Chapter 63: Early Exit Plan

Lucien gasps for air, wheezing out a broken laugh, flat on his back at the base of the shattered tree, staring straight up at a sky full of unfamiliar stars that are, at the moment, spinning gently in a slow, entirely indifferent circle above him.

"I’ll take that as a no, then." he snorts.

Wind knocked clean out of him, he pushes himself up, wobbly, mind hazy, every single inch of him throbbing.

But not with pain.

With something else entirely.

Power, humming low and steady just under the skin, unfamiliar and entirely welcome.

His vision clears slowly. He looks down at his own hands, his own body, and his mouth falls open in disbelief.

The scrawny, powerless frame he’s been dragging around resentfully since he first crossed into the tribelands is simply gone, replaced by a kiss, with something built, sculpted, radiating raw physical presence in a way he hasn’t felt since he first arrived in this world. The kind of body that used to require Ashland-grade demonic infrastructure just to properly maintain. He flexes one hand experimentally, watching muscle shift and settle beneath skin that finally, finally feels like it genuinely belongs to him again.

"I got my body back!" He nearly shouts it at the treetops, voice cracking with sheer relief.

The Beast Mother bellows a laugh from across the clearing, unhurried. "Starting to actually look like a demon lord, I’ll grant you that much."

"Thank you!" he says, beaming despite everything, already turning to face her properly. "I didn’t expect—"

She blurs.

And for a moment, he’s entire body screams at him. Every sense squarely pointed and focused at the haze of fur and muscle coming toward him.

But he reacts too slowly. Thoughts trying hopelessly to catch up with an instinct trying to guide his movement.

A fist catches his jaw mid-sentence and sends him rocketing backward through the tree behind him in an instant, bark and splinters exploding outward in every direction. he hurtles through a stretch of dark forest that blurs past him in streaks, and finally into a boulder that cracks clean down the middle on impact, the shockwave rolling out visibly across the entire clearing floor.

"That," she calls out, voice carrying easily across the trees despite the distance now between them, "is the Blessing of the Beast Mother. Strength to hunt any prey that roam these lands. To adapt. To survive whatever comes." She pauses, clearly amused. "Survive me, and you keep it. And I agree to your proposal in full. If not.... I eat well tonight, one way or another."

He coughs hard, spitting blood and dirt from his mouth. "Just to clarify... does that include the friends-with-benefits clause?"

Her cackling laugh rolls through the surrounding trees from everywhere and nowhere at once, impossible to pin down to any single direction.

Lucien’s eyes flicker open into full darkness a moment later, and his vision sharpens without him consciously asking it to, the whole forest resolving itself into crisp, silvery detail like something purpose-built for hunting in the darkness.

He coughs again, sputtering, blinking hard against the strange new sharpness of his own borrowed night vision.

"Steep price of admission, this. But if it makes us friends in the end, I’m in. Fair warning, though... my personal definition of ’surviving’ has always been generously flexible, historically speaking."

"Then good hunting," her voice says, followed by her laughter echoing from every direction at once.

He hauls himself upright with some effort, dusts himself off, mutters to himself under his breath that this is nothing whatsoever like his usual style of picking up women. Nowhere in his usual repertoire, not once, has it ever involved being turned into a human cannonball by a wolf-woman built like a natural disaster.

Claws flash sharp in the moonlight as she drops from directly above without warning, a black shape blotting out the stars entirely for the half-second before impact.

He barely rolls clear in time, new instincts flaring into action as he flips over a fallen trunk she reduced to splinters directly behind him, chunks of bark raining down hard across his shoulders as he scrambles back upright and keeps moving on pure momentum alone.

He bolts, legs pumping faster than they’ve ever moved in his entire life, the forest floor blurring beneath him.

"I’m not ready for this! I don’t even know how this blessing works!"

"The blessing doesn’t answer to conscious thought. Only instinct, buried deep enough that you can’t overthink it." Her voice chases him easily through the trees, unbothered by the distance.

"No idea what that actually means!" he yells back, pressing himself flat against a nearby tree trunk to hide, and freezes completely as his own skin ripples in response, shifting color and texture without his input, bark-brown creeping steadily across both arms until he’s rendered nearly invisible against the wood itself, down to the faint whorls and grooves of the bark’s actual texture. He stares down at his own forearm, genuinely stunned by the sight, quietly filing this particular development under things to absolutely never mention to Serenith.

