Hunter's Willow swallowed them whole.
The treeline closed like a jaw. The sky vanished. What replaced it was green shadow — dense, layered, ancient — and air that pressed against the skin like a hand that hadn't decided whether to push or hold.
The mana hit Rush first in the chest. Then the throat. Then behind the eyes.
Not painful. Just present. The accumulated weight of something that had been building undisturbed for a very long time.
Darius stopped walking.
His boots made no sound on the soft forest floor.
They stopped behind him.
He turned. His eyes moved across each of them — unhurried, methodical, the sweep of someone confirming a count.
"This exercise isn't about how many monsters you hunt." The forest breathed around them — leaves shifting without wind, something moving in the undergrowth forty feet east and then going still. "It's about whether you can function as a squad."
They nodded in unison.
Jennifer's eyes stayed on the treeline as she spoke.
"The C-Rank monster. What is it?"
"The Red King, an Orc." Something shifted in Darius's tone — not alarm, just the particular precision of someone adjusting for accuracy. "A specific variant. Red skin. Two tusks at the corners of the mouth." He looked at each of them in turn. "Stronger than standard. Faster. One clean hit from it could crush bones."
"How different is C-Rank from D-Rank?" Slavic asked.
"You already know they have different cores, right?" Darius's gaze settled on Slavic. "Each of you can handle D-Rank alone at your current core level but a C-Rank monster is not just more powerful than a D-Rank. It is a different category entirely."
Rush already knew this.
He listened anyway.
Jennifer's chin dropped slightly.
"If we hunted it?"
"You'd be appreciated." A small pause. "But that's not why you're here."
Darius turned back to the forest and started walking.
They followed.
This forest is a buffet, child, Beelzebub said. His voice surfaced slowly, like something rising from deep water. The creatures here have been absorbing ambient mana for generations.
Rush almost smiled.
A buffet. But you should not. We are not alone.
His hand found the hilt of the dagger at his thigh. Didn't draw it. Just confirmed it was there.
He kept walking.
The Armored Boar found them thirty minutes in.
No warning. No sound before the impact of its body through the undergrowth — a low, explosive surge from the left, hide plated with mana-hardened scales that caught the fractured forest light like dark armor.
Jennifer's arm was already moving.
Mana gathered at her fingertips — cold snapping into existence around her hand like the air itself had decided to crystallize. Her sword came up coated in a sheath of ice, the temperature dropping in the space between her drawing and the blade connecting with the gap between the Boar's plating where neck met shoulder.
The cold hit Rush's face from three feet away.
The Boar went down hard. The impact shook the forest floor.
Jennifer withdrew her blade. A thin mist rose from the wound where her ice met the creature's residual warmth.
She didn't look at it.
"Core," Rush said.
Slavic was already crouching, extraction tool in hand.
The forest kept giving them things to fight.
The first Mutated Gorilla dropped from the canopy without warning — a shadow that became a body that became an impact in the space of a heartbeat, aimed at Slavic's unprotected back.
Rush moved before it landed.
He caught its descending arm with both hands, used its own momentum, drove it into the ground with the controlled force of someone who had learned to turn larger things against themselves before he was old enough to carry a standard blade. The impact cracked through the forest floor. Leaves scattered upward in a brief spiral.
He finished it before it recovered.
Slavic stared at his hands. Then at Rush. Then at the Gorilla.
He had seen something like it at the Academy entrance examination.
The second Gorilla watched from forty feet away. Its red-rimmed eyes moved between the downed creature and Rush. It assessed. Then it came in from the side — smarter than its companion, adjusting for what it had just observed.
Jennifer stepped into its path.
Her ice constructs came in layers — not a single overwhelming strike, but a sequence. Frost crawling across the creature's right leg. Then the left. A geometric pattern spreading upward with the quiet inevitability of something that couldn't be stopped, only slowed. The temperature dropped again.
The Gorilla struggled.
Stopped.
Jennifer's finishing blow was precise and unhurried.
The cold that followed her magic lingered in the air for several seconds after the creature went still — a residual chill that Rush felt across the back of his neck and the backs of his hands.
Then the third one came.
Nobody had counted a third.
