The Last Hunter: Collected Edition (Antarktos Saga #1-5)

I’m focused.

And not on the mission. Or on avenging Wright. Or finding the shofar. My thoughts are narrow: keep the bubble open and keep moving. With each passing minute and mile, I push harder and harder, because the effort is taking a toll. I can’t do this forever. And if I stop, we’re all going to drown.

What a way to go that would be. Solomon Ull Vincent, the last hunter, the first and only natural human child born on Antarctica, bonded to the continent and gifted with extraordinary powers, capable of killing Nephilim and dinosaurs, and the only human to set foot in Tartarus and return...killed by drowning. Something about the idea feels like the taunting of past schoolmates, and it fuels my effort for another minute.

But exhaustion is catching up to me.

How far have we come? Five miles? More? It’s impossible to tell without knowing our true speed. The other side of the chamber could be several miles away or a hundred feet. I start to consider our options, when I feel one of my passengers shift.

Without looking, I know it’s Kat. She’s between Em and Kainda, but pulled up against my body. She shifts again with a moan. She’s waking up.

“This might not be good,” Em says as quietly as she can over the rush of water flowing around the air bubble.

I’m not sure what she’s talking about until Kat wakes up and says, “Where’s Wright?”

I feel her head turn back and forth. She can’t see a thing, I’m sure. Even by my standards, the abyss is dark.

“Where’s my husband?” she asks, growing angry.

“We—had to leave him,” I answer.

Honesty is supposed to be the best answer. Even liars say so. But in this case, trapped in a bubble, surrounded by endless water, I think a temporary lie might have been the best option.

“Go back!” she shouts.

“We can’t,” Kainda says, then with a more scolding tone adds, “Calm down.”

Kat reacts to the demand about as well as I’d expect Kainda to, which is to say, not well. She leans forward and then drives her head back into my gut, knocking the air out of my lungs. She has no idea what kind of danger she’s in, only that her husband has been left behind to die.

“Stop,” I say, but the words get lost as I gasp for air.

Kat twists, taking Em and Kainda’s grasp as restraint rather than support. “Let go of me!”

Rather than breathing, I focus on slowing down. I can’t maintain this speed without any air in my lungs, and the bubble around us is rapidly shrinking. I take a deep breath, hoping to explain when Kat manages to wrench herself free, plant a foot against my chest and shove. She slips out of the bubble and is sucked away into the water.

My surprise at this is so severe, that my concentration breaks. The bubble supplying our air bursts. Water envelops us. The pressure is intense. I can feel the weight of all this water pushing on my chest, urging my lungs to let go of that last breath, while my lungs are still urging me to gasp after being struck in the gut.

I reach out for the fleeing air bubbles, trying to draw them back. If I can just reform the bubble, I might be able to get moving again. I might be able to get back to Kat.

But it’s not going to happen. The bubbles bounce through the water, rising toward the surface somewhere above. My energy is gone. I have pushed my abilities to their limit several times over the past few days—stone manacles, flying, and now cavitating through water with three passengers—and while I can do more with each attempt, the end result is still the same. Mind numbing exhaustion.

I need more time, I think, as my vision fades. I need to practice, to build skill and endurance. I’m not ready to fight a war yet. These despairing thoughts and a thousand others flash through my mind as the dark, wet world around me turns black and my consciousness slips away.





16



I awake from my dreamless slumber with a gasp. Last I knew, I was about to drown. But since I’m breathing, I’m pretty sure I’m not dead. Which is good, but confusing. The first question that needs answering is how I survived—a question that is directly tied to answering my second question, where am I?

The space is lit by a single glowing crystal embedded above me. It reveals the brown stone just inches from my face. I’m floating face up, on my back. My ears are partly in the water, so the echo of my breathing sounds funny. I remember floating like this when I was a kid. Not in pools. I had issues going to pools. The water was always too cold and my scrawny body embarrassed me. But I loved to float in my parents’ tub. It was the big kind. A Jacuzzi tub with heated jets. I would float there, daydreaming, until my fingers and toes looked like raisins, or until my parents feared I’d drowned and came to my rescue.