Crossing Fates : Book 1 - Escape (BakuDeku)

30 - Tactical Consideration

There were twenty Goblins left after the two Katsuki had killed.

Before long, they were joined by another dozen. The newcomers switched places with the ones that had been hauling the flatbed. The pace picked up.

After Katsuki pushed the distorted car out in a few more carefully chosen places, they could move around a little more inside and make themselves more or less comfortable. Then he focused his attention on what was going on outside.

Izuku had watched with wide eyes as Katsuki had bent the jagged ends of metal around his legs so he didn't cut himself again when he moved. That was some kind of scary strength the man had. He fished around in the cramped, alien area at his feet and managed to find a battered bottle of water that hadn't been punctured. They shared half of it in sips; then he capped the rest for later.

He had no doubt that Katsuki had saved his life in more ways than one. He was grateful the man had been able to stop his bleeding by sealing his cuts.

Katsuki told him it was a form of cauterization except he was able to keep him from feeling the pain. It was too bad that was the extent of Katsuki's healing skills because his body ached all over.

Izuku peeked out now and then, staring around in awe at the landscape that was so like and yet unlike the part of Earth he knew.

The fluid roll of hills, burgeoning blue-green foliage, shards of sunlight sparking off crystal veins in granite boulders, the scenes they passed veiled some invisible truth that was so essential, so palpable, he could swear he could almost scoop it out of the air with both hands.

Some long-denied, starved part of his soul unfurled and wailed with the need to drink from it.

Was it the magic of the Margin Land that called to him?

Was it the ancient canny wildness of forest that had seen no woodsman's axe, no farmer's plow, that reminded him of his deepest self, the wild creature that lived trapped within the inadequate cage of his weak, half-breed flesh?

Izuku wanted to cut at himself to let the poor creature out. The upsurge of desperate emotion was so violent, so uncontained, the part of him that was civilized with language and culture shrank away from it.

An impulse ghosted through him to try to tell Katsuki about the frenzy teeming inside, but civilization and language failed him in the end.

He did not understand what he felt and so he remained silent.

As powerfully as the land called to him, the Goblins freaked him out, so he didn't look outside too often.

He chose instead to lie back in his broken seat and stare in thought at the mangled roof as he tried to explore the mysterious landscape he found inside himself.

He became convinced the Goblins were the source of the dread that clung to him. The feeling crawled along his skin like baby spiders.

There were other layers to the mélange of contradicting, complicated emotions. Shock from the crash lingered. Fear clung, along with anxiety about what would happen next. Excitement welled that he was actually in a Margin place.

Katsuki existed at the center of it all. He was his one point of stable reference, his compass point, true north.

The man's skin seemed more intense, his hair more glossy, the gold of his red eyes more burnished than it had been before.

Izuku wondered if it was an effect of the magic-saturated land, or if it was a side effect of the Elven poison working its way out of his system. Perhaps both.

He studied the Lord of the Nyr's dangerous face as he reclined on one shoulder and watched what happened outside.

Katsuki's crimson eyes had long turned gold. They were calculating, and he kept the Goblin sword he had captured ready against his side.