A layer of tension had settled over the forest. The air had weight. The trees watched without moving. Loki walked beneath the branches with steady, restrained steps, the cat padding silently at his side. Mist slid between the trunks. The ground was soft beneath his feet, soaked with the remnants of earlier rain. He felt the forest breathing around him.
It had been a few days since the The Hunter's death, Loki had already decide what to do, he had been preparing for a final confrontation with whatever horror lay in that town, he had also checked the other memory, the charm would be very useful for what he was about to do next.
He summoned the charm and a small, polished wooden coin appeared in his hand. Its surface was smooth and faintly warm, marked with thin spiraling grooves that resemble rings. It had two vey useful passive enchantments one called Numb the dulled physical pain and the second called Echo that masked his scent with a faint trace of corruption. Useful for tricking Awakened Beasts and monster.
Loki's senses stretched outward.
Nothing stalked him. No nightmare creatures followed. Only distant crows broke the stillness.
"Good," Loki murmured. His voice was now steady.
The cat glanced up at him once, then resumed its silent trot.
By the time the fog began to thin, Loki reached the tree line overlooking the town. From here, the houses were half silhouettes, drifting in and out of the mist like painted props.
Loki crouched and watched.
The town breathed.
Not literally, but in the subtle, synchronized ways its people moved through the streets. A woman dragging a basket paused mid-stride… and at that exact moment, across the square, a man adjusting a sign paused too. A child stopped bouncing a ball. A dog lifted its head.
As if something had told them to hold still.
Then...movement again. Casual. Seamless. Unbroken.
Loki's Child of Mysteries attribute flickered like a cold thread along the back of his skull. Something was wrong. Something was deeply wrong.
Loki narrowed his eyes. He slipped deeper into the foliage and watched the town for almost an hour.
----
Oddities, It began small. A woman pulled a sack into her home. A human hand fell out of the opening. She nudged it back inside with practiced indifference.
A butcher carved into a haunch of meat with steady, rhythmic motions. Loki waited for the man to turn the slab waited to confirm what instinct already told him. His breath stilled when he finally saw the truth: it was a human torso, ribs split cleanly down the center.
Two boys played beside a water trough. One nudged the other, and the second fell to the ground. His arm bent wrong backwards but the boy only laughed and reset it with a single jerk.
Loki blinked. His expression hardening further.
In the upper window of a narrow house, a woman fed lumps of gray fungus to a child like candy. The child chewed slowly, eyes dull, mouth curling in a wide, strained smile.
Loki exhaled through his nose. The cat made a quiet, uneasy sound.
----
Evening crept into the sky before Loki moved. When the sun dipped behind the treetops, the fog thickened again, blanketing the town like a shroud.
Now.
Loki emerged from the forest and descended the slope. His steps were soft, balanced, Clown attribute making each movement precise. He kept to the edges of the buildings, stopping whenever his instincts sharpened.
He studied the town's layout. Most houses were dark now. Lanterns flickered faintly behind curtains. Figures moved inside. One house felt wrong in a way that tightened Loki's gut.
Something pulsed behind its walls. Not a sound something like a presence woven into the structure. Loki approached its side, crouched beneath a windowsill, and peered through the cracks.
Inside lay a room filled with symbols scratched in deep, violent strokes. They formed spirals, intersecting lines, circles overlapping like rotten patterns in diseased wood. Each symbol pulsed faintly alive with an energy Loki didn't recognize.
A table stood in the center. Bones arranged like flowers made patterns around a bowl filled with dark sap.
A sobbing sound came from another room.
Loki didn't hesitate. He climbed through the window silently and landed on the floor without a creak.
The interior smelled like sweet rot. The air was damp, thick, still.
He stepped past the bone arrangement and listened.
Whispering.
Close. Too close.
He slid toward the doorway and looked in.
Three townsfolk huddled together on the floor. They whispered over a woman bound with rope. Her mouth was gagged. She sobbed against the fabric.
One of the whispering villagers lifted a fungus-covered hand and traced a pattern on her cheek.
"Blessing," they whispered together.
Loki backed away. His heart didn't race as much as it use to, experience had somewhat carved out that reflex. But his mind sharpened.
He had enough information.
The town was feeding something. Feeding it with their impulses. Their cruelty. Their violence.
He slipped back through the window.
The darkness outside felt cleaner by comparison.
