Woodall was waiting by his cabin, away from the last embers of the barbecue. Strips of dried meat hung from the eaves. A polished bow rested against the doorframe—not decorative, but positioned for reach. The cabin of a man who had been a hunter before he was a chief, and who hadn't stopped being either.
"You showed initiative today, Barrow," Woodall said. "The charcoal. The barbecue. Even that business with the beam—you've got good instincts."
His tone was warm. His thoughts were calculating.
—the boy's clever. Too clever for a refugee. People from Luton Village don't know about charcoal. Nobody from any village does. Where did he really come from?—
Kael noted the suspicion and adjusted. He couldn't afford to be too impressive. Competence attracted patronage; brilliance attracted scrutiny. The line between the two was thinner than most people realized, and he'd just spent the day on the wrong side of it.
"Village chief, when winter comes, everyone will definitely want to burn charcoal in the house for heating. At that time, we must warn everyone to keep the room aired out. If there is no fresh air, the toxins produced by charcoal will kill people."
"Ah? Is charcoal that dangerous? It seems that we can't let people use it casually."
Kael knew that the villagers could not understand the concepts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide poisoning, so he simplified the concepts and explained them to the village chief. Kael believed that village chief Woodall was a reliable person.
"Yes, I think it's better for you to properly manage it, Village chief."
Woodall studied him for a moment. Then nodded, satisfied. It was the right answer—the answer that gave Woodall authority over the new resource rather than claiming it for himself. Kael had just handed the village chief a gift and a reason to be grateful, and Woodall's thoughts confirmed it:
—smart boy. Doesn't try to put himself above the village. Knows how to share credit. This one's worth keeping—
Woodall studied the young man's face for a while before speaking. "I wanted to discuss your plans. Do you intend to stay in Ella Village?"
The question carried more weight than its simple phrasing suggested. Through his mind-reading ability, Kael caught the underlying hope and calculation in Woodall's thoughts. We need young blood here, fresh ideas. Can't let another promising one slip away to the cities.
"I haven't thought that far ahead," Kael replied carefully. As he spoke, he noticed a faint silvery-white shimmer dancing around Woodall's hands, visible even in the dim evening light. "Though I must admit, I'm curious about village life. That glow around your hands, for instance—is it common here?"
Woodall's posture shifted.
—sharp. Too sharp. Best to manage this one's curiosity. Don't want him running off to the city before winter—
"Just the firelight," Woodall said.
It was not the firelight. They both knew it. Kael let the deflection stand, because pushing a man like Woodall cost more than it gained, and information extracted by force was always less reliable than information offered freely. He shifted approach.
"I've noticed everyone here has their specialty. Like Violet with the orchard and the tailoring. Is that common in all villages under Lord Greenwood's authority?"
The lord's name landed like a stone in a pond. Woodall's thoughts rippled, surprise that the newcomer knew the name, followed by a rapid recalculation of how much this boy actually understood about the world he'd arrived in.
"We're just a small part of Gritsy Town's jurisdiction," Woodall said carefully. "Simple folk doing simple work. Though I suppose things are different in Greenwood City."
He was probing. Testing whether Barrow had ambitions toward the city. Kael maintained his mask.
"I've heard talk of assessments there. Something about professions?"
Woodall's mind ran through its calculations:
—tell him too little, he might seek answers elsewhere. Tell him too much, he might leave for the city. The boy's useful here. Keep him manageable—
"Ah, city folk and their ceremonies." Dismissive. Practiced. "We find our callings naturally here. The good god provides guidance to those who are patient."
The good god. The phrase landed differently in Kael's ears than Woodall intended. To Woodall, it was theology, the comfortable language of faith. To Kael, it was data. The profession system was connected to something the villagers understood in religious terms: divine recognition, divine light, the shimmer on Woodall's hands. The city apparently formalized this into bureaucratic assessments. The village left it to patience and practice.
Either way, the shimmer was real, and it meant something, and learning what it meant was essential for surviving in a world where power could manifest as a column of fire that vaporized a man in his stolen clothes.
Kael would learn more by watching than by asking. And Woodall was about to give him the perfect opportunity.
The conversation wound toward practical matters. "I'll be heading to Ella Forest tonight," Woodall said, rolling his shoulders. "Village meat stores need replenishing after today's feast."
"Can I help?" Kael offered.
"No, no." The refusal was immediate, expected. "Night hunting is dangerous work. Best leave it to those with experience."
—and best keep you from seeing too much too soon—
Kael thanked him and said goodnight.
—
In the dark, Kael collected the rusty kitchen knife, the bundle of hemp rope, and the two flints he'd set aside the night before. The knife was dull but heavy enough to be useful. The rope was sound. The flints were insurance.
Kael. It's dangerous to go into the forest at night.
I'm not going to do anything dangerous. I'm going to watch.
Watch what?
Woodall hunt. I need to see what divine light looks like when it's being used, not just displayed.
You're not... planning to kidnap Violet, are you?
