Chapter 62: Second round [10]

"So what exactly do we do now?" Nova whispered, his eyes fixed on the giant bear ahead like it might change its mind about existing if he stared at it long enough. "How are we supposed to reach that portal without waking that thing up?"

The bear stood between them and the glowing blue vortex Its low growl came through the ground more than the air, a vibration that moved up through their knees.

Lucas studied the clearing quietly, his eyes moving over the terrain, the spacing between the trees, the way the bear was positioned relative to the portal behind it.

Gideon spoke before Lucas had finished thinking. "That thing is enormous," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "Which means its close-range vision around its blind spots should be weaker than a normal beast." He pointed subtly toward the back-right side of the bear. "If we circle around through its blind area carefully enough, we might be able to reach the portal without triggering it at all."

Lucas considered it for a moment, checking the angle, checking the distance. The idea was sound. The clearing gave them enough grass cover to stay low if they moved slowly, and the bear’s attention was forward and outward rather than behind it.

"Alright," he said. "That’s what we do."

*****

One by one they lowered themselves to the ground and began moving through the grass toward the bear’s blind side, slow and deliberate, every motion calculated to disturb as little as possible.

Sylvia went first, moving with the quiet efficiency she brought to everything, each hand placement tested before committing weight, each knee lowered rather than dropped. Lucas followed directly behind her, eyes splitting attention between her movements and the bear. Gideon came after, then Celia, and Nova brought up the rear with the awkward determination of someone whose body was not naturally designed for crawling but was giving it everything available.

Every sound that had been easy to ignore before became enormous, the soft movement of grass against clothes, the slight shift of disturbed dirt, the sound of their own breathing. The bear’s ear twitched once and all five of them froze simultaneously, holding completely still for several seconds before the ear settled and they started moving again.

"This feels like we’re robbing someone," Nova whispered, from the back.

"Would you," Gideon said, between his teeth, "please."

They kept moving.

Nova was crawling marginally faster than the pace the group had settled into, which put him closer to Celia than the spacing required, which meant every few seconds his shoulder or hands bumped into her boot. The third time it happened Celia’s eyebrow made a decision.

She glanced back at him. "Slower," she whispered.

"I am going slow," Nova whispered back, with genuine conviction. "You’re crawling like an injured gran—"

Celia shifted her boot forward to adjust her position.

A small cloud of dry dirt lifted from the ground directly in front of Nova’s face.

He stopped moving as his nose started twitching.

His eyes went wide in the specific way that eyes go wide when something bad is coming and the person knows it and cannot stop it.

The four ahead of him heard the sharp intake of breath and turned back.

Lucas saw his face.

Sylvia’s expression went rigid.

Gideon’s hand came up with the silent urgency of someone trying to prevent a disaster through body language alone.

Nova’s hands clamped over his nose and mouth, his whole body tensing with the effort, his face going red, his eyes starting to water from the pressure of holding something back that very much wanted to come out. For a genuine, extended moment it looked like he might actually manage it. His entire existence was focused on one thing. The universe held its breath along with him.

Then —

"ACHOOOO!"

The sneeze went through the forest like something had fired a warning shot.

Birds evacuated. The grass around Nova’s head flattened briefly from the force of it.

Silence followed immediately.

Nova lowered his hands from his face slowly and looked at the expressions of the four people staring back at him.

"...Shit," he said.

The four expressions said everything that needed to be said and several things that didn’t need to be said but were being communicated anyway.

The bear’s ear moved.

Just the ear, at first, a sharp pivot toward the sound, the kind of movement that said something’s attention had just fully arrived. Then the massive head turned, those enormous eyes finding the five humans arranged in the grass with the particular clarity of a creature that had heard exactly where they were.

Then it roared. The sound hit the trees hard enough that the nearest ones shed leaves.

"It’s moving—" Celia’s face had gone pale.

"The portal!" Lucas’s eyes went immediately to the glowing vortex under the bear, measuring the distance, the angle, the trajectory of any backward movement the bear might take. "If it steps back even once—"

The bear raised one massive claw, its weight beginning to shift.

"NO—" Sylvia was already moving.

Lightning erupted from her body without buildup, a violent surge that crossed the clearing in less than a second and hit the bear full-body, blue currents wrapping around it from head to foot, the continuous electricity locking its muscles mid-motion. The beast jerked violently, its body seized by the current, its backward step stopping exactly where it started.

Sylvia’s feet cracked the ground as she launched herself forward, closing the distance to the bear at a speed that made the movement hard to track. Electricity gathered in her hand as she moved, pulling together and shaping outward into something solid — a bat of condensed lightning, glowing violently with mana, humming with the energy of everything she’d pushed into it.

Nova’s jaw had separated from the rest of his face. "How is it that bi—"

Sylvia swung.

The sound came a fraction of a second after the impact, a detonation that rolled through the clearing and into the trees beyond it.