“Move! Keep moving! Run!”

“If you want to live, run!“

Nearly a thousand starving people tore through the dense forest in bare feet, every one of them fighting for position, the loose formation of mercenary escorts around them shredded by the panic. The mercenary captain ran with them, his enormous axe on his back, blood across his whole body, waving constantly at the exhausted crowd to keep moving, not to slow, not to stop for any reason.

Behind them, through the trees, shapes moved.

Red-eyed wolves — massive, dark-furred things — orbited the running mass of people with patient, calculating attention. The moment any of the escort mercenaries lost focus, one would explode from cover, close the distance at a speed that looked impossible for something that large, and close its jaws around whatever was slowest. The forest had a way of swallowing what it took.

Twenty or thirty of them. Smart enough to understand the mercenaries, to work around them, to wait.

“Back! Get back!” The mercenary captain was the only one who could individually hold off one of these wolves. He couldn’t kill them — the axes cut and bled and enraged them, but they simply didn’t die cleanly — so he drove them back, one by one, and then the next one came while he was still facing the first.

A silver blade-arc swept down. The wolf with a screaming civilian in its teeth took the blow across the neck — skin splitting, blood leaping. It let go, turned, and vanished into the trees.

The person it had dropped was already dead. The skull had been breached. The hands and feet still moved, the last signals still firing through what remained, but there was nothing to save.

The captain didn’t look for long. He turned back to the crowd.

“Keep moving! Gold City isn’t far! You’ve run thousands of kilometers — don’t stop now! Anyone with strength left, take a child from someone who’s struggling! Anyone who can’t keep up — bite down and keep going! Past the wolf forest, the path is clear, I promise you, but not yet — keep running!”

He didn’t see the old woman stop.

She pressed the baby into the small girl’s arms carefully. The girl — maybe eight, maybe less, face blackened with days of travel — received the bundle and held it with both hands.

“Grandmother—”

“You’re old enough to understand. Your job is your brother. I can’t run anymore.” The old woman’s hands cupped the girl’s face for a moment. “We have one prayer left in this family, and it belongs to you. Don’t stop. Don’t give up. The gods watch from above.” She pressed her lips to the girl’s forehead. “Live, Hua’er. Live.“

The girl’s tears tracked clean lines through the dirt on her face. She nodded. She understood what was about to happen. She understood, and she kept the sob inside her chest, and she ran.

Behind her, dozens of others were doing the same — the very old, the badly injured, the ones who had been half-carrying themselves for the last hundred kilometers, pressing children and grandchildren and the last of their provisions into whoever was still upright, and then stopping.

You filled the wolves’ stomachs with the people who couldn’t make it anyway. Then the wolves stopped chasing, and the rest kept running. That was the arithmetic of the crossing.

The captain had seen it before. He had no better idea. He didn’t have the power to kill these wolves — he barely had the power to slow them — so he let the sacrifice happen and kept moving and didn’t let himself look too long.

The grandmother charged the nearest wolf with a kitchen knife.

She got one eye before it tore through her.

She fell smiling.

The column lurched forward again. The girl ran with her brother pressed against her chest. She didn’t know how much further she had to go. She kept going because stopping was not a thing she was going to do.

“Magnificent,” said a voice from the trees. Sharp, precise, with the quality of an owl’s cry at midnight. “I nearly found myself moved. One more death and I might have.”

Another voice answered from above — a gong struck in a chest, resonant and enormous: “Wonderful performance. Truly. The sacrifice of the weak for the slightly-less-weak has a charm to it. I’d appreciate it if the remaining cast members kept struggling. The enjoyment fades so quickly when everyone simply falls over.”

The sound of the second voice did what the wolves hadn’t been able to do: it stopped the entire crowd simultaneously.

People’s legs simply stopped working. Dozens went down without being touched. The ones who stayed upright did so only because they’d been moving fast enough that the fall hadn’t caught up yet. The mercenary escorts — hardened fighters who had managed their fear this far — were standing with open mouths and dropped weapons. A few, in the back, turned and ran.

Leaves moved.

The leaves moved faster than what a leaf is supposed to do, and the mercenaries who had run fell in sections, separated at the neck, and lay still before the sounds of their fall had finished.

A figure stepped from the trees. His movement was wrong in the way that very dangerous things are wrong — the eye couldn’t track it properly, couldn’t find the moment when it went from there to here. The wolves, which had been waiting to resume feeding, scattered at the sight of him. They fled the way prey flees, low and fast and not looking back.

