Before the soldiers could unleash their deadly horizontal hail of lead, though, the ear-splitting roar of a silverback gorilla boomed through the forest from the troops’ left, sending flocks of panicking birds fluttering in maddened flight from the foliage, and seeming to shake the very trees themselves with its awestriking vociferousness. The startled soldiers had about a second to spin around before Zakaria, with his huge M60 machine gun gripped in his right hand and the ammunition belt in his left, opened fire.
The percussive jackhammering of the M60 resounded through the forest as the machine gun spat out multiple bullets per second, its thunderclap pulsing drowning out the sounds of the wild, the dazzling tracer rounds, interspersed with ball and armour-piercing rounds, streaking like fire arrows through the falling dusk.
Daekwon’s aim may have been wide of the mark, but Zakaria’s was not. Marksmanship was one of many martial skills he had polished to perfection over centuries of battle and war, and the Huntsmen troops didn’t have a second to duck before dozens of M60 rounds were peppering them, the machine-gun bullets twisting and jerking their bodies and limbs in a St Vitus’ dance of brutal gore.
As the soldiers dropped dead, Zakaria bellowed out another tree-shaking roar, this time one of triumph, and Lightning Bird rumbled a throaty growl in response. The two beastwalkers took no time to revel in this small victory, though, for all it was, really, was a minor escape, a temporary reprieve, and now that the shooting had started, every other Huntsman soldier in the vicinity knew exactly where they were. Any chance of a stealthy escape had gone out the window; it would be a desperate fighting retreat from this point on, and their only hope of escaping alive depended on them reaching the north-eastern peak of the mountain.
Ahead of them, William and Chloe had fallen behind Njinga and Jun by around fifty yards. They heard the firefight erupt behind them, and the instant the sonorous barrage of M60 fire reached William’s ears he knew that he and his friends were in dire straits. Already, he thought grimly, the other Huntsmen troops had to be heading their way, drawn by the sounds of the gun-battle like moths in the night to a naked lightbulb. Even though his limbs were burning with exertion and his breathing was ragged, he had to push harder and run faster; stopping now would mean death. Rumbling out a snarling growl, he injected desperate speed into his weary muscles, surging forward as more bursts of fire started to pop and chatter from all sides.
A stag, his eyes white and wild with fright, burst out of a thicket to William’s right, and upon seeing this terrifying foreign predator, mounted by a human being, no less, he froze in his tracks. William’s tiger reflexes were as sharp as any surgical instrument, but even so, he almost crashed into the large creature at thirty-five miles an hour, which would have been enough to seriously injure or kill Chloe. Reacting almost instantaneously to the sudden appearance of the large obstacle, though, William jumped over the fear-paralysed deer, sailing through the air a couple of feet above the bewildered stag’s antlers. Chloe’s previous horse-riding experience was the only thing that allowed her to stay mounted during this manoeuvre.
William landed smoothly, without jolting his rider too much, and continued to sprint, sucking in great lungfuls of air as he ran, panting and growling as pain throbbed its liquid fire through his muscles and joints. He was so focused on racing onwards that he almost failed to notice the glint of a rifle scope on the periphery of his vision, to his left. He could not afford to slow down and look, though; Chloe would have to deal with the threat.
‘To the left, nine o’ clock, lass! Give the scumbag hell!’
A shot rang out and Chloe grunted, and an icy blast of panic ripped through William’s veins as he felt her body jerk atop him; he knew at once that she’d been shot. This chill of biting dread lasted for only a second, though, because with a shrieking banshee howl of primal fury Chloe swung her AK-47 around and unleashed a barrage of automatic fire in the shooter’s direction.
‘I got him!’ she screamed as they raced onward, her ears and William’s ringing with a shrill whine in the aftermath of the gunfire. ‘Holy fuck, I just, I just fucking shot someone! B-, but he shot me first, oh shit, he shot me, he shot me!’
‘Hold on Chloe, hold on!’ William shouted into her mind. ‘I’ll get you to safety, girl, I’ll get you there, just hold on!’
‘I’m okay, I’m okay!’ she gasped, digging her knees more firmly into his flanks. ‘It, it must have hit my bulletproof vest! My, my chest feels like someone hit it with a fuckin’ baseball bat, and I’m, I’m finding it a little hard to breath, but … shit, fuck!’
Before William could respond, Chloe screamed out a guttural screech of battle-wrath, and again pumped out a couple of AK-47 rounds in quick succession at another Huntsman soldier who had had emerged from cover.
‘Suck on that, you son of a fuckin’ bitch!’ she howled as William raced onwards and vaulted over a massive fallen tree. He guessed that if she was still able to scream with such vociferousness she wasn’t too grievously wounded, and he continued to course through the labyrinth of living wood at speed, his goal almost in sight.
At the head of the broken train of beastwalkers, Njinga and Jun burst out of the trees onto the rock-strewn peak of the mountain. The summit was most flat, and it was bare of any kind of vegetation, but at the northernmost tip a series of piled-up boulders in the rough shape of a sphinx formed the highest point of the mountain, and just beyond the head of the likeness of this mythical beast, which peered