As Loki moved toward the forest edge, he froze.
Not ten paces from him stood a man he had seen earlier, the friendly baker with the too-symmetrical loaves.
Now the man's smile had collapsed. His face sagged slightly, as if half his features had begun to rot. One eye bulged with a spreading ring of grey fungus. His arms bent wrong, too many joints.
He wasn't fully transformed.
Not yet.
The baker lunged.
Loki stepped sideways, letting the attack sail past. He flicked a card, its edge slicing across the man's throat. The man shuddered, jaw jerking up at an painful angle.
No reaction. No pain.
The man's arm split at the elbow, bark pushing through skin like a blooming flower.
Loki moved.
Fire first.
He struck dry leaves against one another. Flame blossomed. He flung the sparks against the mutated flesh. The man recoiled for a moment.
"Good."
Steadying himself the man lunged again. Loki ducked, rolled beneath his guard, and slashed upward. His knife found the seam where bark met soft tissue. Sap sprayed out in a dark, sticky arc.
The body collapsed in violent spasms.
A whisper brushed Loki's mind.
[You have slain a Dormant Beast, Blighted Man.]
Loki flicked the blood and sap off his blade.
The cat approached silently, tail low.
"We're leaving."
----
At the border of town and forest, Loki paused. Something beneath the ground pulsed faintly. He crouched and brushed aside the soil.
Roots. Thin, grey, tangled and warm.
Loki followed them.
The forest around him grew darker with every step. The trees leaned in unnatural directions. Fungi spread along their trunks like veins. The air smelled damp, bitter, metallic.
He saw a raccoon skull lodged in a tree knot, fungus sprouting from its eye sockets.
All paths curved downward.
Loki's instincts screamed, whatever was effecting the town and the forest was mostly likely ahead.
Loki climbed a ridge and saw a faint glow in the distance. Pale. Wrong. A heartbeat of light that pulsed irregularly, as if reacting to thoughts and desires.
He marked the place in his mind and turned away,
"Not yet."
----
Loki returned to a small clearing deep within the forest, the place he and the Hunter had used for preparing traps. The burnt remains of their last fire lingered beneath a collapsed log. A few scattered metal casings remained untouched.
He knelt and began to work.
His hands moved carefully. Resin. Sap. Metal shavings. A crude mixture of irritant dust. Binding cloth. A fuse rubbed with oil to keep moisture out.
He crafted three large bombs. Then two more smaller ones. Then sharpened sticks for trap triggers. Then weighted stones wrapped in cloth.
The cat sat on a log, tail curled neatly around its paws. Watching.
When Loki finished, he arranged the charges in his satchel.
"Tomorrow" he thought. The enemy needed to be approached when he was at his sharpest.
----
The path to the grove wound between slanted trees and trembled with quiet life. Something beneath the ground shifted occasionally, as if roots were dragging themselves subtly through the soil. Summoning the dagger Loki noticed how the air changed when he crossed the invisible threshold.
It grew warm. Too warm. Like standing too close to a fire. The trees leaned inward, bending unnaturally toward the center of the grove.
Then he heard it.
Whispers.
Soft and Gentle.
Loki stepped forward.
Branches bent overhead, weaving a tunnel that pulsed with faint light. The woods hummed faintly with a rhythm that matched neither wind nor heartbeat.
His Child of Mysteries flared in warning.
Danger. Influence. Something reaching for him.
He didn't speak. He didn't react externally. But he shifted his breathing, grounding himself.
The cat trotted ahead, tail high, completely unaffected.
The grove opened like a wound.
At the center stood a tree, 50 ft tall.
It was beautiful.
Its bark shimmered pale gold. Its leaves glowed softly, like tiny lanterns. Sap dripped from its trunk luminous droplets falling gently onto the fungus-covered soil.
Loki stepped closer.
The tree pulsed. A whisper slid into his mind, smooth as velvet.
Loki froze. Before he could react, the world around him flickered.
Then he heard the whisper.
Soft. Familiar. Too familiar.
"Loki…"
His name, spoken as if someone was standing right behind him.
He turned. Nothing was there.
When he faced forward again, the forest was gone.
He was standing in the slums of NQSC or rather, an imitation of it. A distorted one. Buildings leaned at impossible angles. Doors stretched tall like open mouths. The rain fell, but upward, sliding into the sky.
Bodies lay on the street.
People he had never met.
