Chapter 886: The Hunters Become The Hunted [I / Bonus - ]

Chapter 886: The Hunters Become The Hunted [I / Bonus Chapter]

He set the coffee down and leaned back, lacing his fingers over his stomach.

“You know what happened back home,” he said. “Old man Vanderbilt threw forty billion credits at a pair of magic gloves for that one-armed freak, and he got nothing… Not a scrap of return… Board’s been bleeding ever since, and the old man’s been looking for any way to plug the hole.”

His mouth twisted.

“Jobs like this are how we plug it in quietly with nothing that leads back home though I’m sure that they’ve discovered it must be from us since we have high technology but as long as they don’t have any proof, we’re quite safe and I’m trusting in our technology.”

He would have been scared of this Jungle witch thing that their source had told them existed in the forest but their technology was sold to them by a member of the World Council’s Elite so Briggs was sure that they would be able to avoid her throughout this whole mission.

’I hope…’

Another voice cut in from the doorway.

A wiry woman with a tight blond braid and a drone controller strapped to her forearm stepped into the module, wiping mud off her gloves.

“Speaking of quiet,” she said, “something lit up the sky to the east about two hours ago… A huge black blast over the canopy and thermals went crazy.”

Briggs frowned.

“Military?”

“Didn’t look like any military ordnance I know,” the woman said. “And there’s chatter on the Amazonian bands… Something about the High Marshal heading into the deep forest personally.”

The young man laughed nervously.

“Maybe the jungle witch finally woke up?”

Briggs snorted.

“The jungle witch,” he repeated, rolling his eyes. “The locals tell that story to scare their kids… A naked woman who lives in the trees and talks to animals and kills anyone who touches her forest.”

He picked up his coffee again. “We’ve been in this forest for two months, taken eleven high-value specimens and haven’t seen so much as a footprint. If she’s real, she’s either dead or very, very bad at her job… besides our technology is too advanced for this.”

The woman didn’t laugh.

“The locals also say she’s why nobody’s poached the deep basin in two hundred years,” she said quietly.

“And the locals didn’t have cloaking drones,” Briggs said, unbothered. “Relax… We move on the Starmane tonight, we load the trucks and we’re across the border by dawn then this whole place can go back to telling ghost stories.”

He sipped his coffee and smiled.

Outside, beyond the shimmering dome, the jungle had gone strangely quiet and none of them noticed.

…

Forty miles to the east, the Amazonian forward outpost at Igarapé Bend was a much louder place.

It sat on a wide bend of the river, a fortified cluster of concrete bunkers, watchtowers and steel docks carved out of the jungle’s edge.

Three river gunboats rocked gently at their moorings, sleek and bristling with cannons as soldiers in jungle armor hurried back and forth between them carrying crates of ammunition and coils of cable.

Floodlights were already flickering on along the walls as the afternoon light began to fade into deep orange.

Inside the main command bunker, a large holographic map of the forest glowed above a steel table.

Valeria Da Silva stood at the head of it with her hands braced on the edge and her scarred jaw set like iron, and the warmth she’d shown Aki on the riverbank was nowhere to be seen.

This was the High Marshal of Amazonia now, the woman who had unified the jungle territories through sheer force, and every soldier in the room stood a little straighter when her eyes passed over them.

“Here,” Da Silva said, tapping a stretch of flooded forest far to the west.

The map zoomed in. “Lara’s pointing us to this region… We’ve swept it twice in the last month and found nothing. There’s no heat, no signal and no tracks to work with either.”

“Because they’re hiding,” Lara said.

She was leaning against the far wall of the bunker with her arms crossed and her staff propped against her shoulder, still completely naked, and every soldier in the room was very carefully not looking at her.

Two of them had been reassigned to door duty because they couldn’t stop blushing.

“Their machines bend the forest around them,” Lara went on, bored. “They hide from your satellites and your patrols and your little scanners… but they can’t hide from the forest… The trees remember where they’ve walked and the water remembers where they’ve waded.”

Her jade eyes narrowed.

“I can feel them… They’re right there…”

The issue with this feeling she was getting and having information from nature was that there was something interfering… there were few beings on her level so where was this Columbia place getting technology to counter her senses?

’There are few beings on my level that actually exist… so one of them could be helping these people succeed in my forest.’ Lara thought. ’Which means that our pact is being broken…’

Da Silva nodded slowly with her eyes on the map.

