The squad reported in. Ten voices confirming positions in a forest that felt too big and too alive and too wrong in ways my C-rank senses were still cataloguing.
Belle was the first to say it.
"Something's off." She stood with one hand on her crossbow and the other pressed flat against her temple, the Silver buff pushing her Treasure Sense to its maximum detection radius. "My readings are wrong."
The question hung there for maybe two seconds before Belle kept talking, her fingers already moving through the air like she was manipulating invisible controls that only her ability could see.
"The density. I'm picking up signatures everywhere. Not forty to sixty. More." Those amber eyes swept the canopy in jerks and starts, processing streams of spatial data that her brain was probably struggling to convert into language. "A lot more."
