The forest was quieter then usual that evening. Not peaceful just subdued, like something holding its breath. Loki walked behind the Hunter, matching the man's pace as best he could. The ground was damp with late rain, smelling of pine rot and minerals. The cat trailed beside him, a black streak gliding between roots
Loki had grown quite found of the cat. The echo itself was also quite useful. The attributes it possessed were somewhat better than his own. He was still a little envious of the little carefree creature. He had been quite shocked when he first saw the them.
Echo Attributes: [Unseen], [Dull], [Predator]
[Unseen] Attribute Description: The cat's presence slips beneath perception. While still, it becomes almost impossible to notice, its movements leaving no trace. This concealment is instinctive.
[Dull] Attribute Description: The creature's mind dull and simple. Thoughts are only about food and sleep. Because of this the cat is naturally immune to mental intrusion, corruption, illusions, or fear. There is nothing complex enough inside it for hostile influence to grasp.
[Predator] Attribute Description: Its senses are sharp, its muscles dense, its instincts honed toward swift and precise kills. Attacks launched from concealment strike with amplified force, allowing the cat to overwhelm prey far larger than itself.
Loki had also figured out the other part of his aspect, it allowed him to throw cards like shuriken. Though now was not the time to lament about his aspect.
As they had spent the last few days checking trails. They found hollow trees packed with grey fungus. Half consumed bones. A deer whose ribcage had twisted inward until it resembled a cage built to trap itself. Yet the Hunter remained steady, working with the same methodical patience he taught Loki, where to place feet on soft ground, how to tilt the spear for a cleaner thrust, how to pack sap resin and mineral dust into a casing and seal it against damp air.
By sunset, Loki's hands smelled faintly of smoke and metal dust. He was tired but alert. The cat perched briefly on a branch overhead, eyes glinting.
That was when Loki felt it his Child of Mysteries attribute stirring like a cold finger across the back of his neck.
"Something's… wrong," he murmured.
The Hunter didn't look back. "Keep your voice down," he said quietly. "They're close."
The wind shifted. The moss underfoot trembled slightly. At first Loki thought it was just the air thickening with humidity. Then he heard the sound soft scraping, like bark splitting slowly.
Shapes slipped between the trees.
Not running. Not rushing. Simply appearing, as if the forest had pushed them forward.
And then Loki saw their faces. Their skin had turned into bark, not clean, smooth bark but the kind found on dead stumps: splintered, cracked, peeling in ragged curls. Grey fungus clung to them like second skin, coating shoulders, creeping along arms, filling old wounds with spongy pulp.
Where joints should be was only wood: stiff hinges that rasped as they moved. Their limbs dragged slightly, but with a sense of purpose that felt almost ritualistic. Some had eyes; some had hollow sockets where fungus had grown over, sealing them shut like old wax. A few had smiles carved directly into hardened flesh, frozen in place.
Their clothes, what little remained hung in tatters, fused to their wooden skin. Thick sap leaked from cracks, slow and dark, smelling faintly of rot and sweetness.
Loki saw one brush its arm against a tree, the bark scraping and cracking deeply. It didn't react. No flinch. No pause. Its grin remained. They felt nothing.
Loki's heart shuddered.
The Hunter exhaled once, a brief resigned sound. He slid a finger along the shaft of his spear. Loki felt a faint vibration, no glow, no color, just a subtle strengthening, like the wood had inhaled and steadied itself.
The Hunter raised the weapon.
"Stay behind me."
The first of them lunged.
The Hunter moved with the kind of precision only a lifetime of violence can carve into bone. No wasted motion, no flourishes just direct, functional strikes.
He stepped forward and thrust the spear into the first creature's sternum. The bark cracked, and sap splattered in dark streaks. Before the creature fell, the Hunter twisted his wrist, shifting the angle. Loki saw it: the moment where a seam in the fungus lined perfectly with a vein of pulsing sap.
The Hunter struck there. The man, if it could even be could even be called that collapsed instantly, legs folding inward.
Another approached, arms wide. The Hunter didn't retreat he stepped into the creature's shadow, angled the spear low, and swept the legs. Fungus split under the enhanced blade. Before the body hit the ground, the Hunter pivoted and drove the spear through the back of its neck.
It still reached for him.
He muttered, "Not deep enough," and pressed down harder. The fungus cracked. The body stilled.
More came.
Five. Then ten. Then more shapes between the trees, silhouettes with hollow smiles.
The hunter's spear was an extension of his bones. He struck without prelude: a footstep, a low pivot, the spearhead finding the seam between the man's jaw and throat. The creature's head did not loll as a living head might; it came away with an old, brittle sound, sap leaking like dark blood into the leaf litter. The hunter's blade sang and bit and did not pause. He moved as if dancing to a tempo only his body could hear: step, stab, rip, slide. In his left hand he carried shorter blades for close work, each movement practiced until it required no thinking.
The Hunter worked quickly, finding weaknesses in each one: a soft spot where the fungus hadn't hardened, a knotted intersection of bark that could be split with force, a swollen area where sap pooled like infected blood. His spear made no sound besides wood cracking and sap hissing.
Loki watched, terrified and awed.
This was an Awakened. The kind who survived by cutting closer than anyone else would dare.
But even the Hunter could not hold back an entire town.
----
One lunged at Loki from the right, arm outstretched, fingers like hooked twigs. Loki moved on instinct. The Clown attribute flowed through his limbs, giving him a controlled, acrobatic balance that wasn't his own. He shifted his weight and slid under the creature's swing.
From his belt he pulled a thin metal card the only Memory he had.
He flicked it.
The card spun in a tight arc, slicing across the the creatures jawline. A strip of fungus peeled away. Sap leaked, slick and dark.
