Gareth pushed forward, boots pounding against the damp forest floor.
The trail was clear enough—broken branches, faint tracks in the soil—signs of where Kael might have fled. The deeper they went, the darker the trees seemed to close in around them.
Not long after, other knight teams appeared from different directions, silently falling in step. No one spoke. There was nothing to say.
Gareth's mind held only one purpose—find Kael's remains.
He never once considered the boy might still be alive. In his mind, Kael was already gone.
If luck was kind, they'd recover a body before the beasts stripped it to bone.
A minute more of running, and Gareth's instincts screamed. Something was ahead.
He slowed, raising a hand for the others to halt.
That was when the scent hit him—thick, metallic, unmistakable. Blood.
The iron tang clung to the air, heavy enough to taste.
They moved forward now with caution, every step measured, the forest watching in silence.
Gareth froze mid-step.
The stench of blood hung thick in the air, heavy enough to choke on. His eyes swept the forest clearing—and his breath caught.
Corpses.
Everywhere.
Shredded limbs, charred flesh, gaping wounds where life had been torn away. More than ten monsters littered the ground, their ranks clear from the fragments of their cores—D- to D+ rank beasts. Blood soaked the earth in black-red puddles, steam still curling from burns.
And in the middle of that carnage lay something even more grotesque—a massive hound, easily twice the size of the others, its aura screaming C-rank. Its body was a canvas of slashes and punctures, its jaw burnt to ruin. Where its eye should have been, a katana was buried deep through the skull.
Gareth's mouth went dry.
Who… could have done this? Even a C-rank awakened would have struggled to put this beast down, and here it was, surrounded by the butchered remains of its pack.
His gaze swept the clearing again—and then stopped.
Near the fallen hound, a body lay sprawled in the dirt. His pulse spiked. He knew that figure. He had trained that boy for months. He was the very reason Gareth and his team were here—because they believed he was dead.
Kael Thorne.
Gareth's boots pounded across the blood-slick ground. Dropping to one knee, he turned the boy over, his eyes narrowing. Kael was alive—barely. His skin was pale, his breaths shallow, his body broken and shredded by claws and teeth. One arm hung limp, mangled.
But he was still breathing.
Relief washed over Gareth, but it didn't last. Something else caught his attention—something impossible.
Kael's aura.
Two days ago, Gareth had seen him training in the fortress yard, struggling as an E-rank awakened. Now… he was D-rank.
How…?
It wasn't just an increase in raw strength—his mana felt denser, sharper, like a blade fresh from the forge. Gareth's mind spun through possibilities. Had Kael been hiding his true power? No… that didn't make sense. He had watched the boy's progress for months. No one fakes being E-rank for that long.
Then what happened here? What in these last two days could have forged this change—and left a trail of slaughter in its wake?
Gareth's eyes drifted back to the corpses, to the sheer, methodical brutality. The answer was both unthinkable and inescapable.
It was him.
Gareth shook the thought away. There was no time to dwell on it.
Pulling a vial from his space ring, he uncorked the healing potion and tipped it to Kael's lips. The boy's throat twitched as he swallowed, crimson running down the corners of his mouth.
"Stay alive, boy," Gareth muttered under his breath. "Whatever you've done… we'll figure it out later."
When Gareth tilted Kael's head and poured healing potion after healing potion down his throat, the rest of the team stood frozen.
They were all experienced Awakened—men and women who had seen battlefields drenched in blood and corpses torn apart. Yet the scene before them was… something else entirely.
The ground was littered with mangled beast corpses, their black fur soaked in crimson. Deep claw marks scored the earth, and the air stank of iron and decay. And at the center of it all… was a single boy.
The boy they had assumed was long dead.
They had pictured him ripped apart by these hounds, his body lost beneath gnashing teeth. But instead, he lay barely clinging to life—bloodied, broken, and breathing. And around him lay the carcasses of monsters far stronger than himself.
A shiver passed through the group.
The same boy they had mocked. The same boy they had written off as weak and useless…
Now, he was the one who had turned this battlefield into a slaughterhouse.
No one spoke. Their eyes met in uneasy silence, each seeing the same shock reflected back.
While the others were frozen in disbelief, Gareth faced a far greater dilemma.
One potion after another—low-grade, mid-grade—he poured them into Kael's mouth, forcing him to swallow. The liquid shimmered faintly before fading, doing little more than keeping his condition from worsening. Even the best mid-rank potion in his possession, the one he'd been saving for emergencies, had failed to mend the boy's wounds.
It was as if Kael's body had taken damage beyond what normal healing could repair.
Gareth's jaw tightened. Damn it… this won't work.
His mind churned, calculating. They didn't have high-rank potions here—not in the middle of this cursed forest. Without a skilled healer, Kael wouldn't last. The fortress had both… but time was bleeding away as fast as the boy's life.
No hesitation. Gareth slipped an arm under Kael's limp frame and lifted him onto his back.
"You, you, and you—check the area. I want every carcass examined," he barked, voice sharp enough to cut through the lingering shock in the others' eyes. "The rest of you, with me. We run."
Half the team scattered toward the blood-soaked clearing, grim expressions set as they approached the mangled monster corpses. The other half fell in behind Gareth.
And then they moved—pounding through the forest at a pace far faster than before, the sound of their boots a desperate rhythm against the earth.