Vol 2: Chapter 57

They set up the engagement zone by the book. Anya assigned positions and confirmed sight lines while Ziya ran a final diagnostic on the Mark I module's load, ammunition count and heat tolerances verified twice against the numbers she already had memorized. Rhian brought the Arosaurer to its designated perch on the high ridge, sensors sweeping in a slow arc across the basin. Seraphine checked medical supplies without being asked. Fia and Lyra locked down the Mule's defensive perimeter and ran comms checks that came back clean across every channel. The whole thing took less than twenty minutes, and by the end of it, everyone was exactly where the plan said they should be, doing exactly what the plan said they should do.

Rhian's voice cut through the comms first.

"I've got her. North face, mid-altitude." A pause, just long enough to mean something. "She's not alone up there."

Alex pulled up the feed on his own display. He'd seen photos in the Roost's files, grainy long-range shots that hadn't done her justice. In person, even through a screen, the Ashwing filled the frame in a way the numbers on her profile never quite managed. Her wingspan stretched wider than he'd pictured, feathers a mottled ash-grey that caught the light differently with every shift of the wind, and she held her slow bank with a kind of effortlessness that made the whole mountain range look smaller underneath her.

Then he saw the second shape, closing fast above her, wings folded tight against a dive.

"That's a Petras," Anya said, and then didn't say anything else for a second. "Diving on her. On the Ashwing."

"I can see that." Ziya's eyes stayed on the readout. "I'm just trying to figure out why."

"Territorial dispute, maybe." Anya didn't sound convinced of her own answer. "Ridge Line's got overlap zones, especially this close to the season."

"A Petras doesn't dispute anything it can't win." Ziya finally looked up from the screen. "That's half the reason they're rated the way they're rated. They test, they back off, they don't throw themselves at something two ranks above them for a patch of air."

Nobody had a better guess ready to offer instead. Alex kept his eyes on the feed, watching a fight that didn't line up with anything either of them had just said out loud.

Movement caught Alex's eye lower on the display, well below the two Titans circling each other. A rock shelf jutted out from the cliff face, and something was moving along it, matching the pace of the fight overhead instead of keeping clear of it.

"You seeing this?" Rhian's voice again, less sure of itself than before. "There's something on the ledge under them. Two somethings."

Alex zoomed the feed in as far as it would go. Two low, heavy-bodied shapes came into focus, backs studded with a ridge of pale spines that ran from the base of the skull down to a short, thick tail. Every few seconds one of them tossed its head, and a spine broke loose from the ridge to snap forward through the air toward the fight above.

He pulled up the scan function and let the System sort through what the feed had caught.

GUILD DATABASE — PARTIAL MATCH

Species: Spine-Ridge Boar-Type

Classification: Rank C, Ground-Type

Confidence: Moderate (limited prior field data)

The match came back thin, stitched together from whatever scraps of prior sightings existed on file, but it was enough to put a name to what he was looking at. Spine-Ridge Boars, a pair of them, each launch of the head sending another barbed spine arcing up toward the fight overhead, timed close enough to the Petras's dives that neither attack seemed to be waiting on the other.

Ziya leaned into her own screen, jaw tight. "A minute ago this was one Petras acting strange. Now I've got two more of these things timing their attacks with it like they planned it that way."

Alex watched the pattern hold across three more passes. The Petras dove, the Ashwing broke off to avoid it, and every time she dropped low enough, one of the Boars below sent another spine up to meet her, closing the exact gap she needed to climb back out of range. Neither attacker adjusted for the other's mistakes. They didn't need to. Whatever the Petras missed, the ground below was already covering.

Nobody on the comms said anything for a long moment. Anya's slate had gone still in her hand, the sight-line data she'd been tracking forgotten against whatever she was watching instead.

"Boars don't range up this high." Ziya said it slowly, like she was checking the words against something in her own head before letting them out. "Scrub-dwellers. Lower slopes, past the tree line at the latest. I've never seen a field report put one anywhere close to the Ridge."

"Maybe the terrain pushed them up," Alex said.

"Maybe." She didn't sound like she believed it any more than he did.

"So what's the call?" Anya broke the silence, slate already coming back up in her hand. "She's carrying two fights right now instead of one. That's an opening if we move on it."

"Or a reason to hold." Alex kept his eyes on the feed. "We don't know why any of this is happening. Walking in blind on top of it doesn't sound like an improvement."

"We don't know why, and we're not going to find out sitting here watching her get worn down either." Anya's tone stayed even, but she didn't look away from him. "The plan already accounted for engaging her tired. This isn't that far off the shape of it."

"It's not the shape of it. It's a different animal wearing the same shape." Alex shook his head. "I'd rather lose the window than walk everyone into whatever's actually going on up there."

Anya didn't answer right away. She looked back at the feed instead, jaw set, clearly working through whether that was a fair point or just caution dressed up as one.

Before Anya could push further, the fight above changed shape.

The Petras broke off its dive without climbing back to altitude the way it had every other pass. Instead it hung back at a fixed distance, wings working just enough to hold position, while the two Boars below shifted their spread. What had looked like scattered, opportunistic fire started narrowing into something with a direction, driving the Ashwing sideways along the cliff face instead of trying to bring her down wherever she happened to be. She fought every foot of it, wingbeats hard and uneven, veering twice to break free of the pattern closing around her. Both times the space snapped shut again before she'd gained more than a few meters.

Alex's chest tightened as he tracked it. This wasn't three predators competing for a kill. A kill would have ended already, one way or the other. This was patient in a way none of the individual pieces should have been capable of on their own.

The Ashwing came down hard on a lower outcrop several minutes later, wings folding under her as she hit, chest heaving against the rock. The Petras settled onto a ledge above her, and the two Boars took up positions flanking the base of the outcrop, close enough to strike again but not attacking, just holding.

Nobody on the comms spoke. Anya's slate had gone dark in her hand, forgotten. Fia's breathing carried over the open channel, quick and shallow, the only sound for several seconds.

"That's not a kill," Alex finally said. "That's a cage."

Rhian's voice cut in before anyone could respond to that, thinner than usual. "Guys. There's someone up here."

Alex found her feed and pulled it into focus. Further along the ridge from where the Ashwing had gone down, a single figure stood on an exposed outcrop with no cover in any direction, no gear visible on their back or belt, nothing that explained what they were doing out there alone. They weren't moving. Their arms hung at their sides, head tilted slightly toward the outcrop where the fight had ended, and even at this distance, something about the stillness read as effort rather than rest, the kind of tension that came from holding something steady against a weight trying to pull it the other way.

"Can you get me a clearer angle?" Alex asked.

"Working on it." A pause. "It's not helping. They're just... standing there. Except they're not, not really."

Nobody offered a guess at what that meant. Ziya had gone quiet on her own screen, gaze fixed on the same figure, her earlier certainty about scrub-dwelling Boars and impossible altitude nowhere in her expression now. Anya's hand had drifted to the comms switch without pressing it, some order half-formed and abandoned before it reached her mouth.

The figure didn't move. The Ashwing didn't either, pinned and spent on the rock below, and the plan they'd spent the last hour setting up sat forgotten somewhere behind all of them, already belonging to a fight that wasn't the one still happening in front of their eyes.

Advance chapters on my p@tR$0n/Najicablitz.