Chapter 176: Longing
"Guilliman."
Evil Spirit Lucas called out first, eyes scanning the sky as the three figures converged above the valley floor.
No words were exchanged imdiately.
They just landed, checked themselves over, and let the silence settle.
The air around them had gone quiet. The Gale Bulls in the distance had stopped their frantic noise. Whatever had been pushing them into a frenzy was gone now.
No presence. No dread pressing down from above.
The abomination was no longer anywhere near them.
A slow, collective exhale moved through the group.
Even the Jackal, who had been rigid with fear the entire chase, finally loosened his grip on nothing and let his shoulders drop.
"It probably already killed the abomination-ranked Gale Bull," Evil Spirit Lucas said, sighing as he looked around the group. His eyes landed on Guilliman and stayed there.
The beast had followed him.
Lucas had made the call to split, and the beast had locked onto Guilliman and chased him alone. As a senior mber of Athen and soone who had brought Guilliman into this hunt, that sat wrong. It felt like he had used the new man as bait, even if it hadn’t been intentional.
He felt guilty.
He didn’t say it. But it was there.
Guilliman, however, didn’t seem bothered at all.
In fact, a slow smile had crept across his face.
His eyes were on his information panel, expression quiet and satisfied in the way a man looks when a long calculation finally pays out.
[Gene Points: 49,000/70,000 (purple)]
Twenty-five thousand points.
That single abomination had handed him twenty-five thousand gene points. His chest had been sitting at just over twenty-three thousand before the chase. Now he was nearly at the threshold.
One more. Just one more hunt like that and he would cross into A-rank.
It was painfully obvious to him now.
The only thing standing between him and the next rank wasn’t technique. Wasn’t strength. Wasn’t talent.
It was prey.
He needed more beasts. Better beasts. And he needed them fast.
He closed the panel.
"Let’s just head to the rendezvous point and wait for River Bandit and the rest." Poison Lilly’s voice was quiet but certain. She scanned the tree line and then the sky above it. "Sothing doesn’t feel right."
Nobody pushed back.
Running into an abomination out here could be written off as bad luck. It happened. The valley was dangerous and the deeper zones were worse.
But sothing about the way it had appeared sat wrong.
Too sudden. Too early. Like it hadn’t wandered into their path but had been pushed out of sowhere it normally wouldn’t leave.
Either bad luck.
Or the start of sothing worse.
They weren’t going to wait to find out which.
So they turned toward the eting point and flew, no longer stopping to hunt. No longer scanning for targets. Just moving.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
What they didn’t know was that they weren’t the only ones who had been hit.
Across the valley, in several other locations at the sa ti, beasts of similar rankings had surged outward. Not just toward humans pushing into the outer zones. Toward other beasts too. Territories being crossed. Borders that hadn’t been touched in years suddenly being trampled.
It wasn’t coordinated.
There was no signal. No single point of command.
But there was a pattern.
The sa race appearing in each disruption.
Red Mane Lions.
They wouldn’t understand why until much later.
One of the valley’s Great Abominations had failed its evolution. The process had broken down sowhere in the middle and what ca out the other side wasn’t stronger. It was broken. Mindless. Rage with no direction and no restraint.
It had turned on the nearest Great Abomination and attacked.
And the entire valley had shaken from it.
The humans behind the constructed walls in the valley’s inner zone felt nothing. Heard nothing. Sat behind their defenses and waited for their hunting teams to return.
They had no idea that a silent war had already started in the deep zones.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
"Guilliman?"
Hamdel’s voice ca out slow, carrying genuine skepticism as he looked sideways at Jemie.
"You’re sure? He’s supposed to still be in the nightmare desert."
Jemie didn’t waver.
"I’m sure."
The carriage moved at full speed, wheels cutting hard across the uneven ground, the entire group pushed forward by sothing that felt less like urgency and more like disbelief trying to beco certainty.
The mont Victoria had heard that na she had stopped thinking about beasts entirely.
The hunt was over. The plan was over.
All of it was dropped without a second thought.
Guilliman.
His case had lived in the back of her mind for a long ti. Not loudly. It didn’t announce itself every day. But it was there, settled like a stone she couldn’t move. A failure that she had carried because she had been too weak to prevent it.
Her father had left because of that sa weakness. That inability to protect the people who mattered.
She had made a promise to herself after that. Quiet and private and completely serious.
She would go back to the Blacksteel Lord.
She would kill him with her bare hands.
And she would free Guilliman herself.
But now he was free?
The thought sat strangely. Not bad. Not good yet. Just suspended, waiting for confirmation.
"I’m sure," Jemie said again, this ti without being asked.
He understood what was riding on this. If he had been wrong, if the figure in the sky had just been soone who looked similar from a distance, he would have cracked sothing open in Victoria that would not close easily.
He had thought about that before turning back.
He was still sure.
"For your sake, I sincerely hope so."
Berthold’s voice ca from the front, eyes fixed ahead, locked on the road like Guilliman himself might appear around the next turn if he stared hard enough.
He wasn’t being harsh.
He ant it exactly as it sounded.
They were all family. That was just the truth of it for him. The people in this carriage and the people they had fought beside were family in every way that mattered.
But Guilliman was sothing more specific than that.
Guilliman was part of his beginning. The early days. Before rank. Before reputation. Before any of the things that ca after.
He wanted him back just as much as Victoria did.
Maybe more.
He would never say that.
But his eyes didn’t move from the road ahead.
Not once.????????????????????????????????
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