Chapter 204: Our Little Bunny is...
His Future Sight was usually a flickering candle in a dark room, but now, it was a blinding, erratic strobe light.
Suddenly, the golden eagle beastman let out a choked, horrific sound, a ragged cry that died in his throat. He stalled mid-air, his wings locking into a rigid, trembling V-shape. His eyes, usually sharp and calculating, rolled back until only the glowing whites were visible.
"Thane!" Victor roared, banking hard to avoid a mid-air collision.
The ground team, scaling the final precipice, skidded to a halt. Lucan and Exile looked up, faces twisted in primal terror. For Thane to pause for the seer to stutter meant only one thing.
"What did you see?!" Exile hissed, his massive anaconda body coiling tight against the cliffside, his scales standing on end. "Thane! Speak!"
Thane plummeted a few dozen feet, then snapped his wings open and gasped for air as if surfacing from water. He looked at the husband’s face, deathly pale, with a thin trail of blood trickling from his nose from mental strain.
"She’s... she’s not fighting," Thane whispered, his voice trembling. "I saw her. She’s at the edge of the cliff, curled in a ball. She’s sweating... shaking. She’s sick, Victor. She’s vomiting, and she can barely keep her eyes open. She looks like she’s fading."
The silence that followed hit with explosive force.
Damien’s onyx eyes flared with a sickening green light, his Nerve Dominion surging so violently that the small shrubs on the cliffside withered instantly. "Sick?" he repeated, his voice dropping to a guttural, murderous register. "Felicity doesn’t get sick. She’s a Level 100 healer. Her body purges toxins in seconds."
Lucan bared his fangs, his shadow-magic boiling around his claws. "That rat," he snarled, his mind immediately leaping to the darkest possible conclusion. "The Jackal. He did something to her. He’s a spatial specialist—he must have used some black-market sedative or a spatial poison to keep her compliant. He made her sick on purpose so she couldn’t fight back."
He’s breaking her body because he couldn’t break her spirit," Exile roared, his voice echoing like a landslide. His possessive instinct flared white hot. The thought of Felicity—light, hearth—shaking and alone while a scavenger watched her made his blood turn to acid.
Victor didn’t say another word. The golden aura around him stabilised into a thin, vibrating line of absolute annihilation. The air didn’t just heat up; it began to ionise.
"Dimitri," Victor rumbled, not looking back. "The Jackal doesn’t get a trial. He doesn’t get to speak. When we hit that fold, I want his nervous system shredded before he even knows we’re in the room."
"Consider it done," Dimitri replied, his albino fur bristling as he signalled Leaf Team to prepare for a "Zero-Variable" breach.
The pack didn’t just resume climbing. They became a vertical tsunami. Worry transformed—it was no longer just a rescue. Now it was a race to stop a man they saw as poisoning their world.
High above, hidden behind the shimmering violet veil, Wanderer slept on, dreaming of his new life, unaware the pack was minutes away convinced he was a tormentor.
The mountain didn’t just groan this time. It braced for the end of the world.
They were five minutes from the breach five minutes from painting the Jackal’s Nest in the blood of the man who had dared to touch their world.
Every word Thane spoke about Felicity’s condition was a match tossed into a powder keg. To them, she was a goddess, a Level 100 axis. Her being compromised was a violation of the highest order.
"I’m going to peel the skin from his ribs," Exile hissed, his massive tail cracking the stone as he surged upward. "I’ll make him watch while I crush his spatial heart."
Voss, however, had gone strangely quiet. The massive wolf-beastman, usually the group’s grounded tank, was staring at the cliff face, his amber eyes narrowed. He was calculating. He remembered the smell of her during her heat—the heavy, sweet jasmine that had nearly driven them all to madness. He remembered how intense it had been, how deeply she had been "claimed" by the circle.
"Wait," Voss rumbled, his voice cutting through the bloodthirsty chatter of the others. It was low, almost a whisper, but it carried the weight of an Alpha.
Victor banked in the air, his golden eyes burning. "Wait for what, Voss? She’s dying up there!"
"She’s a Level 100 healer, Victor," Voss said, looking up at the shimmering violet fold. "If he poisoned her, her body would have purged it in three seconds. She’s too powerful for black-market sedatives. But... she just finished her heat."
He paused, a strange, terrifyingly soft look crossing his rugged features. "Maybe she’s not poisoned. Maybe she’s just... pregnant."
Everything stopped.
The physical reaction was instantaneous and violent. Ivan, the stoic lion, stumbled mid-step, his claws gouging deep, jagged trenches into the mountain’s granite. His golden mane bristled, and a low, rumbling purr, half-primal, half-protective, erupted from his chest. Victor nearly dropped from the sky, his wings stuttering as the weight of the realisation hit him like a physical blow to the solar plexus.
Damien froze, shadows retracting as his pupils dilated to full black. The thought hit: Bred. The fox carried the pack’s future. The sickness was biology’s cost for their love.
"Pregnant?" Lucan whispered, his voice cracking. He looked at his hands, his shadow-magic flickering uncertainly. "She’s... our little bunny is..."
The shift in energy was tectonic. The murderous rage didn’t vanish; it evolved. It became something much more terrifying: a nesting instinct backed by Level 95 power.
"If she’s pregnant, she’s starving," Sarge barked, his tactical mind immediately pivoting. "She’s sick because she’s exhausted, and her body is diverting everything to the kits. She needs warmth. She needs comfort. She needs her snacks."
"She loves those little dried mango slices," Marx blurted, his mounting worry shifting to a practical focus.
"And the chocolate-covered nuts. We don’t have enough!"
Victor looked at the team, his authority snapping back into place, but his voice was thick with emotion.
"We can’t all swarm her. If she’s sick and overwhelmed, twenty-five apex predators crashing into a tiny cave will terrify her."
"He’s right," Dimitri said, grounding the group even as his own heart hammered against his ribs. "The inner circle goes in. The rest of you, move!"
The command was unspoken, but twelve of the men, including Shadow, Pope, Ash, and several members of Leaf Team, immediately broke off from the main ascent. They didn’t even need to be told where to go.