Zweli Masilela made a choice. He didn’t fight. He didn’t break the wrists of the four riot guards surrounding him. He slowly extended his hands.
“Cuff me,” he said calmly.
He knew that if he fought his way out of a maximum-security prison, he would be a fugitive for life. He would never be able to run the company or protect Beauty legally. To win the war, he had to enter the belly of the beast.
They shackled his hands and feet. They placed a black hood over his head. They threw him into the back of a van that smelled of bleach and old iron.
The engine roared to life. Zweli felt the vibrations. He counted the turns.
Left. Right. Straight. Highway speed. North.
He meditated as the hours passed. One hour. Two. Three. Four.
The smooth hum of the N1 highway eventually gave way to the jarring bumps of a gravel road. The air grew hotter, stifling under the hood. The smell of the city—exhaust and concrete—was replaced by the scent of dust, dry grass, and wild sage.
Limpopo, Zweli thought. The Bushveld.
Finally, the van stopped. The doors opened.
Zweli was dragged out and thrown onto hard, red earth. The shackles were unlocked.
“Run, boy,” a guard whispered. “Before they find you.”
The van doors slammed. Tyres spun on gravel. The vehicle sped away, leaving him in silence.
Zweli pulled the hood off his head.
He was standing in the middle of a vast, dry savannah. The sun was setting, painting the sky in blood-red streaks. Scrub acacia trees dotted the landscape. In the distance, the silhouette of a mountain range looked like jagged teeth.
He was wearing his prison-issue orange jumpsuit and cheap canvas shoes. No phone. No weapon. No water.
A buzzing sound broke the silence.
Zweli looked up. A heavy-duty agricultural drone hovered twenty metres above him. A speaker strapped to its underbelly crackled to life.
“Welcome to the wilderness, Mtshana.”
It was Darius.
“You conquered the boardroom. You conquered the street. But tell me, Zweli… how are you with nature?”
“What is this, Darius?” Zweli shouted at the drone. “A hiking trip?”
“A transaction,” Darius replied gleefully. “I needed liquid capital to fund my legal defence. So, I sold a ticket. An exclusive experience for three very wealthy, very bored individuals. They are tired of hunting lions and elephants. They wanted to hunt a king.”
Zweli scanned the horizon. “You sold me as a trophy?”
“The hunting party is five kilometres south,” Darius said. “They have rifles, thermal scopes, and a pack of Rhodesian Ridgebacks. You have… well, you have your ‘Qi’. The boundary fence is ten kilometres north. Reach it, and you live. Get caught, and you get mounted on a wall in Zurich.”
The drone ascended, its camera lens blinking red.
“Run, Zweli. The dogs are hungry.”
High Court of Pretoria: 14:00
Beauty Masilela stood in the centre of the chaotic courthouse hallway. The news of the Chief Magistrate’s arrest had caused a media frenzy. Reporters were swarming.
Comfort Sindane pushed through the crowd, his face grim. He grabbed Beauty’s arm and pulled her into a quiet alcove.
“He’s not in the system,” Comfort whispered urgently.
“What do you mean?” Beauty asked, her stomach dropping. “He was arrested this morning!”
“The intake logs at Pretoria Central show he was processed,” Comfort said, showing her his tablet. “But the exit logs show a transfer order signed by a ‘Warden Smith’. There is no Warden Smith. The vehicle registration belongs to a shell company listed as ‘Apex Safaris’.”
“Safaris?” Beauty stared at him. “They took him to a game reserve?”
“They kidnapped him, Ma’am. Under the guise of a transfer. The magistrate was just the distraction.”
Beauty leaned against the wall. The Architect. It had to be.
“How do we find him?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Limpopo is huge. He could be anywhere.”
“We can’t track the van,” Comfort admitted. “But we can track the money. Whoever rented that van, whoever paid the guards… they left a digital footprint. I need an hour.”
“We don’t have an hour,” Beauty said. She thought of Voster. She thought of the taxi network.
