Instead of accompanying Sally back toward civilisation and fluorescent hospital lights, Umbra made a different choice. She retrieved her spear and shield first, then she slung her handbag over one shoulder, more out of habit than necessity. It looked almost comically domestic against her towering, armoured frame.
“You should stay—” Sally began weakly.
Umbra shook her head once. “I cannot. I sense no more of her creatures nearby. Get yourself to safety.”
And with that, she turned and ran into the wilderness.
She chose the direction of the nearest team that had failed to check in, which was Several kilometres away, according to the last radio confirmation. A trivial distance.
The moment she cleared the edge of the park and entered the thicker treeline, she accelerated.
She did not run like a human, she flowed with unnatural grace. Her tall, lithe frame should have been clumsy, but instead she bled between the trees as though she had been born beneath their canopy. She ducked low branches without breaking stride, twisted sideways through narrow gaps in the undergrowth, and leapt fallen logs in effortless arcs. Leaves whipped past her horns and ferns flattened in her wake.
The forest seemed almost to part for her.
Every footfall was deliberate, controlled. She wasted no movement. Her breathing remained steady despite the pace, her second heart beating in perfect rhythm with the first.
The air tasted wrong.
She followed that sensation as It tugged at her awareness like distant thunder, guiding her in the correct direction. Then the trees thinned abruptly, A highway cut across her path. Cars streaked along it at high speed, unaware of the war being waged in the greenery on either side.
Umbra did not slow.
She planted one foot at the edge of the asphalt and launched herself forward.
The leap carried her clean over the highway. Dozens of metres of road passed beneath her in a blur of painted lines and moving vehicles. For a suspended heartbeat, she was above them all. Above the noise, above the world.
Even the fastest car below could not match her pace.
She landed on the opposite side with a heavy thud that cracked the earth beneath her boots, then continued forward without missing a step, crashing back into the brush. Branches snapped, birds scattered and yet she pressed onward.
Soon, she felt the nearest anchor point more clearly. The bone’s energy hummed steadily, properly embedded.
Two figures stood nearby, rifles raised the instant they caught sight of movement.
Umbra slowed sharply, skidding slightly as she came into view.
“Friendly!” she called out.
The men tensed for half a second longer before recognising her silhouette. They lowered their weapons, though not completely.
Harris and Samuel, if she remembered correctly. Both NZSAS. Both thankfully disciplined enough not to panic at the sight of her charging out of the forest.
“What’s wrong?” Harris asked, scanning past her shoulder instinctively.
“Teams two and eight have not checked in,” Umbra said bluntly. She gestured to the black ichor splattered across her armour. “I was attacked by one of her creatures.”
Both men stiffened slightly at that.
“Have you completed the burial?” she asked.
They nodded.
“The bone is in place,” Samuel confirmed.
“Good.” Umbra gave a curt nod. “Return to the city. Do not engage hostiles if possible. Your bullets will do little to her creatures.”
Harris frowned. “Little?”
“Little,” Umbra repeated. “Aim for joints if you must. Eyes and mouth will make for decent targets, but avoidance is preferable.”
The two soldiers exchanged a brief look.
“Copy,” Samuel said. “We’ll head back to FOB Koru.”
Umbra did not wait for further questions.
The moment she was satisfied that Harris and Samuel were actually retreating, Umbra pivoted sharply on her heel and launched herself back into the wilderness. Her boots struck the earth like artillery fire, each step landed with a deep, concussive thud that sent vibrations through the soil. She did not attempt subtlety now when speed mattered so much more.
When she wasn’t putting on airs—when she wasn’t playing the part of the distant Countess or acting under official orders—she genuinely enjoyed running, though it hadn’t always been that way. As a human adult, running had been a chore. A punishment disguised as exercise, complete with burning lungs, aching joints, and the dull monotony of pavement and breath.
But this body could devour distance like it was nothing.
Three hundred kilometres an hour across open plains felt like flight without wings. The world blurred into streaks of colour and wind. Air parted around her like water around the prow of a ship. It was freedom in its purest, most intoxicating form.
Unfortunately, she was on the job and enjoyment had no place here, so she forced the thrill down, replacing it with focus. She hoped that Team Two had merely become occupied. Maybe a radio malfunction, or a temporary interference, hopefully nothing more than a minor delay.
Anything but what she feared.
Lives lost were never numbers to her, and She had mourned millions before.
Empires had burned in her memory. Cities had fallen and entire species extinguished beneath indifferent skies. She carried those losses like sediment at the bottom of an ocean. Out of sight, but impossibly heavy, adding to the burden she carried on her shoulders.
She did not want to add two more names to that depth.
The power signature grew stronger. Umbra realised, a fraction of a second too late, that she had overshot the marked location. She dug one heel into the ground and pivoted violently. The sudden change in direction tore a trench through the forest floor.
Her shoulder clipped a tree mid-turn. The trunk did not survive the encounter. It exploded into splinters with a crack like gunfire, the upper half collapsing in a shower of leaves and shattered wood. Birds erupted into the sky in alarm, but Umbra barely felt it.