“Then we hit them tonight,” she said. “Before they move… Leona.”

Captain Leona stepped forward, her hazel eyes sharp.

“Ma’am.”

“Take a recon team on the river using wind and water only, no engines… Find the edges of their cloak and map their drone ring, I want to know exactly where it ends.”

“Understood,” Leona said, and then, a little dryly, “and if they happen to spot us, ma’am? Any instructions for that particular situation?”

“Then don’t let them spot you, Captain.” Da Silva said, without looking up from the map.

“Very helpful, ma’am, thank you,” Leona said, in a voice so perfectly deadpan that two of the soldiers by the door had to look away to keep from laughing.

Da Silva’s mouth twitched at the corner, just once, and she turned to the stiff young woman standing beside her.

“Maya…”

“Front line!” Maya said instantly, snapping to attention so hard her boots clacked. “Request permission to lead the assault, High Marshal!”

“Denied,” Da Silva said, without even a pause. “You’ll lead the second wave…”

“But High Marshal, I…”

“Second wave, Lieutenant,” Da Silva repeated, in the flat final tone that every soldier in Amazonia knew meant the conversation was over and Maya’s protest died in her throat.

Maya’s jaw tightened in visible frustration, and her eyes flicked toward Aki standing beside the map, then toward Kara leaning lazily against a filing cabinet with her hand in her pocket.

She wanted to be in the first wave, after all, she wanted Lord Vespera to see her fight.

“…Yes, High Marshal,” she said through her teeth.

“Good,” Lara said from the wall. “Then it’s settled… We go in, we find them and I kill all of them.”

The whole bunker went silent as Da Silva closed her eyes briefly.

“Lara…”

“They took my matriarch’s mate,” Lara said, and for the first time since they’d met her, her voice wasn’t lazy or amused at all.

It was flat and very cold.

“They’ve taken eleven of my beasts in two months… They’ve drugged them and caged them and stolen them from their dens in the night. I’m going to put every single one of them into the river and let the matriarch sort out the rest.”

Nobody spoke then Aki stepped forward.

She walked across the bunker until she was standing right in front of Lara, small and blue-haired and still faintly streaked with mud, and she looked up at the tall woman without flinching.

“No,” Aki said quietly.

Lara looked down at her.

“No?”

“If you kill them, the animals they’ve already taken will be gone forever,” Aki said. “Somebody’s already moved them, Lara… Eleven beasts in two months, and you said yourself they’re gone. If they’re all dead, nobody can tell us where they went or who bought them.”

Her blue eyes hardened.

“Alive, they can talk. Alive, they can be put on trial in front of the whole world, and everyone will know exactly what Columbia’s been doing in your forest… Their names will be dragged through the mud… The buyers will be exposed and nobody will ever dare to come back here again.”

The bunker was very quiet.

Lara looked down at the little princess for a long moment with her jade eyes looking unreadable.

“…You’d rather humiliate them than kill them,” she said slowly.

“I’d rather destroy them properly,” Aki corrected. “Killing them is too fast.”

A slow sharp smile spread across Lara’s lips.

“I like you, little thing,” she said. “You’re vicious…”

“Thank you,” Aki said primly.

Leaning on the filing cabinet, Kara watched the whole thing with a quiet fond pride swelling in her chest.

’Eh? She’s becoming a bit too ruthless…’ she thought.

Da Silva cleared her throat.

“Alive, then,” she said. “All of them… They’ll be taken back to Nova Manaus and put in front of a tribunal.”

She glanced at Lara.

“You can break as many bones as you like on the way, so long as they can still talk.”

“Oh you’re very generous~” Lara drawled.

The briefing broke up.

Soldiers hurried out to prepare the gunboats, Leona gathered her recon team with a few short sharp orders, and Maya marched off toward the armory muttering under her breath about second waves.

Kara pushed off the filing cabinet and wandered out of the bunker onto the wide concrete dock, letting the warm evening breeze wash over her face.

The river glowed deep orange in the dying light, and across the water, the jungle was turning dark and loud with the evening chorus of frogs and insects.

She’d made it about twenty steps when a tall shadow fell over her.

“There you are, handsome…” Lara purred.

Kara didn’t even turn her head.

She kept her eyes on the glowing river and let the corner of her mouth curve, as if she’d heard those bare footsteps coming from the other end of the dock.

