He got both elbows into the bog bed and heaved hard right, rolling over his shoulder. The coat's outer layer tore as the claws dragged through the fabric, and he came up in the slurry with his arms clear, the beast dumped backward into the caustic water.
[ COAT: TORN ]
[ SUMP-BLIGHT: REORIENTING ]
[ DISTANCE: 8 FEET ]
IT'S FASTER THAN YOU. NOTED.
He went backward along the root line before it finished finding its footing. His right hand went into the coat's deep inner lining, past the canvas poacher's pocket, and found the spool. He worked the catch with his thumb, his left boot finding the next root behind him while the slurry sucked at the step. Ten feet of wire stripped off in a hard pull.
[ IRON-STRAND WIRE: DEPLOYED ]
[ CLOSING DISTANCE: 5 FEET ]
YOU ARE HOLDING A RAZOR. NOTED.
His left shoulder hit the first trunk in the dark. He caught himself and looped the wire around the bark twice at knee height, then stepped back across the gap and wrapped the free end directly around his bare right hand, steadying the slack with his left, the dead little finger folded out of the way against his palm. The edge cut through his palm's calluses to the skin below, sharp enough that the tension registered in the bone before anything else. He braced his locked knee against the root ridge and leaned his full weight back, pulling the wire taut across the gap just as the creature lunged.
[ WIRE: SEATED ]
[ SUMP-BLIGHT: CHARGING ]
[ DISTANCE: 2 FEET ]
DON'T MOVE.
The creature charged through the gap and the wire took it at the throat. No give in the iron. Its own mass drove the cut deep, through hide and into whatever ran beneath. The impact wrenched Vane's arms forward, the wire tearing a deep, wet line across both bare palms before going slack.
The creature came through the gap anyway, throat laid open, and went down in the caustic three feet from his boots. It thrashed for a long count of ten with its head under the slurry, the bog filling the cut faster than it could clear it, and then it stopped. Acid blood pulsed from the wound in a flat scatter and he stepped back along the root to clear the radius.
[ SUMP-BLIGHT: DEAD ]
[ TECHNIQUE LOGGED: SNARE KILL - LIVE TENSION ]
[ FAT: HARVESTABLE ]
[ ACID BLOOD: ACTIVE. SPREADING. ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: HARVEST THE FAT. ALSO: LEAVE. PICK ONE FIRST.
[ FEAT SLOT: UNLOCK COST - CALCULATING ]
THAT ONE COUNTED. WE WILL DISCUSS THE PRICE LATER.
Acid blood spread from the opened throat in slow threads through the slurry. The wire had cut his right hand to the meat. The fat was right there, enough to fuel a trench-lantern for a week, and south was still a mile of caustic bog in the dark with Inquisition hounds on his scent.
The smell reached him before his knee hit the slurry. A chemical sweetness over the bog's alkaline base, with the rot of necrotic tissue under it. The fat already showed through a tear in the flank where the wire had opened the hide. He got down on his right knee alongside the carcass, well clear of the throat where the acid blood ran, left foot flat in the slurry for balance, and pulled the dagger.
[ STAMINA: CRITICAL ]
[ SUMP-BLIGHT FAT: HARVESTING ]
[ HOUNDS: SCENT LINE - CLOSING ]
FASTER. WOUNDS ARE OPEN. HOUNDS ARE NOT STANDING STILL.
The dagger was iron. The hide was tougher. He set the tip against the flank two inches below the tear and bore down. The tremor in his wrist sent the blade skidding sideways twice before he locked the elbow and put his full forearm behind the push. It went in on the third attempt with a wet, resistant pop, and the smell from the incision displaced everything else in the air.
He extended the cut with two more passes, each one fighting the tremor, until the gap was wide enough for his fingers. Blood seeped from the edges, dark and thin. He worked his bare, bleeding fingers into the carcass. The fat came away from the muscle in long, reluctant strips, cold and slick, pale yellow near the center and grey-translucent near the hide. He stripped it back with his thumb, the residue smearing his shredded palm.
[ FAT: PARTIAL HARVEST ]
[ WOUND STATUS: UNTREATED ]
THE WOUNDS ARE GETTING WORSE WHILE YOU DO THIS.
He unbuttoned the reinforced drop-pocket at his thigh left-handed, keeping his right in the fat, and pulled the trench-lantern free. He set it on the root ridge beside his knee. The reservoir cap was a threaded collar, and his left thumb needed two rotations to work it loose. He packed the stripped fat in with three loads, pressing each down against the wick, the tremor in his left hand worsening with the close work. The fourth load went sideways off the reservoir lip into the slurry before he could correct. It was raw, and raw fat would spit and smoke before it rendered. The brass would do the rendering once it was lit, which was more than the lantern had managed on an empty tank.
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[ TRENCH-LANTERN: FUELED ]
[ STAMINA: CRITICAL ]
FUEL SECURED. WOUNDS NOT ADDRESSED. MILE OF BOG REMAINING. NOTED.
He closed the cap and stowed the lantern in the drop-pocket. The wounds needed treatment. The lantern had needed fuel first. Both had been true since the grapple, and there was still a mile of caustic bog between him and any surface where he could address the second without dying of the first.
