The time set aside for rest passed quickly — and in that window, Evelyn had once again demonstrated exactly why her professional capabilities were in a league of their own.
By the time Andrew had finished packing his gear and was preparing to turn in for the night, she had already taken care of every single thing he had asked of her. The crates of assorted food were already resting quietly inside the Material Box, and — after listening carefully to Andrew's explanation of what lay ahead — Evelyn had gone the extra step of sorting, organizing, and pre-packing the seasonings and cooking ingredients he would need on the road, arranging everything according to his habits and preferences.
Fortunately, the Material Box had never shown any particular interest in the concept of capacity limits. This occasion proved no different.
The night passed without incident.
Andrew was up before dawn the following morning. He pulled on the full set of Chainblade Dragon armor he had brought with him, and for his weapon, he went straight for the Blazing Light Tachi — Icebrink — strapping it to his back without a second thought.
As for the miscellaneous field equipment he might need along the way — camping tools, medicines of various kinds — all of it had been stowed in his Item Bag in advance.
Down in the workshop at Seliana Smithy, Hoshimi Miyabi was already waiting on the ground floor, fully equipped and ready to move, Wuwei at her side.
The two of them exchanged a single look — a brief, wordless glance that needed no commentary — gave each other a small nod, and set off under Belle's remote guidance, heading for the coordinates deep inside Hollow Zero where the Rift awaited them.
With the combined strength of Andrew and Hoshimi Miyabi, the roads that would have spelled mortal danger for any ordinary Hollow diver or Agent failed to slow them by so much as a single step. Every obstacle, every threat — nothing registered as more than background noise.
Before long, the two of them stood before a spatial Rift that, to the naked eye, looked indistinguishable from any other Rift they had ever seen.
The fissure yawned before them — deep, dark, and utterly lightless. There was nothing solid inside it, nothing that the eye could resolve into a shape or a surface. Only chaos, looking back at them. No way to tell where it led. No way to see what waited on the other side.
Andrew turned his head to look at Miyabi, standing just beside him.
Her face was, as always, perfectly unreadable — the same composed stillness she wore in every situation. But Andrew had spent enough time with her now to know how to look past the surface. And in her eyes, he could see it clearly: a brightness that refused to be contained. A light she couldn't quite keep tamped down no matter how hard she tried.
No words of confirmation were necessary.
Andrew turned toward the communication channel linking him to Belle, and spoke the final words of departure:
"Belle — we're heading out now. Wait for good news from us."
On the other side of the H.D.D System's screen, Belle watched the two of them standing at the threshold of that unknowable Rift — one step away from crossing into something she couldn't follow them into — and felt a thousand things rise in her chest all at once, tangled and impossible to sort.
In the end, she let most of them go unsaid.
"Mm," she said, her voice quiet and steady, weighted with a solemnity she usually kept well-hidden. "Safe travels."
Andrew stepped forward.
The familiar, deeply unpleasant sensation of weightlessness — the one that always accompanied transit through a Rift, the one Andrew had never once managed to make peace with — swallowed him whole the instant his foot left the ground.
No matter how wide he opened his eyes, there was nothing to see. Only void. Only black, stretching in every direction without end.
This was a return crossing — back to the Monster Hunter world. And perhaps because the destination lay so impossibly far away in the fabric of space, the transit itself stretched on far longer than anything Andrew had experienced before. The journey through the Rift seemed to go on and on, long past the point where it should have ended.
The sensation of falling — of plummeting downward through an endless, resistanceless dark — came in wave after relentless wave. For some reason Andrew couldn't rationally explain, it began to feel less and less like falling through space, and more and more like he was lining up a drop-kick aimed directly at the surface of the earth.
Wait.
Hold on a second — that wasn't a feeling. That was actually happening.
A roaring wind exploded past Andrew's ears with all the subtlety of a freight train.
In the span of a single blink, a landscape — familiar and yet somehow strange all at once — burst into his field of vision.
The massive, ancient tree trunks crowding in around him on all sides made the situation immediately clear: he was in a forest. A dense one. No question about it.
Coral Highlands...?
