Chapter 4: The Green Giant and the Waterfall

The alien dawn broke through the canopy, greeting the brothers with a renewed sense of purpose. Spears of charred bamboo in hand—the bows still delayed until they found the right fibrous wood—they marched toward the sound of rushing water.

When they broke through the tree line, the view stole their breath. The river unfurled like a ribbon of crystal-clear water, carving its way through dense, emerald jungle. They knelt at the banks and drank deeply. The water was crisp and revitalizing.

"Still no aquatic life," Inori said, wiping his mouth. He peered into the transparent depths, searching for the flicker of a fish, but found only smooth, pale stones.

"It's highly irregular for a freshwater source of this size to be devoid of an ecosystem," Kaguya said, his brow furrowed.

"Depends on the source," Takuya replied, looking upstream. "If this river comes from an underground aquifer, or something further up cuts it off—a waterfall, a natural dam—fish wouldn't be able to migrate into this stretch. For now, we work with what's on land."

They spent the day walking the bank, chewing strips of dried bird meat left over from the night before. Takuya kept careful track of the time, cutting another notch into his makeshift calendar. Day three. As the sun dipped below the trees, bruising the sky violet and orange, he called a halt. "We camp away from the water tonight."

They walked about ten minutes inland. The site wasn't as defensible as their first night's—just a shallow dip between three massive tree roots—but it would do.

Over a small, carefully hidden fire, the conversation turned heavy.

"We need a contingency," Inori said, flicking a twig into the flames. "We're assuming this river leads to civilization. But what if we're the only intelligent bipeds on this continent? What if there's no human equivalent here at all?"

Kaguya pushed his glasses up, firelight catching in the lenses. "Then, biologically speaking, we become the first. We introduce agriculture, metallurgy, medicine—to whatever species we find, or we build all of it from nothing."

Takuya nodded slowly, already weighing the scale of it. "We have the accumulated knowledge of human history behind us. If there's no civilization out there, we build one ourselves. We need to be ready for that."

What the three of them didn't know, as they banked the fire and settled into their sleeping shifts, was that they weren't alone.

Fifty yards off, buried in the underbrush's deep shadow, a pack of four-legged predators watched them. Lean, built like panthers but with too many joints in their limbs, they moved without a sound. They were smart—smart enough to smell the roasted meat and still hold back at the sight of sharpened spears and open flame. Tonight wasn't the night. They would follow the strange, upright creatures. They would wait for the moment carelessness set in.

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The next morning, they picked up the trail along the river again.

Survival was one long experiment in trial and error. Takuya had tried carving knives from the hollow bones of the giant quail, but the bird's skeleton was too brittle and shattered under pressure. Inori had better luck, finding a dense, flint-like stone in the riverbed. Takuya spent the morning knapping its edge against another rock until it held a functional, razor-sharp point.

It was during that search that Inori dropped to his knees near a boggy offshoot of the river.

"Takuya. Look at this." His voice cracked with excitement. He pointed first at the gravel—stained a deep rust-red—then at a strange, iridescent film sitting on the stagnant water.

"Oil?" Takuya asked, crouching beside him.

"No—iron." Inori grinned. "That reddish soil is hematite. And that film? That's an iron slick—bacteria that feed on dissolved iron leave it behind. This whole stretch is sitting on ore. Give me a clay furnace and enough charcoal, and we skip the Stone Age completely."

"Mark the landmarks," Takuya said, eyes lighting at the thought of steel.

"There's more," Inori added, nodding at the inside bend where the current slowed. "Heavy iron deposits usually mean other heavy metals settle out nearby too. If we find black sand—magnetite—or quartz veins in the bedrock around here, there's a real chance of placer gold sitting in the crevices. Gold means currency, Takuya. Wiring, too."

They pushed on with new energy until the afternoon sun beat down hard.

Ahead, a massive tree loomed over the bank, its low branches heavy with bright green fruit the size of small watermelons.

Takuya raised a hand and they stopped. A dozen strange creatures hung from the branches—grey-furred, brown-faced, with two legs and four distinct arms that let them swing and strip fruit at startling speed.

Inori crept toward a half-eaten piece that had fallen to the grass. He picked it up and sniffed the yellow flesh inside.

