[KoJ] Chapter 98: Living Natural Disaster

I whip my body out of the path of a huge claw only for wind to crash against my side and the ocean of gravel to rise into my ventral scales. The impact tears me out of my flow. My head is torn from a distortion, and I’m thrown skyward.

Disorientation consumes my mind for only a moment before I see the hyena’s immense fangs racing in to tear me head from tail. I curl. My tail slips through a bend, and only with its leverage do I slip away from the deadly maw.

I should be the last to make such a mistake, but the speed the Titan shows surprises me; Larger beings tend to be faster than their smaller counterparts, not the other way around. It’s head twists and tries to bite me again. I haven’t been able to get so much as a hundred metres — no distance at all for a beast standing at three kilometres tall — so when the teeth come at me again, all I can do is strike my tail against its snout and dive desperately into a rift.

Thankfully, I escape without harm. I’m not hurt, but that hardly means I’m safe. A thick, dark substance coats my tail from where I struck the hyena. Light doesn’t reflect off it at all.  Immediately, I dive into the earth, trying to scrape it off. Too many beasts I’ve faced have had some control over whatever elements they carried with their bodies. Never to the degree of an elemental, but for a Titan, I can’t be careless.

The thick tar is a nightmare to scrape off, but thankfully it doesn’t come alive on me. Small blessings. I need them, as the Titan sends enormous waves of earth through the sky as it lunges after me. Much of said gravel doesn’t come down. Left to float away in the dark emptiness above.

I slither through another dozen rifts before the beast can catch me. No matter how many times I slide through a bend, the Titan never seems to grow further away. It can keep up with my spatial travel. We pass a few ancient Titan bones with smaller beasts hiding inside. The hyena crashes through them. Both bone and fauna are left as nothing more than shattered remnants and pulp.

This is too soon. I’m not ready to take on a Titan. They are they undisputed apex beings that stand over everything except the Anatla, and its hard to even say they exist yet.

Tar drips off hundred metre long strands of fur, scattering over the fluid landscape as it soars through the sky. I barely dodge its pounce by slipping through another bend. Forget trying to fight back, I rush through another rift that takes me as far as I can travel in a single distortion.

If it can keep up with me at my greatest speed, then how can I run?

I need to find the region of natural distortions; only that will let me slip away.

Three more rifts, and I have to dodge again. I barely slip out of its jaw, only to be slammed by the immense weight of its head. Coated in tar, I tumble to the earth. Immediately, I find it harder to move. The liquid clings to my scales and tries to stop me from slithering side to side. Any limbed creature would immediately be disabled.

Or, if it were a Titan, somewhat impaired.

Crashing through stone, I take a new path. My distortions take me deeper and deeper through the earth. If it can’t find me, hopefully it’ll give up on me.

Unfortunately, that line of thinking is far too hopeful.

Even pushing myself a dozen kilometres below the surface, gravel around me churns with greater intensity than normal. No caverns form down here away from the distorted region, and yet the intense pressure of the Titan above crash earth against earth with such intensity that void pockets form only to slam closed. The powerful blasts rock my body. More often than I’m happy to admit, they throw me off line with my rifts, slowing me down.

A tar soaked paw crashes through the gravel a mere hundred metres to my side. The hyena knows where I am. It knows, and it’s willing to dig for me.

The Titan’s claws retract, but leave a sea of tar behind. I have to close my distortions for vision as the flowing tar pushes against them, threatening to spill near my eyes. I cannot risk blindness. However temporary. Still, it is impossible to miss how the tar seeps through the gravel around me. I abandon another rift as it suddenly opens to an already filled space.

Another claw sweeps through the gravel and batters my side. A gash opens through my scales, but I’m lucky it didn’t tear through me.

This isn’t working.

The Titan isn’t willing to let me go. I can’t be worth all the effort of this chase, and yet it persists. If I go down any further, the hyena is going to catch me.

So, I pivot. The immense beast is already barrelling down into the earth; I take advantage of that. I fold enough rifts into one another that when I pass through them, I am able to reach just beyond the rear of the Titan. It’s tail crashes through the earth somewhere nearby, knocking me aside with a wave of rock, but now I’m heading up.

I can only hope the long beast keeps going down long enough to escape.

The hyena has shoved aside enough earth that slithering back through the air is simple. Gravel swirls like a whirlpool as it rolls down the voided space, trying to fill the space the Titan opened. Spearing through the sky, I decipher each strand of spatial ripples around me. As soon as the Titan Alps fill my sight, I’m on my way.

I don’t know why, but natural distortions always appear below the mountains.

Small critters — relatively — flee the moment they see me. Not that it would have helped them much had I been chasing them. By the time they’ve leapt a hundred metres, I’ve travelled ten thousand.

