The centipede didn't attack immediately.
It watched. Antennae probing the air between them, tasting his fear-scent, calculating. The mandibles opened and closed with the rhythm of breathing—click, pause, click—each sound a small promise of violence.
Sekitanki gripped the wooden shard tighter. His palm was already bleeding where splinters had embedded themselves, but pain felt distant now. Abstract. Like it was happening to someone else's hand.
Move and you die. Stay still and you die. Choose.
The centipede's body segments rippled—a wave of chitinous armor flowing like liquid machinery. Horrid, in the way a perfectly designed engine is modernized. Every part optimized for a single function: killing things smaller than itself.
Which, unfortunately, included him.
Sekitanki's mind raced through options with the desperate speed of a drowning person grasping for anything floating. The creature blocked the only exit from his shelter. Running would expose his back. Fighting something ten times his mass with a stick was suicide wearing a different mask.
But I've already chosen suicide, he thought. I chose it the moment I stepped into that machine. The realization came with strange clarity. He'd been killing himself slowly for years—starvation diets, sleepless weeks, relationships sacrificed on the altar of equations that didn't care if he lived or died. This was just faster. More honest. The centipede lunged.
Sekitanki's body moved before his mind caught up—pure animal reflex overriding genius. He threw himself sideways, shoulder slamming into the hollow's wall. The mandibles snapped shut where his throat had been, taking a chunk of rotten wood instead.
He stabbed upward. The wooden shard penetrated the soft membrane between segments—barely, maybe half a centimeter—before the chitin armor stopped it cold. The centipede shrieked.
The sound was mechanical. Alien. Like metal scraping against metal in frequencies that shouldn't exist. It recoiled, and Sekitanki scrambled out of the hollow, hands and knees churning mud, not looking back, just moving—
He made it five meters before he realized: the centipede wasn't following.
Sekitanki spun around, gasping in the thick air. The creature had retreated into the shadows beneath the log, only its antennae visible, twitching with what might have been pain. Or rage. Or hunger delayed but not forgotten.
A dark fluid leaked from where he'd stabbed it. Not blood. Something thicker. Greenish-black. I hurt it. The thought arrived with a spike of something dangerous. Not quite hope. More like... acknowledgment. He could be hurt. But so could they.
The playing field wasn't level. Would never be level. But it wasn't completely vertical either.
Sekitanki backed away slowly, keeping the wounded centipede in sight until the undergrowth swallowed it. Only then did he allow himself to breathe.
The sun—if you could call that dim green glow filtering through the canopy sun—had fully risen by the time Sekitanki found the clearing. His leg throbbed with each step. Infection spreading, probably. His mind felt cottony from oxygen intoxication. But he'd survived the night.
One day down. How many more until I die?
The clearing was maybe thirty meters across, dominated by a massive tree stump—something had fallen here, creating a gap in the canopy where actual sunlight broke through. Real light. Yellow and warm and impossibly far away.
Sekitanki stood in it for a long moment, feeling warmth on his face, and thought of summers when he was nine. Before physics. Before everything. His mother taking him to the park, buying him kakigōri—shaved ice that melted on his tongue, sweet and cold and perfect.
When was the last time something had felt perfect? The memory hurt worse than his leg. He was so lost in it that he almost didn't hear the wings. Almost.
The sound started as a whisper—silk tearing in slow motion. Then louder. A rhythmic thrumming that he felt in his feet vibrations. Sekitanki's head snapped up.
The dragonfly descended into the clearing like a god dispensing judgment.
Not the same one from yesterday—this one was larger, its wingspan easily six meters. Its body gleamed iridescent green-gold in the direct sunlight, segmented abdomen flexing with the precision of hydraulic pistons. The head swiveled, compound eyes catching light and fracturing it into a thousand watching angles.
Meganeura, some distant part of his mind supplied. The giant dragonfly genus. Top predator of the Carboniferous. Apex hunter of the ancient skies. And it had seen him.
They stared at each other across the clearing—prehistoric perfect killing machine and lost genius who'd never thrown a punch in his life. Sekitanki's grandfather had been a kendō instructor. Tried to teach him once, when he was six. Stance, kid. Everything starts with stance. Root yourself. Become the earth.
He'd thought it was stupid. Mystical nonsense that couldn't be quantified. Now, with death hovering thirty meters away, he remembered.
Feet shoulder-width apart. Knees bent. Weight centered. The wooden shard held forward like a sword that wasn't a sword, would never be a sword, was just desperate hope carved from rotting wood.
The dragonfly's wings blurred. It came at him like a missile. Sekitanki dove left—not fast enough—the dragonfly's leg-hooks raked across his shoulder, tearing fabric and skin in one motion. Pain exploded white-hot. He hit the ground rolling, came up running, heard the thrumming as the predator banked for another pass.
Think. It's just physics. Velocity, trajectory, reaction time—the dragonfly struck again.
This time Sekitanki dropped flat. Six meters of killing machine passed overhead close enough that he felt wind from its wings, smelled something sharp and chemical from its body. He swung the wooden shard upward blindly.
Felt resistance. Heard that mechanical shriek again. When he scrambled to his feet, greenish fluid dripped from his makeshift weapon. The dragonfly had landed on the opposite side of the clearing, one leg damaged, twitching irregularly.
They stared at each other again. Both wounded now. Both calculating. It's learning. Oh god, it's actually learning. The creature launched itself forward—not flying this time, but running, six legs churning earth in a nightmare skitter. Impossibly fast. Physics-defying speed that shouldn't be possible for something that size.
Sekitanki ran toward it.
Later, he wouldn't remember deciding to do this. Wouldn't be able to explain the logic. There was no logic. Just the understanding that running away meant death from behind, and if he was going to die, he wanted to see it coming.
