It was a beautiful day.
Sunlight filtered down through the thick canopy above, dappling the jungle path in golden specks. Somewhere, birds chirped. The air was warm but not hot, the kind of perfect pre-lunch weather that made you question why anyone would ever choose violence as a profession.
Naturally, I was complaining.
"I'm just saying," I muttered, swatting away a bug that might've been a butterfly or a flying pickle, "if your shield glows when squirrels touch it, maybe it's cursed."
"It is not cursed," Velis said without looking up from her map. "It's attuned."
"To rodents," I muttered.
Lyra sighed. "If it attacks him, I'll purify it. If he attacks it, I won't stop him."
"I heard that."
Iria marched ahead with the confidence of someone who did not care about any of us, the squirrels, or the heat. Her armor made the faintest clink with each step, like a holy wind chime built for violence.
Silas was hanging upside down from a low tree branch, flipping a stolen beastman coin through his fingers. "What if the squirrel was just really judgmental and triggered an enchantment by mistake?"
That was the mood.
Light. Ridiculous. Calm.
And then we passed a tree.
There wasn't a warning. No dark clouds on the horizon, no foreboding chill, no subtle shift in magical pressure.
We just walked past one moss-covered, vine-wrapped jungle tree—
—and on the other side, the world ended.
The path turned black.
Not dark. Black. Scorched, cracked soil stretched ahead in jagged lines, steaming faintly as if the sun were personally offended. The air changed too—thick, dry, hot, and somehow greasy, like we'd walked into a butcher's oven filled with ash and regret.
The trees? Gone. Replaced by twisted husks, all sharp limbs and knotty bark that looked like they were made of bone and mold. Their branches reached toward the sky like skeletal hands.
Speaking of the sky: it had turned from pleasant blue to angry gray, swirling with slow-motion clouds that looked one sneeze away from lightning.
The sounds of the jungle vanished.
Replaced by silence.
And something... else.
Something screaming, far off. Or laughing. Maybe both.
I stopped walking.
"...I think the map skipped a biome."
Velis blinked and quickly scanned the horizon. "This is it. The Dead Fringe. We've crossed into demon territory."
"That quickly?" Lyra asked, already casting a purifying charm over the air. "It's like the land just gave up."
"It did," Velis said. "They don't conquer with force. Not at first. They conquer with presence."
Silas dropped from his tree limb, brushing ash from his boots. "Well, their welcome mat sucks."
I looked back over my shoulder.
The jungle was gone.
So was the path.
Only black stone now.
"...We're not in Whiskerstep anymore," I muttered.
Five minutes in, and we were already dehydrated.
Or, well—I was dehydrated. Everyone else had that annoyingly heroic "grit and stoicism" look going on.
I lifted my waterskin, took one sip—
—and immediately spat it back out.
"WHY DOES IT TASTE LIKE COINS AND SADNESS?"
Velis looked over. "The ambient miasma corrupts fluids."
"Great."
Lyra sighed, knelt beside a nearby puddle, and started chanting. The water hissed and fizzed like angry soda as her magic worked.
She offered me a fresh vial. "This will last an hour. Don't waste it."
I drank it in three gulps.
"Okay, now I'm hydrated enough to cry."
Night didn't fall so much as drop. One second it was late afternoon. The next, the clouds overhead swallowed the sun whole, and we were walking through a landscape lit only by distant flashes of lightning and the occasional green glow of corrupted fungus.
We set up camp beneath the rotting stalk of a mushroom the size of a barn. It leaned sideways like it regretted its life choices.
I sat on a rock that squished under me.
"Velis, is this rock alive?"
"No."
Pause.
"Maybe."
I didn't sit again.
Dinner was roasted root.
Black, rubbery, vaguely humming.
Silas ate it anyway.
"Crunchy."
"It twitched."
"Still crunchy."
Velis stirred a pot of magically heated soup that smelled like it had thoughts. Lyra refused to taste anything without first pouring two purifying drops on it and whispering a prayer.
I chewed a piece of dried jerky that probably predated the kingdom and stared at the horizon.
A tornado spun lazily in the distance, silhouetted against the night sky like a divine middle finger.
We saw it the next morning.
A black cliff rose ahead, jagged and spiked like the ribcage of a fossilized god. At its peak sat a fortress—not built, but grown—from the same dark stone, erupting upward like a tumor with towers.
Demons swarmed across it in endless motion—some flying, some crawling, some just... writhing. Wings beat the sky like drums. Fires burned from within. The whole place pulsed like it was alive.
Velis stood beside me and took notes.
Lyra didn't speak.
Iria simply gripped Edelbrecht.
Silas whistled. "Looks like a war crime had a baby with a prison."
"I want to go home," I said.
"No one lives there anymore," Velis replied without looking up.
"That wasn't comforting."
We started backtracking—just enough to get a sense of the cliff perimeter—when a noise echoed through the trees.
Not a roar.
Not a howl.
A bleat.
A corrupted goat rounded the corner. It had five legs, two mouths, and glowing eyes. One of its horns was made of metal.
It charged.
I screamed.
So did it.
Silas threw a rock at it. It caught the rock in one mouth and kept running.
"Are we fighting this?!" I shouted.
Iria stepped forward.
"No," Velis said. "It's just confused. We're on the edge of their grazing zone."
Then it spat fire.
Iria sliced the flames in half midair.
"Okay," Velis amended, "we might be fighting it."
The goat was eventually subdued with a combination of Velis's barrier magic, Iria's extremely literal hoof-splitting, and Lyra screaming "do not drink its blood!" at me while I checked if it had pockets.
It didn't.
Obviously.
We were catching our breath when Silas stopped.
He crouched low, hand on the dirt.
"Movement," he said. "Five o'clock. Organized."
We turned.
And saw them.
Marching across the edge of the ridge—a demon scouting party.
Humanoid shapes. Armor. Banners. Long weapons that shimmered with enchantment.
These weren't beasts.
They were soldiers.
Velis's eyes narrowed. "They're patrolling. Strategically."
Lyra's voice was tight. "Which means they expect us."
I looked at my shield.
It sparkled uselessly.
"...I really want to go home."