The night in the Scarlet Wastes was not a simple absence of light. It was an entity—a vast, breathing cloak of cold and amplified sound. The wind, which had been a distant moan in the Shattered Teeth, became a chorus of whispers and shrieks as it tore over rock formations shaped by eons of bloody sandstorms. Strange, phosphorescent lichens cast sickly green and purple glows in patches, creating a landscape of lurking, ambiguous shadows.
Alex moved.
He did not run, or stumble, or huddle in fear. He walked with a purposeful, measured gait, his senses fully deployed. His mind was a silent command center, processing streams of input.
Wind direction: consistent from the northwest. Use as constant for navigation offset.
Ambient temperature: dropping 1.7 degrees per hour. Estimate freezing point reach in 4 hours.
Auditory signatures: distant skittering (small scavengers), intermittent low hoots (canyon drakes on the hunt), a deep, rhythmic thrumming (geothermal vent, bearing 045, approximate distance 3 miles).
Ground composition: loose scree, transitioning to hard-packed, iron-rich clay. Footing unstable but predictable.
The flint-like stone was now a crude, sharp-edged hand-axe. He had spent an hour at the base of the pass, striking it against a harder basalt outcrop with precise, calibrated force, guided by his intuitive understanding of fracture mechanics. Each strike was an experiment; each resulting flake a piece of data. The final product was ugly, asymmetrical, but its edge was lethally sharp.
He held it not like a weapon, but like a tool. Because that's what it was. His first tool.
The primary objective was water. The waterskin Seraphina had given him was half-full. In this desiccated environment, it was a treasure to be hoarded, not consumed. He needed a source.
He recalled the view from the Western Keep. A faint, heat-haze shimmer in a specific quadrant of the wastes, visible only at dawn. A geothermal signature. Where there was heat and subsurface activity, there was often condensed water, or at least the means to distill it.
He adjusted his path, moving with a hunter's patience but a surveyor's intent. He avoided the phosphorescent lichen patches. Their light was a beacon, and in a place where everything fed on everything else, he would not be the moth.
An hour into his trek, the data stream shifted.
New auditory signature: padding feet, multiple sets, moving in sync. 30 meters to the east, paralleling his course. Respiratory pattern: fast, shallow. Predators.
He didn't freeze. He altered his angle of travel subtly, veering toward a cluster of large, wind-sculpted boulders. He moved behind one, his back to the cold stone, and became still. Not just quiet, but null. His breathing slowed to an imperceptible whisper. He let the absolute inner quiet expand, wrapping around him like a non-reflective sheath. It wasn't invisibility; it was the cessation of noticeable output.
Three shapes slunk into the faint starlight between the rocks.
Hemohounds.
They were the size of large wolves, but their bodies were hairless, covered in a thick, leathery hide the color of a dried scab. Their heads were all jaws and milky, pupil-less eyes that could see heat and smell blood leagues away. Long, whip-like tails ended in bony, spiked clubs. They moved with a disturbing, fluid silence.
They stopped, muzzles lifting, sniffing the air. They had his scent trail. They fanned out, low to the ground, approaching the boulder cluster.
Alex's mind was a cold crystal of analysis.
Targets: Three.
Primary weapons:Jaws (crushing), claws (raking), tail-clubs (blunt force).
Weak points:Eyes (blind but heat-sensitive, rely on scent secondary), underbelly (softer hide), joints.
Environmental advantage:Confined space between rocks limits pack coordination.
My weapon:One stone axe. Insufficient for direct engagement.
He didn't think of fear. He thought of force vectors and chemical reactions.
His eyes scanned the ground. There. A scattered patch of a brittle, grey-white fungus growing in the lee of the boulder. Ashcap. He'd seen it referenced in a botanical bestiary he'd been forced to memorize. Highly volatile spores when crushed and exposed to oxygen. An irritant, not a poison.
The lead Hemohound rounded the boulder, its head swinging toward him, jaws peeling back from rows of needle teeth. It didn't growl. It inhaled, preparing to let out a subsonic howl that would disorient prey and summon the pack.
Alex moved.
He lunged not at the beast, but to the side, his hand sweeping through the patch of Ashcap fungus, crushing a clump of it into a dusty powder in his fist. As the Hemohound's chest expanded, Alex threw the powder directly into its gaping maw and wide, blind eyes.
The reaction was instantaneous and violent.
The hound choked, the subsonic howl turning into a strangled, agonized shriek. It thrashed, clawing at its face. The spores, reacting with the moisture in its eyes, nostrils, and throat, created a burning, itching, explosive micro-flammation. The beast was blind and in torment.
The other two hounds, confused by their leader's distress but driven by hunger, charged the narrow gap.
Alex was already moving. He'd used the first hound's convulsions as a shield and a distraction. As the second hound pushed past its flailing packmate, Alex swung his stone axe.
He did not aim for the skull. He aimed for the biomechanics.
The sharp edge connected with the precise point where the hound's left front leg met its shoulder—a complex joint of tendon and bone. He struck with all the leverage his body could muster, guided by an innate understanding of structural failure points.
CRACK.
The sound was sickeningly dry. The leg buckled, the hound yelping in surprise and pain as it tumbled, its charge turned into a messy sprawl, tangling with the first, blinded hound.
The third hound, smarter or more cautious, hung back, circling, its tail lashing.
Alex didn't press the attack. He had created chaos, not victory. He backed away, keeping the boulder at his back, his eyes on the third hound. The two wounded beasts were a writhing, shrieking obstacle. The third hound snarled, but its pack coordination was broken.
Optimal outcome: Disengagement. Fighting to kill expends energy, risks injury, and attracts more predators with the noise and blood.
He slowly, deliberately, picked up a fist-sized rock. He weighed it. He looked at the third hound, then at a particularly dense patch of the brittle Ashcap fungus five meters to the hound's left.
He threw the rock. It wasn't aimed at the hound. It arced perfectly and smashed into the heart of the fungus patch.
A small cloud of grey spores puffed into the air, carried on the wind toward the hound.
The beast snarled, recoiling from the unfamiliar, acrid smell. It was a hesitation, a moment of primal caution.
That was all Alex needed. He turned and ran, not in panic, but with controlled, efficient speed, putting distance between himself and the compromised pack, angling directly toward the now-audible thrum of the geothermal vent.
He ran until the sounds of the hounds faded behind him. He didn't stop until he reached the edge of a shallow, steaming ravine.
Before him, from a crack in the world's flesh, geysers of hot mud burbled and spat. The air was warm and stank of sulfur and minerals. Condensation gleamed on the cooler rocks at the vent's periphery.
Water.
He had solved the first equation. He knelt by a trickle of condensed runoff, clear and cold where it met the night air. He drank deeply from his hands, then refilled his waterskin with meticulous care.
As he worked, the adrenaline of the encounter faded, leaving only the pure, quiet hum of his mind. He looked at the crude stone axe in his hand, stained now with foul Hemohound ichor.
Tool: Effective. Design: Can be improved. Material: Inadequate.
He looked at the steaming vent, at the strange, metallic-colored stones around it, at the absolute foreignness of this world.
For the first time since his descent, he spoke aloud, his voice a soft, clear note in the geothermal symphony.
"Protocol established. Survival is possible. Now," he said, his crimson eyes reflecting the hellish glow of the mud pots, "we begin the optimization."
He had secured water. He had a tool. He had defended himself. The null soul had not just survived its first night in the meat-grinder; it had begun, calmly and precisely, to reverse-engineer it. The workshop of his mind had its first successful field test. The blueprint for everything to come had just received its foundational proof of concept.