Chapter 71: WHERE PATHS VANISH

The slope held still after Veilhollow sealed behind them. Cold wind flattened the wet grass around Sio’s boots, carrying pine and damp soil over the mineral taste still clinging to his mouth. Nobody rushed them, and that alone felt wrong.

Three hunters near the lower road were staring past Sio toward the blank stone where the entrance had been. One of them lowered his weapon without realizing it. "They came out." The woman beside him tightened both hands around her spear. "They’re alive. Nobody said anyone came back out."

Sio looked over one shoulder at the mountain. Good to know that after the fact. The stone gave him nothing back but a pale seam already disappearing beneath shadow.

A projector snapped open near the road. Blue light climbed above a hunter’s palm, broke into flickering panes, and Sio recognized the numbered symbol before his own face appeared beside Angle’s. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

TARGET SIGHTING CONFIRMED

LAST VERIFIED ROUTE: VEILHOLLOW

SURVIVAL STATUS: UNCONFIRMED

Sio stared at the symbol. "That holographic bastard isn’t even here and he still found a way to annoy me."

Rhea made a small sound beside him that she failed to hide. Gumm tightened around her shoulders while Angle rolled one wrist inside his gauntlet, heat already blurring the air around his knuckles. Sterling adjusted his glasses and studied the projection. "On the positive side, their information is outdated." The hunter closed it with his thumb. "Not anymore."

Two people still had not moved. One sat on a high boulder with a long wrapped weapon across his knees. The other leaned against the broken pine farther right, hands inside a dark coat. Neither joined the ring tightening around Sio’s group, and that bothered him more than the weapons pointed their way.

The first attack came from the tree line. A metal bolt cut toward Sterling, curved when he ducked, then bent again around Sio’s shoulder. Its path wriggled beneath the Scar instead of holding straight.

Sio opened a portal no wider than his hand. The bolt vanished and came out beside a hunter charging Rhea. The man twisted away from it, giving her all the space she needed. Her heel broke his balance, claws caught his coat, and she drove him face-first into the wet slope.

"That was mine," Sio said as he shifted away from another blade. Rhea glanced over her shoulder. "You sent him to me." Sio pointed between them. "Shared custody."

Her mouth pulled upward as a broad man crashed into her from the side. Rhea punched beneath his ribs, but her fist sank disturbingly far as his torso folded around the impact, then snapped back into shape. He grinned and swung. Rhea took the blow across one forearm, boots carving tracks through the grass, then watched his ribs as he came again.

Her next strike changed direction halfway through. Claws caught the solid point shifting inside his chest, and she lifted him off his feet before throwing him into the runoff channel.

Sio caught the movement and nearly smiled. Okay. That was attractive. The teamwork. Obviously.

A knife passed close enough to stir his hair while another hunter dropped low and slapped a full palm against Sio’s boot. Something tightened through leather, soil and stone. His foot would not lift.

The palm hunter reached for his wrist. Sio opened a portal beneath the trapped boot instead. A chunk of wet earth vanished with it and dropped from another opening two steps away.

Sio stumbled free with part of the mountain stuck to his sole, caught the knife wielder’s next arm and opened a portal beside the man’s elbow. Momentum carried him through, and Rhea’s hand emerged from the other side to seize his collar without even looking. She tightened her grip and called, "Shared custody?"

Sio ducked another strike and opened space between himself and the next attacker. "See? You’re learning."

A second impact slammed into Rhea where an earlier punch had landed, though nothing touched her. Sio saw the first attacker smile and understood enough. "His hits repeat."

Rhea rolled the injured shoulder once. The man landed another blow and retreated, expecting the delayed strike to punish her. When it arrived she turned with it, letting the force carry her forward. Her knee buried into his stomach, and she caught the back of his head before driving his face into the same patch of ground twice.

Downhill, another hunter had been sprinting toward Sterling for nearly thirty metres. Each stride sent a stronger vibration through the slope. Sterling looked from the charging man to a reading on one of his devices. "That number is becoming unpleasant."

A transparent field snapped upright. The runner hit it at full speed, and the crack reached Sio through his teeth as the man bounced backward across the grass. Sterling stared at the fractured device instead of him. "That was custom made."