But before he could get a proper look at his surroundings and narrow things down, the wind — rich, living, unmistakably forest-scented — was already hitting him square in the face with the force of a freight train, dragging every other thought out of his head.
"Ugh..."
Andrew blinked against the gale, reached up and scratched the back of his head, and muttered with a mildly baffled tilt to his voice:
"Huh... I didn't realize the wind could blow this hard inside a forest this dense."
Then he looked down at the ground beneath his feet.
His hand drifted to his chin on pure reflex as he murmured:
"...Wait. Why is the ground coming up toward me?"
BOOM.
Gravity, as always, had the last word. The fall was barely twenty-odd meters — and for Andrew, twenty meters might as well have been nothing. He covered the distance in an eyeblink.
"Cough cough cough!"
He waved a hand irritably, dispersing the small explosion of dirt and debris that had erupted from the impact zone, and then stood there for a moment with the expression of a man processing his own stupidity in real time.
"I thought I was seeing some kind of landscape I'd never encountered before," he muttered with a long-suffering shake of his head. "Turns out I was just the one moving."
Also — that drop? That barely counted as a drop. Not for a Hunter. Not even for Miyabi, honestly. It was nothing.
What was slightly bothering Andrew, however, was something else entirely.
He and Miyabi had gone through the Rift one after the other — practically back to back. So why, after all this time, was there still no sign of her landing nearby?
...Did something go wrong? Did we get separated?!
The moment that possibility surfaced, Andrew's chest gave a sharp, involuntary lurch. It wasn't out of the question — this was, after all, the first time anyone had attempted a multi-person simultaneous crossing. Something going sideways wasn't impossible.
Fortunately, his worst fears turned out to be baseless.
He looked up — up toward the exact spot where the Rift's exit had deposited him — and there she was.
Hoshimi Miyabi, who had come through a half-step behind him, was standing perfectly still on one of the massive branches of the enormous tree beside the Rift's exit point. Poised. Composed. Without the faintest trace of any interest in experiencing a freefall alongside Andrew.
They'd come through the exact same Rift. The exact same one. And somehow she had landed gently on a tree branch while he got hurled into midair like a ballista bolt?!
What kind of catastrophic cosmic bad luck was that?!
Some all-powerful being wasn't personally targeting him, was it? Because it sure felt like it. Though he couldn't imagine who in this particular world would have it out for him specifically —
Andrew shook his head sharply, scattering the spiraling thoughts, and looked back up at Miyabi.
She hadn't moved.
Not even slightly.
Andrew called up to her. Once, twice. And still, Miyabi showed absolutely no sign of making any move to descend — or to do anything at all, for that matter. She just... stood there. Motionless on the branch. Like a computer that had locked up mid-process and was waiting for a hard reboot.
The only thing that kept it from being genuinely alarming was the pair of fox ears at the top of her head — twitching and flicking in tiny, involuntary little movements that served as unmistakable proof that she was, at minimum, biologically operational. Whatever was happening with her, it wasn't a sudden fatal reaction to being dropped into a new world.
"...What's going on up there?"
Just as Andrew was starting to genuinely scratch his head over the motionless Miyabi frozen up on her branch —
The surrounding jungle spoke.
A chorus of rustling — the sound of living things moving through dense undergrowth, carefully at first, then with increasing boldness — rippled in from the treeline in every direction. It snapped Andrew's attention to sharp focus in an instant.
Because this was the Monster Hunter world's wilderness. And nothing that lived out here was harmless. Not a single species.
Andrew had been a Hunter for long enough that field instincts had long since replaced conscious thought for situations like this. He identified the specific type of monster making those sounds in the same instant he heard them — before the information had even fully registered in his brain.
The clawed footsteps grew more numerous. More confident. As if the newcomers were feeding off each other's courage, the sounds became less careful, more brazen, closing in from all directions at an accelerating pace.
Like a pack of hyenas working up to a rush.
They were fast. Methodical in their own way. And within moments, Andrew could hear identical rustling from every compass point around him — the encirclement was complete.
Only once they had confirmed that every exit was sealed — every possible avenue of retreat cut off — did they finally stop hiding.
