Cage released the radio transmitter and slowly exhaled, his eyes still locked onto the digital tactical display where the heat signatures of the Grounder coalition were actively fracturing across the valley.
Standing a few paces behind him, Captain Emerson adjusted the dark sling holding his newly set and heavily braced right wrist. His face was tight with a mixture of raw pain and simmering fury. "What now, sir?"
Cage didn't look back at him. Instead, he reached over and patched into the secure, encrypted channel reserved for the elite vanguard teams hidden on the ridges surrounding Tondc.
"Team Delta, this is Command," Cage barked into the microphone. "We have a change of plans. The savages are dividing their forces into hunting parties. You are to split your formations immediately. Team Alpha, three of you take the eastern path and hunt the Heda. Team Bravo, three of you tracking the northern ridge after the Blake girl. The remaining four..." Cage's voice dropped into a dark, venomous register. "You hunt the Butcher and once a target is neutralized go for the last group led by Indra. The missile will be inbound on the village center in exactly twenty minutes. Confirm orders."
Through the static, the cold, disciplined voice of the Delta squad leader crackled back. "Copy that, Command. Splitting formations now. Three after Lexa, three after Octavia, four tracking the Butcher. Once a target is neutralized, our remaining units will sweep west to eliminate Indra's group. Moving out."
Cage let go of the button, leaning his palms heavily against the metal console.
Emerson shifted his weight, his eyes scanning the flickering thermal monitors. He chewed on his lower lip, his brow furrowing deeply. "Sir... it doesn't feel right. The timing. They've been sitting in that village for days, and the exact hour we prepare a localized strike, they throw a sudden, massive hunting festival? Something is off."
Cage let out a sharp, dismissive scoff, turning around to face his captain. "It doesn't matter if it's off, Carl. It's an act of desperation. They are savages trying to find comfort in their pathetic traditions before the hammer falls. And today, we eradicate them."
He stepped closer to the primary launch monitor as a smug and arrogant smile stretched across his face. "Let them run into the trees. Let them play their games. It is utterly futile. That pathetic little alliance they built out of mud and sticks is going to end in fire and blood today. And by the time the smoke clears, their precious 'Butcher' will be nothing more than a forgotten footnote in our history books."
—-
Deep in the southern sector of the woods, the air was freezing, the thick canopy blotting out the faint moonlight. The small, isolated group of twelve Grounder warriors marched in a tight, defensive formation, their torches casting long, dancing shadows against the ancient pine trees.
Suddenly, Jason stopped in his tracks. He didn't turn around to face them; he simply stood perfectly still, his head tilted slightly as if listening to the faint rustle of the wind.
"Wait... you want us to do what?" one of the seasoned Tondc warriors asked, his voice thick with confusion and immediate distrust as he stepped forward.
Jason didn't look back at them. He kept his eyes scanning the high, rocky ridges above, his voice rising in a light, almost musical, sing-song tone. "I want you all to stay right where you are. Park your lovely little savage behinds on those rocks, keep your torches nice and bright, and absolutely do not follow me into the deep brush. The hunt is about to begin, and I work entirely alone."
The warriors immediately erupted into a chorus of harsh, angry protests.
"We are warriors of the Heda!" a fierce female scout snarled, stepping up and resting her hand on her axe. "We do not sit in the dark like frightened children while a Sky-man runs into the woods to hunt for game!"
"The Commander ordered us to hunt with you!" another rumbled, stepping into his path. "We do not break protocol!"
Jason let out a soft, theatrical sigh. He slowly turned around, his carefree, lazy smile completely vanished, replaced by a cold, sharp, and terrifyingly serene expression. He locked his gaze onto the hesitant group, his cadence dropping into a smooth, authoritative purr.
"Tell me," Jason murmured, stepping closer until the firelight illuminated the dangerous glint in his eyes. "Would this sudden outburst mean you are all choosing to disobey the Heda's direct commands to obey me? Because if I recall correctly, she told you to hunt with the Butcher, not to babysit him."
The warriors froze as the words died in their throats. They looked at one another, the heavy hesitation thick enough to cut with a blade. None of them wanted to face the wrath of Lexa, and none of them truly knew how to handle the unpredictable anomaly standing before them.
Jason's smirk slowly returned, sharp and mocking. "Didn't think so."
Without waiting for a response, Jason spun on his heel and launched himself forward, vanishing into the pitch-black density of the thick woods like a ghost, leaving the twelve warriors standing alone in the flickering light of their torches.
——-
The northern ridge hunting party moved deeper into the shadows. Octavia led the line, her hand loosely resting on the recurve bow given to her by the masked scout who glided soundlessly at her shoulder.
