I just froze my own eardrums to avoid having a mental breakdown. Have these pristine, high-society aristocrats genuinely never seen a person do emergency self-surgery before? I am deaf, my neck is covered in frostbite, and we are standing in the middle of a Class 3 ecological hazard. Please judge my medical choices later and focus on the treeline.
Freya's mouth moved. The syllables were sharp, commanding. I couldn't hear them, but I could read her lips well enough.
Astarte. Drop your hands.
Raiden's jaw tightened. She took a step toward me, her lips forming a stiff, clinical observation.
Your auditory nodes. You're intentionally severing the acoustic intake. You're making yourself deaf.
I heard nothing. Just the wet, muffled thud of my own pulse behind frozen eardrums.
I didn't drop my hands. Not yet. The forest was still watching, still parsing. If I let the sound back in, the Author's crosshairs would instantly lock onto my coordinates.
Wait. They think I did this on purpose.
They think I deliberately crippled my own hearing as a tactical maneuver. They don't know I was having a panic attack over my dad. If I drop my hands and admit I was panicking, I'll look like a liability. I need to spin this. I need to give them a reason that sounds like I'm a cold, calculating monster instead of a terrified speedrunner.
I dropped my hands. I let go of my ears, ignoring the immediate, agonizing hum of ambient Ink trying to force its way back into my skull, and straightened my spine.
My face smoothed out.
Not by choice. This is the thing nobody tells you about people like me. When my panic crosses a certain threshold—when the fear gets too loud, too fast, too much—my expression doesn't freeze in terror. It doesn't twist in agony. It just... wipes. Every muscle goes slack. Every microexpression flatlines. My eyes go half-lidded, my jaw loosens, and my entire face projects this horrifying, suffocating nothing.
I don't look scared. I look like I've stopped caring.
Which is the exact opposite of what's happening inside my skull, where my consciousness is screaming like a kettle whistle in a burning kitchen. But my body doesn't get that memo. My body decides the most efficient response to mortal terror is to look like a serial killer waiting for his coffee.
It's not composure. It's a neurological glitch. A hard crash. My brain panics so hard it forgets to tell my face to look panicked.
And the worst part? I don't even know I'm doing it.
I don't know that right now, at this exact moment, I look like the scariest person in this forest. I don't know that my half-lidded stare reads as cold, calculated dominance. I don't know that my slack jaw looks like supreme, unbothered indifference. I just know that I'm terrified, my hands won't stop shaking inside my sleeves, and I need to say something before these two realize I'm falling apart.
I shifted my gaze from their stunned expressions, past their defensive postures, and locked onto the dense, suffocating grey fog ahead.
"Sound is a two-way conduit," I said flatly.
Since I was completely deaf, I had absolutely no idea how loud or dead my voice sounded. I just stared into the fog, delivering the lie with absolute conviction.
"The fog parses the echo of our reactions to triangulate our psychological weak points. If I cannot hear the broadcast, I cannot feed it a response. A deaf node renders their radar blind."
I have no idea if that is scientifically or magically true in this universe. I am pulling this directly out of my ass. Please buy it. Please stop looking at me like I'm about to shatter.
Freya's single eye widened a fraction. The panic in her posture settled, replaced by a grim, militaristic understanding. Raiden's katana lowered by an inch, her clinical gaze analyzing my frostbitten neck with newfound respect.
The bluff worked. Thank god. They're not looking at me like a liability anymore. They're looking at me like I actually know what I'm doing.
I have no idea why that expression on their faces makes me uncomfortable. Like they're seeing something in me that I'm not seeing myself.
The heavy, rhythmic tremor shook the damp earth beneath my boots, vibrating straight up my shins. Since my auditory cortex was currently running on conceptual ice, the forest couldn't use sound against me anymore. So, it used the ground. It used the sheer, suffocating weight of its proximity.
First, six points of sickly, bioluminescent yellow ignited in the fog, roughly eight feet off the ground. Unblinking. Geometrically wrong. Not a single entity branching out. One consolidated nightmare.
A T3 Alpha.
The apex of this localized food chain. The mist curled around its massive silhouette as it stepped forward. The sheer physical density of its presence snapped the dead branches beneath its weight, sending heavy, rhythmic tremors straight through the mud.
And my frozen blood ran even colder.
Because I recognized it.
Not from a bestiary. Not from a lecture. From Chapter 87 of the novel, during Arga Orlando's first deep-forest survival arc.
Barkhollow.
T3 monster-class Alpha. The novel described it like a walking mass grave given legs. Imagine a grizzly bear. Now scale it up to the size of a city bus. Now cover every inch of it in bark-plated armor so dense that standard Shard attacks bounce off it like pebbles off a fortress wall. Six yellow eyes clustered in a V-shape across its skull, unblinking, geometrically wrong—like someone glued spider eyes onto a wolf's face. Its breath came out in visible, toxic plumes of amber fog that corroded anything organic it touched.
But the Barkhollow's real weapon wasn't its size or its armor. It was its ears.
That thing didn't just hear sound. It mapped it. Every heartbeat, every breath, every tiny shift in your pulse—it built a three-dimensional model of your emotional state in real time. The novel called it an "acoustic hunting grid." The moment your fear spiked, the moment your psychological guard cracked, the Barkhollow knew exactly where you were, exactly how scared you were, and exactly how to dismantle you.
In Chapter 87, Arga killed it by manifesting a Shard that generated emotional dead zones, essentially blanking his own fear response to slip through the grid.
I just did the same thing.
Accidentally.