The Titan has yet to rise, and for a brief instance I feel relieved. Maybe I lost it while its eyes were engulfed with darkness and its nose blocked by stone.

As if hearing my hopeful thoughts, the hyena shows itself. The ground erupts below. Stone, gravel and water from a deep aquifer reach for the sky, swallowing all light. From within the kilometres of exploding earth, the Titan’s head breaches, fangs bared and jaw wide. Rivers of stone and tar roll down each tooth as if they were a chain of mountains. Ridges and valleys run through each, large enough for a small hive of sapients to settle within. The slick, tar coated pit of a throat rippled; muscles convulse in anticipation for a meal.

The Titan rises too quickly. I won’t be able to slip away without my entire tail being ripped off.

I divert my path, almost foolishly, down to meet the hyena. The wide pit of its jaw reaches nearly as wide as Kalma’s pit that first let me reach the surface. I dive inside. I slither between its teeth.

I’m sure, should I get out of this alive, I’ll look back on this moment as being completely foolish. But right now, it feels like the only way to escape those teeth. Slip past them before they can bite rather than dodge sideways, and give the creature the longest opportunity to bisect me.

A rift appears between its tar-soaked gums and I slide through.

The Titan tries to bite, but the bends I placed below each teeth slow it enough for me to slide through. They’ve never let me down before. I place the trap for the unimaginable strength of the being’s bite to rip through its own neck… but it fails.

My distortions hold for only a moment. Long enough to slip away without being digested, but no more. Its fangs slide through the bends easily, and yet instead of breaking the skin of its own neck, its my distortions that shatter. A gust of wind and a burst of heat follow their collapse, but the Titan snaps its mouth shut as if nothing more than a twig had been stuck in its jaw.

The fangs should have locked the distortion in place… and yet it broke through with nothing but sheer force.

As I flee again, I try to peek within its jaw, hoping that the collapse of the spatial fabric at least severed its teeth. But no. Those towers of bone remain entirely intact. As if they hadn’t just been wrenched through space.

Titans are something else…

This time, as I peal through the air, the Titan no longer follows. I don’t praise my luck. I simply keep my head straight and stretch my distortions as far as they can reach. Smoke and debris block any sight of the Titan Alps, but I know where to go. So long as I can make it there, even if the Titan decides to pick up the chase again, I will survive.

As I garner more distance, I keep the chain of distortions following behind me. If I had ever known my normal rift distance wouldn’t be enough to escape a Titan, I would have left chains leading everywhere, even with how annoying they are to maintain at increasingly immense distances.

The chain also lets me watch the Titan as I gradually close in on the Alps.

Pulling its legs from the depths of the gravel swells, the Titan never breaks its gaze on me. Nether does it chase. I reach almost a hundred kilometres, far beyond what I know the horizon should hide, and yet it watches.

It is unnerving.

The hyena raises its head, bares its fangs, breathes in, and unleashes a gravelly howl that unleashes devastation upon everything in its path. The ocean of earth parts. My distortions collapse. In an instant, the Titan’s howl slams through my scales, invuluntarily convulsing the muscles beneath, and imbuing a slimy hardness through every fibre of my being.

Terror embraces my mind in a way that I haven’t felt in a long time. I hit the earth before I realise I’m falling. The world shifts. Somehow, I suddenly find myself looking down on myself through a bend only large enough for my eye. It is the only natural distortion in sight, yet it perfectly shows myself… and the Titan standing over me.

How did it get so close?

I try to move, but the instinctual fear has a tighter grip over my body than my mind. Again, this is just like that day so long ago when the phantom destroyed my home. Titan’s are an immense existence that should never be opposed. The rule of the strong. What was I ever thinking to think I could ever reach their scale. They are beings so far above all else.

I’m sorry Scia.

The hyena growls, stepping closer. Horror and fear of death pound through my mind and body. I curl in on myself, trying to appear dead.

As it takes another step, tar slips from its snarling maw and falls over me. From my bird’s eye, I notice something strange. Something that seems so incredibly odd that I don’t know how I never realised before.

I’m not that much smaller.

Coiled up in myself, I take up about the same size as the hyena’s massive head. Stretched out, I would probably reach almost as long as it.

I don’t know when it happened, but I’m as long as a Titan.

Suddenly, my mind calms. The fear bleeds out of my muscles, and command returns.

What have I spent the last countless cycles doing if not to prepare for this? If I’m to always  double guess myself about when is the right time, then I’ll never reach my goal. This is the world demanding I prove my worth.

I will never be Titan prey again. This time, the Titan will be mine.

My fabric slips into the only natural bend, and rips it open. Larger than any distortion I’ve made, the bend consumes all my coils, just in time to avoid the snapping fangs of the larger beast.

I fall on top of the Titan, determined to end its life, or die trying.

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Damn, with how quick Orm's growing now, we'll be wrapping the globe in no time. :3

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