Text me when you're home.
The words sat behind Ethan's eyes, and they kept coming back. Her voice. That soft “please” at the end. Over and over, the same loop, the same message he couldn't answer. He wasn't going to text her. He wasn't going home. He was here, wherever here was, and she was going to wait.
The guilt came with the thought.
Stephanie loved him. He'd known for a long time, known it in the way she looked at him, in the things she gave up to be there when he needed her. He pretended he didn't see it because seeing it meant doing something about it, and he wasn't ready. Something in him was still raw, still healing, and he cared about her too much to give her half of what she deserved.
He owed her more than he could name. She'd made “text me when you're home” into their ritual because she knew what happened when he went quiet—how easy it was for him to disappear into his own head and not come back for days. She kept pulling him back. Refused to let him vanish.
And now he was going to vanish anyway, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Ethan adjusted his grip on the branch and kept moving toward the smoke. His ribs complained with each step, a hard hot ache that flared when he breathed too deep. His palms stung where dirt and tiny cuts had worked themselves in. The clearing was behind him now, and the forest closed in—trunks, ferns, moss, a canopy that let in thin light from everywhere at once, shadows absent where they should have been.
Something snapped behind him.
Not a twig under his own heel. Not the dull little crack of dead wood giving way. This was heavier, sharper, followed by a scrape that sounded like weight shifting in the brush.
Ethan stopped moving. He forced his breath thin, held his legs still before adrenaline could dump into them and make the decision for him. His ribs wanted a deeper breath; he refused them. Insects ticked. Leaves whispered. And then the brush moved again, and this time the sound had rhythm: two beats, pause, two beats. Testing distance.
He turned his head an inch at a time and saw it between the ferns.
At first it was just shape: low to the ground, thick through the shoulders, built for power. Then it pushed forward and the details resolved, and his brain did what it always did when it found an edge case—tried to label it, failed, tried again. A heavy head with a blunt snout and tusks that curved out and hooked forward. Fur that wasn't quite fur; it lay in coarse clumps, bristled, mottled dark with streaks that made it hard to see in shadow. And the eyes—set forward, predator placement, focused on him and tracking.
The creature inhaled. Ethan heard it—a wet pull through nostrils, reading his scent.
He'd gone hunting as a kid with his uncle—sat in a blind, waited for deer, pulled a trigger from sixty yards. That wasn't this. Nothing in his experience was this. The thing in front of him had tusks it was born with, instincts carved by generations of killing things that ran, and it was reading him the way he read everything else—looking for the pattern, waiting for the mistake. Fear made you fast and stupid, and fast and stupid was what every ambush hunter on earth had been eating for millions of years. His only edge was the six inches between his ears and the dead branch in his hands, and both of those stopped working the moment he let adrenaline do his thinking.
His hands tightened on the branch. Deadwood. Not ideal. But it had reach and it had weight, and that was more than nothing.
He scanned without moving his head. Thick trunk eight feet to his left. Dense undergrowth to the right—no clear path. Behind him, the direction he'd been heading, the trees thinned slightly. If he ran, that was his line. But the creature was low and heavy, built for short explosive charges. It would close distance fast. Running meant giving it his back.
The creature took a step forward. Then another. Not charging yet. Closing the gap.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Ethan shifted his weight onto his back foot, slow, keeping the branch between them. The creature's head tracked the movement. It was smart enough to watch what he was doing. That made it more dangerous.
Twenty feet. Fifteen.
He could try to back toward the thinner trees. Keep facing it. Use the branch to create space if it lunged. But backing up blind in unfamiliar terrain was a good way to trip and die.
The creature's haunches bunched.
Ethan moved first.
He didn't run away—he ran at an angle, cutting hard toward the thick trunk to his left. The creature lunged a half-second later, and the angle meant it had to adjust mid-charge. It was fast, but it wasn't agile. Its shoulder clipped a fern cluster and it stumbled, just slightly, and Ethan used that half-beat to get the trunk between them.
The creature hit the tree instead of him. The impact shook bark loose. It made a sound—not quite a squeal, not quite a roar, something furious and wet—and scrambled around the trunk.
Ethan circled the other way, keeping the tree as a barrier. His ribs screamed. He ignored them. The creature tried to cut him off, and he reversed direction, and for three long seconds they did a deadly dance around the trunk, the creature trying to close and Ethan refusing to let it.
It broke pattern. Feinted left, then surged right, faster than he'd expected.
Ethan didn't have time to circle. He planted his feet and swung the branch hard at its head.
The wood connected with a crack that ran up through his arms. The creature's charge stuttered. Its head jerked sideways, more surprised than hurt, and Ethan was already moving, putting distance between them, scanning for the next piece of cover.
There—a cluster of rocks, waist-high, ten feet away.