From behind the cover of the shrubs and undergrowth, one by one, they revealed themselves.
Lizards. Large ones — the size of full-grown wolves, each of them. Emerald-green scales that caught the sunlight and threw it back in bright flashes. Yellow manes running down their backs. Yellow claws. Yellow eyes.
And a slow, steady drool running from between their very sharp teeth — the kind of drool that spoke, wordlessly but eloquently, of a pack that had been very, very hungry for a very long time.
Jagras.
Andrew recognized them immediately. Of course he did.
They had clearly come running the moment they heard his impact — assuming that the thunderous landing meant something had been injured. Maybe dead. Worth investigating. Worth picking clean.
He swept his gaze around the ring they'd formed.
The ones he could see in his direct line of sight kept circling — cautious, hungry, looking for an opening but not committing. Andrew had tangled with Jagras enough times to know exactly where the real threats were: just outside his field of vision, inching forward while the visible ones kept his eyes busy.
That familiar sensation. That specific, unmistakable brand of déjà vu.
"Well," Andrew said to no one in particular, a dry, unhurried note in his voice, "this is quite the welcome-back party. Can't say they're being shy about it."
The next moment —
Thud. Thud.
Two punches, thrown in a single fluid motion. Two Jagras that had timed their lunge perfectly — going for the blind spot at his back, banking on the ambush — caught Andrew's fists in their faces instead.
"SCREE!!"
The impact was not gentle. The sheer force behind those two blows launched both Jagras backward at a velocity significantly greater than their approach speed. One of them — in a particularly dramatic arc — flew straight into the one that had been quietly trying to scale the tree trunk toward the motionless Miyabi on her branch, and knocked it clean off.
The tree itself, for the record, barely shuddered. Thick enough that even a flying Jagras impact rated as a minor inconvenience at best. Which was fortunate — because if it had actually swayed meaningfully, Andrew would have had to contend with a falling Miyabi on top of everything else, given the complete systems-offline state she seemed to be in.
The second Jagras Andrew had punched sailed at a carefully calculated angle — and plowed into a cluster of its packmates, sending them scattering like billiard balls.
That single exchange was all it took.
The assembled Jagras, who had built their courage entirely out of the fact that they were many and their target was one, found that courage evaporating the moment overwhelming violence introduced itself to the equation. Pack courage dissolves fast when reality shows up uninvited.
And then the oldest of the pack saw it.
Andrew, reaching over his shoulder, drawing the blade strapped to his back — an absolutely enormous Tachi, easily as tall as a grown man —
Every single Jagras brain in the vicinity performed the same calculation at approximately the same speed.
"SCREE!! (OH HELL — HUNTER!!)"
The oldest one bolted.
It was the only sensible move. The young ones didn't know what they were looking at — but it knew. It had lived long enough to know exactly what those weapons meant.
Because the pack's previous Great Jagras — the old boss, the one who had kept them fed and led them through the lean seasons — had been killed by a group of humans carrying weapons just like that. If the old boss had still been around, they wouldn't be running on empty like this.
And the two Jagras who had been the strongest candidates to fill the vacancy — the next-in-lines, the ones the pack had been looking to as future leaders — were currently lying in the craters to the left and right of that terrifying figure, motionless.
As for seizing this moment to claim the top spot itself?
First you had to survive the next thirty seconds. Everything else came after that.
The pack's morale, already hanging by a thread, snapped completely the moment their eldest turned tail. What followed was less a retreat and more a controlled explosion — bodies scattering in every direction at maximum speed, every single Jagras running on pure survival instinct, no longer caring about formation or strategy or anything except away.
None of them wanted to find out what the new crater on the forest floor was going to look like if it was shaped like them.
Andrew watched the rout with calm, satisfied eyes. None of it had surprised him in the slightest.
If anything, this was exactly what he had been going for.
Of all the monsters a Hunter encountered on their first steps in the New World, Jagras were almost universally the first. Andrew knew their behavioral patterns the way he knew how to breathe. There was nothing they could do that would catch him off guard.
He gave a quiet, satisfied nod.
