Despite them being fine for the first night and day of entering the Node, the next few days were agony.
Elias had expected the density of Flow in the Node to be uncomfortable. He had not expected it to feel like drowning. Flow hung in the air in suffocating density—thick, metallic, almost visible as it drifted between the iron-barked trees like a crimson haze. Every breath they took carried it inward. Every step deeper forced more of it into their bodies.
At first, they could not move far.
Their limbs trembled under the pressure. Their thoughts dulled. Their bodies rejected the excess energy violently—headaches, nausea, spasms that came without warning. It was not just exhaustion.
It was poisoning.
Flow oversaturation.
They remained near the cave.
They spent those first days in the cave, sitting cross-legged across from each other, circulating thier own internal energies.
Elias guided his Flow slowly, methodically, tracing its pathways through his channels with careful precision. He learned the rhythm of his body, the points where energy pooled too heavily, the places where it resisted movement. He pushed it forward, not forcing, but persuading.
Jamie was different.
Her Anti-Flow moved like a storm.
Where Elias was precise, she was instinctive—raw currents of inversion spiraling through her veins, resisting stagnation by sheer force. She fought the pressure, clawed against it, refused to let it settle.
Jamie extended her hand. Elias took it. Fingers intertwined.
Her Anti-Flow traveled counterclockwise through her channels, cold and steady, passing through their clasped palms and into his body. He received it, converted it—Anti-Flow to Flow, destruction to creation—and pushed it back through his own channels clockwise.
At first their energies clashed, resisted, faltered. The exchange caused tremors through their bodies, feedback that rattled their nerves and forced them to stop again and again.
But they tried again.
And again.
Until it worked.
A rhythm formed.
A shared pulse.The circuit completed. The loop closed.
Circulation.
Again.
Again.
Again.
They sat like that for hours. For days. Eventually, they adapted the dense energy of the Node becoming something they could tolerate for a time.
They began to move. At first, only within the cave. Then beyond it.
Each step was deliberate. Each breath controlled. They could not afford carelessness.
The Iron Forest watched them.
They felt it.
In the shifting mist.
In the subtle movements of the metallic trees.
In the distant echoes of beasts that were not beasts anymore.
They learned quickly.
The Node was not a place for the weak.
There were no mundane creatures.
No harmless life.
Everything that lived here was touched by Flow.
Imbued.
Awakened.
Or worse, Apex.
The first hunt was cautious.
They targeted an Imbued creature—something manageable. A beast swollen with Flow, its body warped slightly but not yet monstrous. Elias approached with precision, analyzing movement, waiting for an opening.
Jamie did not wait.
She charged.
It worked.
Barely.
They adapted.
Their second hunt was cleaner.
The third was efficient.
The fourth was effortless.
Once they had gotten a grasp of fighting in such an energy dense environment, they targeted the next prey.
The bats.
Elias had not forgotten the family that had hunted him through the metallic trees. He tracked them to a section of the forest one afternoon, their wings folded, their bodies clustered together in sleep. Jamie stood behind him, holding her axe behind her back, her grin already sharp.
The bats were Awakened—strong, coordinated, relentless. The reacted to the sudden attack, their sonic attacks fractured the air, their numbers overwhelming.
But Elias and Jamie did not just walk over into a stronger creatures territory and hope for the best. They had planned and prepared, having already set up arrays to confuse the bats and eliminate them in that state.
One by one, the bats fell.
The colony collapsed.
They killed them all.
It was not clean. It was not merciful. It was revenge, pure and simple, and Elias felt nothing as the last bat fell.
Jamie kicked its body to make sure it was dead.
"Good riddance," she said.
The infected creatures were scattered throughout the Node—corrupted remnants of the ooze that had spilled from the battle of Saints. Some were small, barely Awakened, easy prey for two children who had grown accustomed to the pressure. Others were larger, faster, more dangerous.
They hunted them anyway.
