Chapter 23: The Path Through Giants

The jungle breathed — slow, deep, and damp — as if it were alive and watching.

The map led them through it not as guests, but intruders.

Ai ran point, always five paces ahead, her spiked ball and chain slung loose at her hip, swaying with every step. Her black hair clung to her neck, soaked with sweat, and the red sash around her waist danced like a live flame. Her feline ears flicked constantly — reading the wild like scripture — her eyes sharper than steel.

Behind her came Jiro, furless and lean, the crew’s quartermaster, his face a map of mistrust and calculation. “Forty-two paces off course,” he muttered. “The canopy’s off — sky’s wrong. Something was moved here… or something moves everything.”

Kaito, the massive Maine Coon, lumbered behind, his broad shoulders brushing against hanging vines. “Trees too quiet,” he growled. “No birds. No screams. Just old teeth waiting.”

Mato tapped slowly, deliberately, his cane whispering against stone and root. His blindfold was tied neatly, his ears twitching in response to every echo, every creak. “We walk in the bones of something ancient,” he said softly, “and it remembers us.”

And behind them all — Shiro.

Too small to be noticed. Ears back, tail low, heart pounding like a snare drum. He followed as he always had — a secret in plain sight.

They pressed on through the endless green.

**

At first it was vines. Then it was fangs carved in bark. Then it was bones.

They came upon it suddenly — a fortress, blackened and dead, its towering palisades of tree-trunks fused with metal spikes, walls scorched by battles long swallowed by time. Massive sharpened poles jutted at savage angles, and on those poles —

Dinosaurs.

Impaled. Forgotten. Their skeletons bleached in the jungle sun, necks twisted in their final death cries. Jawbones wide as boats. Eye sockets deeper than helmets.

The fort's gate was open.

A slow creak on the wind, as if even the jungle had long since declared this place lost.

Ai stepped through first, cautious. Her fingers brushed the worn grip of her chain. She didn’t speak.

Jiro muttered as he passed the bones. “Someone thought they could fight back. Build walls. Use reason. I wonder if they lasted a week.”

Kaito sniffed the air. “Smells like something still rots here. Not just the bones.”

Mato tapped along the blackened wood, hearing the memory in the grain. “They prayed here,” he whispered. “Before they died.”

Shiro crept along the edges of the ruin, heart pounding, trying to be smaller than he was.

They exited the far side — into green light and river mist — and the ground trembled.

Thoom.

A distant, bone-deep tremor. Then again.

THOOM.

The trees behind them shivered. Something was coming.

Still they pressed on, past flowers with teeth, through fern-forests older than memory.

Then the roar of water overtook the world.

**

Before them stood the Twin Falls — two monstrous curtains of water, one silver-blue, the other red and clay-rich. They spilled into a deep, mist-choked gorge, and strung between its cliffs, dangling like the last hope of man —

A rope bridge.

Ancient. Woven from fibers long since fraying, the planks swayed in the wind like they wanted to fall.

The crew stood still.

And then — the forest screamed.

The T. rex erupted from the green behind them — thirty feet tall, hide scarred and thunder-thick, its mouth a cathedral of hunger.

The crew froze.

But Ai turned — like a lightning bolt made of breath and courage — and ran directly at it.

She screamed, swirling her chain, her red sash snapping behind her like blood in wind.

The beast saw her. Roared.

She didn’t stop.

She passed under it — drew it away — into the trees again, a blur in the jungle, a fox taunting a god.

The T. rex gave chase, cracking the world with every stomp.

And the crew was moving.

Kaito went first, the bridge creaking beneath his mass.

Jiro next, balancing with arms outstretched like a knife thrower on a tightrope.

Then Mato — slow, deliberate, cane tapping plank by plank, the wind snatching at his coat.

And then… Shiro.

He stepped to the edge.

Below: mist like smoke, gorge walls vanishing into distance.

He looked down — saw the planks twist, sag, sway.

His ears drooped. His breath caught.

He stared.

Gulped.

And took his first step.

Behind him, the jungle was silent. Ai had vanished.

Before him, the bridge whispered:
You will fall. Or you will follow.

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