He made it five feet before the creature recovered and came again.
This time he couldn't dodge. He turned, braced, and met the charge head-on.
The tusks drove in low, aimed at his gut. Ethan jammed the branch down at an angle, one end in the dirt, the other braced against his hip—a crude spear-brace, the kind of thing he'd read about and hoped worked the same way here. The creature's momentum did the rest.
Chest and throat met angled wood.
The branch bent. Ethan's feet slid in the soft earth. His arms burned with the effort of holding position. The creature pushed, and the wood creaked, threatening to snap—
It broke. Not clean. Jagged. The splintered end punched into the soft space under the creature's jaw.
Not deep. Not dramatic. But enough.
The creature made that wet furious sound again. Its forelegs scrabbled for purchase. It tried to pull back and couldn't, because the jagged wood was caught in muscle and tissue and Ethan was still driving forward on pure reflex. It thrashed, tusks swinging wild, and one of them caught his forearm—a shallow rake that burned hot and immediate. His grip almost broke.
Almost.
He shoved harder. The wood sank deeper. The creature's legs buckled. Its head jerked once, twice, and then the body shuddered and went heavy against the branch.
Ethan held position for a full three seconds, waiting for it to surge back up. It didn't.
He let go of the branch and stepped back. His hands opened slow, reluctant, fingers cramped from gripping too hard. The creature slumped sideways, legs twitching once, then still.
He stood there, chest heaving in shallow pulls, and stared at what he'd killed. His brain tried to run the fight again—every decision, every angle, every half-second where it could have gone differently. The impulse was sharp, almost hungry. He wanted to see the mistakes so he could fix them next time.
Not now. He forced his eyes away.
He checked his body first. Thigh: torn fabric, shallow cut, bleeding but not arterial. Forearm: same. Ribs: still complaining, no worse than before. He could move. He could function. That was enough.
He looked up at the trees, scanning for movement. Listening for the sound of another charge.
Instead he saw the leaves.
They weren't green.
They were blue—subtle at first, visible only when the light hit at a certain angle. But once he saw it, the pattern became obvious. The blue wasn't random. It clustered in bands through the canopy, almost veins, a structure hiding inside what looked natural.
His focus narrowed. The world thinned.
Ethan forced his attention back down with a sharp exhale. He wiped his bloody forearm on his sweatpants—it smeared and did nothing useful. He flexed his fingers. They shook. He swallowed and tasted copper.
Then something hit him that wasn't pain.
It started in his chest and spread outward—a rush of warmth that had no source, flowing into his limbs, his head, his fingertips. For a half-second it felt good. Better than good. A clean bright surge that made the ache in his ribs fade and the burn in his forearm go quiet.
His stomach turned. The feeling was euphoric, and that was wrong. He'd just killed something. He shouldn't feel better for it.
The warmth kept spreading, and his vision flickered—a hard visual intrusion, text forming where nothing should be:
[Ethan Cross… ████████ : ????]
[Initializing.]
Brush crashed at the edge of the clearing.
Two more of them. Same build, same tusks, same predator eyes. They broke the treeline together, already moving fast, and their heads swung toward the body of the one he'd killed.
Then toward him.
Ethan's hand was empty. The branch was still buried in the dead one's throat.
?
THE WEAVE — SIGNAL ECHO (Fragment v0.05)
(uncanny environment… interface still refuses full rendering)
=====================================================================
IDENTITY
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Ethan [CONFIRMED]
Origin Label: UNMOORED [UNCONFIRMED DISPLAY] (do not assume social meaning)
Species: Human [SELF-ID]
Affiliation: None
=====================================================================
SYSTEM STATE
---------------------------------------------------------------------
INTERFACE: INCOMPLETE
Authority: [PRESENT] (object-linked; type not rendered)
=====================================================================
CORE ARCHITECTURE
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Cores: UNFORMED (0/9)
Class: UNFORMED
=====================================================================
THE WEAVE (INTERNAL STRUCTURE)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Meridian Weave: [NO READ]
Vitae Weave: [NO READ]
Nodes: [LOCKED]
Node Map: [LOCKED]
=====================================================================
ATTRIBUTES
---------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTE: no stable readout yet
Strength: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Agility: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Endurance: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Perception: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Intellect: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Will: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Presence: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Luck: [?????????] [GLITCH]
Fate: [?????????] [GLITCH]
=====================================================================
INVENTORY (CARRIED)
---------------------------------------------------------------------
- %^$^* ????? authority seeding (Soul-Quarantine) [UNAPPRAISABLE]
ERROR: REJECTING
Currency: [NONE LOGGED]
=====================================================================
NOTABLE EVENTS
---------------------------------------------------------------------
- Wake in foreign terrain (high uncertainty; assumptions flagged unsafe)
=====================================================================