The question was so unexpected that Kael actually stopped moving.
What?
I don't know! You've been scheming ever since you arrived! You have a knife and a rope! What am I supposed to think?
Kael looked down at the knife and the rope in his hands and, for the first time in Xi's presence, came very close to laughing.
They're for the forest. In case something tries to eat me.
Oh. Right. Yes. That—that makes more sense.
Xi's embarrassment radiated through the connection like heat through a wall.
He slipped out of the house and into the dark.
—
Ella Forest at night was a different world.
The canopy blocked the moonlight in dense patches, leaving the forest floor a mosaic of silver and black. Sounds that had been background noise during the day—birdsong, wind, insects—were replaced by a different register: the careful movement of nocturnal animals, the distant call of something Kael couldn't identify, the creak of branches under weight that wasn't wind.
Kael moved low, placing his feet with deliberate care. He had no training in fieldcraft, no experience in forests after dark, and the eye's identification function was working overtime—every surface he looked at sprouted labels, every sound source was tagged, and the volume of information was almost more disorienting than the darkness itself.
But the eye also gave him something invaluable: Woodall's footprints.
The identification was precise—each print on the forest floor tagged with the chief's name, direction of travel, and approximate freshness. Woodall was a careful hunter who erased his tracks periodically to avoid attracting predators, but he did so inconsistently, leaving stretches of clean ground between identifiable prints. It was enough. Kael followed the breadcrumb trail deeper into the forest, keeping his distance, testing every step before committing his weight.
You're actually good at this.
Xi sounded surprised. Kael wasn't sure if she was complimenting his stealth or his stubbornness.
I'm following labels on the ground. The eye is doing the work.
The eye is telling you where the prints are. You're the one not stepping on branches.
They walked in silence for a while. The forest at night was the first truly private space Kael had occupied since arriving—no villagers to perform for, no thoughts to read, just the dark and the eye's labels and the sound of his own careful footsteps. It was in this silence that his mind circled back, as it always did, to the loose threads of the day.
The beam.
He replayed the moment in the storage shed. His right hand on the support post. His left hand finding the wedge. The shift—less than a centimeter—while Xi's eye was pointed at the post. And afterward: nothing. No question. No suspicion. Just "That one doesn't look safe" and, even hours later, no judgemental remark.
Xi hadn't seen. She'd been in his skull, sharing his senses, reading his surface thoughts, and she'd missed it entirely. Which confirmed what he'd suspected but hadn't been able to test until now: Xi could only see through the right eye. The left was his. What his left hand did while his right eye was looking elsewhere was invisible to her.
The implications unfolded in his mind with the quiet precision of a lock opening.
He could act without her knowledge. He could plan, prepare, execute anything that could be done with a turned head and a busy left hand and Xi would never see it. She would see the results. She would draw her own conclusions. And those conclusions, as today had demonstrated, would be wrong in exactly the way that served him best: she would attribute to instinct what had actually been design, and her misattribution would deepen her trust, and her deepened trust would give him more room to operate, and the cycle would continue until—
Kael didn't finish the thought. He stepped over a root the eye had flagged and kept walking. The manipulation of Violet had a plan, a timeline, a measurable objective. The manipulation of Xi, if that's what this was, had no plan. It had just happened. A wedge shifted, a silence kept, a hope allowed to grow in soil he hadn't prepared.
The accidental manipulations, he was learning, were the ones that stuck.
After half an hour, the trail converged on an area where the trees thinned and the moonlight came through in broad silver sheets. Kael found Woodall squatting in the shadows, setting a snare with the practiced economy of a man who'd done it ten thousand times. The silvery-white shimmer on his hands was more visible here, away from the village fires, it was clearly not reflected light. It came from within. A soft, steady luminescence that clung to his skin like condensation.
Woodall finished the snare and moved on. Kael followed at distance, relying entirely on the eye's tracking data. The forest was Woodall's terrain, not his, and the chief moved through it with a confidence that made Kael feel, for the first time since arriving in this world, like the amateur he was.
Every step Woodall took was informed by decades of knowledge Kael didn't have and couldn't read from someone's thoughts. The angle of a branch. The depth of a print. The way silence changed quality when something large was nearby. This was not a skill the eye could shortcut. This was time.
Nearby, animal calls split the quiet, sharp, frightened sounds, the noise of prey being flushed by something faster. Kael pressed himself against a tree and watched as Woodall, who had climbed to a branch at some point Kael hadn't noticed, raised his hunting bow.
The draw was slow. Full extension, the string pulled to his cheek, his breathing suspended. Moonlight caught the silvery-white glow on his fingertips, and in the moment before release, the glow intensified—concentrated at the points where his fingers met the string, as if the light itself was being threaded into the arrow.
The release was silent. The arrow flew fast and flat—impossibly flat, cutting a trajectory that should have arced but didn't, as if the air had been told to step aside. Then a dull impact, a brief wailing, and silence.
Kael stared.
