The fifth day dawned with mist so thick it felt like drowning in slow motion.
Sekitanki woke to find his shelter cocooned in white—a fog that smelled of rot and minerals and something chemical his modern mind couldn't classify. The Carboniferous morning pressed against him like a living thing, humid and heavy, turning each breath into an act of will.
His right arm had swollen overnight into something grotesque. Purple and black, hot to the touch, the puncture wounds from the scorpion weeping clear fluid. Infection spreading faster than his body could fight it.
Antibiotics, his mind supplied uselessly. Penicillin. Modern medicine. Things that won't exist for 359 million years.
He laughed—a dry, broken sound. Then forced himself to move.
Movement was everything. Movement was life. The moment he stopped moving was the moment the forest won. Using strips of fern frond soaked in stream water, he wrapped his arm. The coolness provided temporary relief, nothing more. The infection would kill him eventually if something else didn't kill him first. Racing death had become his daily routine.
He gathered his weapons—the scorpion-stinger spears, the chitin blade—and descended from the outcropping. The mist swallowed him immediately, reducing the world to three meters of visibility in any direction. Shadows moved within the white. Could be trees. Could be predators. Could be death wearing any of a thousand prehistoric faces.
Sekitanki moved silently, feet finding purchase on ground he'd learned through repetition and pain. Five days had taught him things no textbook could: where the mud was too soft, where roots waited to trip him, where the carnivorous plants grew that snapped at anything warm-blooded.
He was hunting.
The sound reached him through the mist: rhythmic clicking, like a train passing over rails. Mechanical. Methodical. Massive. Sekitanki froze, every sense straining. The clicking grew louder. Closer. The mist swirled with displacement from something moving through it—something so large it pushed the air ahead of itself like a pressure wave.
Then he saw it. The millipede emerged from the white like a fever dream given form. Arthropleura. His mind supplied the name reflexively. But knowing its name did nothing to prepare him for the reality of it.
It was seven meters long. Maybe eight. Its body segments flowed in waves of articulated chitin armor, each plate the size of a dinner table, black and glossy and shiny. Hundreds of legs—maybe thousands—moved in hypnotic synchronization, carrying the creature forward with the inevitability of a glacier.
It was sharp. It was horrifying. And it was heading directly toward his shelter.
Sekitanki's first instinct was to hide, let it pass, avoid confrontation with something that outmassed him by probably five hundred kilograms. But then he saw what trailed behind it: dozens of smaller arthropods following in its wake, scavengers picking at the plant matter the millipede crushed. A mobile ecosystem.
And more importantly: it was herbivorous. Docile, according to every reconstruction he'd ever read. Meat. Enough meat to last weeks if I can preserve it. The thought arrived with cold pragmatism that would have horrified the person he'd been six days ago. That person had never carved weapons from the corpses of his enemies. Had never stabbed living creatures while screaming. Had never learned that survival meant becoming something new. Something harder.
Sekitanki began to follow.
The millipede moved through the forest like a living bulldozer, crushing everything in its path. Sekitanki trailed behind, keeping distance, observing. Looking for weakness. For patterns. For the moment.
His grandfather's voice again, memory surfacing: In kendō, you study your opponent. Learn their rhythm. Find the space between their movements. That space is where victory lives.
The arthropleura's rhythm was hypnotic—legs moving in waves, head swaying slightly side to side, antennae probing the mist. Every few minutes it would pause to feed, mandibles scraping at ferns, processing plant matter with sounds like industrial machinery.
Docile. Peaceful. Sekitanki felt something twist in his heart. Guilt, maybe. Or the last vestiges of the civilized person he'd been, protesting what he was about to do. He told that person to shut up. Survival didn't care about guilt.
He waited until the creature stopped to feed again, then moved. Silent feet on muddy ground. Scorpion-stinger spear gripped in his left hand, his good hand, the only one he could trust.
The millipede's segments overlapped like roof tiles, each one protecting the next. But between segments—where the chitin plates articulated—there were gaps. Soft membrane. Vulnerable points. Sekitanki chose one at mid-body. Close enough to reach. Far enough from the head that the mandibles couldn't turn on him quickly.
He took three running steps and jumped. The spear drove into the gap between segments with every ounce of his weight behind it. Penetrated deep. Hit something vital. The arthropleura screamed. The sound was unlike anything he'd heard—mechanical yet organic, a shriek like metal tearing mixed with animal agony. The creature's body convulsed. Hundreds of legs thrashed. The segment Sekitanki clung to bucked like a living wave.
He lost his grip on the spear. It remained lodged in the wound as he fell, hitting the ground hard enough to drive air from his lungs. Above him, the millipede writhed, its body coiling and uncoiling, crashing into trees that splintered under the impact.
Move. MOVE. Sekitanki rolled as the creature's tail segments whipped past, missing his head by centimeters. He scrambled backward, drawing the chitin blade, watching the millipede's death throes destroy the forest around it.
