Chapter 38: Fearfeed!!
Malrec’s men learned fast enough to become more dangerous than brave.
The air smelled of ash water and old marrow, the kind that leaked from broken road-bones when too many desperate feet crossed them. Nothing about the passage was symbolic. If the road wanted payment, it found skin, breath, blood, or a handhold and took from there.
Fearfeed showed itself in the way the wall seams reacted to flinches. Each breath held too long became scent; each glance backward became bait.
CLINK!
Fourteen survivors and the frightened line behind Kael made a rough half-ring without being told. The shape had not become formation yet; instinct was learning discipline. The left wall seam split wetly and showed the angle where fearfeed would reach first.
They did not descend.
They stayed on the upper rims, moving between furnace bone shelves with pressure rods, hooks, and Black Ledger signal plates. Their armor lamps burned red through the root fog above. Every time Kael’s group slowed, a rod fired into the wildland near them.
Not at Kael.
At pods.
At root walls.
At pools that steamed too quietly.
BANG!
A pod burst twenty steps to the left, spilling hot white fluid into a root channel. The channel convulsed. A wave of black tendrils swept toward the survivors.
"Right!" Kael shouted.
The cluster shifted right.
Too slow.
Sair’s foot caught on a root lip. Miro tried to pull her. The fever girl swayed. Renn shoved both forward and took the tendril sweep across his back.
CRACK!
He hit the ground face first.
The tendrils wrapped his waist and dragged.
Vaela cut low before Kael reached him.
CHIK!
The tendrils snapped. Renn rolled free, coughing root dust and blood.
"I hate being useful," he wheezed.
"Then become decorative," Orrek said. "I will carry you badly."
"I choose usefulness."
Another rod fired from above.
BOOM!
This one struck a steaming pool. The water erupted into red vapor, and the whole wildland seemed to inhale.
Kael looked up.
The pressure men were not trying to kill them directly. They were feeding the forest fear, heat, vibration, and torn bodies of its own roots. They were making the wild angry, then letting Kael pay the price. A Black Ledger caller shouted from the rim.
"Leave the weak and the Wild sleeps! Leave the marked one and the Warden pays!"
The words echoed through the cavern.
The roots liked echoes.
Every repeated sound made pod light pulse. Every pulse brought movement in the fog. Vaela lifted her blade toward the rim. "Give me one clean throw."
"Too far," Kael said.
"I did not say I would hit. I said clean."
Orrek squinted upward. "I can insult them."
"That may help them," Renn said.
"No one appreciates craft anymore."
The old predator appeared again between two black trunks ahead. It stood half hidden in the fog, taller than Orrek, longer than a cart, with antlers made of root forks and old bone. Its face was not a face. Bark plates folded around a vertical mouth filled with flat grinding teeth. Red light pulsed under its chest where roots entered and left its body.
It watched Malrec’s men fire. Then watched Kael’s group stagger. Then lifted one long arm and pressed its clawed hand to a trunk.
The trunk answered with a pulse.
The wildland changed direction.
Roots stopped reacting to random shots. They began to guide the impact. Malrec’s men fired again, and the disturbed root lines carried the vibration around Kael’s group instead of through them. Not mercy. Arrangement. The predator was learning the Warden’s rhythm too.
"It is using them," Vaela said.
Kael nodded. "And us."
A pressure hook fell from above, trailing a screaming body. Not one of Kael’s. A lower worker. Maybe captured. Maybe already half dead. Malrec’s men cut him loose over the Furnace Bone Wild and let him fall.
He hit a root island thirty paces away.
THUD!
For one breath, the whole wildland stilled. Then roots erupted around the fallen man.
He screamed once.
Only once.
CRUNCH!
The sound went wet and final.
The survivors froze.
The fear changed flavor. It went from sharp panic to hot disgust, and the roots under the fallen man thickened as if that tasted better.
Miro clapped a hand over the fever girl’s eyes. Sella whispered, "They fed it a person." Kael’s jaw locked. Above, the Black Ledger caller shouted, "The Wild eats what is given! Choose who gets fed!"
The old predator watched Kael.
Testing.
Malrec had turned cruelty into bait. The wildland had accepted the bait and was waiting to see whether Kael would break formation to punish the rim.
Kael wanted to.
His body wanted the climb, the collision, the feeling of armor folding around his fists. He could imagine it too clearly: leap, grab rim, skull into stone, rod broken through a chest, men dropped into the forest they had tried to use.
But fourteen lives stood behind him.
The wildland counted heat.
Malrec counted mercy.
Kael counted the distance to the next root shelf.
"We do not chase," he said.
Orrek’s eyes flashed. "They dropped a man."
"I saw."
"Then let me climb."
"No."
The word hit hard enough that even Vaela looked at him.
Kael did not soften it.
