The march continued. But the ambient temperature inside my own chest began to plummet. Not the biting, crystalline cold of Raiden's winter magic. This was a heavy, suffocating chill sinking directly into my bone marrow. A sensation of the fog watching me, a vapor that did not have eyes, but possessed an infinite appetite for grief.
The generic playback of the dying students outside the shield abruptly cut off. The world inside my skull went static silent.
"Fifty points from House Abyssion."
The voice did not come from the trees. It vibrated directly from the toxic fog currently being digested inside my own Solar Plexus node. Instructor Cicero's voice cut through the static, dropping into the acoustic loop with elegant, academic malice.
Wait.
The shield blocks external acoustic assaults. But my passive is actively eating the forest's poison. I am inviting the root network's data stream directly into my central nervous system.
"I don't care what kind of anomaly you are."
Nova Celestine Melody's desperate, unhinged hiss from the soundproofed infirmary bed immediately followed, overlapping with Cicero's deduction in a chaotic stereo of aristocratic hostility.
My boot stepped over a puddle. My breathing remained even.
Is this it?
The botanical tape recorder is parsing my short-term memory and weaponizing it against me. It is just playing a highlight reel of my institutional debt. I lived through this exact administrative nightmare yesterday. If this mutated ecosystem intends to break my psyche, it is going to have to try harder than a replay of my exhausting social interactions.
My grip adjusted on the heavy iron sword, thoroughly unimpressed.
Beside me, Raiden's pace hitched by a micro-second. Her winter-sky eyes flicked to my chest, tracking the unnatural, mechanical stillness of my ribs. The frost around her shoulders subtly thickened, a defensive reflex reacting to a spike in my biometrics that I was trying to hide.
"...just wanted to sleep..."
The playback shifted.
The tone fractured. The aggressive echoes of the Academy vanished, dropping into a hollow, breathless despair that I did not recognize. A voice that belonged to the lungs currently expanding inside my ribcage, but held none of my exhaustion. Only surrender.
"...the brass collar is so heavy... my circuit is trash... they look at me like I'm already dead..."
My boots hitched for a fraction of a second.
"...if I just walk far enough into the fog... it will finally be quiet..."
A cold sweat broke across my spine. The humidity of the forest suddenly felt like the clammy palm of a corpse pressing against the back of my neck.
The missing six hours.
The roots aren't just playing my recent stress. They are reading the biological metadata of the corpse I hijacked. A failing, unranked provincial walking into this exact forest at seven in the morning, taking off his life-support collar, and waiting for the toxic flora to put him out of his misery.
"...why did you wake me up...?" the boy's voice wept, the syllables scraping against the inside of my skull. "...I was almost gone..."
My grip on the hilt of the iron sword tightened until the metal bit into my palm. My heart hammered against my ribs, not out of fear, but out of a sudden, voyeuristic desperation.
Wait. Do not fade out. Keep talking.
This is a massive lore drop. This is the exact context I need to figure out who this suicidal extra was and why he had a prior relationship with the Headmaster of Endstoria. Just give me one more minute. One more sentence. Let me hear the rest of the file.
Click.
The sound of a heavy metal suitcase latch snapping shut.
The phantom voice of the original Arzane vanished, swallowed by the grey mist that felt heavier than the fog outside.
My jaw locked. Frustration flared hot and sharp in my chest.
No. No, no, no. Do not skip the track. Rewind that. Bring the audio back right now. That was the only clue I had to this body's origin.
Ping.
A sharp, synthesized electronic chime.
The silence was instantly replaced by the rapid, aggressive clack-clack-clack of mechanical cherry-blue key switches. The sound was dry. Percussive. Utterly alien to the damp, breathing rot of the Whispering Woods.
"Donation received."
A flat, robotic Text-to-Speech voice vibrated directly from the center of my chest.
"Go to sleep, bro. You have been live for forty-two hours. Your mechanics are getting sloppy. This run is dead."
My boots stopped moving.