But it wasn't dying. The arthropleura's movements became more coordinated. More purposeful. The initial shock was wearing off. And now it was angry. The creature turned—somehow its massive bulk pivoted with terrifying speed—and came at him.
Not a charge. Worse. A methodical advance, hundreds of legs churning ground, mandibles clicking open and closed, every movement radiating rage.
Sekitanki ran. The mist had burned off, revealing the full nightmare of the Carboniferous in daylight. He sprinted through a landscape of alien geometry—club mosses towering overhead, ferns the size of buildings, ground that sucked at his feet with every step. Behind him, the arthropleura followed, crashing through obstacles, unstoppable.
It's too big. Too strong. This was suicide—his foot caught on a root. He went down hard, tasting mud and copper. Rolled onto his back just in time to see the millipede's head zoom up above him, mandibles spreading wide.
Time crystallized. In that frozen moment, Sekitanki saw everything with perfect clarity: the compound eyes reflecting his terrified face, the mandibles designed to grind plant matter now ready to destroy him, the segments of its body still rippling with rage.
He saw his death. And refused it. The chitin blade came up as the mandibles came down. Not a block—he couldn't block something that strong—but a redirect. The blade caught the left mandible, twisted, used the creature's own momentum to turn its head slightly aside.
The right mandible crashed into earth beside his head, so close he felt chitin scrape his cheek. Sekitanki didn't think. Thinking took time he didn't have. He simply moved—rolling beneath the creature's head, between its front legs, into the space underneath its armored body.
Darkness. The overwhelming smell of alien biology. Hundreds of legs churning above him. The soft underbelly—relatively soft, still tougher than leather—close enough to touch. He drove the chitin blade upward. Again. Again. Again. Each strike punching through membrane, releasing ichor that rained down on him, warm and viscous and revolting. The millipede shrieked again, its whole body convulsing. Legs kicked. Segments twisted.
Sekitanki kept stabbing. No technique. No elegance. Just desperate, animal violence. This is what I am now. This is what survival made me. The arthropleura's movements became erratic. It was trying to dislodge him, but its own body was the trap—he was inside its defenses, beneath its armor, in the one place it couldn't reach.
One more strike. This one found something critical—a nerve cluster, maybe, or whatever passed for a heart in millipedes. The creature's legs stopped moving all at once. The massive body shuddered and went still.
For a moment, Sekitanki lay there in the darkness beneath the dead thing, unable to move, unable to process what had just happened. Then the crushing weight began to register—seven meters of armored millipede settling onto him.
Panic gave him strength he didn't know remained. He clawed his way out from under the corpse, emerging into daylight covered head to toe in greenish ichor, gasping, shaking, alive.
The forest had gone silent.
Every creature within hearing distance had fled or hidden. Only Sekitanki remained, standing over the massive corpse, chitin blade still gripped in trembling hands. He'd killed the walking wall. Alone. With primitive weapons. Through nothing but desperation and the absolute refusal to die.
The realization hit him like a physical force. Not pride—he was too exhausted for pride. But something else. Something primal. I did this. Me. The empty prodigy who couldn't connect with anyone. The genius who felt nothing. I killed a giant prehistoric millipede with a knife made from bug parts. He started laughing. Couldn't stop. The sound echoed through the silent forest, manic and broken and triumphant. The sun was setting by the time Sekitanki finished butchering what he could use.
His infected arm had gone numb—probably bad, definitely concerning—but his left arm worked well enough. He carved away sections of the softer tissue, trying not to think about what he was doing, just doing it. Survival didn't care about squeamishness.
The meat was white. Fibrous. Smelled faintly of ammonia. He had no idea if it was safe to eat. Didn't matter. He'd either die of infection or starvation anyway. Might as well gamble on prehistoric millipede.
He built a fire—his first fire, achieved through friction and tinder and a patience he'd learned from necessity. The smoke would attract predators, but everything was a trade-off. Cooked meat was safer than raw. Probably.
As the first pieces sizzled over flames, Sekitanki sat and watched the sunset paint the Carboniferous sky in colors Earth would never see again. Purples and greens mixing with orange, filtered through an atmosphere so alien it might as well be another planet.
He thought of his mother. Wondered if she was at his memorial service right now, crying into his father's shoulder. Wondered if Dr. Yamamoto had said nice things. Wondered if anyone understood that he'd found what he was looking for.
Not meaning. Not purpose. But challenge. Real challenge. The kind you couldn't solve with equations. The kind that demanded everything and gave nothing but the chance to try again tomorrow.
He was empty. Still empty. But the emptiness didn't hurt anymore. The meat finished cooking. Sekitanki took a bite, chewed, swallowed. It tasted terrible—bitter and tough and wrong. He ate it anyway. And planned for tomorrow.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The Collapse"]