People he had met.
A man slumped against a dumpster, the drunk he accidentally killed. But his head twisted upright, jaw cracking, eyes hollow.
"You pushed me," the corpse whispered.
Loki jolted back.
Another shape stood further down the street.
A thin boy. Filthy hair. A blanket draped around his shoulders.
The original Loki.
The boy's lips curled, not in accusation but in something worse.
Acceptance.
"You took my body."
The accusation didn't come as a shout. No anger.
Just a fact delivered quietly, like a cold hand pressed to Loki's chest.
Loki shook his head, stepped back, breath shaking.
"This isn't real."
But the world around him shuddered.
The ground pulsed.
And from the cracks in the street, thin roots began to crawl.
Black roots.
Sharp roots.
They curled around his ankles.
He tried to tear free they slithered higher, up his calves, cold and wet like slick fingers.
"Eat."
The voice wasn't human now.
It wasn't even pretending.
"Eat… and be eaten…"
The sky tore open.
A hundred faces stared down from the clouds the townsfolk, each wearing the same frozen smile. Bark split their cheeks, fungus grew from their eyes. Their mouths opened wide like cracked wood.
He felt something press against his mind not like a push, but like a pair of hands searching through a drawer.
Looking for something to twist.
Images flashed through his mind.
Loki ripping flesh from a corpse.
Loki dragging a screaming woman into the shadows.
Loki laughing as he lit someone on fire.
Loki standing over the Hunter's corpse, smiling as ash rained down.
None of them were real.
None of them were him
The images weren't fantasies they were possibilities.
Versions of him shaped by cruelty.
Loki fell to his knees, nails digging into the dirt as he fought to anchor himself.
"No… I'm not— no—"
The roots squeezed tighter, creeping past his ribs like they were searching for a heart to crush.
The voices swarmed him:
"You want power."
"You will kill more."
"You already enjoy it."
"Do not lie."
Loki's breath tore from him in a broken gasp.
He felt the horror rising the fear that maybe some part of it was true.
That the town was not corrupting them it was revealing what already hid beneath their skin.
The Tree pushed again harder trying to burrow into the softest parts of his mind.
A shape lunged at him in the vision the Hunter, half-rotted, half-wood, eyes hollow, jaw dangling loose.
"Why did you kill me?"
That broke him.
Loki curled forward, hands shaking violently, nails tearing into the soil of the hallucination. The guilt hit him like a blunt knife to the chest. His breath hitched. His vision swam. His pulse thundered.
The Tree felt his weakness.
It struck deeper.
The world wrapped around him like a closing fist, dragging him into a darkness thick as soil. Roots crawled up his arms, pressing into his skin, into his veins, into his mouth....
Then something collided with his shoulder like a hammer.
A small, sharp hiss cut the hallucination in half.
The he felt pain like someone was ripping his arm off
Then came a second hiss.
A third.
Finally the illusion cracked like glass struck by a stone.
The world snapped violently back into focus the forest, the tree, the cold air. Loki gasped as if surfacing from deep water. His chest burned. His hands trembled uncontrollably.
The cat stood before him fur bristled, back arched, teeth bared as it ripped the roots that had covered Loki up to his waist at some point.
The Tree shrieked without a sound, a psychic recoil furious that its grip had been broken.
Loki staggered back, grabbed his dagger and started cutting the roots that were entangling him, wiping blood from his nose. He forced his breathing under control.
He stared at the tree again, it was no longer the beautiful tree he had seen a moment ago what Loki was looking at now was not a tree, not truly.
It only wore the shape of one.
Its trunk rose in a twisted column, bark knotted as if grown from fused bones rather than wood. Pale roots sprawled outward in a tangled web, gripping the earth like a creature refusing to be unearthed. Each root pulsed faintly, as though something inside them breathed.
The branches spread wide overhead, but no leaves rustled in the wind. The canopy was a mass of limbs, heavy and unmoving.
At its heart, half-hidden behind layers of gnarled bark, a soft glow throbbed.
A single, pulsing core.
Not warm.
Not natural.
A heartbeat that did not belong to any creature of the waking world.
The air around it felt wrong. Thoughts slowed the longer one stared at it. Old fears stirred like dust in the lungs.
The abomination in front of him did not spread evil.
It revealed it drawing out the darkest corners of the human heart, feeding on them, shaping them into something no longer human.