Chapter 173: Same Rot?
Nobody behind him said a word for a second, every set of eyes locked onto the back of his head, then they all started talking over each other at the same time.
"What do you mean we’re fucked?" Cassie demanded, scrambling up from her spot beside Jonas as fresh panic flooded back into her voice.
"You literally just finished promising us that nobody was going to die today," Jonas added, one hand still pressed flat against the scar on his chest.
The scout didn’t manage anything coherent, just a thin strangled noise while he gripped his walking stick like it could somehow save him.
Juna appeared at Hajin’s shoulder, her ears pinned flat and her claws sliding out while she scanned the treeline.
"Master, what did that screen of yours just say?" she asked quietly, her tail held stiff behind her.
He didn’t answer any of them yet, his eyes still locked on the red panel sitting in the corner of his vision.
The system had thrown him plenty of warnings before, but it had never once told him to leave. Not in the mutated two-shard gate, and not even while the Beast King was busy caving his ribs in.
A flat order to evacuate was something new, and that bothered him a great deal more than the words on the screen themselves.
He pushed a thin thread of mana up into his eyes and activated his Divine Eye without a word. The forest washed out into dull grey, the living mana of his party and the trees glowing against the muted background.
Buried in the ground and crawling up through the trees ran a web of sickly purple veins he hadn’t been able to see until now.
He recognized that color the instant he saw it, since it was the same corruption he had torn out of Maren. That same wrongness had been soaked into every inch of the Beast King’s gate, all the way through from the inside.
The difference was that none of this corruption leaked out of one monster or sat waiting inside a single core. It was woven straight through the entire gate, like the whole place had been deliberately grown out of the stuff.
’So that’s what the static has been this whole time,’ he thought, letting the skill drop before it could drain him. ’This isn’t a normal gate that turned bad on its own, someone went and built it this way on purpose.’
He turned back around to face the others, sliding his hands into his pockets while his expression gave away nothing. Cassie, Jonas, and the scout were all staring at him, pale and shaking, clearly waiting for him to take it back.
He had no intention of taking a single word of it back, "this place might be more dangerous than we thought," he said simply.
Cassie let out a short, cracked laugh that didn’t have any humor left in it at all, "that’s it? That’s the whole explanation we get after you scared the life out of us?" she asked.
"That’s all I’ve got that’s actually worth saying right now," he replied, his tone as flat as ever.
Vella drifted up beside him, and for once that lazy, teasing look of hers was nowhere to be found.
"You can feel it too, then," she said, her gaze moving slowly along the treeline. "It’s in the air, and it keeps getting thicker the longer we stand here."
He gave her a short nod, not bothering to hide anything from her.
"We could always just turn around and walk out," she pointed out, tipping her head toward the faint shimmer of the entrance. "Nobody would fault you for calling an unranked gate too dangerous to clear."
He thought about it for a moment, because leaving was easily the smartest option on the table. The system was practically begging him to take it, and every instinct he had quietly agreed.
But something at the heart of this place had gone to real trouble to build this trap. He wasn’t about to walk back out of it without knowing exactly what that something was.
"Change of plans," he said, glancing back at the three rookies behind him. "The training is done for now, so stay close to me and don’t wander off."
"You all saw how close that rabbit came to killing one of you," he added, his eyes drifting back toward the trees. "Whatever built this gate is going to be a lot worse than that."
The three rookies fell in close behind him without a single word of argument left in them, while Vella drifted back to watch their flank. Hajin started walking deeper into the trees, though his head wasn’t really on the path in front of him.
The corruption here matched the Beast King’s gate down to the exact color, and that was the part he couldn’t get past. Two gates carried that same rot now, and each one had turned up sitting right in his path.
His mind went back to that day in the forest, to the two adventurers who hadn’t been adventurers at all. The system had flagged both of them as demons the second they walked up, even while the knights stood right there and sensed nothing wrong.
At the time he’d let it slide, since the pair hadn’t done much beyond stage a monster fight and ask where the raid was headed.
There had been far bigger problems to deal with than two strangers hiding behind a good concealment trick.
But somewhere in the middle of the Beast King fight, with his ribs caved in and the ruins getting torn apart around him, he could have sworn he felt them. Two cold signatures sitting somewhere up on the ridge above the fight, just watching, never once stepping in to help or hurt.
Back then he’d written it off as the blood loss, since his skull had been ringing and his vision was half-gone. Standing in a second gate grown from that same rot, he wasn’t nearly so sure he’d imagined any of it.
’Those two,’ he thought, his eyes tracing the purple veins woven through the trees, ’the gate, corruption, and the way it keeps finding me... are they tied to all of it?’
He held the suspicion in and kept moving, since there was no point spooking the group over a hunch he couldn’t back up. From here on, though, he paid a lot closer attention to the empty gaps between the trees.
They pushed deeper, the purple veins thickening across the bark with every step, until something shifted in the canopy up ahead. Juna’s head snapped toward it, but even she was a half-beat too slow.
A shape tore down through the branches faster than anything had a right to move, all black feathers and five shards burning the same sick purple as the rot in the ground. It crossed the clearing in the space of a single breath.
The scout had drifted a few steps off the back of the group, exactly where Hajin had told him not to be. The bird picked him out instantly and folded into a dive aimed straight at his face.
Hajin kicked off the ground after it, the chain snapping into his hand in a flash of gold, but the gap between them was just too wide. Juna launched at the same moment, claws out, fighting to close the distance.
The black point of the beak filled the scout’s whole vision, a hair away from his eye—