Loki landed lightly and snapped his fingers against the dry leaves he'd tucked in his pocket. They caught fire instantly only a small tongue of flame, but bright enough to stun the creature's vision.
He threw the burning handful. The creature recoiled, giving Loki an angle. He followed the Hunter's earlier demonstrations close the gap, strike the seam.
The knife he carried wasn't special, but the angle was.
He forced the blade into the hollow beneath the fungus-covered jaw. Sap spilled. The body convulsed once and collapsed.
A voice rang in his head.
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Blighted Men.]
Loki staggered.
His heart was pounding violently, but his hands were steady. The Clown attribute kept him centered when he should have been shaking.
Another creature charged.
Loki grabbed a handful of pine needles, dried by luck, ignited them, and flung them like dust. The creature hesitated long enough for Loki to retreat behind a tree.
He didn't think. He moved.
The cat had vanished somewhere in the chaos.
Then Loki heard a wet crack.
A creature had collapsed, face-first into the dirt. Behind it, the cat landed silently, claws dripping with a mix of sap and mush. The creature hadn't even seen the attack.
[Your Echo has slain a Dormant Beast, Blighted Man.]
The cat moved unseen its attribute made its body a flicker of absence. Only when it struck did the world remember it was there. It sprinted forward, leapt onto another creature's back, and dug its claws deep into the base of the skull where fungus met bark. A quick wrench sharp, practiced and the creature fell, limbs twitching.
[Your Echo has slain a Dormant Beast, Blighted Man.]
The cat darted away before the next one could touch it.
----
The hunter's breath kept even. He hacked, he pushed, he moved through the line. He used the land with animal cunning: a raised root became a trip, a shallow ditch a place to funnel movement. His boots found narrow angles; his knives cut away tendons and the fungus that pulled at meat.
Loki fought too.
He had no grace, not that day. His hands remembered the fox pounces in the forest; they remembered the weight of a spear when the hunter had showed him how to hold it. He drove a stolen blade at a fungus-plated forearm; it skidded and cut, but there was no flinch from the thing. It took more to fell these shapes; a cut bled sap, then healed with fungus, as if the wound were only a new surface for moss to claim.
But no matter how many they killed, more arrived.
A dozen. Then two dozen. All smiling the same dead smile.
The Hunter parried one strike, stabbed another, broke the wrist-joint of a third and still the wave closed in.
He exhaled slowly.
"Enough."
He shoved Loki back with his free hand.
"Run."
Loki caught his footing instantly Clown balance saving him from a fall.
"Wait— I can fight—"
"No," the Hunter said. "Not against this. If they take us, they will hollow us out. That is not a fate I'll accept."
The hunter looked towards a bag, a bag filled with explosives, Loki understood his meaning instantly his breath caught in his throat.
"I can't—"
"You can," the Hunter said simply. "And you must."
A mass of them converged towards their location. The hunter's face, always controlled, tipped into something harder, a regret without softness. He barked one word: "Go."
A blighted man lunged. The Hunter intercepted it with a brutal, downward strike that split its torso like rotten bark.
"Go," he said once more. "Let me choose my death."
Loki's hand trembled. His throat tightened.
The choice hung like frost on the bones.
If Loki refused, the The Hunter would be seized and the thought came unbidden and cold. Whatever remained of that man would become wood and fungus and a smile, and the hunter's eyes would go hollow and follow something that was not human. The hunter had made it clear in those quiet lessons: they did not feel pain. They did not plead. They consumed.
If Loki obeyed, he would strike the hunter down by his own hand, the blast burning everything in a radius, taking the hunter with it so he would not be taken, so he would not become a puppet.
There was no mercy in either path.
Loki had watched the way that man had ended lives with a patience that belied sorrow. He did not want to be the one who marked the hunter's end, but he also could not bear the image of the hunter dragged away, roots winding through his body.
The cat nudged his leg, urging him backwards
The Hunter met Loki's eyes one last time.
"Live."
Finally Loki strengthened his resolve. He felt his feet obey before thought had time, at the edge of his aspects range Loki lit the fuse. The blast tore through the clearing an eruption of dirt, sap, and fungus. It wasn't bright so much as it was violent. A pressure wave hit Loki's chest, flinging him back. The trees shook. Birds scattered. The air filled with dust and the smell of burnt resin.
The spells voice kept ringing in his head, as if mocking him for what he did.
[You have slain an Awakened Human, Gehrman, The Hunter.]
[You have received a Memory.]
[You have slain an Awakened Beast, Blighted Man.]
[You have slain an.....]
Loki crawled upright, coughing. The Hunter was gone. Where he had stood was a crater of splintered roots and shattered bark-men. Ash drifted slowly, like grey snow.
The world was very quiet. Then the forest remembered to breathe. Loki's vision blurred. He wasn't sure if it was smoke or grief.
The cat pressed its head against his shin a light, grounding touch. Loki grabbed the animal and held it tight, his breath unsteady. He forced himself to stand. He forced himself to walk.
Because if he stayed, more would come. And then the Hunter's sacrifice would mean nothing.
Loki fled into the forest. The air felt cold against his face. Branches whipped his shoulders. His breath came in sharp bursts.
Behind him, the clearing burned faintly, the smoke dissolving into the treetops.
He didn't know how long he ran only that his legs eventually buckled, and he sank to his knees beneath an ancient pine.
He didn't cry. There was no room for it. Only a quiet ache settling under his ribs, heavy and familiar.
Guilt threaded itself through his thoughts, slow and poisonous.
He had killed the Hunter. He had saved him.
Both felt true. Neither felt right.
The cat climbed into his lap and curled there, its tiny breaths warm against the night-chilled air.
Loki stared into the dark between the trees.
He had survived.
And now he was alone.
He closed his eyes.
Tomorrow, he would continue.
Tonight, he simply endured the weight of what he had done.