Stop thinking. Stop analyzing. What would Mia do? She’d fucking do something instead of over-thinking until everything fell apart around him.
He reached down, and lifted. Holy shit Caera was heavy. David was a strong guy; short limbs and some muscle made it easy for little guys to lift a lot of weight. But damn, Caera had some heft to her, and he groaned as he pulled up on her arms and pushed her against a big boulder so she was sitting. His fingers hated that. His aching limbs hated that. He almost screamed as he got her up, and of course when he stood back up, blood dripped from his fingers.
He squatted down beside her and shook her shoulder.
“Caera?” he asked. Still breathing. “Caera.” A cut ran across her forehead, across the scar already there. “Caera. Ca–”
Her eyes shot open, and she snapped out her arm for him, full intent on cutting him to ribbons. But thankfully he’d half expected that, and he jumped away, leaving her swiping at nothing. And she’d missed anyway, to far to the side. Definitely a head injury.
“David?”
“Yeah, it’s me. You okay?”
“We… We fell. We–where’s the… the thing, chasing us?”
“No idea. Jes and Dao are alive, but injured. Broken bones.”
Nodding, Caera clutched her head with one hand as she tried to stand up. And failed. She fell back with a grunt and stared down at her splayed legs, and her tail twitching lightly beside her.
“How… How fucked are we?” he asked. “Jes and Dao won’t be walking for months, and you’re–”
“We’ll recover fast enough,” she said. “I’ll be… good enough to walk in a few minutes. The girls will take a day or two, maybe three.”
“A day or two? To recover from broken bones?”
“We’re demons. You recovered from your ruined feet in a day, didn’t you? All fresh meat do.”
“Yeah but that was just bruises and skin.”
She managed a shrug. Nothing dislocated then.
“If they’re not dead and they still have their limbs, they’ll be fine. It’ll just take a couple days, maybe a few, to recover. If they have resonance. And…”
“And you were already getting hungry because I’ve been dragging your asses across Hell twelve hours a day.” Fucking fuckity fuck. “Alright then. What do I–”
The booming thud of a colossal creature taking a step filled the ravine, and it was only ten feet away. Now that they stood on a pile of rocks instead of a solid path, the stones and pebbles crushed into powder underneath the colossal footprint, and the pile rolled with the new indent. Like it was sinking in quicksand, and it kinda was, the invisible thing took another step, and again the whole ravine shook with the impact.
David fell on his ass as the pile of rocks rumbled and shook. Scampering only led to more tripping as the pebbles rolled underneath him, and he fell on his side. He squinted, expecting gravity to get its revenge and crack his skull open, but his shoulder hit rock instead, and he yelped and rolled onto his back.
He still couldn’t see the thing, whatever it was. But he felt it, the same way anyone felt it when they were being watched. Which of course wasn’t actually a thing, but it still felt exactly like how that was supposed to feel in the movies. Like there was something there, something he couldn’t see, staring straight down at him from a great height, looking into his soul.
The rocks erupted underneath him. No, not erupted. Were crushed. He gasped, looking to breath through the immense weight of being stepped on, but he… felt fine. He looked to Caera, but the tiger lady, half pushed off from the rock she’d leaned against, stared at him, just as confused as him.
He now lay in a big footprint, big enough for his whole body. And he was unharmed, except for the nasty fall from before.
“W-What the–”
The ground did erupt this time, to his right. He sucked in a hard breath, shivers shooting up through his spine into his limbs like someone had stabbed him with ice. But he was fine. Three enormous gash marks, each a foot wide and maybe six feet long, cut along the pile of rocks he lay on, straight through him horizontally.
It happened again, vertically. Four gashes this time, and they ripped the rocks out underneath him and out from under his feet. The invisible thing had tried to cut him into ribbons from head to crotch. But, it couldn’t.
It couldn’t touch him.
“David!” Caera yelled.
He looked her way, half expecting a bunch of mysterious gashes to rip the boulder she leaned against apart. It had to attack her next. But, nothing. It didn’t attack her.
A gigantic rock nearby came up off the ground, lifted by something they couldn’t see or hear. But the rock crumbled, broke apart, as if crushed through a grate or filter. Where once a boulder had been hovering a couple feet off the ground, a pile of pebbles, dirt, and dust fell harmlessly on the pile. Had it tried to throw a rock at them?
It roared, or wailed, or shrieked. Whatever it was, whatever strange invisible presence was hunting them, it made noise, but not sound, no vibrating air sending signals into his ears. But there was vibration, something that pulsed out through David’s body regardless, and instead of hearing the thing with his ears, he heard it with his bones.
And then it was gone. The air shimmered slightly, like Arnold’s Predator, and it was gone. The sensation of something watching him, gone. He sat up and stared at nothing, eyes slowly panning around, first to Caera again, and then to the gashes cut into the crushed rocks underneath him. No more thundering footsteps. No more swipes from a hand that’d been big enough it could have held his entire body in its palm, judging from the slash marks. And that was all assuming it’d been a hand slashing at him, and a foot stomping around.
“What… is going on?” Caera asked. She got down on all fours and walked his way, stumbling slightly. Her limbs worked, but she was a lot more beat up than he was, and probably had the afterlife equivalent of a head injury.
“I don’t know. How would I know? Fucking christ fuck!” He jumped up and gestured out to the empty ravine around them. “Something invisible just tried to kill us!? What the hell!?”