Inch by Inch

Jay was the first to notice trouble, which was really a horrible thing.

It was a beautiful day. The rain had cleared up; the air was fresh, and they’d heard more laughter than complaints on their way through the city — his neck had even stopped bothering him. And now he had to ruin all that.

“Broken fence ahead. Nine hundred and twenty-four meters away.” He pointed the broken section out, not that doing so would do much good. He didn’t think either of them were able to see it from so far away.

It was a shame. If whatever smashed the fence was still around, Kane would have seen it first, and likely before Jay had a chance to. Kane was good at that, spotting living creatures and oddities too, if the knobs were any indication. Jay dealt better with... well, he wasn’t entirely sure what. Small details, he guessed.

He’d barely even seen the issue to begin with. The fence was so small from this distance, a speck in his vision instead of the 1.5 m high fence it was in reality. Small enough that Jay wouldn’t have even noticed if it wasn’t for the large gap that had been torn through it. The broken posts formed enough of a gap in the straight line of fencing that it tickled that sense in his brain and gave him a measurement.

Jay shouldn’t have even been looking that way, it was an hour of patrolling away, but he’d wanted to avoid looking at more of the damn crops.

“Some animals escaped?” Ana asked in a voice Jay didn’t understand yet, but believed was a mixture of indecision and hope.

Kane was busy scanning the landscape in the direction of Jay’s finger.

“No,” Jay answered slowly. That sounded like too much of a coincidence to be true. “I don’t think so.”

Left unsaid was that no knob would be breaking down fences. Not cattle fences anyway.

“What do we do?” Ana asked, absently moving her spear in front of her to guard. The handle was starting to brighten under her hands. Faint wisps of light like the first of the morning’s rays.

Jay considered going back to Slow Keeping. It wouldn’t be wrong of them per se. This was a strange report, but it was half a report. A broken fence could mean anything from animals escaping, to a fallen tree, to a misadventurous local, to a deadly oddity attack. Some of that Jay could cross off, but who would believe testimony from a kilometer away given in measurements?

In the end, it boiled down to the same choice they’d made the last time they’d found an oddity.

“We need to check it out.”

“I can’t see anything,” Kane said finally, having finished his search.

Jay took a breath. That was a good sign at least. Less possibility of something waiting in ambush. “Let’s keep an eye out as we get closer.”

They started to move. Jay couldn’t stop one last thing from slipping out.

“Don’t forget, some Oddities you can’t deal with. You just have to run.”

| i i i ¦ i i i | i i i ¦ i i i |

Kane led the way as they followed the tracks leading away from the broken fence, but not out of any real need. The trail was so obvious that Jay or Ana would have been able to guide them with one eye closed. Torn grass could have been cattle, but the footprints? Those were too odd. Each was the size of a dinner plate, and there were too many. To the point that it looked like the creature was dragging something behind it instead of stepping forward. There were two of these trails, 2.19 m apart, and while they weren’t parallel as such, they never wavered far from each other.

“Two of them?” Jay asked quietly, suspecting not.

Kane shook his head. “Unlikely. Not unless they can act in sync, and if they could, why would they have followed the cattle together instead of splitting up and herding them?”

Jay grimaced. This matched none of the descriptions of known oddities around Lauchia. It was unique enough that Peter and Tema should have mentioned something. If the tracks matched a known oddity, they would be able to report back. Now they needed more information. “The tracks are over two meters across. If it’s one oddity...”

“It’s big.” Kane finished.

There was a squeak from behind them. Ana shifting her grip on her spear.

“There is one positive,” Kane said, squatting down in the middle of the tracks and pointing at a smaller footprint in the wet soil. “No bodies. It’s chasing cattle, but hasn’t caught them.”

Jay took a slow breath. “Right. That is good news.”

“Yeah,” Ana agreed with a strange pitch to her voice.

Kane stood. “Trail continues to the grove ahead. Let’s go.”

At a thicket of trees the trail turned, following around the boundary of the woods instead of carrying through. The grove was fenced off, but given the state of the pasture’s sturdier border fence, that wasn’t an obstacle for the oddity. The barrier only served to hinder the cattle. They were running, but where could they go? There was only one exit from the field for them, the one created by the oddity, and they were being chased away from it.

Jay stepped up beside Kane, holding his spear at the ready as they walked around the edge of the woods. The grove was overgrown, the trunks of its trees covered in brambles and brush. Nothing would move quickly through the undergrowth, but its dark depth could hide anything. Long ago, this pasture and grove was closer to the edge of Lauchia’s mana domain, and it showed in the foliage. It was inconsistent, wild, and unruly. The result of a hundred thousand hinterlands brought together over years and scattered. A few thin lofty trunks sought the sky while gnarled branches fought against a thousand kinds of leaves below. The sight was proof that for all the farms around, the area remained a little wild.

It wasn’t the most settling environment to be chasing an oddity near. All the trees did at the moment was block their view of the cattle and their predator.

They walked in silence for another five minutes before Kane inhaled sharply and they stopped. It wasn’t a signal of any kind, but they were on such high alert it might as well have been a scream.

Jay frantically scanned the woods, the surrounding fields. He couldn’t see anything. None of the numbers were abnormal. His breaths came deep.

“I can see... something,” Kane finally said. He was staring at and through the wild trees.

“Any details?”

Kane shook his head.

Jay grimaced again. Where his Word gave him nothing but excruciating detail, Kane’s seemed to be the opposite. His teammate seemed to have trouble focusing on anything he could see, and the only thing they shared was their difficulty with looking at certain objects.

“How far away is it?”

Kane made a face, eyebrows furrowing together. “I can’t tell. It’s past the trees, but there’s too much in the way.”