They were found in pieces before they’d made it a hundred meters.

Leaves again. Dozens of them, arriving before the eye could send the signal.

The mercenary captain watched the wolves that he hadn’t been able to kill — not one of them — die in the time it took to breathe in.

He reached for his axe.

His body stopped responding.

“I haven’t agreed to let you die,” the owl-voiced man said. “Did you think you had that option? My ‘Hand of Manipulation’ operates on life and death equally. I control when you live. I control when you die. You don’t get a vote in either.”

The crowd on the ground made no sound.

The second voice arrived in person: a throne of gold carried on the shoulders of eighteen slaves, moving through the trees with a kind of theatrical comfort. The man in it wore elaborate armor, held wine, had a red cape that moved in the wind with more drama than the wind actually warranted. A woman with nothing on at all crouched at his feet, pouring his cup when he indicated.

“Now,” the man on the throne said, with the cheerful tone of someone announcing a game, “I’ll count to one hundred. Anyone who gets out of my sight before I finish — I’ll let go free. Run! All of you! One—”

No one moved, except the girl with her brother.

She ran.

“Yes! That’s it! Faster! I’m counting — you have until one hundred!” The man watched her go with visible satisfaction. He swirled his wine. He did not continue in numeric order. “Three, four, five, six — you really should be moving faster — seven, eight, nine — and of course — one hundred! Oh, what a pity. You couldn’t quite make it out of my sight, could you? You should have been just a little faster.”

An arm reached down. A slave grabbed the girl and brought her back, deposited her on the ground before the throne.

The crowd looked away where they could.

“Nine comes after ten,” the girl said. She was crying now, finally, but her arms hadn’t loosened around her brother. “Not one hundred.”

“You’re absolutely right!” The man on the throne laughed until his eyes watered. “Nine comes after ten! And yet I said one hundred, and somehow I’m still here and you’re still there. Almost as though the rules of the game were mine to set and change as I please. Doesn’t that make you angry? Doesn’t it hurt? I do enjoy that expression — when someone knows they’ve been wronged but can’t do anything about it.”

The owl-voiced man had drifted to one side, faintly disapproving of the delay.

“This area is abandoned,” the throne man said, waving him off. “The country lord dropped it months ago. No one’s coming. We haven’t had anyone to chase in a long time — let me have this.”

A shrug. Fine.

“Lovely. Now—” The throne man gestured to the nearest slave. “Peel this one. Take care not to damage it — I want it whole. The baby is too thin for eating, so take the heart and liver and roast them. Sweetly this time. I specifically said sweet last time and it came back salted.”

“Don’t—” The girl lunged as the slave reached for her brother, teeth finding the nearest arm, biting down with the only weapon she had.

She was eight years old, maybe less. Starved. Without power of any kind.

She bit anyway.

The mercenary captain’s hand found his second knife. Before he could move it, his body stopped again — completely, everything, even the eyes.

The slave reached for the girl’s mouth with its tool.

Its body moved, slightly, and then it fell.

It fell in halves.

The halves took three seconds to fully separate, settling onto the forest floor with a sound that took a moment to categorize.

No one had visibly done anything.

A shape arrived from somewhere and stopped next to the girl. One hand scooped her up. The voice that came with the shape was recognizable as belonging to someone who had been moving very fast and was annoyed about something specific.

“You’re not hurt. Good. This place is infuriating — the space is locked, I couldn’t transit in directly, that’s why it took so long.” A pause. “What are you waiting for? Start taking them down. Actually, wait — do take their teeth first. And their skin. I’m furious and this is appropriate.”

That was Qianqian.

Behind her came Fengji, the only person in the group who had been following on the ground and was therefore genuinely out of breath and genuinely impressed that a human being moved that quickly through trees.

The third arrival was different. The man on the gold throne felt something settle onto the backrest of his seat — weight, actual weight, a person sitting on the back of his throne with the casual possession of someone who had decided it was available. A foot came down onto his shoulder.

“You locked the local space,” Yueyang said, to the back of the man’s head. “First time I’ve been late to anything because of a spatial lock. I want to know how you’re planning to make that up to me.” He looked down at the throne’s occupant with an expression of mild interest. “Your currency of teeth and skin isn’t going to cover it. My standards are somewhat higher than yours, as you can probably tell from context.”

The man on the throne came out of his seat like something launched. Every bit of power he had came with him, and it was directed at the person who had used his shoulder as a footrest.