Farther Out to Sea (3)
Across a desert lashed by a coarse wind thick with grit, a tribe of desert warriors raced astride giant lizards—one mount to each rider.
For any ordinary person, the sand would have swallowed their legs to the knee with every step, a brutal terrain that left you drenched in sweat just to walk a single pace. But the lizards, with feet broad for their size and webbed for purchase, tore across the desert without the slightest trouble, running for the sheer joy of it.
How long they had been racing under their riders' control, no one could say—until, at a signal from the war chief at the head of the column, the desert warriors drew their spears and hurled them toward a single point.
The spears flew toward a stretch of sand where the surface was being raked into a line as if some invisible finger were dragging a furrow at high speed. Crude, simple spears—cactus spines wrapped in cloth, leather, and plant bark—struck the desert and sank like harpoons into water. A moment later the sand erupted, and a colossal snake that had been gliding beneath the surface burst into view.
The serpent looked to be a full thirty meters long. It thrashed violently, trying to shake free the cactus spines that had punched through its scales and lodged in its flesh—but the spines were barbed in reverse, and every shake only drove them deeper.
Ssssssssh!
Realizing at last that the spines would not come free, the snake gaped its jaws and loosed a threatening hiss at the desert warriors who had hunted it down.
This snake had no venom. Its sheer bulk, and the muscle packed into that bulk, were weapon and armor enough. When it needed water, it simply drove its triangular, pointed head down through the desert floor and drank from the groundwater—such was its raw power.
The warriors steered their lizards outward in every direction, flinging cactus spines at the snake without pause. They threw and threw again, determined to drive the spines into its body and draw blood. All the while they kept their distance so the serpent could neither seize nor strike them, weaving and crossing paths so it could never lock onto a single target.
Bring down that one snake, and the village would eat without end. Special microorganisms unique to this desert acted as a natural preservative, keeping anything buried beneath the sand from rotting.
How effective was it? Once, in the ruins of a vast kingdom buried under this desert centuries ago, they had unearthed a host of mummies in remarkably fine condition—so fine that the joints still moved smoothly and the skin remained taut and full.
A place where even the dead seemed not quite dead, as if they had merely fallen into a quiet sleep. A place where people who could not bear the thought of rotting in misery would dress themselves beautifully, come here to die by their own hand, and remain beautiful even after death.
People called this land by many names. The land where no one can die. The desert of living corpses. The beautiful ending.
But the most famous name of all was drawn from the sand itself—ordinarily a dull, yellowish grain that, under a certain angle of massed sunlight, blazed with a radiant golden light—and from the desert's peculiar nature: the Immortal Golden Land.
That was what the neighboring regions called it. Farther away, another name might have been easier to understand.
The Demon Realm.
"Uoooooh!"
The warriors who lived in that very Demon Realm roared. Their war chief had leapt from his lizard and clung to the thrashing snake.
Clinging to the serpent, the war chief let his great black cloth—protection against the grit-laden desert wind and the sunlight that threatened to scorch bare skin—stream out behind him as he worked both rope-wrapped hands and climbed the snake at a terrifying speed.
The snake, distracted by the warriors around it, never noticed the dangerous climber scaling its body. Reaching a good position, the war chief unwound the rope from his waist and seized the free end.
At the tip hung a thick, gruesome iron stake, dense and solid, studded with reverse-facing iron barbs. He swung the stake and drove it deep into the snake's body, then began to attack in earnest—swinging wild atop the thrashing serpent, held only by that single rope.
In his hands was a massive axe most men would have struggled to lift with both arms. He swung it freely, stripping scales, splitting flesh, and spilling blood in torrents.
The sight of it sent the warriors into a frenzy. They threw their spears harder and fiercer still, roaring sharp, raucous cries to keep the snake from ever shaking free their war chief—vicious, relentless, and loud.
The war chief leaping and hacking with his axe atop the snake. The warriors spearing it so thickly it might have been mistaken for a cousin of the porcupine.
The desert warriors clung to the assault, attacking and attacking again, until long hours had passed and the surrounding sand was stained red with the snake's blood—and at last, they brought it down.
In a final thrash, the snake reared upright to sweep everything around it—then its strength failed, and it crashed to the ground. The impact flung the war chief free. He tumbled a long way across the sand.
"War Chief! Are you all right?"
"…Y-yeah. I… I'm fine."
The war chief answered in a strangely clumsy, awkward tone, then ordered his men to prepare to move the snake. He rubbed at the sore places on his body. Falling onto the desert's thick sand was not the same as falling without impact.
"Whew. Well—that wraps up this hunt."
Letting out a breath of relief in fluent speech utterly unlike the clumsy desert tongue of a moment before, the war chief unwound the cloth from his head and shook it hard, scattering the sand.
He shook out his hair as well, checked the place where his scalp had split and bled, then brushed the dust from the scars that covered his face—and found that some of those scars had torn open and were bleeding again.
"Hmm."
A man whose face was strangely crowded with fine, minute scars.
Feeling the pain those scars still carried—scars earned on a wandering island that drifted across the world—he thought:
I wonder if Chester's gotten even stronger living on that island.
Urgo muttered as much, roughly sterilized the wounds with sand, and wrapped his face in cloth once more.
"The coastal tribe… uh, how are they?"
"Unchanged, sir. They still seem to be scouting near our oasis."
"We took the snake. We strike first."
"Understood. I'll report it to the chieftain."
"Die, you shark bastards!"
While Urgo was dealing with the giant snake, Chester was fighting for his life on a single raft in a sea whipped by fierce wind and rising swells, fending off the sharks that had come for them.
"Aaaagh!"
They had been fighting the sharks with harpoons until the battering waves tore the weapons away into the sea. Chester and Monia swung their machetes in wild arcs.
Then Ant, who had been clinging hard to the raft, lost his footing and slipped into the water. Chester, panic-stricken, lashed out with a brutal kick toward the sea.
In the instant a wave heaved high and began to fall—
In the instant one side of the raft surged upward and the balance went unstable—
He hooked a foot into the gap between the raft's logs, seized the mast with one hand, and kicked.
Chester's kick caught Ant before the beast could fully go under, and with a sweeping motion of his leg he flung Ant toward Monia. Then, as the raft seemed about to plunge back into the sea, Chester clenched his teeth hard.
The moment the raft slammed down, it snapped back to level—and hauled a shark up with it from below.
"Shark!"
"Aaaagh!"
Chester locked onto the shark that had come half onto the raft, held it fast, and before the creature could do a thing he hacked with his machete, splitting its skull and destroying the brain.
"Get lost!"
Then he kicked the dead shark off the raft and shoved it back into the sea.
The shark attack had begun thirty minutes earlier.
With the surface this rough, ordinary sea creatures would have dived deep to escape the churning swells—yet these four sharks had decided there was something worth eating and set upon Chester's family's raft for no good reason.
Why? There was no point dwelling on a crisis already upon them. Surviving it came first. Understanding the cause could wait.
"Aaaaaaaah!!"
Chester loosed a raw, savage roar—and glowing blue patterns rose across his skin.
The sight of the War Paint wrought by the Grace of the Summit lifted Chester's spirit, and fresh vitality flooded a body that the struggle against the swells had drained of strength.
Atop a raft that the waves sometimes flung clean into the air, Chester moved with a swiftness and skill that would not have shamed the People of the Summit, smashing the sharks that came for them one by one.
In the process he lost the machete he had been lucky enough to claim at the Floating Island's waterfall—but somehow they beat back every shark and lived through the assault.
"Why the hell do sharks just show up like that?! Sharks!"
"Never mind that—the wind! When is it going to stop?!"
The wind slammed into them again, hard enough that the raft heaved as if it would flip at any second.
"Kyaaaa!"
"Aaaack!"
Chester and Monia seized the stone-filled anchors, scrambled toward the rising side of the raft, and slammed their own weight and the anchors' weight down onto the part that was lifting to flip—forcing it back into the sea and steadying the craft by sheer force.
Once they were back aboard, they gripped the anchors tight in one hand and watched every direction, half-expecting the raft to try something strange again.
It was the fourth day of their journey across the sea.