Chapter 171: First Test
The gate light swallowed Hajin whole, then spat him back out somewhere else. When the white finally cleared from his eyes, he was standing in the middle of a forest, trees stretching out in every direction with the ground soft under his boots like it hadn’t seen a dry day in years.
The sky up top had gone a weird shade of green instead of blue, which tracked, since gates never bothered getting that part right anyway.
He took one slow look around, hands still in his pockets, and let out a breath that came out more bored than anything.
’Typical,’ he thought, rolling a shoulder, every gate he’d walked into had been nature having some kind of breakdown.
It was always a forest or a desert or some stretch of busted old ruins, so the system was clearly working with three moods total and today it went with trees.
He honestly couldn’t tell you what he’d been hoping for, a city would’ve been new, a beach would’ve been nice, but no, more trees it was.
The girls had gone in ahead of him, so all three were already there when he popped out, scattered around the patch of forest the gate had dropped them in.
Juna had her ears up and swiveling, done sniffing the place before he’d even finished arriving.
"There is nothing close," she said the second she clocked him, "whatever lives out here is keeping its distance for now."
Loccy was already down in a crouch a few feet off, jabbing at the ground with one finger like she’d never met grass before.
"It’s so squishy," she said, ears bouncing, "Master, you have to come feel this."
"Hard pass," he said, not even looking, and her ears drooped about a centimeter before she went right back to torturing the ground.
Vella stood off to the side with her arms crossed, already wearing the flat look that said she’d rather be somewhere with walls and a roof.
"I hate forests," she said, "you can’t see anything coming and there’s bugs in everything."
Behind him the gate light flared and dumped Cassie’s crew straight onto the ground, supply packs included. The big guy landed face-first, while the third one tripped on his own walking stick and folded up beside him.
Cassie somehow kept her feet, swaying but upright, and stared around at the trees like she’d fully expected to be a corpse by now.
"We made it," she breathed, sounding stunned about it, "nobody died in the teleport, that’s already better than I pictured."
He rolled his neck and got moving, no real direction in mind, just away from the spot the gate had dropped them in.
"We’re not camping here," he said over his shoulder, "stay close and keep the packs on, we walk until something shows up worth the trip."
That weird grain in the mana was still hanging around too, the same rough little texture he’d picked up outside the gate, except in here it was stronger. It sat under everything like a static he couldn’t quite tune out.
He didn’t love it, but he wasn’t about to turn a whole party around over a bad feeling, so he filed it next to all the other stuff he’d deal with later and kept walking.
They hadn’t made it fifty feet before Juna’s ears snapped forward and her whole body locked up mid-step.
"Hold on," she muttered, claws already sliding out, "scratch what I said earlier, something just moved and it’s headed straight for us."
A monster came crashing out of the trees a few seconds after Juna called it. Branches snapped off to the right, the ground shook once underfoot, then it forced its way into the open without any attempt to hide.
It looked like a rabbit, except stretched out to the size of a horse. Two thick horns curved back from its skull, and three dull shards drifted in a slow circle around its neck.
It planted its feet, dropped its head low, and fixed on the nearest targets. Those happened to be Cassie and her boys.
’Perfect,’ Hajin thought, not moving a muscle.
Cassie’s whole team froze at once. The big guy scrambled to drag his axe off his back while the third one made a strangled noise that wasn’t quite a word. Cassie’s hand snapped up on instinct, mana already gathering to throw a barrier between her group and the monster.
All three of them looked straight at Hajin, waiting for him or one of the girls to step in and turn the monster into paste like usual.
He looked right back at them, then tipped his head toward the monster, "all yours," he said.
For a second nobody moved, like they were waiting for the rest of the sentence.
"...What?" Cassie said.
"The rabbit," he said, pointing, just so there was no confusion about which problem he meant. "It’s yours. Go kill it."
The big guy’s head whipped around so fast he nearly lost the axe a second time.
"That’s a three-shard," he said, his voice rising with every word, "we are two-shard adventurers. You do see the problem here, right?"
"It’s a three, but a weak one," Hajin said, not bothered in the slightest. "There are three of you, and I’ve got nothing better to do than watch. You’ll be fine."
"We’ll LIVE?" the third one repeated, somewhere close to a shriek.
Behind Hajin, Loccy dropped straight onto the grass and folded her legs like she was settling in for a show. Vella sank down beside her, already enjoying this more than she’d enjoyed the whole walk over.
Juna’s tail gave one slow wag. She didn’t sit, but she stopped looking like she might handle the monster herself, which was as relaxed as she ever got.
Cassie’s eyes bounced between the monster and Hajin a couple of times while she very clearly weighed which one was more likely to kill her.
"You said you’d protect us," she tried.
"I said anything you do in here falls on me," he corrected, "which is exactly why you’re fighting it instead of riding through this gate on my back. You want to stay a two-shard your whole life, fine, just don’t do it on my time."
Cassie opened her mouth, came up with no argument that didn’t end in her death either way, and closed it again.
The monster stopped waiting, letting out a shriek and threw itself forward, all of its weight behind the charge with no technique to it at all.
"Move, move, move!" Cassie screamed, and credit where it’s due, they moved.
The big guy lunged forward, swinging his massive battleaxe in a wide and desperate arc until the blade bit deep into the rabbit’s flank.
"I managed to land a solid hit on this overgrown rat!" He shouted in triumph, a wildly panicked grin breaking across his face.
Unfortunately for him, the three-shard monster barely even flinched from the blow, blurring forward with terrifying speed before the man could even try to rip his axe free.
There was a sickening crunch of shattered armor and breaking bone as the rabbit’s thick horn impaled him dead center.
The beast lifted his frame completely off the ground with terrifying ease, ruthlessly tossing him against the trunk of a nearby tree like a discarded ragdoll.
The man crumpled to the ground as a dark pool of blood instantly spread beneath his shattered body, and he lay perfectly still in the grass.
Cassie let out a horrified scream, while Hajin just watched the bloody scene unfold with his hands still resting casually in his pockets.
