Chapter 92: Ask for Trouble, Get Trouble

Uriel yanked Seraphina into the fork on the left.

There was no path here. Undergrowth clawed at them from both sides. Vines whipped across their faces. Branches raked past their cheeks. Mud sprayed up from under his boots and caught Seraphina somewhere behind him. He threw his free hand up and clawed through a curtain of thorned creeper, dragging her through the tangle of exposed roots — dodging, leaping, anything to keep moving.

Seraphina ran with him, her other hand pressed against the collection bag on her shoulder to stop it from bouncing off. Uriel was clearing the path, but the branches he shoved aside kept snapping back at her.

"Uriel." Her voice jolted with each step. "I hope your escape route doesn't add a third problem."

Uriel didn't look back. He vaulted a fallen log without breaking stride. "Pray the two behind us don't catch up first!"

Seraphina glanced down at their joined hands.

"You didn't choose this path just to hold hands, did you."

Her voice cut through the rustling leaves and landed directly in his ear.

"What—" Uriel whipped his head back, eyes wide, caught one look at her expressionless face, snapped back to front before he ran into a tree, his voice cracking an octave in sheer, defensive panic. "Is this really the time for that?!"

A wall of wind slammed into them from behind, followed by an impact that seemed to rattle the bones of the entire forest.

The adult Roundhead had committed. One full-force pounce, claws driving into the trunk of a massive tree just off their flank. The tree snapped at the middle — The entire crown crashed down, the impact shuddering through the ground beneath their feet. Broken branches and shredded leaves rained down and nearly buried them both.

Through the rising dust, the Roundhead pulled itself over the fallen trunk. Its paw pressed down; the wood splintered and sagged under the weight. Those amber eyes found them through the haze, and a low, rolling rumble built in its throat.

The hairs on the back of Uriel's neck stood on end.

He pushed through the settling dust and locked onto a feature in the terrain ahead.

An ancient tree—massive, gnarled, its trunk broad enough to hide a carriage behind. The trunk was enormous — a dozen people with linked arms couldn't have circled it. The bark had split into plates the size of flagstones. At the base, rot and time had eaten out a hollow — a gap dark enough and deep enough to disappear into.

A Roundhead Tiger couldn't possibly fit through that opening.

"This way!"

He drove off the mud, pulled Seraphina into a sliding turn, and they threw themselves into the hollow one after the other, half-running and half-falling.

The interior was surprisingly spacious. It smelled of damp wood and moss. There was even enough room to stand comfortably.

They put their backs against the curved inner wall and breathed.

Seraphina raised one hand and wiped a fleck of mud from her cheek with the back of her wrist. She set the collection bag down by her feet and steadied her breathing.

"Good observation," she said evenly. "Spotting the hollow under pressure."

Uriel dragged his sleeve across his forehead, already forming a response—

"Assuming the smaller one doesn't follow us here." She completed the sentence without pause. "Also, hollows like this are common denning sites. Venomous snakes. Cave-dwelling magical beasts."

His arm stopped mid-wipe.

"Don't jinx it."

WHAM.

The entire tree shook. A shower of splinters rained from the ceiling and settled across Uriel's shoulder.

He spun toward the entrance.

A massive feline face filled the opening. Eyes adjusted wide for the dim interior, pupils blown out to full black circles. The Roundhead pressed its nose to the gap and inhaled — a long, wet, stentorian sniff — and breathed out a gust of warm air that carried the full weight of whatever it had last eaten.

It found them.

The rumble that followed was not happy. One enormous forepaw drove into the opening and swept the interior. Splinters flew. Claws raked blind arcs through the hollow.

The tips stopped about half a meter short of Uriel's boot.

He stared at the thrashing paw. Then at the massive body lodged immovably in the entrance. Too big to fit. Simple.

His shoulders dropped. The tension drained out of him all at once.

He stood up, planted his hands on his hips, and addressed the blocked entrance with the energy of a man who had just survived something and hadn't finished processing it yet.

"Not so tough now, huh?! Big head, round body, can't fit through a door! Come on then! Come get me!"

The paw swept in again. Uriel flinched back. Still short.

He timed the next swing, stepped in, and delivered a petty, face-saving kick directly to the side of the intruding paw. The Roundhead yanked it back with a sharp snarl. Light returned to the entrance.

"How's that feel?" Uriel dusted off his hands and turned back toward Seraphina, grinning. "It'll get bored and leave. Cats have terrible attention spans—"

Seraphina was looking past him.

"Uriel."

"Yeah?"

"It's squeezing through."

Something cracked behind him. Deep, wet pops, one after another — sounds no living creature should have been making.

He turned.

The Roundhead's head was inside the hollow.

Its skull had compressed. The opening was pressing the round face into something no longer quite round, the wood biting into the fur on either side of its head, neck muscles contorting at angles that should not have been possible. But it kept coming. Steady. Methodical. The gap widened around its skull as wood cracked and splintered.

One shoulder followed. Then a forepaw, claws hooking into the inner wall, dragging. The wood at the entrance edge split and crumbled under the force. The hollow expanded, one splinter at a time.

"Are you serious—" Uriel was beside Seraphina in one step. "Cats are liquid?!"

Seraphina stood next to him. She watched the tiger force its way inside. Then she looked at Uriel's face.

"You were very brave just now," she said, with complete sincerity and zero emotional inflection. "What's the plan from here? Use the confined space to limit its movement range and eliminate it on favorable ground?"

Uriel looked at the claws, which had already reached the spot where he'd been standing. Five parallel furrows in the earth.

Then he looked deeper into the hollow. Faint light at the far end. A second opening.

"Obviously," he said, and grabbed her wrist. "We run."

---

The light grew. The passage opened.

They burst out into a clearing.

Circular, wide, completely unobstructed. The canopy pulled back and let the sky in. It would have been almost serene.

Directly ahead was a cliff face. It was sheer, smooth, and at least sixty meters high. There wasn't a single ledge or crack to use as a handhold. Sixty, maybe seventy meters of pale stone with nothing to hold onto — no ledges, no cracks, no mercy. The sky above it was a clean ellipse of light.

At the center of the clearing, a few enormous vines lay dead across the ground. Each one was several meters across, arranged in no particular pattern, like something immense had fallen here and never been cleared away.

Uriel swept the perimeter.

One exit: the passage they'd just come through.

A dead end. Completely and utterly screwed.

He stood there. His gaze moved from the cliff to the clearing to the cliff again. His hand had tightened around Seraphina's wrist without him noticing.

Seraphina extracted her wrist — gently, though it had begun to ache. She turned to face the passage entrance behind them.

"I see." A single nod. Calm as a morning briefing. "Draw the Roundhead in using the hollow to restrict its movement, then eliminate it in a contained space with no exit routes. That was the plan all along, wasn't it, Uriel."

Behind her, heavy footsteps echoed from the passage.

The Roundhead emerged.

Its previously sleek orange coat was destroyed — scraped raw in patches, matted with wood dust and debris, standing up in wrong directions where the entrance had dragged across it. It pulled itself fully into the open, shook once, and straightened up.

The clearing light hit it with no obstruction. Muscle moved under that tawny fur like something cast from iron.

It looked at Uriel.

Uriel looked at it.

"HROOOAAAALLL—"

The roar that tore from its throat didn't just rattle the trees—it made the air itself heavy, vibrating in the marrow of their bones.

Maybe he shouldn't have kicked it that hard.