Chapter 138: Sound from Above
The last severed tendon slid into Maggie’s bag with a dull sound. The stench of blood and warm entrails thickened in the humid air, a perfume of death that would inevitably attract other scavengers.
Not that Maggie wasn’t starving herself.
She wiped her soiled dagger on a pant leg without ceremony, her gaze constantly scanning the surrounding ridges and dense thickets of reeds. The tension hadn’t left with the boar’s life—it had simply shifted.
"We move," she announced in a hoarse but firm voice, closing her bag with a sharp tug. She stood, one hand gripping the hilt of her flail-halberd, still smeared with mud and black blood.
Dylan groaned as he pulled himself from the mud where he’d collapsed. His face was ashen, hollowed by the dull pain gnawing at his chest and the exhausting resonance of his stigma. He leaned heavily on his jian to stand, his knuckles white. An uncontrollable shiver ran through him, quickly suppressed. "About damn time. This place already reeks of carrion."
Elisa, who had carefully wrapped the pulsating anima gem in thick cloth before stowing it deep in her pack, nodded. Her fingers still trembled slightly—remnants of the superhuman effort to control her lance and projectiles. Her green stigma pulsed faintly beneath her sleeve, like smoldering embers. She tilted her chin toward the east, where the valley narrowed against an even more imposing mountain than the ones they’d already crossed.
"Not that way," she said, her voice slightly strained but clear. Her eyes, bloodshot with fatigue but still sharp, studied the steep, rocky slopes ahead. "That mountain... it’s steeper. A sheer cliff on the northern face. And the air..." She narrowed her eyes, focusing her heightened perception. "...it vibrates. I don’t know how to explain it, but I hope you understand that up there, there are likely things clinging to the rock, waiting for a misplaced step."
A fleeting image crossed her mind: agile, silent shadows, falls into the void. "We go around to the south. The pass is longer, but the slope is gentler. Fewer footholds for... whatever might make us slip."
Maggie followed her gaze, weighing the suggestion. The thought of scaling that menacing slope—exhausted and potentially under threat from unseen enemies—twisted her gut. Elisa’s vision, honed by her strange connection to the world, was worth more than any scout’s report. "South, then," she agreed quickly. "We follow the stream to the ravine fork. That’ll keep us clear of most of the marshes, too."