He cut a second slab off the flank, wrapped it in a strip of linen, and pushed it deep into the coat's lining. Three loads wouldn't last; he'd seen enough lanterns go dark to know it. The spittle on his coat had quit hissing somewhere in the fight, cut down by all the slurry he'd rolled through. It had eaten the outer wool and gone no further.
Sulfur first. The bog's alkaline load ran everywhere at this depth, but this was denser, a concentrated stillness where water had sat against peat runoff in a root depression long enough to become its own problem. The pool lay flat and black between three petrified trunks, a sheen on its surface catching the System's blue.
[ DEHYDRATION PENALTY: ACTIVE ]
[ STAMINA CAP: HALVED ]
[ NEAREST CLEAN WATER: UNKNOWN ]
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: THE CHARCOAL SKIN. THAT POOL WILL HURT YOU REGARDLESS.
He got down at the pool's edge and worked the charcoal skin from the coat's inner poacher's pocket. The leather had gone board-stiff with cold, and the cap stuck on the first quarter-turn, taking his left thumb two full passes before the seal gave. He lowered the mouth of the skin into the pool. The water tilted inward with a flat, airless sound, the surface film parting and closing as the outer cavity filled, the sulfur at the waterline thick enough to taste.
[ DYSENTERY PROBABILITY: 67% ]
[ INTERNAL PARASITE: LIKELY ]
[ CHARCOAL FILTER: ACTIVE ]
FILTERING. THIS HELPS SOME. THE SLAG-ROOTS WATER IS STILL THE SLAG-ROOTS WATER.
He held the skin upright and waited for the filter to work. The charcoal pack was dense and unyielding through the leather, the crushed charcoal and sand having taken the first of the outer water into the layer. Where the inner bladder met the outer shell the leather had gone rough at the seams from years of charcoal grinding through. The first drops came through the bottom port two minutes in, grey-black, tracking down the port's lip in slow, grainy threads.
When the bladder held roughly two inches, he lifted the skin and turned the port toward his mouth. The sulfur at the rim was reduced but present. The sap dripped from the canopy overhead, and the ten seconds he stood there with the port near his mouth registered in the stamina readout as ten seconds he hadn't spent moving south.
[ DEHYDRATION PENALTY: ACTIVE ]
[ STAMINA: DRAINING ]
DRINK OR DON'T. THE STAMINA COST OF STANDING HERE APPLIES EITHER WAY.
He swallowed once against the dry, then tipped the skin. Three draws, then the sulfur was too far back in his throat for a fourth. The charcoal grit went down with the water and stayed.
[ CHARCOAL FILTER: INSUFFICIENT - SLAG-ROOTS ]
[ NOTE: NOT CLEAN WATER ]
THE PENALTY REMAINS. THAT COUNTS AS CORRUPTED LIQUID. CLOSE, THOUGH.
The readout hadn't moved. Still halved. The System had its own position on what counted as clean water, and filtered Slag-Roots runoff wasn't going to make the list.
The System dropped red at every margin at once. A dozen status frames opened across his vision, each in full critical red, cascading inward until the pool and the trunks and the canopy were buried behind the overlay.
[ TOXIC EXPOSURE: SYSTEMIC ]
[ KIDNEY FUNCTION: 47% - DECLINING ]
[ LIVER LOAD: CRITICAL - THRESHOLD APPROACHING ]
[ LUNG CAPACITY: 61% - COMPROMISED ]
[ WOUND CONTAMINATION: SEVERE ]
[ ORGAN FAILURE PROBABILITY: 34% - ESCALATING ]
IMMOBILITY ACCELERATES TOXIN STAGNATION. MOBILITY SLOWS IT. THIS IS YOUR OPTION.
STRONGLY RECOMMEND: MOVE.
The numbers sat in his peripheral vision and the center of it at once, several of them in motion, KIDNEY FUNCTION ticking from 47 to 46 while he read it. The Stress Metric in the corner had climbed three points while he stood at the pool. The mechanism wasn't hard to read. The organ numbers fed the stress, and his jaw was already responding.
[ STRESS METRIC: 8/10 ]
[ TOXIN STAGNATION: ACCELERATING ]
STILL HERE. NUMBERS STILL CLIMBING. THAT'S HOW THAT WORKS.
He got upright by stages, the charcoal skin back in his inner pocket, the left foot landing in the slurry with a sharp edge from the exposed skin at the ball of it. The locked knee delivered what it always delivered on the first push. He pressed his back against the nearest trunk and pushed himself off it, south.
[ ORGAN FAILURE PROBABILITY: 37% - ESCALATING ]
[ NOTE: RATE OF ESCALATION DECREASING ]
THERE. THAT'S WHAT MOVING DOES. YOU'RE WELCOME.
The Slag-Roots were lightless past the System's blue, which showed root ridges as dark breaks in the slurry and nothing further. He moved in half-strides on the root line, the left foot testing each root before committing. The organ failure numbers had settled to a steady flicker at the left edge of his vision, which meant the System had what it needed and would content itself with tracking.
The probability held at 37%. The Slag-Roots ran south for as long as they ran. That was all of the available information.