They collided.
The dragonfly's mandibles snapped shut an inch from his face. Sekitanki stabbed forward, putting everything—seventeen years of repressed rage, loneliness, the empty hole where his soul should be—behind the wooden blade.
It punched through the membrane between the creature's head and thorax. Sank deep. Hit something vital. The dragonfly convulsed.
Its wings beat frantically, lifting them both—Sekitanki still gripping the embedded shard, screaming, legs dangling three meters off the ground. The world spun. Green light and blue sky and ancient earth tumbling together.
Then gravity remembered them.
They crashed down. The dragonfly's bulk hit first, Sekitanki on top, momentum driving the wooden shard deeper, through whatever passed for a spine in insects, out the other side. Through the stomach.
The creature thrashed. Wings cracking. Legs kicking. Mandibles clicking rapidly—click-click-click-click—like a machine losing power. Sekitanki rolled clear, gasping, covered in that greenish ichor that smelled like copper and rotting flowers.
The dragonfly took four minutes to die.
He watched the entire thing. Couldn't look away. Watched the movements become spasms, the spasms become twitches, the twitches become stillness. Watched the light fade from compound eyes that had never known fear until something impossible—a human, tiny and soft and wrong—had killed it.
When it was finally over, Sekitanki knelt in the mud and vomited bile. Nothing left in his stomach but acid and horror. He'd killed before. Insects. Mice in laboratories, sometimes, when experiments required it. But this felt different. This was personal. Intimate. He'd looked into those alien eyes and seen intelligence. Limited, yes. Inhuman, absolutely. But present. Aware.
And he'd ended it. Welcome to survival, he thought bitterly. This is what it costs. The sun had moved—maybe noon, maybe later—before Sekitanki could bring himself to approach the corpse.
It looked smaller in death. Funny how that worked. Terror added meters to everything. But even reduced by mortality, it was massive. Six meters of chitin and evolutionary perfection now cooling in the Carboniferous heat.
He needed water. Needed food. Needed to treat his wounds before infection finished what the insects started. But first... I need a real weapon. The thought arrived with cold pragmatism. The wooden shard had broken during the impact, jagged pieces scattered in the mud. He couldn't rely on finding convenient sticks every time something tried to eat him.
He needed something better. Something that would last.
Something made from the only material harder than wood available: the bones of his enemy.
Sekitanki's stomach turned at the thought. In his old life—was there still an old life?—he barely touched raw meat. The idea of butchering a giant insect corpse with his bare hands made every civilized part of his brain scream in protest.
But civilization was 359 million years away. And the dead don't feel disgust.
He started with the legs. The exoskeleton there was thinner, easier to break. Using a sharp rock—his hands already numb to new pain—he worked at the joint, prying, cracking, feeling chitin give way with sounds like breaking pottery.
Inside: the leg's internal structure. Not bone, not exactly. Harder. Chitinous plates that supported the muscles, tapered to sharp points at the ends where they formed the leg-hooks.
These. These could work. It took three hours. Three hours of breaking, scraping, peeling away the soft tissue that his mind refused to categorize. Three hours of greenish fluid coating his arms up to the elbows. Three hours of gagging and continuing anyway because stopping meant dying and he'd already decided—somewhere in that collision, somewhere in that desperate airborne moment—that he wasn't ready to die. Not yet.
Not until he understood why he'd been so eager to in the first place.
When he finished, he had three pieces: Two long leg segments, each about a meter long, tapered to vicious points. And one mandible—smaller than he'd hoped, but sharp as surgical steel, serrated along one edge.
The leg segments he bound together using strips of his lab coat, creating a spear of sorts. The mandible he kept separate, wrapping the dull end in fabric to create a grip.
A bone spear. A chitin blade. Weapons made from death to prevent death.
Sekitanki held them up to the light filtering through the canopy, and something shifted inside him. Not quite pride. Not quite horror. Something between—the understanding that he was becoming something else. Something that could do this. Something that would do this to survive.
His grandfather's voice again, memory surfacing like a drowning victim: The sword is an extension of your will. It does not think. It does not fear. It simply exists as expression of your intent.
He'd thought it was mystical bullshit. Now he understood. The weapon wasn't just a tool. It was a statement: I choose to live. Even if living meant doing the unthinkable.
He tested the spear on a nearby tree. The point punched through thick bark, sank deep, held firm when he tried to pull it free. Strong. Durable. Better than wood by orders of magnitude.
The blade he tested on tough fern stems. It cut cleanly, the serrated edge perfect for sawing. Good. This is good. Sekitanki allowed himself a moment to feel it. Not happiness—that was still beyond him. But satisfaction. The cold mathematical certainty that he'd increased his survival probability by a measurable percentage. It would have to be enough.
The forest had grown quiet during his work. Now sounds returned—distant chittering, wing-beats, the eternal backdrop of an ecosystem that didn't care about his small victory.
He gathered his new weapons, his ruined coat, his bleeding hands and infected leg and oxygen-drunk mind. And he started walking. Because staying still meant dying.
And somehow—impossibly—stupidly—he'd decided that dying was no longer acceptable. Behind him, the dragonfly's corpse began attracting scavengers. Nature's cleanup crew arriving to reclaim the matter, redistribute the energy, continue the endless cycle. Ahead, somewhere in that impossible maze of ancient green, was another day.
Sekitanki Hankō suru hito—genius, prodigy, empty vessel finally filling with something like purpose—walked toward it with weapons made from nightmares and the first stirrings of something that might eventually become the will to survive.
TO BE CONTINUED... [NEXT EPISODE: "The First Shelter"]