"Citrus," he said, surprised. "Smells exactly like an orange."

"That tracks," Kaguya said, watching the four-armed creatures. "On Earth, oranges grown in the tropics stay green. They only turn 'orange' in cold weather, when the chlorophyll breaks down. This is probably safe to eat."

Inori laughed, hefting the green sphere. "If we're lucky, maybe there's durian somewhere on this planet, too. Let's hope it smells better than the ones back home."

The creatures stopped eating. They stared down and let out sharp warning calls. Takuya and his brothers froze, hands tightening on their spears—until Inori took one deliberate step forward, testing them. The creatures screeched and bolted higher into the canopy, out of sight.

"Cowards," Takuya muttered, easing his grip. "Grab what's fallen. We need the water and the vitamin C."

They slung their spears over their shoulders and gathered the fruit. The juice was startlingly sweet, a small mercy after days of dry meat.

But as Takuya bent for a third piece, the hair on his neck rose. The jungle had gone dead quiet. Even the insects had stopped.

He straightened and looked up into the canopy.

His stomach dropped.

There weren't a dozen of them. There were hundreds.

They'd crept back through the connected branches without a sound, forming a wide grey ring around the tree. Dozens of brown faces stared down with cold, calculating intent. They hadn't fled earlier—they'd gone to gather the rest of the troop.

The largest of them, a scarred alpha with silver fur, dropped onto a lower branch and let out an ear-splitting shriek.

The canopy exploded into motion.

"Run!" Takuya shouted, dropping the fruit.

They didn't hesitate. All three tore down the bank at a dead sprint. Behind them, branches snapped and the noise swelled as the troop dropped from the trees and gave chase on all six limbs, closing fast.

"They're flanking us!" Inori shouted, glancing back. The creatures were using the trees along the water to cut off any route inland, herding the brothers onto the narrow, rocky bank.

They ran until their lungs burned, the thick air scraping like fire on the way down.

Then, over the noise behind them, came something deeper—a low, thunderous roar.

Takuya skidded to a stop, gravel spraying under his shoes. Inori and Kaguya slammed into his back.

The bank simply ended. Below, the river churned white over a steep drop—not a massive fall, maybe thirty feet into a deep plunge pool, but the rocks beneath looked unforgiving.

The screeching grew louder. The first wave broke through the tree line, teeth bared, closing off any retreat.

There was nowhere left to go.

Takuya looked at the water, then at his brothers. All three had swum competitively as kids. It was a gamble—but standing their ground meant getting torn apart.

"Jump!"

They leapt without a second thought.

The cold hit Takuya like a wall of concrete. He went under, the current spinning him through churning white foam before he clawed his way back up, gasping. He kicked hard against the undertow, spear still gripped in one fist.

"Inori! Kaguya!" he shouted, coughing up water.

A few yards off, Inori surfaced, paddling hard. Further downstream, Kaguya was already angling toward a shallow, pebbled shore.

They dragged themselves out and collapsed onto the stones, chests heaving, soaked through. High above, at the lip of the falls, the creatures paced and screamed in frustration—unwilling to make the jump themselves.

Takuya lay back and stared at the strange sky. The fruit was gone, swept off downstream. They were cold, wet, and back where they'd started.

"Status?" he managed, sitting up to check on his brothers.

To his surprise, Kaguya was laughing. Not panic—something closer to a quiet, clinical delight.

"What's funny?" Takuya demanded, wiping water from his eyes.

Kaguya sat up, pushing wet hair off his face, eyes bright. "The fruit's identical to an Earth orange. Those things up there have the same social structure and ambush instincts as Earth primates. Don't you see it, Takuya?"

Inori caught his breath, and the realization hit him a beat later.

"The life here runs almost parallel to Earth's," Kaguya said, grinning now. "Which means the odds of this world evolving something like us—an intelligent, bipedal hominid—just went up. A lot."

Takuya stared at him, then let out a short, breathless laugh of his own. The logic held.

"That's good news," he said, catching his breath. He looked out at the jungle stretching endlessly ahead. "And bad news. Because if people evolved here... God only knows what they've built to defend themselves by the time we find them."