The annoyance over the lost clue evaporated. Confusion took its place, cold and sterile.
Mechanical switches. A digital text-to-speech alert.
Those acoustic frequencies do not exist in Odia-Prime. They have never existed in Odia-Prime. They belong to a dimly lit room that smells like stale coffee and dust. They belong to a world that hasn't been invented yet.
For three long seconds, my brain forgot about the heavy iron sword in my hand. It forgot about the toxic mist. I was sitting in my ergonomic chair, staring at the glare of a dual-monitor setup, listening to the stream chat rolling on the screen.
But streaming isn't a trauma. It was just my life. A random, exhausting Tuesday night.
Why is a biological nightmare designed to broadcast calcified agony playing an audio log of my streaming chat?
The intercostal muscles in my chest locked. The realization didn't build. It dropped into my stomach like a block of concrete, pulling my sanity down with it.
The botanical network isn't just reading the biological metadata of the corpse anymore. The mutated roots have bypassed the host body completely. They are parsing the unformatted soul anchoring it. They are digging through my Earth memories.
And if the forest broadcasts calcified trauma, and it has access to Earth...
A suffocating, primal terror clawed its way up my throat.
No. No. Shut it down. Stop.
The robotic TTS vanished. But the audio feed didn't dig deeper into the alien archive. Not yet. It looped back to my own voice. A broadcast from a 72-hour endurance run. A perfect, no-hit walkthrough of the Siege of Aethelarrion.
And in the recording, I was breaking.
But this time, the fog didn't just play the audio into my skull.
It projected it outward. Through me. Using my vocal cords as the playback speaker. And I didn't even realize it.
"Forty-seven hours!"
The words scraped out of my throat in a trembling, broken register that I had never used in this world. My jaw quivered. My hands shook around the hilt of my sword.
Are you KIDDING me? Forty-seven hours on the no-hit run and I blew it at the final boss phase transition because the engine desynced my i-frames. FORTY-SEVEN. I could have learned a real skill in that time. I could have learned to knit.
"I gave everything I had!" My voice cracked, climbing into a raw, acidic fury that resonated through the dead trees. "Every single second. Every single breath. I gave it all, and I have nothing to show for it!"
Nothing! Zero! A deleted VOD and a chat log full of F's! My highlight reel is a compilation of me eating shit on the same attack pattern for six consecutive hours!
"I did everything right." My throat constricted around the words like they were shards of glass. "I didn't miss a single step. I followed every rule. And it still wasn't enough."
Frame-perfect parries on the Vanguard combo. Optimal stamina management. Clean execution on every single room clear. And the game still cheated me out of the clear with a rigged hitbox that extends THREE PIXELS past the visual model. I measured it. I PAUSED THE VOD AND COUNTED THE PIXELS.
A shuddering, wet breath escaped my lungs.
"It doesn't matter what I do. The result is always the same."
The RNG seed on this run was cursed from frame one. The item drops were garbage. The mob AI was reading my inputs. I am being bullied by a random number generator and I cannot sue it for emotional damages.
"You do everything right, and the world still finds a way to rip it away." My voice splintered. "Because it needs you to suffer."
Because FromHard hates joy. That's the actual design philosophy. "Prepare to be Killed" isn't a tagline, it's a legally binding contract.
Freya's single eye had left the treeline entirely. Her scarred knuckles whitened around the secondary grip of her buster sword. Her posture had shifted from a lazy stroll to a rigid, wide stance. The instinctive brace of a soldier watching a bomb detonate in slow motion.
"Again!" The word tore out of me, sudden and desperate, my free hand clutching the front of my uniform like I was trying to physically hold my chest together. "I went back and did it again. And again. And again. Every single time, I told myself this time would be different."
Reset the save. Delete the footage. Start the VOD over from scratch. Lie to myself that this attempt will be the one. This is the definition of insanity. I have become the definition of insanity. A speedrunner is just a clinically insane person with a capture card.
"And every single time, I ended up right back here." My jaw clenched so hard my teeth screamed. "Right back here."