A few paces behind her, the Grounder warriors were growing visibly restless. Twice now, the heat of a forest deer had rustled the brush not ten yards away. Twice now, a skilled hunter could have easily claimed a kill. Yet Octavia had barely glanced at the tracks, her eyes focused entirely on the high, rocky ridges above them rather than the forest floor.
To an outsider, her behavior might have looked like the clumsy hesitation of an inexperienced Sky Person. But the warriors of Tondc knew better. This was Lincoln's lover, the girl who had survived their trials, trained under Indra, and proven her mettle in blood. She wasn't incompetent, no, if anything at all, she was distracting them.
"This is ridiculous," a sharp voice cut through the silence.
Caris, a fierce Tondc warrior with heavy black paint smeared across her eyes, stopped dead in her tracks, slamming the butt of her spear into the frozen dirt.
Octavia paused, slowly turning around to face her. "What is it, Caris?"
"We have passed three potential kills," Caris said with a tight mixture of anger and confusion in her voice. "You look at the tracks and you ignore them. The entire line has noticed. We are supposed to be hunting."
Athol, a broad-shouldered warrior traveling right behind Caris, stepped forward to back her up. "She's right. The Heda expects us to return to the village center with a bountiful harvest to honor this alliance. Why are we stalking the empty ridges? What are we actually doing out here?"
Octavia looked at him. "Is that so, Athol?"
The moment Athol took another half-step forward, the masked scout beside Octavia moved with a terrifying fluid grace. He stepped directly between them, his hand resting firmly on the hilt of his weapon, ready to shield her the absolute second the air turned hostile.
Athol hissed, his eyes narrowing at the guard. "This entire hunt doesn't make a lick of sense to begin with! We are on the very precipice of a war with the Mountain. A ceremony like this is never performed when the enemy is at our gates."
A low murmur of agreement rippled through the rest of the unit, the warriors shifting their weights, their hands drifting toward their weapons as the illusion of the hunt began to unravel.
"You all need to stop asking questions and follow the Heda's direct orders," Octavia commanded, her voice dropping into the stern, uncompromising register she had learned from Indra. "We move where I say we move, and we will return to Tondc when things settle down."
"When what settles down?" a gruff, heavily scarred warrior at the back demanded.
Octavia let out a heavy, frustrated sigh at the slip. "We need to keep moving. Let's go."
She turned on her heel to continue up the path, but Caris shot forward, her hand launching out to violently grab Octavia's shoulder to force her back around.
Schwing.
The sound of cold steel sliding from its scabbard cut through the mountain air like a whip. In a fraction of a second, the masked guard had pulled his sword, leveling the razor-sharp edge mere millimeters from the soft flesh of Caris's throat.
The entire unit went completely rigid. Athol drew his broadsword with a harsh growl, and the remaining warriors raised their spears, a dozen weapons instantly converging on Octavia and her lone protector.
"Stand down!" Octavia barked at her guard, holding a hand up. The masked scout didn't lower his blade, but he held his ground with an unyielding stance.
Caris didn't flinch, her eyes boring into Octavia's despite the cold steel pressed against her neck. "What is going on, Sky girl? What is this ritual really all about?"
The masked guard shifted his head slightly, his dark eyes looking at Octavia through the slits of his bone mask, silently waiting for her directive.
Octavia looked around at the fierce, distrustful faces of the warriors who were supposed to be her allies. She looked up at the empty sky above, then back to the unit. She let out a long, weary breath. "I hope I don't live to regret this," she muttered.
She took a step closer to the center of the group, keeping her voice low but projecting it with absolute, terrifying clarity. "Listen to me carefully. This far out from the village center, their scouts shouldn't be able to hear us, even if their thermal arrays can see our heat signatures."
She met Caris's gaze, her eyes wide with a grim, suffocating dread. "There is an attack coming. A bomb. Mount Weather is launching a missile at Tondc, and it's going to hit the village center."
——-
The trees thinned out as Lexa and Clarke led their contingent into a rocky clearing, the ground littered with fallen boulders and thick patches of mountain brush. Clarke slowed her pace slightly, glancing back at the silent line of warriors moving like ghosts behind them.
"You think this will work?" Clarke whispered, her voice barely carrying over the rustle of the leaves.
Lexa kept her gaze fixed on the ridge ahead with a stone cold expression on her face. "His plan better work. If it does not, we have split our forces for nothing."
"It'll either force Cage to hold his hand on the missile or split the strike team in Jason," Clarke argued, trying to convince herself as much as Lexa. "With the leadership scattered across four different sectors of the valley, dropping a bomb on an empty village square accomplishes nothing. He has to wait. He has to re-coordinate."
THWIP-CRACK.
A deafening, high-velocity report shattered the silence of the forest. The warrior marching directly behind Clarke didn't even have time to gasp. A heavy-caliber round struck him squarely in the temple, the sheer kinetic force dropping him instantly into the dirt.