They planned and executed. They learned each other's rhythms, anticipated each other's movements, fought back-to-back more often than not. When Jamie was wounded—a gash on her arm, a bruise on her ribs—Elias would use Accelerate Heal to treat her. It was a shock to learn that Jamie, reckless as she was, had not mastered this healing technique. When Elias was wounded—a shallow cut across his chest, a bite on his calf—Jamie would try to patch him up though his wounds would close before she could really do anything. Still she had put in the effort and that was what counted.
They moved on.
Circulation became routine.
Morning.
Evening.
Sometimes in between.
The circuit between them stabilized further, their bodies adapting faster each time. The suffocating density of Flow that once threatened to break them began to feel… normal.
Manageable.
They learned to draw from it.
Not just endure it.
Absorb.
Refine.
Use.
Elias experimented cautiously, pulling ambient Flow into himself in measured amounts, testing the limits of his control. Jamie followed instinct, drawing Anti-Flow in bursts, laughing when it surged too strongly and forced her to reset.
They improved.
They encountered hunters once.
A small group, wary, armed, gathering Flowstone from the surrounding area. The meeting was brief. The hunters were surprised to see children in the Iron Forest. More surprised to see them alive. Most surprised to see that it was the Lord's son and the late Hunter Chief's daughter
They ignored the men and passed by vanishing back into the mist leaving the hunters staring after them.
Elias wondered why after all this timeno one had come for them.
'Surely Mother would be worried and send Sir Gable to come get us. Right?'
The thought lingered but they were hunting a particularly feral beast so he dismissed it.
Not entirely.
But enough, until he got his answer as to why. Sometimes, he felt eyes on him.
Not hostile.
Not entirely.
Watching.
Observing.
He caught glimpses of Crystalline forms.
Distorted shapes hidden between trees.
Ortis' Soul Beasts.
Always at a distance.
Always silent.
They never intervened.
Never approached.
Just watched.
He pointed them out to Jamie.
"Your uncle?" she asked.
"Probably."
She squinted at the nearest wolf.
"Ugh,creepy."
Elias shrugged.
The Node changed them.
Their hair grew longer—Elias's blonde locks falling across his brow, Jamie's indigo tangles brushing her shoulders, often tied back in uneven attempts at practicality.. Their clothes grew tattered, torn by thorns and claws and the constant friction of movement. They replaced what they could with the hides of the beasts they killed—rough leather tunics and stitched furs, crude but functional.
They looked older. Them being awakened to Flow already made them look a few years older than they actually were even though they were pushing thier firts decade. Now thier exposure to the nodes energy had made this change even more profound. They had grown slightly taller too. At firts glance one would assume that they were maybe twelve or thirteen even.
The hotspring was a discovery.
It sat in a Flowstone basin formed from a break in the terrain. The water steaming, the air thick with mineral warmth. Steam rose from its surface, shimmering with faint energy, the water glowing softly under the influence of the surrounding crystals. Elias found it while scouting for a new hunting ground. Jamie stripped off her clothes before he could suggest caution and slid into the water with a satisfied sigh.
Elias hesitated.
"Are you coming in or not?" Jamie called.
He looked at the water. He looked at her. He sighed and undressed.
At first, Elias was… uncomfortable. Jamie was not.
'We are still young,' he told himself.
' So it's fine. Right?'
The hotspring became a ritual. Every few days, when their muscles ached and their bones felt heavy, they would return to bathe together.
He noticed the birthmark on her right shoulder—a dark spiral, like a serpent consuming its own tail.
"Ouroboros..." he murmured.
Jamie's head snapped toward him.
"Hm? what did you say?"
"Nothing."
She didn't believe him. She lunged, splashing water into his face, laughter replaced tension and they wrestled in the steaming pool until the mark was forgotten.
They trained too, not just combat but in creation, in Artificing.
SK's teachings came to life.
They experimented with materials harvested from their hunts—bones, hides, crystals, fragments of Flowstone. Some attempts failed spectacularly. Others worked.
