Beneath the gray sky of that immense forest, Kenzo watched from the top of his great severed trunk, eighty meters high. From up there, in the strange and oppressive silence of that Fragment, he could see it… the fog. That same sinister, dense fog that lay exactly where he had been chained the day before. A fog that moved little by little, slowly, like a beast in no hurry, certain of its advance.
Kenzo had not expected the fog to be so thick, nor to reach such a terrifying height. He realized that if he had not been atop that eighty-meter trunk, he never would have seen the point where the fog began, nor understood the monstrous extent of it.
He remained there for a long time, staring at it. Time passed, indifferent to his unease. As the hours went by, he saw the fog shrink in size, yet draw closer, slowly and inexorably, toward his position. Even if there had to be hundreds of kilometers between the point of origin and where he stood, he could still make out its source like an open wound in the landscape.
Night finally fell. But Kenzo did not stop watching it. There was something alive about that fog. It advanced, undulated, almost vibrated. Even without moonlight or the slightest natural glow, its thickness remained visible, as if it carried its own dark radiance.
Little by little, thirst began to make itself known. His throat was growing dry.
– « Why is there a gray sky but no rain… » he thought, irritated by the contradiction.
The hours stretched on, long and silent, until at last the fog reached Kenzo's trunk.
Its height was exactly as he had seen it the first time he arrived in that forest. Just a few centimeters… but the more time passed, the more it advanced, the more it rose. Kenzo remained motionless, calculating mentally every minute that passed, every variation in the thickness of the white veil.
After a few hours, in the middle of the night, even in the almost total darkness, the fog remained perceptible. A white mass, opaque, almost alive. It had reached around twenty meters in height. Then it stopped growing.
Maybe… maybe that was the limit of the fog in this place.
Kenzo tried to reassure himself.
– « So that's all… I just have to stay high up when it gets here. I was expecting worse. »
But the moment he decided to stop watching the forest from his perch, a brutal sound rang out.
A crash. A tremor. Growls, followed by monstrous noises that echoed through the entire area.
Kenzo jolted. His instinct screamed. He pressed his body against the trunk, lowered his head, and gripped his spear tightly, as if the slightest mistake could mean death.
What he had just heard sounded like nothing he knew: a mix of roars, splintering wood, and heavy vibrations, almost too intense to belong to any simple animal.
Last night, he had heard absolutely nothing. Not a sound, not a stir. Total silence.
But now… something was happening below.
A fight.
Between two Void Creatures.
He did not need to see more to understand. Those creatures were causing tremors strong enough to shake a tree as gigantic as his trunk.
Kenzo realized it immediately: there was no need to have killed or absorbed fragments to know that such a level was… beyond him. Far too dangerous. He desperately hoped that the Void Creatures fighting down there were not the norm in this forest.
He remained lying there for a long while, holding his breath at every sound. Yet the moving chaos gradually calmed. Silence returned, but it was a heavy, threatening silence.
Kenzo then decided to move to the opposite side of the trunk, toward the place where he had left the skeleton yesterday.
– « Hopefully it's quieter over here… » he murmured, casting one last uneasy glance behind him.
The cold returned slowly, gliding over his skin like a winter breath. Kenzo sat down and looked at the horizon again, trying to forget the monstrous sounds he had just heard. And that was when he saw something… something so strange that he immediately straightened.
– « What the hell is that??? »
Far away, in the dark immensity of the forest, a tiny red point glowed faintly. A red light, almost imperceptible, but real.
– « What is that…? »
He watched it for a long time. The point flickered slightly, glimmering like a lost ember in the night. Was it a creature? A phenomenon of the Fragment? A trap?
He had no idea.
He spent several minutes speculating, his mind wavering between ominous theories and nervous curiosity. But sleep eventually caught up to him. His body, exhausted from the day before, gave in. His eyelids closed despite himself, and he fell asleep there, on his trunk, the red light still burned into his mind.
The next morning, the scene was exactly the same as the day before. A clear sky, a very real sun somewhere beyond… but completely smothered by the colossal shadow of the Gargantuan Tree, whose kilometers of height enveloped everything.
Kenzo stretched with a grunt.
– « I'm already getting used to sleeping badly again… that's a good thing. »
He almost laughed. He was glad not to forget his roots, his habits from the outer walls. The worst possible outcome would have been to get used to the comfort of the Royal Academy's beds. That would have made this kind of night a thousand times worse.
He finally got up.
– « Alright… I'm going to see if that red light is still there. »
As he walked toward the edge of the trunk, where the skeleton still lay exactly where he had left it, Kenzo instantly understood what he had truly seen the night before.
His heart leapt. Only beings with intelligence were capable of that…
– « Smoke… someone lit a fire last night. »