“Past them...” Jay muttered, looking at the grove once more. Just what exactly did Kane see? If he could see past, through things... It wasn’t important. Not right now. “Let’s continue along the edge. We’ll get eyes on the oddity and leave.”

He examined his teammates. Kane was frowning at whatever he could see through the trees. Ana was rigid and tense, her only movement that of her hands as she shifted her hold over and over again. Her fingers would change position on her spear, forming and losing the grip that Kane and he had taught her. A good portion of the weapon’s shaft was orange now. Jay needed to do something. Say something.

“Ana, everything alright?”

She nodded, a short sharp motion. Her hands didn’t stop their movements.

“We can...”

She shot him a look he couldn’t interpret, but it was enough to make him shut up. She did tend to fidget. Maybe this was like that, a focus instead of a source of concern.

“Let’s go.”

They heard the sounds before it came into sight. A breathy hiss mixed with squelches. The occasional crunch left them no doubts on the noise’s origins and ratcheted Jay’s heart rate to new heights. The smell came after, dung and blood, ruining the fresh crisp air.

At Kane’s signal, they moved slower and slower through the leafy grass until the oddity appeared from around the corner.

It ate in the field away from the trees. The cattle had given up on their race around the grove and fled into the open space in a last ditch effort to escape. Their attempt had failed. They weren’t defenseless creatures either, but the armored humps of the cattle had failed to save them. Three bodies lying around and between the oddity’s six feet were proof of that. Each bore wounds on their back haunches, between the gaps in their natural defences. From the scars on the armor of the closest one, it had taken a while for the oddity to identify this weakness, but when it did, the other two cattle had fallen fast.

The monster’s legs were bulky. Each was 17.45 centimeters across and protected by segmented plates like an ant. However, this creature was larger than Jay, and the plates were the size of breastplates rather than the hand sized exoskeleton of a common ant. The lower half of the legs swelled at the end into flat feet and the upper rose up to a joint above the creature’s body before folding down to where it was attached.

Its body hung, almost suspended, 1.2 m off the ground. It was small in comparison to its legs. Ovular, soft and smooth aside from random patches of bristly fur, it seemed out of place on the creature. The oddity faced away from them, and there were no features on its ill-fitting body that they could see, none that were visible behind its tail, that is.

Unlike the creature’s legs, this last limb was spindly. It was also segmented, but with smaller plates to allow greater movement. The end of the tail was out of sight, steadying the dead cattle that the oddity was feasting on.

Jay held his breath. It was definitely the oddity they’d been following. The bulky feet and number of legs explained the strange tracks. Moving very slowly, he waved his team away. They had all the information they needed to sound the alarm.

They began to move back.

Step by step, they retreated.

Inch by inch.

Something crunched underfoot. It wasn’t the sound of a twig or rotten wood. The noise was crunchy, a crust breaking. It wasn’t loud and for a moment Jay had hope.

Then the oddity began to shuffle around to face them, one long leg on either side shifting at a time. They were discovered.

He watched it turn in slow motion.

Forest movement and stealth lessons with Kane. Second-highest priority, he thought with a strange sense of calm as the possibility of leaving unhindered faded away.

Surviving being the highest, of course.

“Run.”

No one paused at the order. They began to sprint back the way they came, all efforts to keep quiet forgotten.

The monster huffed with anger behind them.

As he ran, he suddenly had an awful thought. If the oddity could catch the cattle, it was faster than them, but only slightly given how long the chase had been.

Are we faster than the cattle?

Jay had never checked. Never thought to wonder. It was a stupid question. A stupid idea to compete against livestock. Now his life depended on that answer.

He kept pace with Ana, whose eyes were wide and wild, and the grove fence flashed by. She was sprinting, far faster than their usual dog track run. Would it be enough? He risked a glance around.

The oddity was leaving its meal behind, legs jerking back and forth as it ran on six legs. Now that it faced them, he could see that the front of its body was as smooth as its back. It had no face, and that bothered him more than he realized. Even the knobs had faces.

How did you fight something without a face? How did you kill it?

Above the featureless body and lurching legs, the oddity’s tail bobbed back and forth. It moved as the legs did, maintaining a balance. The tail’s end hovered above its front in a pointed but not sharp stinger. A stinger hovering at head height, he noticed, a horrifying realization that formed a pit in his stomach.

He ran some more. They were all breathing heavily now. A sprint in full armor with weapons was not easy. Jay glanced around again. The oddity was larger, closer by 3.76 meters. It was gaining on them. More prey was in its sight. It would not abandon its chase.

He focused ahead. Where were they running? Slow Keeping was half an hour away, and the city further still. His team couldn’t keep this pace up, and even if they could, the oddity was faster. They wouldn’t make it to the gate.

Jay refused to be the cattle, to die as they had.

“Into the trees!” he shouted. “Get past that fence.”

The fence wouldn’t stop the creature, but running hopelessly was only going to earn them the same fate as the cattle.

His team obeyed without question. Kane vaulted the lower fence with ease and Ana ducked through the center segment, catching her spear only for a moment. Jay was last over and while he didn’t clear it as easily as Kane, he was still fast enough.

The briars and bushes were a greater obstacle. It wasn’t a matter of effort on the uncertain ground, more avoiding getting your feet and weapon snagged or a fall. Either of which could now be deadly.

Jay could feel his clothes tearing, but it was the least of his concerns as the oddity thudded to a stop on the other side of the fence. There was a long pause that created a faint hope that the creature had given up. When he spun back, it was for naught. The oddity raised a foot and cracked through the wooden fence almost as by accident as it turned. Could it crack bones in the same way?

“Keep going! It’ll have more difficulty with the trees!” he shouted, half to reassure himself.

The sound of the rest of the fence cracking behind them was a strong argument to the contrary.