They didn’t have time to think. There was only worry. And a need for action.

That suited Kaldalis just fine, because he didn’t exactly have the capacity to think right now.

The fear welling up within him had an iron grip on his mental faculties, and he found himself caught in a memory. Over and over again he heard Onirioago’s threat.

Not from moments ago, but from days ago.

She’d promised that the next time he saw her, it would be with Geas Venom already binding him to her will.

Obviously, her capture meant that the promise had gone unfulfilled. But she was loose in the jungle now, with an army of potential fishers. If Onirioago meant to make good on her threat, this was her best chance.

“We have to move,” Kaldalis said, more to himself than to his friends around him. “We can’t let her head-start get any bigger.”

Gavinkim pushed Balrim away. “Let’s go.” He took a moment to adjust the bandage on his shoulder himself when the Talsar moved to fret over him again. “I’ll be fine.”

Someone started to protest, but they didn’t have time to discuss. They’d wasted too much time just standing here stunned and confused by her departure.

If Onirioago got into proper hiding, they would be beyond doomed.

Kaldalis used the last couple of seconds of his Jump ability to launch himself to the bottom of the stairs, leading the way.

Behind him, he heard everyone scrambling to catch up, but he didn’t have time to wait. He bolted for the building’s front door. Kaldalis needed the slightest hint of direction before Onirioago vanished into the jungle, and the stone courtyard and hard-packed dirt streets weren’t going to give him tracks to follow.

Kaldalis staggered into the courtyard, momentarily stunned by the bright sunlight. Inside the gloomy vine-choked building, being exposed to the twin horrors of battling Ara and losing Onirioago, it seemed wrong that it was a blue-skied sunny day right now.

Her group was already gone from the courtyard before his eyes adjusted to the light - possibly even before he’d even hit the bottom of the stairs.

He needed a clue, and fast.

There was a lucky break to be had. They’d left the corpses of the Jormongumo soldiers behind, and while Kaldalis didn’t have a photographic memory for how they’d been laying, one of them was face up, with blood all down the front of her.

She’d been rolled over. The pool of blood that had emptied from her when she fell was next to her, not beneath her. That was why she was covered in blood. She had been face down, and someone had kicked her on their way past, turning her over.

They hadn’t stomped in the blood to leave a trail, but the way she’d flopped over, relative to the blood pool - as well as the body’s location relative to the door, gave him just the lead he needed.

“South!” he barked as his friends reached the door behind him. “They’re headed south!”

Kaldalis didn’t wait for any confirmation from them.

He took off running.

On their way in, he hadn’t realized how twisted and maze-like the roads here were, but now that he was running, he cursed that none of the streets ran in a straight line. If he hadn’t been in an emotional frenzy to stop Onirioago from vanishing into the wilderness forever, he would have stopped and complained about it. But he had to get to where this road led into the jungle.

Only when he saw bootprints in the mud that he could follow would he allow himself to relax.

Whenever the road forked, he took whichever path went the most directly southwards. He had to hope that they didn’t know these streets any more than he did - only that they knew what direction they were running in.

It was only a couple of moments before he reached the edge of the ruins, bursting out into the narrow strip of low vegetation between the stone and the trees. He stopped dead and looked around, frantic to see some sign - any sign - that he’d chosen the right path.

“Shit shit shit,” Garyung cursed as he ran up behind Kaldalis. “We’re fucked, aren’t we?” He pushed past Kaldalis and squinted into the jungle.

“There’s nothing,” Martok said, mid-conversation, as the rest of the group came up behind him. “If anyone had been mapping this region for me, I’d have known these ruins were here from the start.”

“Okay, but,” Reno objected, “you’ve been all over this jungle. You’ll know what is and isn’t natural. They’ll have to build a shelter here, right?”

“Imagine being caught in the mud and rain we’ve seen out here without shelter,” Ess added. “We have to-”

Kaldalis tuned them out.

He tuned out his friends trying to bargain their way into a plan.

He tuned out Garyung cursing over and over as he made himself the biggest and most obvious assassination target he could be.

He even tuned out the panic in his own brain.

Kaldalis couldn’t let Onirioago’s lead get larger than it had to be. Everything else was a distraction.

Every second he spent distracted, she was getting another step ahead.

