Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 39: Chapter 39 — The Retreat

Lyra called the withdrawal not long after dawn, gathering the remaining Rank D leaders and Arlen’s own small support cluster near the edge of the camp to deliver the decision plainly.

"We’re falling back to Greyhaven," she said, no room for argument in her tone. "Millbrook’s survivors evacuate with us. We are not pursuing whatever’s out there, and we are not attempting to hold this position any longer than it takes to move everyone safely."

"That’s a retreat," Doran said, not quite a challenge, more a statement he wanted confirmed aloud.

"It is," Lyra said, without flinching from the word. "I’d rather retreat honestly than lose more people pretending this is a fight we’re equipped to win. Whatever attacked Millbrook operates well above anything documented in this region. We don’t have the numbers or the information to engage it safely, and I won’t spend lives finding that out the hard way twice in one night."

Nobody argued further. Arlen, still moving carefully with his bound ribs, understood the decision better than most — he’d seen, up close, exactly how far outside ordinary danger this threat actually sat.

The evacuation itself took the better part of the morning, the response party working alongside Millbrook’s frightened, exhausted survivors to gather what few belongings could be salvaged and organize the wounded for the journey back toward Greyhaven. Arlen helped where his injuries allowed, carrying lighter loads, guiding elderly villagers toward the wagons the guild had requisitioned from a neighboring farmstead, doing what small, steady work he could manage without undoing Aria’s careful healing.

The old woman he’d spoken with the previous night found him again amid the organized chaos, her bandaged arm now in a proper sling, her expression still shadowed with the same fear from before, though steadier now in the daylight.

"You’re the one who got a look at it," she said, not quite a question.

"I did."

"Did it look like anything you’d ever seen described? In stories, I mean. Old tales." Her voice carried a strange, careful weight, as though the answer mattered to her in some way beyond simple curiosity.

Arlen considered the question honestly. "No," he admitted. "Nothing I’ve ever heard of."

She nodded slowly, some private thought passing behind her tired eyes, and said nothing further before moving on toward the waiting wagons, leaving Arlen with an odd, lingering unease he couldn’t quite name.

The retreat itself began in the early afternoon, the long column of evacuees and adventurers moving at a careful, deliberate pace back toward the outer forest boundary and the safer road beyond it, torches and watchful scouts flanking the group’s edges despite the daylight. The unnatural quiet that had settled over the forest the previous night hadn’t fully lifted — birdsong remained sparse, the ordinary rustle of wildlife notably absent, as though the forest itself remained braced for something that hadn’t yet finished happening.

They spotted it once more partway through the retreat, a massive, distant shape moving parallel to the column through the deeper trees, visible only in fragmented glimpses through gaps in the canopy — never approaching, never engaging, simply present, watching, in a way that unsettled the entire column more than an outright attack might have.

"It’s tracking us," Yorin said quietly, falling into step beside Lyra at the head of the column. "Not hunting. Just... observing."

"I noticed," Lyra said, her composed voice carrying no less tension for its steadiness. "Keep the formation tight. Nobody breaks from the group, regardless of what it does."

The creature shadowed them for perhaps an hour before finally, without any visible provocation, falling away into the deeper forest and vanishing entirely from sight. The column didn’t relax until well past the point it had disappeared, and even then, the tension lingered, a collective unease that no amount of distance seemed fully able to dispel.

Arlen walked near the rear of the column alongside Petra’s support group, keeping half an eye on the wagon carrying Ilvera, still unconscious but stable, her party members taking turns walking close beside her as though their presence alone might somehow help.

"She’ll recover," Petra said, noticing his attention. "Aria’s confident, and Aria doesn’t offer false confidence."

"I know. I just—" Arlen struggled to find the words for the strange, unfamiliar guilt sitting in his chest, an echo of something he half-remembered from another life, another kind of exhaustion entirely. "I keep thinking I should have signaled faster. Noticed it sooner."

"You noticed it in time to save both your lives," Petra said, firm but not unkind. "Don’t rewrite what happened into something you failed at, just because the outcome wasn’t perfectly clean. Nothing about last night was clean. That’s simply the nature of what we’re dealing with."

He turned the words over carefully as they walked, finding some genuine comfort in them despite the lingering unease he couldn’t quite shake, and found himself, not for the first time, grateful for the found family the guild had quietly become for him these past months — people who understood, without needing lengthy explanation, exactly what kind of comfort a person actually needed after a night like the one just past.

They reached Greyhaven’s western gate as evening settled over the fields, the familiar city walls rising up to meet the exhausted, battered column with a welcome that felt, this time, considerably more significant than it ever had before. Word had clearly traveled ahead of them — a crowd had gathered near the gate, guild staff and concerned citizens alike, and the arrival of Millbrook’s frightened survivors drew a wave of murmured concern through the assembled onlookers.

Arlen caught sight of Cobb and Sil near the edge of the crowd, both visibly relieved at the sight of him upright and moving under his own power, though their expressions sobered quickly once they took in the bandages and the exhausted, grim mood hanging over the entire returning column.

"You look terrible," Cobb said, once they’d found their way to him.

"Feels about right, then," Arlen managed, some small, weary humor surfacing despite everything.

"Guild’s already saying this is bigger than anything they’ve dealt with before," Sil said quietly. "People are scared, Arlen. Whatever happened out there, it’s already all over the city."

Arlen nodded, too exhausted to properly process the wider implications yet, and let his friends help him the rest of the way toward the guild hall’s medical wing, the weight of everything he’d witnessed — the pale eyes, the strange word, the creature’s inexplicable, patient restraint — settling heavier into him with every step, a burden he understood, with quiet, growing certainty, that the Ashen Frontier was nowhere near equipped to set down on its own.