"Weird," Vincent muttered, his gaze still fixed on the oppressive wall of trees, his senses stretched to their limit.

  "What is it? What happened?" the elf princess asked, her voice hushed.

  "I felt something. Something moving toward us. Fast." Vincent pointed a gloved hand toward the general direction of the river, its dark waters hidden by the thick foliage. "From there."

  "Are you certain it wasn't an illusion?" she pressed, a note of desperate hope in her voice. "Or a spirit? This place is known for them."

  "The worst illusions and ghosts cling to the riverbank itself," Vincent countered, his voice low and certain. "This was further out. And it wasn't a phantom. I could feel its heart beating."

  One of the elven guards shifted uncomfortably, his silver armor seeming to absorb the scant light. "About that, my lady," he interjected, his voice uncharacteristically shaken. "There have been rumors... whispers that the curse of this forest has grown more severe. They say it's been fed by the suffering—the sheer volume of slave trafficking that has been poisoning these woods."

  Vincent was silent for a moment, processing this. "Hmm," he grunted, finally looking down as he pieced it together. Then, his head snapped back up, his decision made. "No matter what it was, it's gone now. We keep moving."

  ***

  "Mister Vincent," one of the elven guards rasped, his voice rough with fatigue. His eyes were heavy-lidded, barely staying open. "Should we not rest soon? We have been moving for close to an entire day."

  Vincent didn't turn, but he gave a slow, considering nod. "Hmm. You're right. If whatever was out there meant to attack, it would have by now." His eyes scanned the dark, tangled woods ahead. "Once I find a defensible spot, we'll make camp. We'll take three-hour shifts—each of us—and move again once the last watch is over."

  The two guards exchanged a weary but grateful glance. The one who had spoken straightened his posture as best he could. "Understood. We will also take extra time instead of The princess"

  "Fine by me," Vincent said, his focus already returned to picking a path through the gloom.

  After finding a relatively clear area, they set up their tents with weary efficiency. Vincent settled on a fallen log directly opposite the campfire, intending to take the first watch. The flames cast long, dancing shadows that seemed to writhe in the corner of his vision.

  Halfway through his watch, a sharp *bristle* cut through the night's silence. The sound came from the dense bushes in the direction of the river. Vincent rose silently, his hand resting on the hilt of his short sword as he moved toward the noise.

  Once he had reached close to ten steps of the the sound it stopped abruptly. A moment later, it resumed, identical and clear, but now from a location deeper within the forest.

  Interesting, Vincent thought, a predator's curiosity cutting through his fatigue. He abandoned all caution and followed, each step taking him further from the safety of the firelight.

  After a few minutes of tracking the intermittent sound through the oppressive dark, the trees suddenly thinned. He stopped dead in his tracks.

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  "What the fuck...?"

  There, glinting under the faint moonlight, was the River of the Damned. But that was impossible. By his calculations, they had camped at much more than an hour's walk from its banks.

  As he stood there, trying to process the geographical impossibility, his eyes adjusted. And in the distance, just beyond the river, he could make out two faint, circular lights.

  Glowing a steady, malevolent red.

  He tried to focus on the twin red circles, straining to decipher the low, guttural voice that seemed to emanate from them. But the words were a distorted murmur, slipping through his grasp like smoke.

  Suddenly, the sharp bristle sounded again—this time, directly behind him. His attention snapped away from the river. He spun around, his short sword half-drawn with his right hand, only to find a vast, empty beach stretching into a darkness that shouldn't have been there. The forest was gone.

  "What in the actual—"

  The sentence died in his throat. A presence materialized at his back—a wave of absolute cold and a pressure that crushed the air from his lungs. Instinct took over. Vincent completed his draw in a single, fluid motion, whipping the blade around in a desperate, wide horizontal slash.

  *THUMP.*

  But the blow never landed.

  A gloved hand shot out with impossible speed, not to block the blade, but to catch Vincent’s wrist. The grip was like iron, halting the slash with an effortless, absolute finality. The force was so complete it didn't even jar Vincent's arm; it was simply… stopped

  His heart plummeted.