Right back at the campfire. Right back at the checkpoint. Right back at the same damn boss room with the same damn attack pattern that I have memorized so thoroughly I could dodge it in my sleep but apparently NOT WHEN THE FRAME RATE DIPS BELOW 60.
My boots stopped moving. I stood there in the mud, trembling, my breath hitching in irregular, shallow gasps that fogged in the cold air.
"No one came."
The whisper was barely audible. But in the suffocating acoustics of the Whispering Woods, it carried like a death rattle.
The chat was empty. The viewer count hit zero at hour thirty-nine. ZERO. Not even the bots stayed. I got outperformed by automated view-farming scripts in the entertainment market.
"Nobody was watching." My voice dropped into a hollow, faraway register that belonged to a dimly lit room at four in the morning, staring at a monitor glow in complete isolation. "Nobody ever watches."
Because who the hell watches a no-name speedrunner choke the same boss for the fourth consecutive night? I wouldn't watch me. I DON'T watch me. I skip my own VODs when I'm editing them.
"And I still..."
My jaw clenched. A sharp, self-loathing laugh punched out of my chest, the kind of laugh that only happens when the humor has long since rotted away and only the rot is left.
"I still went back."
Re-queued the attempt. Re-calibrated my inputs. Re-built my route from scratch. I have spent more time optimizing a virtual skeleton's walk cycle than I have on my own actual life choices. I am a functional adult with tax documents and everything, and I chose THIS over sleep.
"I knew it was broken." The words fell out of me like stones dropping into a well. "I knew there was nothing left. I knew nothing I did would ever be enough."
The frame data was lying to me. The seed was rigged. The dev console was actively working against me. I am being personally victimized by an inanimate piece of code and I cannot even report it to customer service because "boss hit me through my i-frames" is not a valid support ticket.
"But I couldn't stop."
Because if I stopped playing, I'd have to sit in the silence. And the silence was worse than the losing. The silence was...
My voice broke.
Silence.
I stood there, panting, my shoulders heaving, my knuckles white around the iron hilt. The echo of my own words bounced off the pale trunks and dissolved into the fog.
Inside my skull, the context was perfectly clear. I was ranting about a failed speedrun. A dead pace on a seventy-two hour endurance stream. The most embarrassing, frustration-inducing, rage-quit moment of my gaming career. A moment so pathetically mundane that I wouldn't even tell my chat about it without drowning it in self-deprecating irony.
This is the most humiliating moment of my entire existence and it's not even close. I am being emotionally dismantled by a botanical nightmare using my own gamer rage against me. If I survive this, I am deleting every VOD. I am burning every screenshot. I will tell anyone who asks that I spent my past life as a shepherd. A quiet, emotionally stable shepherd who had never even SEEN a keyboard.
But the Whispering Woods didn't have context. The botanical tape recorder didn't parse frame data or RNG or viewer counts. It parsed pain. And every word that had just been ripped from my throat was coated in the genuine, unprocessed agony of a man who had stared at a screen for ten thousand hours and realized, in the quiet hours of the morning, that nobody was on the other side.
To the fog, this wasn't gamer rage.
It was a confession from the deepest, most festering wound in my soul.
The roots pulsed with a sickly, fervent green, drinking deep. A wet, organic shudder rippled through the undergrowth. The slow, bloated contentment of a predator that had finally cracked open a difficult shell.
Good job, tree. You made me relive my most humiliating Tuesday night in front of two armed witnesses. Frame the certificate.
Internally, my skull was a furnace of pure mortification. That was not my deepest wound. That was a speedrun VOD. The fact that a Class 3 ecological horror had just parsed it as my core trauma was the emotional equivalent of someone reading my grocery list like it was a suicide note.
The worst part was the delivery. The forest had used my actual vocal cords. Every word had left my physical throat. Freya and Raiden hadn't witnessed a breakdown, they had heard it. In surround sound. With my voice.
