The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 8: Chapter 8

Read chapter 8 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The oldest stone remembers the chisel, but it cannot foresee the earthquake." The Jötnar didn’t hike. They didn’t march. They simply flowed through the suffocating green darkness of the jungle with the terrifying, silent grace of an avalanche. Despite being nine feet tall and carrying weapons that looked like they belonged on siege engines, they didn't snap a single twig. They communicated entirely through micro-shifts in posture and sharp, decisive hand signals. I had thought they were terrifying before, but this just wasn’t fair. They were a team of apex predators who had been running this exact woodland for two thousand years, and their efficiency was chilling. I was jogging just to keep up, but for the first time since falling out of the sky, I wasn’t a stumbling liability. Not that that was a high bar, considering how little I actually used my legs back home. But the violent, cellular remodeling I had forced upon myself in the freezing cave was paying dividends. I didn’t feel noticeably stronger, but I felt incredibly dense. My center of gravity had shifted downward, pulling like a lead plumb bob anchored in my pelvis. When my boot caught a protruding root, I didn't go sprawling into the mud; my stance simply absorbed the shock, and my foot slammed back down into the dirt, heavily rooted. My self-named "Dirt-Dao" was holding my fragile frame together. Suddenly, Karg held up a massive fist. The entire hunting party stopped instantly. We had found the wake of our prey, and it was like a herd of bulldozers had rolled through. A massive, ancient hardwood tree was snapped clean in half. But the wood wasn't just broken; it was scorched black. The damp, mossy soil around the impact zone had been flash-baked into dry, cracked ceramic. Karg didn’t speak. He pointed the head of his stone spear at the massive dents in the ground. Each print looked like a pair of curved horns pointing at each other. Karg held up three thick fingers, drawing everyone's attention back. Vora gave a single, tight nod. My mind started to whirl as I broke down the information. We weren't tracking a single animal; we were tracking a sounder. Pickup-truck-sized boars, if the tracks were any indication. Given the scorch marks and the ambient heat radiating from the prints, these things were walking, heavily armored boiler rooms. It begged a useless question, but my analytical brain couldn't help itself: why steam? Heat and iron scales in a dense, humid forest made zero evolutionary sense unless the environment itself was so hostile that becoming a walking furnace was the only way to survive. Abruptly, the hunting formation shifted without a word spoken, snapping my attention back to the present. I looked around to see the terrain tightening. We were moving into a natural choke point. We crested a ridge overlooking a narrow, high-walled ravine. Karg and the three heaviest hunters descended to the canyon floor, locking their massive stone shields together to form an impenetrable wall—the Anvil. Vora and the faster scouts vanished into the canopy above, circling far behind the herd to act as the Hammer. Even I recognized the tactic. A giant grabbed me by the back of my lab coat, hoisted me up, and unceremoniously dropped me into the hollowed-out center of a petrified tree trunk resting high on the ridge. "Rabbit stays," the giant grunted, before sliding down the embankment to join Karg’s shield wall. I crouched in the dark, peering through a crack in the petrified wood. This was actually perfect. I had assumed they were just going to use me for bait now that we were out of the village. I had a front-row seat to the slaughter, but I was safely out of the way. I almost felt touched by the act until my pragmatism kicked in—dead healers don't heal very well. Keeping the "Rabbit" safe was just good inventory management. It started with a sound like a ruptured steam valve. Then, the herd of what I dubbed "Furnace-Tusks" burst into the ravine, driven forward by Vora