He sent himself mentally back in time. He was in the woods with his father. It was the crack of butt in the morning, cold as balls and just turning light enough to illuminate the forest through the dense evergreen canopy. He had stupid normal human eyes, and no darkvision globe, but good nightvision nonetheless. Camo coveralls over his clothes, and a rifle slung over his back.

And his father was kneeling down in the tall grass next to the logging road, silently pointing out signs of an animal’s passage. With just a few gestures, he reminded young Dylan of what he’d been told aloud earlier.

“Not just flattened,” Kaldalis muttered to himself. “Bent. And not just bending. Bouncing back.”

There was a twitch in the undergrowth. A bit of the foliage there had a bend that was just a little bit more than windblown. Beneath it, there were a few grassy stalks that were closer to the ground. As Kaldalis’s attention zeroed in on the twitch, he saw another stock bounce up an inch.

“There,” Kaldalis barked, pointing at the spot. “Tracks.”

He didn’t wait for them to mentally catch up to his interruption. He went running.

As he crashed into the jungle, panic sharpened his senses. He saw a soft part of the dirt where there were obvious prints of several boots. When he got to those footprints, he saw where a low branch had been broken off - still leaking green-golden sap - and stepped on. From that branch, he saw Onirioago’s foot shackles discarded under a bit of brush too thin to hide them. From there he saw more footprints. From there he saw a leafy fern that had been stepped on.

From there. From there. From there.

Every stop was a moment of terror that the trail would end.

And at every stop, a lucky break.

After about ten minutes, his heart rate started to come down. Onirioago and her friends weren’t obscuring their tracks even a little. They crossed a muddy creek and left a trail of soggy mud prints for nearly a hundred yards. They were trampling over the undergrowth rather than picking their way around it. They kicked over rocks, scraped bark from roots, and stomped right into soft patches of dirt.

Their carelessness left Kaldalis with an obvious highway to follow.

He slowed down when he realized that this might have been part of Onirioago’s plan, too. To lure him into a trap. He let the others catch up.

“Jesus Christ, man,” Balrim cursed, breathing heavily as the group finally got to where they could talk to Kaldalis without shouting into the jungle. “Where are you going?”

“Tracking them,” Martok said. The cartographer pointed ahead, to the faint footprints Kaldalis was walking towards. “And impressively, at that. More than once, I didn’t see what you were following until you reached it.”

“We can’t let them get away,” Kaldalis said. He scanned the jungle for his next sign, and saw a thorny bush that had a few cloth fibers hanging from its branches on one side. “If night falls before we find her, it’s all over.”

“We do what we must,” Reno said, between gasps for breath, “because we can.”

Kaldalis kept the pace slow now. He hadn’t realized that all of the non-tanks had been badly winded by the panicked run he’d been on until he’d allowed them to catch up. The group needed to be in fighting shape when they found Onirioago.

If they caught up to her right then, they’d be outnumbered and exhausted. A recipe for disaster going into a fistfight.

“I’m sorry,” Gavinkim said, sidling up beside Kaldalis. His voice was low, this apology only between the two of them. “I let my guard down.”

“We all did,” Kaldalis said. He wanted to offer more reassurance than that, but his attention was consumed by the need to find the next sign to keep moving forward. “She outwitted us all, not just you.”

“I should have known, though,” Gavinkim insisted. “I was unprepared for her to have a war weapon. I should have known someone like her would have gone to great lengths to have one as a part of her backup plan.” He shook his head. “She got away because of my own carelessness.”

That answered one of Kaldalis’s questions. War weapons must have been another class of weapons, possibly as unique drops, or with very limited availability from certain vendors. It might even be contraband as illegal and limited as the Geas Venom at the center of her diabolical plot. It was possible that they were part of the real PVP system of this game. He could have guessed that some people would be unsatisfied with all the player versus player content being fistfight brawls only.

“She didn’t get away yet,” Kaldalis said. He pointed at the next sign - a scrap of discarded rope at the base of a tree. “And we’ll be ready for her tricks this time.”

Kaldalis reached the bit of rope, and scanned the jungle floor for a long time. For a moment, he thought Gavinkim had been too much of a distraction for him to see the next lead. And then he thought that maybe the next clue was a little bit farther away than he expected.

And then the panic began to build all over again when he realized there wasn’t a track to be found.