Another curved bolt arrived while he was still inspecting the damage. Sio watched it ignore Sterling after he dropped flat and bend toward the blood on Sio’s forearm. Blood. He smeared two fingers across a loose stone and threw it toward the road. The bolt changed direction and chased it, punching through another hunter’s sleeve.

Angle reached that hunter almost immediately. Fire flashed from one gauntlet in a narrow burst, turning the man’s weapon red and forcing him to drop it. A woman rushed Angle from behind with black plates layering over her arms. Angle blasted the mud beneath her lead foot, and Sio opened a portal as she fell.

She dropped through and came out above the runoff channel, directly in front of Rhea. Sio presented her with one hand, and Rhea hit the woman hard enough to shatter the black plates against the water.

Sterling planted two flickering fields near the cave mouth and called, "Left," while Sio caught three hunters trying to force that side. He dropped one through a portal behind Angle, who answered with a compact burst into the man’s chest. Rhea intercepted the second, drove him off balance and sent him toward another opening Sio had already placed.

The man fell out above Sterling’s nearest field, bounced off the barrier and crashed into the third attacker. Sterling watched both collapse. "I’m beginning to resent being identified as the easy one."

"You look expensive," Sio said, tasting blood where he had bitten his cheek. "People make assumptions."

"That is not better." Sterling kicked a device uphill just before a spear struck where it had been, and the small disc unfolded into a slanted field that forced its owner straight toward Angle.

Angle met him with one controlled burst. Heat washed across the slope without blooming outward, and the hunter dropped with his coat smoking rather than burning. Rhea laughed somewhere to Sio’s right, brief and breathless, and the sound eased the tightness under his ribs before he had time to examine why.

The broad hunter climbed from the runoff channel again. Sio almost opened a portal toward Rhea, then stopped when he saw her watching the shifting shape beneath the man’s skin. When the brute tried to swallow her next punch, Rhea changed targets and drove both claws into the shoulder that remained solid. She stepped inside his wild swing and threw him over her hip hard enough to shake water from the grass.

Rhea was already turning toward the next threat, so Sio shifted his attention to Angle. Three hunters had surrounded him, and he answered with short bursts: a wrist burned, a knee gave out, a blade melted through its center before reaching him.

One fallen hunter reached for a weapon. Heat climbed Angle’s gauntlet until the air around it whitened. He looked down, let the fire shrink, kicked the weapon away and moved on. There was nothing calm in his face; he was simply refusing to spend that anger here.

By the time the wind shifted, bodies covered the slope between Veilhollow and the lower road. Some groaned, others had stopped trying to stand, and the few hunters still upright had spread apart instead of advancing.

Rhea stood near the center with blood along one cheek and mud darkening her knees. Sio still had a slab of earth stuck beneath one boot, Angle’s gauntlets smoked at the seams, and Sterling crouched beside another ruined device looking personally offended by its death.

The two watchers had not moved. Sio had checked them between almost every exchange, yet the man on the boulder still sat with the wrapped weapon across his knees and the figure by the pine had not taken their hands from their coat. Everyone else had shown him something he could read: a direction, a habit, a tell, a mistake. Those two had given him nothing.

A hunter near the road finally looked uphill. "Are you two planning to help?" The man on the boulder lifted the wrapped weapon from his knees and stood. At the broken pine, the other hunter pushed away from the trunk.

Sio straightened and wiped blood from his forearm onto his trousers. "Angle."

He did not need to say more. Angle followed his stare, Rhea’s ears turned toward the same two people, and Sterling rose without bothering to collect his broken device.

The man from the boulder stepped down onto the slope. Sio caught the route immediately, clean and simple beneath the Scar, and then it disappeared. Not changed or redirected. Gone so completely that the absence hurt worse than a wrong path.

Pain tightened beneath Sio’s right eye as he searched for the missing connection. The second hunter’s path had vanished as well, leaving only wet grass trembling where they had stood.

Rhea’s head snapped left. Angle turned right while Sterling’s hand disappeared inside his coat. Sio found nothing in either direction until both paths returned at once.

One ended directly in front of him. The other cut in from his blind side, so close that cold metal and wet leather reached him before his mind placed the bodies. Rhea shouted his name, but both hunters were already inside the space his portals needed him to understand. Two attacks closed from different directions while his Scar offered him no time to decide which path to break.