“Lara,” she said, in the mild tone of someone greeting a stray cat that kept showing up at the door.

The protector of the forest stepped up right beside her, close enough that her bare shoulder brushed Kara’s arm, and leaned her hip against the dock railing so she could look down at her with that lazy knowing smile.

“You’ve been avoiding me… did I perhaps do something wrong?” she said.

“I’ve been standing in a briefing for an hour, watching Valeria point at a map,” Kara said lazily, resting her forearm on the railing. “If that counts as avoiding you, then I’ve been avoiding everyone on this base.”

“Avoiding me,” Lara repeated, completely unbothered.

Her gaze drifted slowly down Kara’s suit. “It’s very rude. Especially after everything I saw…”

Kara finally looked at her.

“You’re going to keep bringing that up, aren’t you?”

“Every chance I get.” Lara leaned in, her locs swaying, until her lips were close to Kara’s ear, and her voice dropped to a low warm murmur that only Kara could hear.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen anything worth looking at in my forest? Three hundred years of jaguars and crocodiles and men too scared to come within a mile of me… and then you walk into my Domain looking like that.”

’So essentially… She’s horny?’

Kara looked at her with mild amusement and absolutely no embarrassment at all.

“And?”

“And I’m still thinking about it…” Lara said simply.

She lifted one long finger and traced it slowly along the edge of Kara’s jaw, from her chin to her ear.

“When this is over, you and I are going to have that private talk you promised me,” she murmured. “Somewhere without a princess guarding you like a little dog…”

“She’d bite you,” Kara said, sounding far more entertained by the idea than worried. “She’s small, but she’s got a very good aim… You can ask her sister.”

“Then I’d bite back,” Lara purred, and her teeth flashed white in the dying light.

“I’ve been biting things for three hundred years, handsome. A little princess doesn’t scare me.”

Behind them, the bunker door opened.

Da Silva stepped out onto the dock with a data-tablet in her hand and her mouth already open to say something about the gunboat schedule.

She stopped.

She took in the scene… Lara leaning against the railing, practically draped over Lord Vespera, her finger resting on Kara’s jaw and her lips hovering near her ear, and Kara standing there completely relaxed, letting her.

Something hot and sharp twisted in Da Silva’s chest.

“…The boats are ready,” she said, much more coldly than she’d meant to.

Lara didn’t move her finger.

“Thank you, Valeria,” she said sweetly, without looking at her.

Da Silva’s jaw tightened.

She looked at Kara, and Kara looked back at her with that same easy, unbothered smile that made Da Silva want to throw something and then do something much worse than throw something.

’Why does it bother me?’ Da Silva thought, gripping the tablet. ’Tch… also when did that woman get more touchy?’

Valeria just turned on her heel and marched back into the bunker, and the door slammed behind her.

BANG!

Lara laughed softly.

“Oh, she likes you,” she murmured.

Kara watched the closed door for a moment, looking quite thoughtful.

“…Well we all have eyes here so I can see that, the issue is why…?” Kara blinked.

Did Valeria like Kara or was she horny like this forest woman next to her…? Truly there was no understanding these Amazonia women.

…

Three hours later, the jungle was black.

The gunboats slid silently up the river with their engines dead and their lights out, carried by a low current of wind that Leona and her team pushed along the surface of the water.

The Amazonian soldiers crouched along the decks with their rifles ready and their breath held, and the forest pressed in close on both sides, rustling with the occasional distant scream of something being eaten.

On the lead boat, Kara sat on the railing with her legs dangling over the edge and her chin propped on her hand.

Aki crouched beside her, peering into the dark with wide determined eyes.

Da Silva stood at the bow with her saber drawn and her scar gleaming faintly in the starlight.

Maya waited behind her with her fists clenched and her Core humming, and Lara stood at the very front of the boat with her staff glowing a barely visible green.

Ahead, Leona’s voice drifted back over the water in a whisper.

“Drone ring’s two hundred yards ahead, ma’am… Twelve units… I can see the edge of the cloak though they’re flickering but something is helping counter their disguises.”

Kara grinned.

’That would be me…’

The cloaking was strong but with her space element, she could easily reveal everything without even taking credit for it… All Kara wanted to do was to wreak havoc for the people of Columbia that were here.

Lara raised her staff as the green gem flared once and all around them, the forest answered.