The roots drank deeper, completely oblivious to the fact that they were mainlining flavored water and calling it whiskey.
Beside me, the silence had a specific texture.
Freya's cigarette had burned down to the filter. Her single eye was wide, not with combat readiness, but with the raw discomfort of a woman who had just heard something she was never supposed to hear. Raiden's katana had cleared its scabbard by an inch, her winter-sky eyes locked onto my face with the intensity of someone trying to solve an equation where none of the numbers made sense.
They had just heard a boy say he gave everything, over and over, for nothing. That nobody was watching. That he went back anyway, knowing it was broken.
In this world, where students died in training exercises and the unranked were discarded, those words didn't sound like gamer rage.
They sounded like an origin story.
"Astarte."
Freya's voice. Stripped of its military edge. A single, careful syllable.
I couldn't hear it.
The word reached my eyes before it reached my ears. I saw her mouth move, the shape of the syllable forming between scarred lips, but the sound arrived muffled, flattened, like it was traveling through three feet of wet concrete. The fog's ambient drone had swallowed it whole.
No. Not yet. Not now.
My brain sent a frantic priority override: focus on her, read her lips, stay anchored to the real world. But the roots had already found the seam. The frequency shifted, sliding sideways out of the external broadcast and burrowing deeper into my auditory cortex, bypassing my eardrums entirely.
Freya was still talking. I could see it. Her jaw moved. Her hand came up, open palm, flat, the universal gesture for stay still, I'm talking to you. Her single eye was locked on my face with an expression I couldn't quite parse through the fog.
Nothing. Not a single syllable reached me.
Raiden shifted at my shoulder. Her mouth moved too, short, clipped words, clinical and fast. Her winter-sky eyes weren't on my face anymore. They were tracking my chest, my ribs, the rise and fall of my breathing. I watched her lips form what might have been "his vitals" or "his breathing". Impossible to tell.
The frost around her shoulders crackled.
I was watching two people talk to me from the bottom of a well.
Freya's expression hardened. She stepped closer, two meters, one and a half, her boot crunching against dead leaves that I couldn't hear. Her mouth moved again. Slower this time. Deliberate. Over-enunciated, the way you speak to someone who's hard of hearing.
Look. At. Me.
I saw every letter. Heard nothing.
The frustration that flickered across her scarred face was almost comical. She was trying to help. She was doing the exact right thing, grounding a compromised asset, establishing eye contact, using clear verbal cues. Textbook crisis response.
And I was standing there, watching her lips move like a fish in an aquarium, unable to hear a single damn word because a tree had turned off my ears.
My jaw clenched. Not from grief. From the sheer, boiling absurdity of it all.
Raiden said something else. Short. Sharp. Her hand moved toward my shoulder. I saw the fingers extend, the precise, controlled motion of someone about to make physical contact to anchor a dissociating person.
I didn't feel it.
Her fingertips stopped three inches from my uniform. Her brow creased. She tried again, leaned closer, said something directly into my ear canal, close enough that I should have felt the breath.
Static. Wet, organic, suffocating static.
Raiden's eyes widened. A fraction. The first uncontrolled expression I'd seen on her face since the duel. She pulled her hand back and looked at Freya.
Freya's mouth moved. Rapid. Clipped. An order. I could read the shape of it, the sharp consonants of military shorthand.
Raiden nodded. Her katana came up fully. She stepped in front of me, placing her body between my chest and the treeline.
They thought I was shutting down. They thought the fog had broken through whatever wall I'd been hiding behind and that I was about to collapse. They were repositioning for a defensive scenario because their only frame of reference for "student goes deaf and unresponsive in a Class 3 zone" was "student is about to die."
Which, to be fair, was not an unreasonable assumption.
But I wasn't shutting down. I was being tuned out. The fog had grabbed the volume knob on my connection to the physical world and cranked it to zero because it had found something more interesting to listen to.
The sickly green pulse flared in the mist.
And then the fog hit bedrock.
The sharp, distinct clatter of a hard plastic case sliding across a desk.