She might have appeared lithe but her body was extraordinarily dense. She had reinforced bone, layered armour. Compact strength coiled beneath dark plating. Momentum, once gained, was not easily dismissed.
She slowed at last, allowing her senses to extend rather than relying purely on speed.
There!
The object’s power radiated nearby. A low, steady pulse that brushed against her awareness like heat from a banked fire. She adjusted course more carefully this time, pushing through the undergrowth at a controlled pace until the trees thinned into a small clearing only several metres wide. Umbra stepped into it and her dark eyes moved first to the burial site. The earth had been disturbed properly and the bone was in place, the faint hum of energy confirmed it remained intact.
But the men assigned to guard it were gone.
A metallic scent reached her next. The familiar stench of blood. A cursory glance around found dark stains that marked the grass and tree trunks in chaotic arcs. The ground was scuffed deeply in several places, as though boots had dug in during a struggle. One patch of earth had been churned almost to mud.
And then there were the drag marks.
Two distinct trails cutting through the undergrowth, vegetation crushed in a linear path leading away from the clearing. Umbra’s jaw tightened when she found no bodies, which meant they had been taken.
She reached for her radio again, bringing it up to her mouth.
“Everyone, return to base if you are done,” she ordered, her voice steady but carrying unmistakable urgency. “Make haste.”
Static crackled.
Then confirmations came in, one by one, with no more of the teams going mysteriously missing.
She lowered the radio slowly and breathed a sigh of relief. Team Eight would have to wait, as she could not be everywhere at once. Even she had limits, despite what some believed. Stretching herself too thin would help no one.
Umbra stepped toward the drag marks and crouched briefly, pressing clawed fingers to the disturbed earth as if feeling for residual warmth.
“They’re alive,” she murmured to herself, not because she knew for certain, but because she intended it to be true.
Then she rose to her full height and began to follow the trail into the forest.
The god corpse frowned, though only on the inside. Her face remained perfectly still, as it always did, the divine flesh unmoving and cold, locked in an expression she could not alter no matter how much she wished to. She no longer had proper control over her muscles, only the legs that carried her flaccid corpse around, though her flesh would not decay or rot away like a mortal body left unattended. Divinity had preserved her in that sense. Still, it was irritating, she preferred smiling to frowning. The Witch had always liked smiling.
The reason for her internal displeasure was that foolish hero, who was, against all expectation, attempting to track her down. What annoyed her most was not the attempt itself, heroes always attempted things beyond their ability, but the fact that the girl had apparently managed to assemble a tracking method that was not entirely incompetent. It was clumsy, lacking refinement, and clearly the work of someone still inexperienced with higher magic, yet it functioned well enough to be a nuisance.
Underestimating an enemy was, after all, how she had ended up like this.
She would not make that mistake twice.
Through the senses of one of her precious children, she watched as the hero encountered it. The child attacked with obedient fervour, and for a brief moment the Witch entertained the thought that perhaps enthusiasm would compensate for weakness. It did not. The hero struck with frightening speed and overwhelming force, and her creation was splattered into the ground before it could accomplish anything meaningful. The connection winked out shortly after, leaving behind only a faint echo in her awareness.
Unfortunate, but informative.
She shifted her perception to one of the birds she had converted earlier, a parrot whose small, fragile body now carried a sliver of her will. Without modification it would have been useless, as the hero moved far faster than any ordinary creature could hope to follow, but the Witch had enhanced the bird’s speed well beyond its natural limits. Its wings cut through the air in unnatural bursts, allowing it to keep the hero in sight from above, at least intermittently.
It was clear now that she would need to accelerate her plans.
Incubation would require several days, even under optimal conditions, and she could not afford to remain within the effective radius of the tracking spell while vulnerable. Travel would be necessary, and soon, preferably beyond the hero’s magical reach before the final stage began.
Fortunately, she had already selected a suitable vessel to serve as broodmother. The conversion was well underway, the woman’s body gradually reshaped to accommodate what would soon grow within her. The transformation was not yet obvious to untrained eyes, but it would not remain subtle forever. Discovery was likely. The Witch accepted that.
Her hope was simply that by the time the vessel was found, events would already be in motion beyond easy reversal. A small army of her precious offspring would hatch and spread, forcing the hero’s attention elsewhere while the Witch completed her rebirth into something new and, ideally, better suited to the current age.
After that, she could only hope that her next incarnation would not be foolish enough to repeat old errors. Grand plans required patience and caution, not arrogance. It would be deeply inconvenient to suffer another humiliating defeat due to pride.
While she no longer commanded the vast numbers she once had at her disposal, there was at least one comfort in her present situation: her dreadful sisters were absent, and the meddlesome angel who had interfered so persistently before was nowhere to be seen. Without them complicating matters, the path forward, though narrow, seemed manageable.
This time, she intended to proceed carefully.