Felicity's Beast World Apocalypse-Chapter 159: Not The Center

Victor had done this, and Dimitri was irritated enough by the fact to respect it.

There was no pettiness in the assessment. Victor had not hidden Felicity out of fear, nor had he pulled her forward simply to taunt them. He had looked at the shape of the problem, measured the pressure gathering around her from both teams, and removed the only piece none of them could stop orienting toward. It was efficient. It was intelligent. It was also making Dimitri’s people increasingly difficult to manage, which meant it had landed exactly where it was meant to.

The road carried both teams east through the bones of the old world. What had once been a service road was now a long strip of broken asphalt with weeds forcing their way through every fracture and whole sections half swallowed by collapsed fencing and wandering brush. Rusted signs leaned at angles that no longer pointed to anything useful. The sky above was clear enough to feel offensive, thin morning light spreading over concrete, dead cars, and the slow movement of two groups of monsters pretending this was ordinary.

It was not ordinary.

Not because Snow Team and Leaf Team were traveling side by side. That alone would have been unusual enough in any other season of the apocalypse. It was because they were doing it around an absence that had already begun to function like a presence.

No one said that aloud no one needed to.

Felicity was not here, and yet every few minutes someone’s attention shifted forward as if expecting her to reappear by force of wanting it enough.

Dimitri remained at the front because that was where he belonged when variables began multiplying. His albino snow leopard form moved with the same measured pace he always carried, each step quiet, controlled, and completely sure of itself, but his awareness extended far behind him. He did not need to turn his head to track the way Richard’s grip tightened around the cart handle by fractions, or the way Dawn’s pressure deepened in subtle pulses as if the sea inside him had become irritated by shallow ground. He could feel Thane’s flight pattern refusing to settle into its normal elegance, the golden eagle circling overhead in lines that were too tight, too watchful, too full of unfinished thought and Exile.

Dimitri was resisting the urge to put him through a wall.

The anaconda had not broken formation. He had not disobeyed. He had not done anything that could be directly criticized yet. What he had done was worse. He had become a problem that had to be continuously managed without leaving any clean point of impact. His coils shifted in long, restless loops, tightening and loosening with the kind of controlled strain that suggested he was one wrong word away from doing something spectacularly inconvenient. His tongue flicked constantly, tasting the air with a frequency that had long since lost all pretense of discipline.

The snake in him had fixed, that was the issue and not attraction, not curiosity. Not even some temporary instinctive response to a female of unusual power.

She had not met him properly, she had not looked at him long enough to make promises, to soothe, to reject, or to complicate anything in a useful way. She had simply existed within range of him, and now the evolved animal logic inside his body had made a decision his mind was being forced to chase after, it would have been almost funny if it were happening to anyone else.

Snow Team noticed, of course they were too good not to, this wasn’t their first rodeo.

Victor said nothing, which Dimitri filed away as both courtesy and calculation.

Voss watched in the infuriatingly relaxed way of a man who was very much paying attention while pretending otherwise.

Ivan did not bother pretending at all. the white lion’s gaze landed on Exile with the same steady awareness he might have given an unstable cliff face.

Damien, in his black snake form, seemed the most openly interested, which Dimitri disliked on principle. Predators always became a little too curious about other predators when instincts were involved.

Tommy, unfortunately, was the first one reckless enough to put words to anything.

"So this is what a team wide public spiral looks like," he said, his white rhino form lumbering a little closer to Sarge as they walked "good to know it’s not just us."

Sarge let out a low rumble that might have been laughter. "Bit comforting, honestly."

Dawn didn’t bother looking at them. "You are both too talkative for prey animals."

Tommy sounded offended. "Rhinos are not prey."

"Your behavior suggests otherwise," Dawn replied.

Sarge barked out a laugh, and Tommy muttered something rude under his breath that lost some impact because he had to snort dust out of his nose halfway through it.

The exchange might have gone nowhere if Richard had not added, in the calm tone of someone making an observation rather than a joke, "At least your team sounds normal when it’s disturbed."

Tommy turned his massive head. "Normal?"

Richard inclined his head very slightly toward Exile, who at that moment had gone so rigid that even Dimitri felt it immediately. "Compared to him, yes."

Exile’s tongue flicked again. The motion was sharp enough to feel violent. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

"Do not engage," Dimitri said, not loudly, but with enough command in it that the line carried through both teams.

Tommy went quiet for roughly three seconds, what for Tommy was honestly a long time.

Then Kai, padding closer in his golden dingo form, said, "You know, in our defense, we’re only strange because she made us stranger."

That landed more honestly than any of them liked.

Ash, still moving in an elegant black jaguar line near the outer edge of the formation, let his gaze flick briefly toward Kai. "That’s one way to phrase it."

"It’s the right way," Kai said. "Before her, we were just a well adjusted convoy of murderers."

"Speak for yourself," Voss said.

"You are speaking for all of us," Pope muttered from somewhere near the carts, his lynx form moving quiet and narrow through the line.

The humor softened nothing. It only made the shape underneath it more obvious, Snow Team was not joking because they were relaxed. They were joking because too much had changed too quickly, and men like these tended to prefer ridicule to direct confession.

Thane dipped lower overhead shadow passed over the road, clipped and brief, Kai noticed first and angled his head upward.

"You still circling like the sky insulted you?" he called.

Thane did not answer immediately, his wings tilted, carrying him into a narrower sweep before he looked down at them with the distracted expression of someone hearing two timelines at once.

"She isn’t the center," he said.

The words were strange enough to shift attention.

Kai blinked. "That sounds like a sentence with more sentence attached to it."

Pope’s ears flicked "go on."

Thane’s gaze drifted ahead again, toward empty road, ruined townships, and whatever lay between them and Orange. "Everyone keeps saying center because that’s how it feels up close, but that’s wrong."

Ash’s voice came smooth and skeptical. "Enlighten us, oracle."

Thane exhaled through his beak, an irritated sound. "A center makes things orbit, a direction makes things move."

That quieted more of them than Dimitri liked, because it was accurate and because Dimitri had already reached a version of that thought on his own and had no interest in hearing it spoken out loud by a seer who looked increasingly haunted by his own usefulness.

"She doesn’t hold us in place," Thane continued, "she changes where we were going."

Snow Team absorbed that in their own ways.

Victor said nothing, which meant he had already considered something similar.

Damien’s dark head lifted a fraction, eyes unreadable.

Voss’s mouth curved, but not enough to call it amusement.

Ivan remained still in that dense white lion way of his, as if he preferred to let truth land before deciding whether he liked it.

Kai huffed softly "that’s a deeply irritating thing to say, because now it sounds right."

"It was right before he said it," Pope told him.

"Yes, but it was less annoying before he said it," for a few minutes the road took all of them again. Then the dead arrived.

They spilled from a shallow dip in the roadside where an overturned bus had long ago collapsed into rust and weeds. Not a massive horde, not the kind that turned highways into kill corridors for hours, but enough of them to matter if ignored and enough to break the current rhythm of movement. They came in a loose, dragging wave, bodies in different stages of ruin, jaws working, limbs catching, the old disease of momentum still driving them forward long after real hunger should have died.

Snow Team slowed by instinct.

Leaf Team did not.

Dimitri’s irritation sharpened into usefulness, "clear them" it was almost a relief.