He holds his breath entirely, heart hammering loud enough in his own ears that it seems genuinely impossible she wouldn’t hear it too. Long, tense moments pass before her sniffing draws steadily closer, her huge shape moving unhurried between the trees, scanning, hunting with patient thoroughness.

She pauses twice along the way, head cocked, close enough each time that he can feel the warmth radiating directly off her, and both times she moves on without quite looking directly at him, close enough to touch.

She spots him anyway, on the third slow pass, chuckling low under her breath.

"You learn fast, don’t you."

He bursts from cover the instant she speaks and sprints hard, weaving between trunks in a desperate zigzag.

"How long exactly do I need to survive?!"

"You only survive if you beat me!"

"That’s impossible!"

"I’ve seen you do impossible things already tonight."

The ground ahead of him detonates without warning, throwing up a full curtain of soil and torn roots in every direction. Dust settles slowly over a fresh crater, and she’s standing calmly in the center of it, grinning wide, fangs bared, not even remotely winded by the effort.

"Strangest courtship I’ve ever personally been on," he pants, doubling over hard, both hands braced against his knees.

"You say that like it’s a bad thing."

"Observation. Purely professional, I assure you." he replies between heaves, "If nothing, I’m loving all the cardio."

She snickers at that, then blurs again, there and gone in the space of a single blink.

Something in him reacts before conscious thought even catches up properly, some new sense flaring hot at the very edge of her bloodlust, a prickling warning that floods up his entire spine a full heartbeat before his own eyes could register the actual threat.

He gets his arms up just in time to block a flying kick aimed squarely at his skull, the impact driving him backward, boots carving twin trenches through the forest floor beneath him.

Her claws tear through both forearms anyway, blood spraying across them both as the impact sends him flying, crashing hard through another tree in a shower of splintered wood, all the air punched clean out of his lungs before he finally skids to a stop in a heap of torn earth and broken branches.

He slumps back against the exposed roots, laughing weakly, blood dripping steadily off both forearms now and pooling dark in the churned dirt beneath him.

"I feel genuinely sorry for your exes."

"I don’t keep exes," she says, laughing low in her throat, stalking closer at an unhurried pace. "I keep trophies."

"Terrifying. Also, somehow, deeply arousing." Lucien replies, "We should probably unpack that particular observation later, slowly and at length. Perhaps over a glass of wine."

She cackles, cheast heaving with delight, blurs again, and scoops him bodily up by the throat, lifting him until his boots dangle a full foot off the ground.

"You are the funniest prey I’ve ever hunted." She smirks at him. "The most entertain dinner I’ve ever had."

"I live to serve." Lucien mutters through choked breath.

She shakes her head slowly, her laughing renewed, "You’re absolutely insane!" she snorts, then hurls him viciously through the forest with everything she’s got behind it

Lucien, now functioning as a meat projectile, arcs well above the treeline before gravity properly remembers he exists at all. He bullets through branches, limbs flailing wildly, snapping small twigs off with every part of his body that makes contact along the way, leaves and bark peeling away in his wake like he’s actively shedding a second skin made entirely of forest debris.

She drops down onto all fours below and gives chase on the ground, howling with pure, unrestrained delight, the sound rolling out over the treetops like a hunting horn signaling the end of a very one-sided race.

He slams hard into a tree trunk high up, slumping down onto a sturdy branch near the top, chest heaving.

She skids to a stop directly below, one clawed hand braced casually against the trunk, peering up through the canopy at him with the exaggerated patience of a woman who genuinely has all night ahead of her and fully intends to use every minute of it.

"You coming down, then, or should I come up and get you myself?"

"Apologies! One minute," he calls back down, voice still ragged. "Making myself presentable first. Wouldn’t want to look bad at my own devouring, after all. Reputation matters."

She cackles hard again, clutching her ribs with one hand.

He drags himself upright on the branch with real effort, body throbbing throughout, one rib cracked cleanly, his face swelling badly along one side, blood still trickling slow and steady down both forearms and dripping off his fingertips into the leaves scattered below.

Every single part of him hurts now, in some new, previously undiscovered way. And yet, buried somewhere deep beneath the throbbing, there’s a low, persistent thrum of something that feels disturbingly, unmistakably close to genuine satisfaction.

He looks down at her, still grinning up at him from the forest floor, still laughing openly at his last line, tail swishing lazily through the dirt like she hasn’t got a single other place in existence she’d rather be tonight.

He smiles back anyway, despite the split lip, tasting warm blood along one corner of his mouth.

"If I’m going to die tonight," he yells down, "at least I’m making a goddess happy while I do it. There are certainly worse ways to go."