Exiled Prince and Hi Chapter 48: Climb Out

Chapter 48: Climb Out

Renji turned slowly in place, looking at all of it.

"Nobody say it," he said.

Kaede looked at him. At the bones. At the walls of the basin above them, steep and crumbling.

"It’s a nest," she said.

"I said don’t say it."

Nobody moved.

The basin sat around them in perfect stillness — mist threading between ancient bones, the silence of a place that had swallowed too many sounds to bother making any of its own. Rei was trembling, not from cold. Ayra turned slowly in place, eyes lifted toward the rim above, reading the dark between the trees. Kaede had her sword in hand with her thumb on the guard, her whole body arranged around the question of which direction it would co from.

Renji raised one hand flat.

"Don’t move."

His voice had dropped to sothing just above nothing. He wasn’t looking at any of them. He was looking at the ground — the claw marks in the stone, deep and deliberate, so of them wide enough to fit his forearm into. Whatever made those hadn’t been in a hurry. It had been here long enough to wear the rock down.

He listened. Thirty seconds. A minute. Only the mist moved.

"Whatever owns this place," he said quietly, "isn’t here right now."

If anything, that made it worse. The tension in the group went up a register — the specific dread of knowing sothing exists that made this, carved these marks, left bones this size scattered like kindling, and not knowing where it currently was.

Kaede’s eyes moved to the skulls. One of them was larger than the carriage had been.

"Renji," she said softly. First ti she’d used his na without weaponizing it.

"I know." He studied the slope they’d co down. Steep, crumbling, but climbable if they were careful. He turned back to the others and kept his voice flat and quiet and steady, the way you speak when volu is the enemy. "We move slowly. One at a ti if we have to. Step where I step. Don’t touch anything that looks loose."

He looked at Rei.

She was holding herself together through what appeared to be pure stubbornness. Her hands were pressed flat against her sides, her jaw set, her eyes doing quick darting checks of everything around her.

"Rei."

She looked at him.

"Eyes on . Just walk."

She nodded once, tight and small.

They moved.

Renji went first, picking a line through the bones — around a ribcage that had been here long enough to moss over, between two cracked skulls that faced each other like they’d died mid-conversation, through a clearing in the debris where the ground was almost solid. He tested each step before giving it his weight. Slow. Deliberate. The kind of movent that cost more effort than running.

Behind him he could hear the others following. Ayra had drifted close to Rei, not touching her but near enough that the proximity said sothing without requiring words. Kaede brought up the rear and she was quiet — genuinely quiet, not the loaded quiet she usually deployed before sothing sharp ca out of it. Just present. Watching the dark.

A bone cracked under Rei’s foot.

The sound was small and the silence after it was enormous. Everyone froze. Four people not breathing, for three long seconds, listening for anything that had heard it too.

Nothing ca.

Rei exhaled through her nose, barely audible, and kept walking.

They reached the slope and started up. The earth was loose and crumbling and it made noise whether they wanted it to or not — small cascades of dirt, the scrape of boot on root, knuckles finding holds in the rock face. Renji went first again and reached back for Rei’s wrist at the worst section and pulled, and she scrambled up beside him and didn’t let go imdiately and he didn’t say anything about it.

Kaede made it up last, pulled herself over the lip without help, and stood on solid ground.

For a mont all four of them just stood there.

Then, as if soone had opened a valve, the breath ca out of all of them at once. Rei pressed a hand over her eyes. Ayra tilted her head back and stared at the canopy above and let her shoulders drop. Kaede sheathed her sword with a click that sounded like punctuation.

Renji wiped a streak of dirt off his face with the back of his hand.

"Amazing vacation spot," he said. "Really. The decor alone. I’m thinking we co back, spend a long weekend, really soak in the ambiance—"

Ayra laughed first, surprised into it, her hand coming up to cover her mouth like she hadn’t expected to make that sound. Rei followed a second behind, tired and helpless, her shoulders shaking with it.

Kaede turned to look at him with an expression built specifically to communicate that she did not find him funny, that she had never found him funny, and that she considered his continued existence a test of her patience.

"You are genuinely insufferable," she said.

"You say that like it’s a complaint." He opened his mouth for the follow-up—

The growls ca through the trees like a current through water. Low and layered and getting closer.

All four of them stopped.

Two shapes moved between the trunks, deliberate and heavy, crimson eyes finding them through the dark. Gravefangs — the sa breed that had hit the carriage, the sa coarse black fur and bone-white plating and burning intelligence behind the eyes, and they were already picking up speed.

Nobody needed to be told. They were already arranging themselves.

Ayra’s arm ca up toward the nearest one and the air between them distorted and the beast left the ground — not gently, not partially, but completely, its entire mass yanked sideways mid-stride by sothing it couldn’t claw or bite, and she threw it, hard and deliberate, and it crashed through the tree line and went down into the undergrowth below in a chaos of snapping branches and displaced earth.

The second one reached them in the sa mont.

Renji and Kaede moved together without discussing it, the way they’d been doing it for the last however-many hours of surviving things they shouldn’t have survived. He went straight at it and she ca in at an angle and the beast had to make a choice about which one was the priority, which gave the other one a free second to work with.

It chose Renji, which was accurate threat assessnt if nothing else.

He blocked the first claw with his sword and turned the force sideways instead of absorbing it, redirected rather than resisted, and stepped inside the follow-through and cut across its plating. Kaede was already there at the ribs, two precise strikes in the gap between plates, and the beast lurched away from her which brought it back into his range and he cut again.

"Its left knee is exposed," Kaede said, not loudly.

"I see it."

"Then use it."

"I was about to—"

"You’ve been about to for thirty seconds—"

He dropped low and cut hard across the joint she’d identified and the beast buckled on that side, weight shifting wrong, and Kaede hit it twice more on the unbalanced side and it was fighting gravity now as well as them. Behind them Rei moved in the small space she gave herself, pushing her reserves past what looked comfortable, keeping the cuts from deepening, keeping them all capable.

The gravefang staggered. Renji felt the opening arrive the way you feel a door give — a specific mont, not before it and not after it. He pushed the last viable thread of essence through his blade and drove it through the beast’s throat.

It went down.

He stood over it breathing hard, sword still extended, and gave himself exactly two seconds to feel that before straightening up.

"One down," he said.

"One down," Kaede confird. She was breathing hard too but she said it evenly. She turned toward the undergrowth where Ayra had thrown the first one and they all looked at the stillness there, the broken branches, the silence.

A long mont passed.

Rei exhaled. "Do you think it—"

The undergrowth detonated.

The gravefang ca out of the bushes like sothing launched, not running but airborne, jaws spread wide and eyes blazing and all of its remaining intent focused into a single point which was Renji’s head. No warning. No sound before it was already there. The distance between the tree line and his face was nothing at all.