  There, standing effortlessly in the unnatural darkness, was the man from his dream. The figure was clad head-to-toe in tactical gear, a stark, modern silhouette against the primordial gloom. A sleek, menacing helmet and a black tactical mask obscured his features, but from within the shadows of the mask's eye sockets, two points of light burned with a hellish, shining red, their sclera a void of pitch black.

  It was him. Ghost.

  Vincent was frozen, a statue of shock and fear. He couldn't move, couldn't think, could only stare into the hellish red pits of Ghost's eyes.

  It didn't matter. Ghost's grip tightened. A crushing, inexorable pressure began to splinter the mana Vincent had desperately channeled to reinforce his arm, grinding through his defenses as if they were nothing.

  "Aghhhh!" A strangled cry was torn from Vincent's throat, the pain too immense to contain.

  *Creeeak.*

  The sound wasn't loud, but it was the most terrifying thing Vincent had ever heard—the sound of his own arm bones beginning to splinter under the force.

  Then, as suddenly as it began, the pressure relented. Ghost loosened his grip by a fraction, stopping just short of a full break. The reprieve was so unexpected it was its own kind of shock.

  Before Vincent could process it, Ghost leaned in. The cold of the tactical mask brushed against Vincent's right ear, the voice that emerged from it a distorted, electronic whisper that seemed to bypass his ears and drill directly into his mind.

  "Wake up."

  Before Vincent could even process the command, the world shattered and reformed.

  The oppressive beach vanished. He was back in the suffocating darkness of the forest, the campfire a distant flicker behind him. Ghost was gone. But he was not alone.

  Shapes moved in the periphery, emerging from the shadows between the trees. A Dozen of them. Their low, wet growls filled the air. Before Vincent could count their numbers or fully process the horror of their forms, one launched itself at him, a blur of matted fur and rotten flesh hoping for the first bite.

  *Slash!*

  Instinct took over. Vincent's short sword met the creature mid-lunge. The blade bit deep, but instead of cleaving it in two, it carved a gushing wound across its torso, deflecting the beast into a tree trunk to his left with a sickening *thud.*

  Vincent’s eyes widened. Even with a gash that should have severed its spine and grazed its brain, the thing was already pushing itself back onto its feet, moving with a twitching, unnatural vitality.

  It was only then that he truly saw them. From a distance, they might be mistaken for wolves. Up close, they were walking corruption. Their bodies were rotting, dripping a black sludge teeming with maggots. Several had jaws hanging slack from broken hinges, and one had an eye dangling from its socket by a gristly thread, swinging with its every jerking movement.

  "Fuck me..." Vincent growled, the transition from cosmic dread to immediate, rotting peril sparking a flare of pure, righteous annoyance.

  His mood was irrelevant. The wolf-like creatures did not care. Three of them broke from the pack and lunged at him in a coordinated pincer movement.

  His eyes locked onto the one in the middle—the closest, most immediate threat. As it leaped for his throat, Vincent sidestepped and drove his short sword downward in a brutal, precise stab, piercing clean through the top of its skull. The blade sank deep, pinning the creature's head to the forest floor.

  It didn't die. Its body thrashed and twitched violently, legs scrambling against the earth, trying to free its impaled brain.

  *It survived a stab to the brain?* The thought was a clinical spark in the heat of battle.*Fine. I'll try different ways to see what works.*

  He abandoned the embedded sword, spinning to face the other two. The hound on his left was a heartbeat from closing its jaws on his leg. Vincent didn't aim; he simply thrust out a palm, and a roaring fireball erupted, engulfing the creature in a wave of searing heat and flame.

  His momentum carried him into the final attacker, which was already airborne. Vincent met it head-on, his hands snapping up to clamp around its skull. A surge of raw, crackling lightning magic channeled directly from his palms, coursing through the beast's body in a brilliant, violent flash. The creature convulsed for a split second before its head exploded in a shower of bone, rot, and maggots.