"Take cover! We are under attack!" a warrior roared from the back.
Before the echoes of the first shot could fade, Clarke felt a violent yank on her jacket. Lexa dragged her down behind a massive, moss-covered boulder just as another round slammed into the earth where Clarke had been standing a millisecond prior, kicking up a violent spray of dirt and rock splinters.
To their left and right, two more Grounder scouts scrambled for the treeline, but the hidden shooters were mercilessly precise. Two rhythmic, muffled cracks echoed from the ridges, and both warriors dropped mid-stride, their blood dark against the pale forest floor.
"Do not move!" Lexa commanded, pressing her back flat against the boulder.
Two seasoned Tondc guards managed to slide into the dirt beside them, their breathing ragged with their axes drawn but entirely useless against an unseen enemy hundreds of yards away.
"Where are they firing from?" Lexa demanded as her eyes scanned the dense, shadowy tree line above the clearing.
"They're using suppressors and thermal scopes," Clarke gasped, her heart hammering violently against her ribs. "They don't need a clear line of sight. They just need a heat signature."
Across the clearing, a pocket of three Grounder warriors hidden behind a fallen log tried to make a break for the thicker brush.
"Stay down!" Clarke screamed, but it was too late.
The moment the first warrior emerged, a round took him in the chest. He collapsed, but instead of retreating, the remaining two warriors used his fall to violently sprint in opposite directions, drawing the fire. Two more shots rang out from different elevations. The grounders fell, but their sacrifice wasn't entirely in vain.
Lexa's eyes tracked the muzzle flashes barely visible puffs of smoke and displaced leaves from three distinct high points surrounding the clearing.
"It's a triangular encirclement," Lexa realized. "They have boxed us in. One on the high ridge to the left, one in the center canopy, and one on the right flank. They have overlapping fields of fire."
"We can't stay here," Clarke said, her mind racing as she looked at the angles. The sniper on the left ridge had a clear downward angle on their boulder; if he shifted just a few feet, he would be able to shoot right over their cover. "The one on the left... he's angling to flush us out. If he moves, we're dead anyway."
Clarke looked at the distance between their boulder and a thick, dense cluster of briars twenty yards away. If she could reach it, she would break the sniper's line of sight, but crossing that open gap was suicide.
She turned to Lexa, her eyes wide with a desperate, sudden resolve. "I'm going to draw his fire."
"Clarke, no," Lexa ordered, reaching out to grab her.
"Listen to me!" Clarke insisted, dodging her grip. "He's watching this rock. The second I run, he's going to track me. The moment he takes the shot, his chamber has to cycle. That gives your guard a few seconds maybe a minute to move up the blind side of the ridge and take him from behind."
Lexa looked at the guard beside her, a lethal, quiet scout who gave a single, tight nod. He knew the terrain, and he knew how to move without a sound if the shooter was distracted. Lexa turned back to Clarke, her jaw setting. "Make it count."
Clarke took a ragged breath, dug her boots into the dirt, and launched herself out from behind the boulder.
"Now!" Lexa hissed to the guard.
The moment Clarke's boots hit the open dirt, the left ridge erupted. A heavy round ripped through the air, tearing a chunk out of the sleeve of her jacket and sending her tumbling violently into the dirt. The sheer force of the near-miss sent her rolling, her hands scraping against the jagged rocks as she frantically scrambled on all fours, throwing her body into the thick, dense briar patch just as a second round chewed into the earth behind her heels.
Up on the left ridge, the Mountain Man sniper cycled his bolt, his eye glued to the thermal scope as he tried to reacquire Clarke's heat signature through the dense brush. He was so focused on his target that he never heard the rustle of the leaves behind him.
The Grounder guard materialized from the shadows like a phantom. Before the sniper could even turn his rifle, a bone-handled blade slid smoothly and deeply into the seam of his environmental suit beneath his jaw, severing his windpipe and cutting off his radio connection in a single, silent stroke.
Down in the briars, Clarke lay flat on her stomach, her chest heaving as she pressed her face into the dirt. The gunfire from the left ridge had completely stopped. She looked up through the thorns, catching the faint, subtle signal of the Grounder guard raising his bloodied blade from the ridge above before vanishing back into the trees.
Clarke let out a breath she felt like she'd been holding. She looked back across the clearing toward Lexa's position.
'That's one,' she thought, her hands trembling against the soil. If that sniper hadn't been neutralized, she would be a corpse right now.
She tightened her grip on her jacket, staring up at the remaining dark, menacing ridges where the hidden shooters still waited.
'Two more,' she thought grimly. 'I just hope Jason and the others are doing better than us.'
——————————