Nothing stopped Adrian Vale.
Not the thorns. Not the trees. Not the tangled undergrowth that had swallowed this forest floor for decades.
He moved like a battering ram given human form — dense thickets exploding apart beneath his boots, gnarled branches snapping like dry kindling, twisted roots torn from the earth and left behind without a second glance. Where other men would slow, would hesitate, would search for a path — Adrian Vale made one.
Then he saw the shadow.
It had no time to react.
He hit it full-force, shoulder lowered, momentum unchecked — and the impact was catastrophic. The creature's body didn't absorb the blow. It came apart. Flesh and bone surrendered instantly to the collision, the shockwave tearing through sinew and mass like a hammer through wet clay. A burst of crimson mist hung in the amber evening light, chunks of matter scattering across the undergrowth in a wide, ugly arc.
Adrian straightened.
The red cape at his back shimmered — a quiet pulse of magic — and every fleck of blood and debris that arced toward him simply stopped, suspended for a half-second before falling harmlessly away. He glanced down at his armor.
Immaculate. Not a single stain.
He gave a small, satisfied nod.
Magic really is convenient.
A clatter of footsteps announced Balen's arrival. The old hunter crashed through the treeline a moment later, chest heaving, eyes wide — and then he froze. He stared at the carnage. At Adrian, standing perfectly composed at the center of it, armor gleaming, expression unreadable.
Balen had seen men fight. He'd spent a lifetime in this forest, tracking things that hunted in the dark. He thought he understood, at least a little, what Adrian Vale was capable of.
He had not understood.
"That's —" Balen exhaled slowly. "The werewolf. You destroyed it."
Adrian allowed himself a brief smile. The quest should be wrapping up. Time to recruit the NPC, collect the reward, move on—
The smile died.
He turned his eyes to the system panel. Scanned it once. Scanned it again.
No kill confirmation. No quest update. Nothing.
A bug? Or...
His gaze dropped slowly to the scattered remains on the forest floor. He studied them without expression — the fragments of flesh, the tufts of grey fur, the broken pieces of limb half-buried in the dirt.
Grey wolf. Four legs.
He counted again.
Four.
"Balen." Adrian's voice was perfectly even. "How many legs does a werewolf have?"
The old hunter blinked. "Two, in its man-form. Four as a wolf. Why would you—"
"Does it ever have five?"
Balen went still.
"Because this one did." Adrian let the pause sit for exactly one second. "Which means one of those legs wasn't its."
The silence that followed was the particular kind that comes just before understanding arrives and turns everything cold.
Balen dropped to one knee, hands moving through the debris — and then he found it. Four short, thick wolf limbs. No more, no less. He remembered. The werewolf's front leg, torn away during their earlier confrontation, had been severed and left behind.
This wasn't the werewolf.
This was bait.
Balen slowly rose to his feet. His voice, when it came, was quieter than usual. More careful. "If it only wanted to escape, it didn't need to do any of this. All this effort, the decoy, drawing us away from—" He stopped. His face went white. "It used us. It pulled us out here deliberately."
Adrian said nothing.
He didn't need to. They both arrived at the same conclusion at exactly the same moment.
Bona. Brannie.
Balen was already moving, voice cracking with urgency: "They're in danger—"
Adrian Vale was already gone.
Night consumed the forest.
The last of the sunset bled out beneath the horizon, and darkness poured in to fill the space it left behind. Above the canopy, a full moon climbed — silver and enormous and indifferent — pouring its light down through the gaps between branches in long, pale shafts.
In a small clearing deep within the trees, a grey wolf sat alone beneath that light.
Its left front shoulder was a ruin — or had been. The flesh was moving now. Slowly, unmistakably, visibly knitting. Torn muscle drew itself back together. Exposed bone disappeared beneath a crawling layer of new tissue. The moonlight didn't just illuminate the wound; it fed it, the wolf's ancient connection to its celestial patron accelerating recovery at a rate that should have been impossible.
In the space of minutes, the injury sealed.
In the space of a few more, something more began — a faint suggestion of mass at the shoulder's edge. The ghost of a limb, beginning to stir.
Then the wolf rose.
It unfolded upward — stretching, shifting, the body elongating and reshaping as it crossed the threshold between forms. When it was done, the creature stood upright on two legs, nearly seven feet tall, broad-shouldered and asymmetric, one arm whole and one arm barely begun.
A werewolf.
It stood motionless for a moment, tilting its scarred face toward the moon. Every instinct screamed at it to howl — to answer the light, to declare itself, to sing in the way its kind had sung since the first wolf looked up and recognized something greater.
It suppressed the urge.
Instead, it inhaled.
Moonlight sharpened everything — senses, speed, strength, awareness. The werewolf filtered through the thousand scents the forest offered and found the one it needed: a faint, specific trail. Its own severed limb, carried away and hidden somewhere in these trees by the old woman's magic.
There.
It knew the direction. It knew the distance. And it knew that the terrifying armored human had been successfully drawn away.
The thought of Adrian Vale surfaced uninvited, and the werewolf shuddered — a full-body convulsion it couldn't suppress. The memory of that collision. That speed. The casual, total destruction. The way he had moved through the forest like the forest wasn't even there.
The werewolf forced the memory down. Buried it. Focused.
The witches first. Eat them. Absorb their power. Recover fully. Then leave — leave this region entirely, leave the country if necessary, and pray to the moon that it never crossed paths with that armored nightmare again.
As for revenge?
The thought flickered briefly — and was immediately, thoroughly extinguished.
No. Not against that. Never against that.
The werewolf moved.
It found the cottage faster than expected — a warm, amber-lit structure tucked behind layers of concealment magic that should have made it invisible. Under normal circumstances, they would have. But the severed limb's scent cut straight through every ward and glamour, a beacon no spell could mask. The werewolf crouched at the tree line, studying the small yard, the lit windows, the simple wooden walls.
Two magic signatures inside. The old witch — and someone younger.
It smiled, in the way wolves smile.
Even better.
It began to move forward—
The dog hit the end of its chain and erupted.
The hunting hound had been tied near the gate, and whatever it lacked in size it compensated for in sheer volume and ferocity, barking with the desperate intensity of an animal that understood exactly what it was looking at and refused to be silent about it. The sound split the night.
Inside the cottage, lights shifted. Movement.
The werewolf snarled. The ambush was blown. It crossed the yard in three strides and silenced the dog with a single kick — the animal crumpled without a sound — and then it was done pretending.
It lunged.
The cottage door burst open before it arrived. Bona stood in the frame, grey-haired and furious, wand already raised, lips already moving. Pale light erupted from the tip — and the air around the yard hardened. A translucent barrier snapped into existence like glass slamming shut, and the werewolf hit it chest-first, rebounding with a snarl.
The old witch didn't stop.
She swung the wand downward and spoke — a single sharp word — and the ground beneath the werewolf's feet began to tremble. Then it cracked. Then it erupted — thick, thorned vines tearing up through the soil in every direction, wrapping themselves around the creature's legs, its torso, its one good arm, coiling tighter with every second, dragging it down toward the earth with slow, relentless, botanical certainty.
The werewolf thrashed. The vines held.