Leo was completely alone.
The temperature plummeted. A grey, low mist started crawling over the forest floor. It moved sluggishly, wrapping around his ankles like cold, wet fingers trying to pull him down into the dirt.
For the first time in his life, he had no safety net. No walls keeping the monsters out. No city guards. No grandpa with a hidden aura of death standing by to save him. Just the unknown.
He closed his eyes. Breathed in.
The raw mana of Elinor Woods scratched his throat like coarse sand. It tasted strongly of blood and old dirt. He didn't turn on the Void State yet. He waited in the dark. Listened.
He let the primal fear wash over him. He didn't fight it this time. He let the panic rise up into his chest, then forced it down, packing it into a tight, hard ball in his stomach. He let the fear sharpen his brain into a needle.
"Camouflage," he whispered to the empty air.
He stepped off the packed dirt and moved into the thorny undergrowth. Heading for the Western Ridge. He wasn't walking. Walking was too loud. He was drifting.
The climb was an absolute nightmare.
It was a vertical graveyard of rotting wood, loose shale, and massive, fallen trees. His lungs burned with every breath. The air up here was thin, heavy with wild mana that tasted strongly of copper and rust. Every time he reached out and grabbed a branch to pull himself up, the bark felt like cold, wet, dead skin. It peeled off in his hands, slimy and gross, sticking to his gloves.
The silence physically pressed against his eardrums. He could hear his own pulse. Thump, thump, thump. It was so loud in his own head he was terrified a monster would hear his heartbeat through the fog.
His thighs burned. The muscles screamed in protest. He slipped twice on the ascent. His knees slammed into jagged rocks hidden under the wet moss. He bit his lip hard to keep from crying out, tasting the warm, metallic salt of his own blood.
He finally hit the crest of the ridge right as the last sliver of sun died completely behind the jagged mountains in the distance. The sky bruised into a dark, starless purple.
Below him, the Elinor Woods stretched for miles, looking exactly like a massive sea of shifting black oil.
But he didn't care about the view. The smell stopped him dead in his tracks.
It hit him like a physical punch to the face.
It wasn't pine needles. It wasn't earthy musk. It was sweet. Sickeningly thick. Like a basket of peaches left to ferment and rot in a hot, sealed cellar. The overpowering smell of bad meat and sweet decay.
The rot.
Leo realized what it was, and his stomach did a slow, sick flip. He had to swallow hard, fighting his own body to keep from gagging and throwing up his lunch.
He immediately sank down into a tight crouch, pressing his back hard against a freezing, lichen-covered boulder. The wet rock soaked right through his tunic to his skin. He didn't care.
He didn't just turn on the Void State; he let it swallow him whole. Forced his mind to become the stone behind him. Became the mist. Erased his own presence, slowing his breathing down until he was barely taking in enough air to stay conscious.
His gray eyes frantically scanned the narrow, rocky plateau of the ridge.
And there. Near a cluster of shattered white rocks about twenty feet away. He saw it.
A thick trail of dark slime smeared across the stone. Not blood. Way too thick to be blood. It looked like industrial tar, shimmering slightly with a gross, toxic violet light in the twilight. Poisonous.
Right next to the slime was a footprint.
Not a paw. Not a hoof.
Looked exactly like a hand. But a hand with way too many joints in the spindly fingers. The claws on the end of those fingers had dug so deep they left jagged white scars carved right into the solid rock. The rock was literally crushed into powder under its weight.
Leo's left eye throbbed. A sharp, burning heat flared right behind his pupil. Like a hot needle being pushed directly into his brain.
The "Monster Soul" fragment buried deep inside him was waking up. Reacting to the tracks. But it wasn't reacting with fear or panic. It was a nasty, predatory hunger. Recognition. The thing inside him wanted to meet whatever made that track. It wanted to eat it.
Leo squeezed his eye shut, fighting down the sudden nausea and the splitting headache. Forced his eye open again.
He looked further down the trail, into the thickest part of the mist near the edge of the cliff drop-off.
He heard it.
A low, guttural clicking sound echoing through the trees. Click-clack-click. It sounded like a thousand dry needles snapping all at the exact same time. Like massive, skeletal teeth chattering in the cold.
Something was moving down there in the fog. Something heavy. Something that absolutely did not belong to the natural Tiers of the forest.
The deal with Arthur was simple: survive the night. Don't fight. Just hide. Be the air.
But as Leo stared at that black, shimmering smear of slime on the rocks, he knew the Elinor wasn't going to just let him sit quietly behind a rock and wait for the sun to come up. The forest didn't play by Arthur's neat little rules.
The 'unknown' Arthur had lectured him about wasn't just a theory anymore. It was a physical shadow with claws. And it was already sniffing the air. Hunting for him.
He slowly reached down. He gripped the hilt and drew the Sting.
The metal scraped softly against the leather. The matte-gray blade felt like a block of solid ice in the freezing night air. It offered absolutely no comfort. Felt like a useless, tiny piece of scrap metal against whatever was clicking in the dark.
"Camouflage isn't gonna be enough," Leo whispered to himself. His voice was trembling. He couldn't stop it.
His breath hitched painfully in his chest as a second, much louder click sounded.
It didn't come from the fog down the trail.
It came from the brush directly behind his rock. Less than five feet away.
"I need to completely vanish."