It burst from the undergrowth to Rush's right — not at him, at Slavic, who had crouched to extract the second Gorilla's core and had his back fully exposed. It was smaller than the first two but faster, the mana saturation having done something different to this one — less mass, more speed, the kind of adaptation that brute force couldn't account for.
Rush moved.
He got between it and Slavic — but a fraction slower than he had moved for the first one. The Gorilla's arm caught him across the left side, a glancing impact that sent him sideways two steps before he recovered his footing and drove his elbow into the creature's jaw.
It went down.
Rush straightened. His left side ached where the arm had connected — not serious, but present. A reminder.
Slavic looked up from the core extraction, entirely unaware of what had just happened behind him.
"Got it," he said, holding up the mana core.
Rush said nothing.
Jennifer had seen it. Her eyes moved briefly to Rush's left side. She said nothing either.
He kept moving.
Slavic's explosions continued from distance throughout — compressed mana placed with improving accuracy. Joints. Not spectacular. Efficient. He was learning.
Between the larger encounters, goblins appeared in small clusters. They were dealt with quickly and without ceremony.
Most monsters kept their distance for some unknown reason.
Half a day into the forest.
The light had changed — what little of it reached the floor had shifted from the pale fragments of morning to something thicker and more amber, carrying the particular quality of afternoon in a place where afternoon arrived slowly and left reluctantly.
Jennifer moved through it like she belonged there.
Her combat suit carried the honest wear of the day's engagements — a tear at the shoulder seam, frost residue on her forearms that hadn't fully dissipated. Her eyes were still moving. Still reading. Still entirely present.
Slavic was breathing heavily.
Rush watched both of them.
Small things.
"We should take a break."
Jennifer's eyes came to him.
"We're fine."
"We're too deep.If something unexpected hits us now, at current output levels — "
He stopped. Left the rest of it where it was.
Jennifer looked at Slavic.
Slavic looked at his right hand. Flexed it once. Then — with the honest self-assessment — he looked up and nodded.
Jennifer's exhale was controlled. Brief.
"Alright."
Darius stepped forward. His boots still made no sound on the forest floor.
"Rush made the right call."
His eyes moved to Jennifer — steady, direct, delivering accurate information without softening it.
"But that call should have been yours. You're the squad leader."
Something moved in Jennifer's expression. Not embarrassment. Just the clean acknowledgment of receiving accurate information about themselves and integrating it without resistance.
"I got carried away." Her voice was quiet. Even. "I'll be more careful."
Darius nodded once.
Said nothing further.
Rush settled against a wide trunk, his back to the bark. Slavic found a root. Jennifer remained standing — eyes moving, hands loose at her sides, the particular stillness of someone whose body was resting and whose mind wasn't.
The forest breathed around them.
A minute passed.
Rush's hand moved before the thought was fully formed.
His dagger left his fingers in a single clean arc — past Slavic's left ear by six inches.
A wet impact followed.
Slavic flinched.
"What are you —"
"Wait."
Rush was already moving toward the undergrowth.
Jennifer followed immediately.
Slavic stumbled after them.
The dagger had struck — but not cleanly.
Whatever Rush had thrown at was still moving.
A blur passed him.
Darius.
One step. One motion. A sharp crack.
Silence returned to the forest.
Rush looked at what lay in the undergrowth.
Ten feet from crown to heel. Green skin, darker at the joints. Dense muscle built for force rather than speed. A crude weapon lay beside it — something between a machete and a cleaver, blade irregular and dull. Rush's dagger was embedded in its throat, the wound survivable if Darius hadn't intervened.
Darius straightened. Adjusted his sleeve.
"Your throw was slightly wide."
Rush looked at the creature. Then at Darius.
"Yes."
Slavic arrived at the edge of the undergrowth. He looked at the creature for a long moment.
"That's an Orc."
"Yes," Rush said.
"I knew they were large." His eyes moved from crown to heel and back. "But actually seeing one — it's humongous."
Jennifer's eyes moved from the body to the surrounding trees. Her hand hadn't left her hilt.
"We've been in this forest for half a day," she said. "This is the first Orc we've encountered."
"It's not strange." Rush crouched, took the dagger's hilt, pulled it free in a single clean motion. "Orcs don't hunt outside their territory."
"And we just entered one."