemies, whether he liked it or not. The minor scrapes he endured were nothing compared to the injuries he already carried.

As long as he bought enough time for the others it was a worthy endeavor. The wave, pushed by a monster that crawled into their minds with whispers of annihilation, would have swept the continent and bled into Central America if he had not diluted its focus.

But now, he was alone, isolated in a land that had been unfamiliar to him, and was utterly packed with unprecedented enemies. He was covered in blood that was entirely his own, drawn from hundreds of scrapes and scratches, missing an ear and two fingers from his left hand, all taken by the assaults of whipping enemies. He tried to staunch the flow from a wound that exposed his ribs on the right side while he ran, but the crimson blood filled his palm and still drained between his remaining fingers, splashing down to his hip. Streaks of sanguine blood stained the muddy dirt and leafy vegetation, highlighted by the color of the atmosphere. It wouldn’t take a genius tracker to sniff him out.

Behind him, a mass of parasites proved that they were sufficiently capable of following his obvious trail, giving chase by noisily crashing through the same woods. The air was thick with the sticky scent of damp alien flesh that pierced the metallic tang of his own blood. The unseen swarm rustled through leaves, clicking at each other from the dense undergrowth, a relentless current that he could feel in vibrations of the earth and in the chilling whispers that nipped at the depths of his mind.

One demand tickled his brain, at first sounding like babbled nonsense from a grotesquerie before carefully getting a simple message across.

“You will Perish.” The deep voice threatened.