The arrow had covered forty meters through dense forest in near-darkness and struck a moving target with lethal precision. The trajectory had been wrong—too straight, too fast, unaffected by the physics Kael understood. The divine light hadn't just been decorative. It had done something to the arrow. Enhanced it. Given it properties it shouldn't have had.
Did you see that?
Yes.
That arrow didn't fly right. It flew too straight. Like it was on a rail.
Kael said nothing. He was recalibrating. In the three days since he'd arrived, he'd been operating under the assumption that his primary threats were large and obvious. Fire columns, armored figures, things that came from the sky. Woodall's arrow had just told him that danger in this world existed at every scale. A Level 2 hunter in a backwater village could shoot an arrow that ignored gravity. What could a Level 10 do? A Level 20? What could the figure in armor who'd incinerated the village do if it decided to come back?
He filed the question alongside the others and continued following.
—
Over the next two hours, Kael shadowed Woodall through the forest. The chief set three more snares, tracked and killed a fox, a rabbit, and three large rodents the eye identified as cave guinea pigs. Each kill demonstrated the same principle: the divine light concentrated at the moment of release, and the enhanced arrow flew with unnatural precision. The effect seemed proportional to the glow's intensity—a brighter flare for longer shots, a subtle shimmer for close targets.
Kael absorbed everything. The mechanics of the bow. The tracking patterns. The way Woodall read the forest, wind direction, animal trails, the acoustic difference between a clearing and a thicket. He couldn't replicate any of it yet, but the eye recorded it, and recording was the first step toward understanding.
Woodall packed his kills and began the walk home. Kael followed from a distance, already planning his next visit to the forest, this time alone, with the knife and rope, to begin teaching himself what Woodall had spent a lifetime learning.
Then his footsteps stopped.
The eye had found something. A print on the forest floor, tagged in the now-familiar angular script:
Husk's Footprint.
Kael had memorized every name in Ella Village. All fifty. There was no one named Husk.
He crouched and touched the print. It was fresh, minutes old, laid down on top of Woodall's trail, which meant someone had been following the same path, recently, in the same direction. But not Woodall's prints. Different gait. Different weight distribution. Lighter. Faster. The stride length of someone covering ground with purpose.
That's not a villager's name.
No. It's not.
Kael followed the prints. The trail moved fast, faster than he could comfortably match in the dark, even with the eye's guidance. Whoever Husk was, they knew this forest or didn't care about noise, and neither possibility was reassuring. The prints wove through the trees in a pattern that suggested not tracking but transit, someone passing through on their way to somewhere else, using the forest as cover rather than hunting ground.
He tracked the prints for nearly an hour, pushing his pace, ignoring the branches that caught his arms and the roots that snagged his feet. The trail led toward the far edge of Ella Forest—the side opposite the village, where the trees thinned and the land opened into scrubland Kael hadn't explored.
At the forest's edge, he caught a glimpse. A figure, moving fast across the open ground. Already fifty meters out, heading away from the forest at a pace that was closer to running than walking. Male. Lean build. Dark clothing. Moving with the fluid, low-center-of-gravity gait of someone trained to cover ground without being seen.
The eye locked on and delivered its assessment:
Husk. Male, 37. Deputy Leader, Crimson Marauders.
Production: None.
Manufacturing: Pharmacist — Lv 1.
Combat: Scout — Lv 6.
Kael stopped breathing.
Crimson Marauders. The bandit group that had destroyed Luton Village—the real Luton Village, the one whose name Kael had borrowed for his cover story. Their deputy leader had been here. In Ella Forest. Tonight. Walking the same trails Woodall used to hunt.
Scout, Level 6. The highest combat level Kael had encountered in this world. Woodall's hunting profession was Level 2. The gap between 2 and 6, in a system where divine light could make arrows ignore physics, was not a gap Kael could estimate with confidence. But it was enough to know that if Husk had wanted to kill Woodall tonight, the village chief might not have come home.
The figure disappeared into the darkness of the scrubland. Kael stood at the tree line, alone, the night air cooling the sweat on his skin.
Kael.
Xi's voice was very quiet.
The Crimson Marauders aren't just a story you borrowed. They're here. They're real. And their deputy leader was scouting this forest tonight.
Yes.
Scouting for what?
Kael didn't answer, because the answer was obvious and the obviousness of it made his stomach turn. A bandit group that had already destroyed one village in the region. A scout reconnoitering the forest adjacent to another village. A deputy leader, not a foot soldier, someone senior enough to do the assessment personally. The calculation was simple, and the conclusion was the same whether you applied it in this world or the one Kael had come from: when a predator studies its next meal, it doesn't need to announce its intentions.
The Crimson Marauders were coming to Ella Village.
Not tonight. Not tomorrow. But soon. Husk's scouting run was preparation, not execution. He was mapping terrain, identifying approaches, counting assets, the same thing Kael had been doing for two days, except Husk was mapping the village as a target and Kael had been mapping it as a host.
The parallel sat in him like something swallowed wrong.