I jumped over a dead man.
Shoots snapped.
Branches whipped against my arms. My shoes pounded on the earth when I landed and fired again.
Boom.
Boom.
The second shot clipped his shoulder. I saw it jerk. Heard the hiss of his pain.
Got you.
And now I was past instinct.
Now I was hunting.
Eyes locked.
Gun hot.
Blood drying in a line down my cheek.
This wasn’t just a chase anymore. This was execution. And I was closing in.
Poor bastard.
He didn’t know whose graveyard he’d just run into. This forest wasn’t natural.
I designed it with Reo—every stalk, every twist, every deceptive clearing. It took us seven months and three architects to perfect the layout.
Each section had purpose just in case someone tried to escape: confusion in the West, entrapment in the East, open kill-zone at the center. The wind patterns weren’t an accident. Neither were the trees that grew slightly curved, like nature had a bias for death.
We laid it out like a blade—tip to hilt.
I knew every blind corner. Every soft patch of moss that muffled footfall. Every stalk that we sharpened at the root so it could skewer a man from below if he stepped too hard.
He bolted right.
I angled left, grinning.
There was a bend ahead. A curved tree with false shelter behind it. We let it grow on purpose. Its trunk was wide, low, and slanted—a natural place for cowards to hide.
But behind it?
Dead end.
Another twenty feet and he would run into a wall of stalks, so thick and woven they might as well be stone.
Now I know where the other two traitors are hiding.
He thought he was gaining distance. He didn’t know this was my forest, and now it was closing in around him.
The bamboo ahead dipped into a shallow arch. I didn’t slow. I slid beneath it, one palm grinding into the damp earth, fingers splaying for balance, knees bent, absorbing the glide like a panther on wet stone.
Dirt sprayed up my side.
My body compressed, every muscle tight, braced, until I cleared the bend and sprang up again, fast and clean, shoes gripping moss like claws.