And then, in the same moment — something that had been nagging at the back of his mind ever since he'd arrived finally pushed its way to the front.
If his memory wasn't playing tricks on him — and if nothing had dramatically changed in the Forbidden Lands during his absence —
Jagras weren't supposed to be in the Forbidden Lands. They didn't live there. They didn't range there. They simply weren't part of that ecosystem.
"...Oh no."
The realization hit. Andrew immediately pulled out his Scoutfly container and released them, letting them sweep the surrounding area for any monster signs — footprints, markings, territorial traces, anything.
The moment the Scoutflies were free, his stomach dropped.
They lit up.
Not the slow, cautious brightening of Scoutflies searching unfamiliar territory. The instant, eager, this is home luminescence Andrew had only ever seen from them in one specific place.
The Ancient Forest.
Within moments, the Scoutflies had flagged a scattered collection of old tracks and markings on the surrounding trees. As the evidence accumulated, Andrew's growing suspicion curdled into certainty.
Aptonoth. Anjanath. Tobi-Kadachi.
All of them present. One set of marks — something that looked like it had been done by a blade and sharp spines — was far too old to identify with any confidence, but the rest was enough.
Andrew stared at the evidence, then looked at the forest around him with an expression of profound resignation.
He had not returned to the Forbidden Lands.
He had come back to the New World.
Specifically, to the Ancient Forest — his old stomping grounds. The place where it had all started.
He stood there for a moment, turning it over in his mind — and then it clicked.
When Belle had run her analysis to locate the Rift, the monster signatures she'd used as reference data had come from the Diablos that attacked Astra's concert and the Gore Magala from New Eridu's outskirts.
Both of those monsters had originated from the New World.
So of course the Rift that matched those energy signatures led back to the New World. That was the only logical outcome. The only Rift that resonated with New World monster energy signatures was one that connected to the New World.
"...Of course that's how it works," Andrew said aloud, in a tone of deeply weary enlightenment.
Going back and asking Belle to locate and calculate coordinates for an entirely new Rift was out of the question. It wasn't a matter of whether there was enough time — there wasn't — it was the more fundamental problem that there were no Forbidden Lands monsters available for Belle to pull a reference signature from. Without sample data, she could search until the end of the world and find nothing.
There was no sample. There was no path. This was where he had ended up, and this was what he had to work with.
Work with what you have.
Honestly — the New World wasn't without its advantages. While Fabius and his cutting-edge Frenzy Virus research were in the Forbidden Lands, the New World had something the Forbidden Lands couldn't offer: the Third Fleet. A gathering of scholars from every corner of the world, encyclopedic in their respective fields, brought together in Astera. In his years of working alongside them, Andrew had developed a genuine respect for their collective depth of knowledge.
Especially the Third Fleet Master herself — that dragon-person elder... sister.
Andrew gave a quiet, reflexive cough — a small, precautionary internal correction — and quietly revised the title he used for the Third Fleet Master in the privacy of his own head.
This was entirely for self-preservation purposes. The last thing he needed was to see her in person after months away and accidentally address her by the wrong title on reflex, which would immediately earn him a very loving and very painful reminder of the correct one.
Given her mastery of biological sciences, she would likely have useful insight into what he was dealing with.
Alternatively — could he use the airship route to courier a physical sample to Fabius in the Forbidden Lands and wait for his reply?
Either way. First things first.
He needed to get back to Astera.
It was an unexpected detour. A wrong turn through the cosmos. But as wrong turns went...
A homecoming, of sorts.
But before any of that — Andrew tilted his head back and looked up at Hoshimi Miyabi, still planted motionless on her branch above, apparently suffering from a complete and total cognitive crash.
He leaped up in a few quick bounds and landed beside her, then waved a hand cautiously in front of her face.
"Miyabi? Are you alright?!"
What he got back, however, was not at all what he had been expecting.
Hoshimi Miyabi, in a tone of consummate, unshakeable calm — the exact same tone she used to describe the weather, or the time of day, or any other perfectly ordinary fact about the world — opened her mouth and said:
"I'm fine."
____
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