My pussy spasms just from touching it. The scale carries his scent—musk and ozone and something that makes my body recognize compatibility on a cellular level. I should throw it away. Instead, I pocket it, feeling it burn against my hip through the fabric.
I map for three more hours, humping every vertical surface when the need gets too intense. Trees, rocks, fallen logs. Nothing helps. My fingers aren't enough. The orgasms just make me need more, need different, need what I can't give myself.
Everywhere I go, I find evidence. Claw marks at my eye level. Disturbed ground where something massive passed. That scent that makes my pussy clench without touch. He's following me. Learning my patterns. Surrounding me with his presence.
By afternoon, I've covered maybe half a square mile. My inner thighs are raw from the constant wetness. My clit stays swollen, protruding, catching on fabric with every step. But I've identified safe paths, dangerous zones, and potential resources.
Time to repurpose the locator beacon they gave me.
My hands shake as I strip the electronics, half from need and half from concentration. The proximity sensor still works. Using conductive vine fibers—everything here conducts something—I create basic alarms. They won't stop a hunter, but they'll warn me when something large approaches.
“Not just prey,” I tell myself, placing the last alarm. “Opponent with tools.”
That's when I find the shed skin.
Thirty-three feet of translucent scales draped deliberately over branches. Display behavior. Whatever shed this wanted it seen. Each scale is palm-sized, still warm somehow. The pattern makes my eyes follow its length, imagine it filled with muscle and purpose.
The skin is fresh. Maybe a day old. The scent clings to it—him, unmistakably him. My body recognizes it from the marks, the scale, the presence in the water. This is my hunter. This is what's been watching me.
My pussy clenches hard at the thought. That's what's hunting me. That's what my body is being prepared for. Something massive enough to leave this skin, intelligent enough to display it.
“Fuck me,” I whisper, then laugh bitterly. “That's the point, isn't it?”
I wake to my proximity alarms beeping. All three at once.
He's circling my shelter.
I freeze, three fingers buried in my pussy where I've been fingering myself in my sleep. The beeping stops. The silence is worse. He's inside the perimeter now.
The sunrise brings full body awareness of how fucked I am. Literally, eventually, if the statistics are right. My clit is permanently swollen now, jutting out, rubbing against everything. My nipples stay hard as stones. Wetness runs down my thighs constantly, my body preparing for what it thinks is inevitable.
But there's something new. His scent is everywhere. On the bark where I sleep. In the air I breathe. On my skin somehow, marking me as chosen. My pussy responds to it with violent clenching, gushing so much wetness I actually sob from the empty ache.
I document the changes mentally while grinding against my own hand. Sensitivity increased fifty percent. Natural lubrication tripled. The empty ache has become physically painful, like cramps but sexual. My body is optimizing itself for breeding despite my mind's objections.
A sound outside. Deliberate. Something large moving through water.
I force myself to leave the shelter, even though walking makes everything worse. Each step makes my thighs slide together, makes my clit throb, makes the emptiness angrier. I've started walking differently, legs slightly spread, trying to minimize contact that just makes me need more.
Fresh claw marks on every tree. A barrier of them. Territory marked in a circle around my shelter. I'm surrounded by evidence of him.
The blue pool calls to me. I need water, and it's the only safe source. But I know he'll be there. Waiting. Watching.
I wade in slowly, gasping as warmth embraces me. The water feels like being fingered everywhere at once. My pussy spasms, gushing more wetness that mingles with the aphrodisiac water. I'm making sounds I can't control, needy whimpers that announce my desperation to anything listening.
The water moves wrong. Currents that shouldn't exist. Something massive displacing liquid just beneath the surface. He's here. Close enough that I can feel the water temperature change from his body heat.
“I know you're there,” I gasp, hand going between my legs without permission. “Enjoying the show, asshole?”
A low sound vibrates through the water. Not quite a growl. Something deeper. It resonates in my bones, makes my pussy clench so hard I actually scream. My body recognizes that frequency. Knows what it means. Mating call.
But I still can't see him. Just shadows beneath the surface. Coils the size of tree trunks moving in patterns that hypnotize. The water carries his pheromones directly to my skin, making every nerve ending fire with need.
“Show yourself,” I manage between desperate strokes. “Stop hiding.”
The sound comes again, closer. The water near my legs swirls with his movement. Something brushes my calf—a single scale against skin—and I come so hard my vision whites out. Just from that touch. That tiny contact.
When I can see again, he's gone. But the water carries something new. Words in Vhazian that my implant translates:
