"How much farther are we going?" Flynn asked as they crossed another, narrower stream and started up yet another slope.
"Let's get over the top here and see what's on the other side," Jensen said, pointing upward. "Must have had some bad storms come through this past winter—see how many trees have had their lower branches bent over nearly to the ground. We'll find one big enough to hide both of us and wait out the daylight."
"Sounds good," Flynn said. "Too bad we don't have any entrenching tools."
"Well, we weren't exactly planning an excursion outside the bounds of civilization this way," Jensen reminded him.
"Weren't we?" Flynn asked, a slight edge to his voice.
Jensen gave him a long, cool look. "Are you implying something, Trainee Flynn?"
And because he was looking at Flynn and not where he was going, he stepped around a scraggly pine and got a full three steps into the small clearing beyond before he spotted the bear.
"Freeze!" he hissed, braking to a sudden halt.
But it was too late. With a roar, the bear reared up on its hind legs, its paws stretching threateningly toward the sky. Jensen had just enough time to notice a small cub bolting away across the clearing; and then, with a thud he could feel ten meters away through the ground, the bear dropped back to all fours and charged.
"Get out of here," Jensen snapped to Flynn, reflexively snatching out a shuriken and hurling it at the bear's head. But a weapon tailored to penetrate rubbery Ryqril skin was no match for fur and thick bone.
Instead of collapsing, the bear merely roared in pain as the throwing star buried itself in its forehead and paused to bat at the irritant with a paw. The shuriken popped free and spun off into the matted leaves covering the ground, and the bear resumed its attack.
There was, Jensen knew, no way he could outrun the creature, particularly not on uneven ground.
Without any other real options, he waited until the bear was too close to change direction, then threw himself in a flat leap to the right.
The bear was faster than he expected, slashing out its paw and catching the edge of his coat with a multiple tearing sound as the claws sliced through coat and shirt and scraped across the flexarmor beneath. Even the relatively slight impact was enough to throw Jensen off balance and send him into a fall that could have left him flat and helpless on the ground.
Fortunately, he was fast, too. As he hit the ground he let his leading leg collapse beneath him, turning the fall into a roll that brought him back to his feet with nunchaku ready in his hand. The bear braked to a halt and turned back toward him, growling angrily as it lumbered again to the attack. Jensen braced himself; and as the bear got within range, he leaped aside again, this time bringing the nunchaku blurring through the air to slam into the side of the bear's head.
But again, the furry animal was tougher than any Ryq Jensen had ever faced. For a moment it seemed to stagger, but then it shook itself and turned again to its prey.
There was a faint whistling sound from the side and something shot nearly invisibly across the clearing to ricochet off the side of the bear's head. Jensen glanced over in time to see Flynn hurriedly loading a second pellet into his slingshot. But the bear paid even less attention to the pellet's impact than it had to the nunchaku. Bracing himself for another slash-and-leap maneuver, Jensen waited for the bear to reach the right spot.
But as he started to push off the ground, something unseen beneath the matting of dead leaves shifted beneath his feet. His leap faltered, and for a crucial fraction of a second he was caught flat-footed.
And before he could recover, the bear's swinging paw caught him squarely across his left side.
He gasped as a multiple spike of agony stabbed through his rib cage. The force of the blow spun him around in midair, sending him crashing bodily into a squat bush. Clenching his teeth against the pain in his side, he tried to bring his nunchaku back into fighting position. But the weapon had gotten itself ensnared in the bush's branches. Letting go, he instead dug a knife from its forearm sheath and twisted it up to point at the bear loping toward him. He would have only one chance at this, he knew; one chance to catch the animal in the eye and hopefully kill it quickly enough that it didn't have time to deliver a killing blow of its own. The bear closed to within two meters, its jaws opening wide to show huge white teeth—
And like a black-clad cannonball, Flynn shot into view, his body sideways and flat to the ground, his knees curled tightly to his chest, arcing straight at the bear's side. His legs straightened out in a convulsive double kick, the heels of his boots catching the bear with devastating force in the side of its neck and sending the animal toppling over onto the ground.
Flynn hit the ground and scrambled to his feet, nunchaku in hand. But the bear had finally had enough.
Hauling itself upright, it bared its teeth once more at its attackers and then turned and lumbered off in the direction the cub had taken. A few seconds later, it was out of sight.
"That has got to be the single craziest move I've ever seen," Jensen said, breathing as shallowly as he could. His whole left side felt like it was on fire, with someone jabbing a poker in the blaze with each breath. "Must be one of Mordecai's."
"It's called a door-clearer," Flynn said, shoving his nunchaku back into its sheath and dropping to his knees beside Jensen. "You all right?"
"Hardly," Jensen admitted, probing gently at his side. "I'm guessing I have a broken rib. Possibly more than one."
"Damn and a half," Flynn muttered, carefully peeling back what was left of Jensen's coat and shirt. "At least the claws couldn't get through the flexarmor."
"No, this way I get to bleed to death internally," Jensen agreed. "Much tidier that way. I'm kidding, I'm kidding," he hastened to add as Jensen's eyes went wide. Sometimes he forgot that these trainees were only kids, without the history of dark wartime humor he and the other blackcollars shared. "Actually, I don't think I'm bleeding at all, at least not very much. Besides, any fight you can walk away from counts as a win. Speaking of which, help me get up."
"Shouldn't you stay put until we get you checked out?" Flynn asked, grabbing Jensen's arm as he started to push his way out of the bush.
"Good idea," Jensen said, biting down hard as the pain level jumped into the red-haze zone. "Nearest medical facilities are back at the Ryqril camp. I'll wait here."
"I just meant—"
"I know what you meant," Jensen assured him. "And it's something we'll definitely want to look into.
But it's getting light, and we need to find some cover."
Flynn grimaced, but nodded. "You're the boss. Nice and easy, now."
With Flynn taking most of his weight, they managed to get him up out of the bush and back to vertical again. "How's that?" Flynn asked as he freed Jensen's nunchaku from the bush and slid it into the blackcollar's thigh sheath.
"Not too bad," Jensen said. His side was throbbing even harder in this position than it had been when he was lying down. But at least he didn't feel like he was going to black out. "Okay, let's go. Westward, ho."
"Northwestward," Flynn corrected as he got under Jensen's arm and wrapped his own arm carefully around the blackcollar's waist.
"Whatever."
It wasn't a pleasant journey. With every step he took a white-hot pain jabbed through his side, and even with Flynn taking a good fraction of his weight his legs were shaking with fatigue by the time they reached the crest of the ridge.
Fortunately, the downward slope on the other side was fairly gentle, and there was one of the bowedbranch trees he was looking for a half dozen steps away. Flynn got them to its base and pulled up the drooping branches on one side while Jensen crawled beneath. The younger man followed, adjusting the branches again to hide them and then helping Jensen settle himself into a seated position against the trunk.