"They want us split. The forest wants us split. Nobody gets what they want."
Orrek breathed through his nose like a furnace vent.
Then he lowered his chain.
Not obedience.
Control.
The air shifted.
A pressure wave from the fallen man’s death rolled through the root bed and slammed into Kael’s chest. Not a strike from an enemy. Ecological backlash. The wild had fed and grown heavier. Kael took one step back, then stopped himself.
The Sovereign Root answered.
Kael drove the command inward, forcing the shards into Metaphysical Resistance.
ALLOCATE!
====================================================================
[ SOVEREIGN ROOT INTERFACE OVERLAY ]
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ KINETIC FRICTION DETECTED: Wildland Feeding Backlash Under Rim Pressure
≫ EXISTENTIAL SHARDS EXTRACTED: +1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
≫ MANUAL ALLOCATION COMMAND RECEIVED
▶ SHARD ALLOCATION REGISTERED: +1 TOTAL
▶ ALLOCATION DISTRIBUTION:
- Metaphysical Resistance -> 14
--------------------------------------------------------------------
▲ UNALLOCATED EXISTENTIAL SHARDS: 5
[!] SYSTEM NOTICE: Five Shard Reserve Maintained.
====================================================================
The pressure settled against him and failed to enter deeper. Kael felt the difference. The wildland’s strange hunger still touched him, but it did not get as much say inside his bones.
"Move to the red trunk line," he said.
Vaela glanced ahead. "Toward the thing watching us?"
"Away from the men feeding the forest."
"Two ugly answers again."
"Choose the one that can bleed."
The old predator tilted its antlered head.
The red light under its chest pulsed once toward the rim, once toward Kael, and once toward the fourteen clustered behind him.
THUM! THUM! THUM!
Maybe it understood, or maybe it only enjoyed the heat of defiance.
They moved.
Malrec’s men fired again and again, but the root lines had begun to route the shocks differently. Some blasts woke pools behind the group. Others stirred vines above the rim itself. One pressure man screamed when a root hook rose from his own ledge and punched through his boot.
CHUNK!
The wildland was no one’s tool. That was the lesson Malrec’s men learned too late.
A huge trunk split open ahead.
Not a path.
A mouth shaped gap leading into the red trunk line. The old predator stepped beside it and waited. Renn swallowed. "It wants us inside."
Sair tightened her grip on her strap. "Everything wants us somewhere. I am tired of being invited."
Kael looked at the predator.
The thing pressed one long claw to its own chest where the red light pulsed, then pointed at Kael’s marked hand. Vaela’s voice went quiet.
"That is not dumb."
"No," Kael said.
The predator turned and disappeared into the trunk mouth. Behind them, Malrec’s men reloaded. Ahead, the den opened.
Kael took the den mouth first.
"Stay close. If it wanted easy meat, it would have taken the slow already."
Orrek grinned without joy. "Comforting. It wants difficult meat."
"It wants to test cost," Kael said.
And entered the den.
The trunk mouth did not close behind them immediately.
That made it worse.
A door that stayed open meant the wildland wanted witnesses. It wanted Malrec’s men to see the group enter. It wanted the pressure rods above to keep firing into its outer bark. It wanted more heat, more fear, more bodies at the rim.
Vaela understood the same moment Kael did.
"It is not hiding us."
"No," Kael said. "It is using us to pull them closer."
Tollen Gray made a small sound. "Then we should not go in." Sair turned her head slowly. "You have said many things since we met, and most have made me want to feed you to a wall. This one is special."
"I am saying it wants everyone in one place!"
"So does the Warden. So does hunger. So does panic. You are not introducing fresh wisdom."
Another pressure blast struck the outer trunk.
BOOM!
The mouth shuddered. Red sap ran down the threshold in thick lines. The wildland drank the impact and sent a low pulse through the floor under Kael’s feet.
Not pain.
Invitation.
The Old Root Bearer stood deeper inside the mouth, patient as buried judgment.
Kael looked back one last time.
Malrec’s men were silhouettes above, rods raised, armored bodies careful not to descend too far. They thought distance made them safe. They thought the wildland was a tool. They thought Kael would either be eaten or flushed back up to them weakened.
All three thoughts were useful mistakes.
"Inside," Kael said.
Renn guided the fourteen through in clusters. Orrek entered last, chain dragging behind him like a promise to the rim. Vaela touched the threshold with her blade before crossing and watched the sap recoil from the metal.
"It dislikes worked iron."
Kael glanced at her.
"Remember that."
"I remember everything that wants me dead. It is why my head is crowded."
The trunk mouth pulsed once more.
A strand of red sap crossed the threshold behind Orrek, not closing it, only marking that the group had entered by choice and under witness.
Then the darkness inside grew ribs.
The den accepted them with heat.