“The Taxi Association drives the long-distance routes to Limpopo,” Beauty said, her eyes lighting up. “Every toll gate, every petrol station… There is a taxi driver watching. Comfort, call Voster. Tell him the Unseen King is missing. Tell him to activate the long-distance network. I want every Toyota Quantum on the N1 looking for a white corrections van.”
The Bushveld: 19:00
Night had fallen. The moon was a thin sliver, offering little light.
Zweli moved through the bush in a low crouch. The orange jumpsuit was a liability—it was a beacon in the dark. He needed camouflage.
He found a muddy waterhole. He stripped off the top of the jumpsuit, tied the sleeves around his waist, and covered his chest, face, and arms in thick, dark mud. It masked his scent and his skin tone.
Snap.
A twig broke in the distance.
Zweli froze. He lowered his breathing, becoming part of the earth.
Through the brush, he saw a beam of light cutting through the darkness. Then another.
Three men. Dressed in high-tech hunting gear. They carried scoped rifles with silencers. They were laughing quietly, confident in their sport.
And ahead of them, straining on leashes held by a tracker, were two massive dogs. Ridgebacks. Bred to hunt lions.
“I bet he’s hiding in a tree,” one hunter whispered with a German accent. “These city boys always climb.”
“Check the thermal,” another said. An American accent.
The tracker raised a thermal monocular.
Zweli pressed himself flat into the mud. The cold mud would mask his body heat, but only for a few minutes.
The tracker swept the area. The beam passed over Zweli.
“Nothing,” the tracker grunted. “Wait… heat signature near the rocks. A porcupine maybe.”
“Let the dogs loose,” the German said. “They will sort the porcupines from the Kings.”
The tracker unclipped the leashes.
The dogs didn’t bark. They put their noses to the ground and took off. They weren’t heading for the rocks. They were circling.
They caught Zweli’s scent—the prison bleach, the sweat—beneath the mud.
One dog turned its head, looking directly at the patch of darkness where Zweli lay. A low growl rumbled in its throat.
It charged.
Zweli didn’t run. You cannot outrun a Ridgeback.
He stood up.
The dog leapt, aiming for his throat.
Zweli didn’t strike. He intercepted. He caught the dog in mid-air, gripping its loose skin behind the neck and under the jaw. He used the dog’s own momentum, spinning with it, and slammed it into the ground.
The dog yelped, the wind knocked out of it. Zweli applied a pressure point grip to the base of the skull—non-lethal, but paralysing. The dog went limp, unconscious.
The second dog hesitated. It growled, sensing a predator stronger than itself.
“What was that?” the American shouted. “Over there!”
A rifle crack echoed. A bullet zipped past Zweli’s ear and struck a tree.
Zweli dived into the thick thornbush. He ignored the thorns tearing at his skin. He moved fast, circling left.
He wasn’t running away. He was hunting the hunters.
He came up behind the German, who was scanning the trees with his scope.
Zweli stepped out of the shadows. He tapped the German on the shoulder.
The hunter spun around, raising his rifle.
Zweli grabbed the barrel. He pulled the hunter forward, delivering a knee to the solar plexus. The man folded.
Zweli stripped the rifle from his hands. He checked the chamber. Loaded.
He aimed it at the other two hunters, who were twenty metres away, blinded by their own flashlights.
He had the shot. He could end it now.
But Darius was watching. The drone hovered above, silently recording.
If Zweli killed these men, he became a murderer. The footage would be sent to the police. He would trade a trumped-up charge for a real-life sentence.
It’s a trap, Zweli realised. He wants me to kill.
Zweli ejected the magazine from the rifle. He cleared the chamber. He threw the bullets into the tall grass.
Then, he gripped the rifle by the barrel, turning it into a club.
He stepped into the light.
“You paid to hunt a king?” Zweli’s voice boomed out of the darkness.
The American and the tracker spun around, blinding him with their lights.
“Drop the weapon!” the American screamed, terrified by the mud-covered demon standing before them.
“I don’t need a weapon,” Zweli said, dropping the rifle into the dirt. “I am the weapon.”
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