The Grove didn't just hold the dark; it compressed it.
The three men and the woman moved in a tight, predatory loop around Maluma. Their Rama torches bled jagged orange gashes into the ozone-thin air.
Maluma stood in the center. His hands were raised—not in surrender, but like a man measuring the weight of the air he was about to break. His face was a mask of static severity. His brow cast shadows so deep his eyes looked like two opaque voids.
"You think you're clever?" Maluma's voice was a low, gravelly grind. "Killing people just to get rid of the Fijians. You are a low human being."
The woman stepped forward. Her skin was stained with salt-dust. She shook the Te-I-Ba—the long, bone-hard tail-spine of a giant stingray. It made a rhythmic, brittle rasp.
"I don't really care about your words, Maluma," she hissed, her voice a whip-thin needle of spite. "The truth is you will die here tonight, and there's no escape."
Maluma bit his lips in controlled fury. He looked toward the shadows of the trees, then snapped his gaze back.
"ARE YOU DUMB?"
The shout was a resonant percussion. It made the woman jolt. The orange light of her torch flickered for a micro-second, as if his rage had its own gravity. Her face twisted, the topography of furrowed creases deepening. She gestured to the three hunters, her voice a jagged staccato.
"Kill him! I said kill him now! Let's see how tough you are!"
The three men shifted. Their frames were supple, heavy blocks of muscle. Their eyes were obsidian gazes that swallowed the firelight. They began to close the circle. Their feet made a high-pitched skritch-crunch on the coral.
Maluma settled into a locked, square hinge of a stance. His chest heaved with a thump-valve intensity.
"If any of you come near me," he rumbled, his voice dropping into a weighted threat, "I will break your spines with your own weapons."
The silence was sterile. No one breathed.
A sudden surge of motion came from behind the woman—a man lunging from the darkness. She felt the rush of displaced air and tried to twist.
"Aah!!"
The cry was cut short. She was too late.
"Get away from me!" she yelled.
His fingers clamped over her wrist. A brutal, calloused hand slammed down to intercept her strike. They grappled for a heartbeat, muscles straining, until he wrenched the blade from her grasp with a sickening twist.
The three attackers sprang into motion, but the darkness birthed more enemies. Five figures stepped into the light, torches held high like burning brands. Their wooden shields and sharpened spears formed a jagged wall.
"Hey!!" one barked. The firelight glinted off his sweat-slicked chest.
Maluma spun, eyes darting, breath hitching in a throat suddenly tight with shock.
Behind the woman, the man's arm wrapped around her neck. He locked his elbow in a vice-grip that cut off her air. She clawed at his forearm, her heels digging into the dirt, struggling against the crushing weight.
"You think you can just threaten to kill the Chief, huh?" he yelled into her ear. He jerked his arm upward—a sharp, warning constriction that turned her world dizzy.
"Chief!" another warrior called out. "We cornered them for you. What do we do with them?"
The Chief did not answer immediately. His eyes remained fixed on the woman, hooded and unblinking. Slowly, the irritation on his face smoothed out, replaced by a predatory aloofness.
He began to walk. Each stride was a heavy quake. The thud of his feet on the packed earth resonated through the ground. The torchlight played across the deep ridges of his brow and the heavy, scarred muscle of his shoulders.
The man holding the woman forced her down. Her knees hit the dirt with a dull thud. He grabbed a handful of her hair, wrenching her head back. Her face was a map of defiance; even with her pulse hammering in her neck, her jaw remained set like iron.
The Chief loomed over her, a mountain of shadow blocking out the stars. He stood in silence. Beneath his heavy, dark brows, his eyes began to burn with a suffused redness.
"I feel ashamed of you," he rumbled, his voice vibrating with a strange, spiritual weight. "Sin has rotten your spirit long ago."
There was no warning. No shift in his stance.
He simply swung a huge, tree-trunk fist toward her face. The knuckles caught the firelight for a fraction of a second.
Darkness.
The world unzipped.
The Entity didn't walk; it frame-skipped between the palms. It was a flickering column of absolute black that vanished from one trunk and reappeared behind another in a heartbeat.
From the darkness, a voice emerged—the soft, high-pitched call of a little boy.
"Dad. Come look for me."
Inside Maluma's mind, the horror was replaced by a system-flush of memory. The humid night vanished. In its place: the golden, honey-thick light of a Banaba afternoon years ago.
A younger, softer Maluma pushed through the ferns. He found his son—alive, eyes bright with mischief—hiding behind a massive breadfruit tree. The boy's laugh was a vibrant, healthy sound.
The scene shifted. They were sitting inside their bure. The boy leaned against Maluma's massive arm.
"You're the best, dad," the boy whispered.
The memory shifted again. Tenia's voice, a broken, weeping sound:
"It's hard to live like this. I will never forgive myself."
A flash of a different reality: Maluma, his face burned and scarred, holding Tenia tightly beside their home.
A reflection of Maluma appeared inches from the Real Maluma's face.
"You hardened yourself by a tragedy," it rumbled. "Now, you harden others by your actions."
The vision zoomed out Maluma's pupil—past the redness, past the electrical impulses of his fear.
A single tear formed.
It began to roll down his cheek, but as it moved, it crystallized. The liquid turned into polished coral—a beautiful, jagged pearl of grief that froze mid-way down his face.
As the tear hardened, the rest of him followed. Silver skin smoothed over his eyes, sealing the memory of his son inside a featureless, ashen shell.
Everything fell quiet.
One of the men turned to an attacker in slow disbelief. "What the hell? What in the land's name did you do?"
Silence for a few seconds.
He pushed him backwards with a THUD. "What did you do?! You turned him to stone?!"
The other protested with raised arms. "It wasn't me, I swear! It wasn't me!"
The man locked his focus on the others. He gestured toward the grove with a full swing. "We need to tell the village! We need to tell them the land claimed him!"
The men sprinted off into the dark, their torches bobbing in a full-panic sprint.
The attackers remained in a state of marrow-chill.
The woman was pinned to the dirt in a state of petrification. Her heels were dug deep into the shoal-grit, her torso thrown back, supported by arms matted in sweat and locked at the elbows. Her palms were pressed into the earth.