By freezing my own eardrums because I was having a panic attack about my dad.
The Barkhollow's six eyes burned through the fog, fixed on my position with an intensity that made my frozen spine ache. It was trying to read me. Trying to parse my emotional signature. Trying to find the fear.
And finding nothing.
A void. A black spot in its map where a living, breathing human should be broadcasting terror, there was just... silence.
I adjusted my stance. My bleeding fingers tightened around the hilt of the Tang Heng Dao. The heavy iron aggressively dragged my wrist downward, my muscles screaming a formal, biological protest just to keep the tip off the ground.
Then, the earth beneath my boots vibrated again. Harder.
Right behind the towering, six-eyed silhouette of the Barkhollow, the shadows in the fog deepened. Two narrower, violently yellow eyes flickered open near the ground. Low. Lean. Predatory.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
I recognized those too.
Greyveil Stalker.
T2 monster-class. The novel described them like stretched wolves—lean, fog-colored frames about the size of a large dog, but with limbs just slightly too long, slightly too jointed, moving with that uncanny, stop-motion jerkiness that made your skin crawl. Their fur was the exact color of the grey mist, making them nearly invisible in the fog until their yellow eyes gave them away. And their claws—long, curved, constantly dripping with a clear, viscous fluid that the novel called "nerve-ink." One scratch and the Ink seeped into your bloodstream, paralyzing your motor functions while keeping your pain receptors fully, screamingly online. You couldn't move. But you could feel everything.
The Greyveil Stalkers weren't independent hunters. They were symbiotic. The Barkhollow marked the target with its acoustic grid. The Stalkers executed the kill. Think of the Barkhollow as a living radar tower and the Stalkers as the missiles it guided.
A T3 Alpha functioning as a living radar. A seven-pack of T2 Stalkers acting as its killing appendages. This wasn't a random encounter. This was a structured extermination node.
Then another pair of eyes ignited. Two. Four. Seven.
Eight sets of glowing eyes in the dark, moving with the terrifying, synchronized geometry of a pack hunt.
Freya and Raiden shifted behind my shoulders. I couldn't hear the mechanical clack of Freya's buster sword. I couldn't hear the freezing, atmospheric crackle of Raiden's Katana. My inner ears were literally flash-frozen blocks of conceptual ice. I was completely deaf to the world. I couldn't hear the Barkhollow's breathing. I couldn't hear the Stalkers' claws sinking into the mud. I couldn't even hear the sound of my own racing heartbeat.
All I possessed was the rhythmic vibration traveling up my shins and the crushing, gravitational weight of the dead iron in my hands.
Yeah. No. I am done.
My stamina bar is completely empty. My grip is failing. My eardrums are literal blocks of ice, my lungs are burning on anomaly poison, and my arms are actively threatening to dislocate just from holding this ridiculous iron slab upright. If I take a single step forward to engage a T3 Alpha and a seven-pack of T2 Stalkers, the kinetic recoil will turn my skeleton into fine powder.
I am putting down the controller. I am logging out of the frontline. I am letting the high-level NPC companions carry the rest of this fight instance while I sit in the backseat and try not to die of a heart attack.
Please. I'm so out of my league. I'm scared. I'm weak. I can't feel my arms. I can't hear anything. If I take one more step forward I will literally die. Just—just carry me. Please.
I let out a long, silent exhale. A thick plume of freezing white vapor curled around my jaw.
My white-knuckled grip on the Tang Heng Dao simply gave up.
I didn't drop the weapon. I just let gravity take it. The heavy, iron blade plummeted, the tip stabbing deep into the damp mud with a dull, vibrationless thud. I rested both of my hands on top of the flat pommel, leaning my entire body weight against the vertical steel like an exhausted old man using a walking stick. My shoulders slumped by a fraction of an inch.
A complete, absolute surrender of the offensive guard.
And then the forest reacted.
The eight sets of glowing eyes in the fog didn't fan out. They didn't bracket Freya and Raiden. Every single bioluminescent pupil—every Stalker, every subordinate—pivoted with a horrifying, synchronized precision and locked directly onto me.
The Barkhollow's six sickly yellow eyes burned through the grey mist like searchlights. Its massive, bark-plated head swung toward my stationary form with the slow, deliberate certainty of a predator that had just found the only thing in the forest worth killing.
The rhythmic vibration in my shins intensified. The pack shifted. Not outward. Inward. Toward me.
Why are they all looking at me?
My brain, running on frostbite and gamer panic, desperately sifted through the archived lore. The Barkhollow hunts through acoustic parsing. It maps emotional resonance. Sound is a two-way conduit. The fog reads the echo of our reactions.
I severed my acoustic intake. I made myself a deaf node.
But a deaf node doesn't just blind the radar. In the ecological logic of the Barkhollow's hunting grid, a node that suddenly goes completely silent doesn't register as "absent." It registers as a gap. A hole in the map where something should be but isn't.
And for a predator that has spent its entire existence at the top of the food chain, a gap isn't something to ignore.
It's something to investigate.
It's prey that's hiding something.
The Barkhollow isn't targeting the biggest threat. It's targeting the unknown. And every Greyveil Stalker in its grid is hard-coded to follow the Alpha's fixation.
I just painted a target on my own spine.
I tilted my head slightly toward Freya and Raiden over my left shoulder. My vocal cords were still half-frozen from the internal frostbite. Since I was completely deaf, I had absolutely no idea if I was shouting or whispering. To my own skull, my voice probably sounded completely flat. Dead. Absolutely, profoundly apathetic.
"Destroy them."