Most were… strange.
Useful.
Dangerous.
Awesome.
Once they had a grasp on how to make a stable artifact they moved on to thier next target.
It took them three days to come up with a plan to take down the caterpillar.
It was an Awakened beast of considerable size, its body segmented and armored, its head crowned with a single black horn that gleamed with spatial energy. The horn was what Elias wanted. He had seen how useful Jamie's laurel bracelet was—the subtle probability skewing, nudging events in her favor, allowing her to avoid danger in ways that seemed almost absurd.
But Elias wanted a Space type artifact, similar to the Copper Ring SK had given Jamie.
They spent the first day observing the caterpillar's movements, noting its patrol patterns, identifying its weak points. The second day was spent preparing—setting traps, carving arrays, positioning themselves for the ambush. The third day, they struck.
Jamie froze the ground beneath the caterpillar's legs. Elias struck the joints between its segments with precise, calculated blows. It took a couple of hours and everything they had to avoid the creatures attacks that trapped them in tight spaces like in the trunck of a tree or a birds nest. But the beast fell, and Elias carved the black horn from its skull.
He made a bracelet, beads of the polished horn, threaded on sinew.
This Artifact was a Grade Six Cosmic type artifact that drew on the caterpillar's resedual essence to replicate its ability. The beast could create an artificial space anywhere so long as it already had walls or a barrier of some sort. That was howit was able to trap Jamie in the squirrels den in the tree or Elias in the birds nest. Had it not been for a set of Binding arrays they had prepared and planted before hand they would have been trapped.
The space inside was small—about the size of a small room, nothing more—but it was enough. He could store his daggers there, his supplies, anything he needed to carry.
Jamie tested her own spatial artifact. She filled it with rocks, with fallen trees, and when she pushed a little , a chunk of the forest spanning a few meters. Nothing seemed to fill it. The ring's capacity was vast, far larger than anything Elias could create.
"SK was generous," he said.
Jamie nodded with a taunting grin on her face as she eyed him.
The days blurred together.
They hunted. They ate. They bathed. They slept. They practiced the artificing SK had taught them. Elias laughed more in that month than he had in years.
Jamie laughed too. At night, before bed, they talked.
Elias told Jamie about his fight with Ortis—the hunt through the forest, the soul beasts that chased him,the explosion that had leveled the trees. He told her about his uncle's casual violence, his lazy arrogance, his unsettling interest.
Jamie listened. Then she tried to leave.
Elias grabbed her arm.
"Let me go," she said. "I'm going to fight him."
"You're going to die."
"I don't care."
"I do."
She stopped struggling.
He told her he would teach her a language. A secret language. Something only the two of them could understand. Only then did she agree to stay, pretending to still be angry to hide her interest in this new language Elias mentioned.
By the time the month had passed, their bodies had grown leaner and harder, more accustomed to the pressure of the Iron Forest. Their control over Flow and Anti-Flow sharpened. They learned to draw energy from the mist around them, to absorb it, to weaponize it. Elias understood now why the Rite of Passage was sacred to his family. The Node was a crucible. It burned away weakness, forged resilience, taught lessons that could not be taught anywhere else.
But it was dangerous.
One mistake, and the energy would overwhelm you. One misstep, and the beasts would tear you apart. The Imbued were manageable. The Awakened were challenges. The Apex—
They had not encountered an Apex yet.
But they were planning to.
In the final week, they prepared.
Not to leave. To hunt.
There was an Apex beast in the Iron Forest. They had felt its presence—a weight in the mist, a pressure that made even the Awakened creatures flee. It was powerful. It was one of the reasons the Node had not been fully explored.
Elias wanted a piece of it.
Jamie wanted the challenge.
They spent seven days tracking it, studying it, preparing. They built traps. They carved arrays. They practiced their teamwork until they instinctivelywhat to do and when to do it in the coming hunt.
The mist curled around them as they slept, the Flowstone glowed in the darkness and the forest waited for the final trail.