Kealix stared down in frozen silence, heart thudding against his ribs as the pale things circled the trees below. His breath caught. No matter how long he looked, they didn't become less real. He blinked once. Then again. Still there—moving with twitching, insectile grace beneath the branches, just far enough that the blood-red canopy obscured their full forms.
Not a dream. Not exhaustion.
Real.
"What the hell are those…" he whispered, voice barely audible.
"I do not know," Hero answered, low and quiet, his voice like steel dulled by unease. "But they've been circling the area for the past ten minutes. I waited until they stopped directly beneath us before waking you."
A cold pressure clamped around Kealix's chest. He leaned back slowly, inch by inch, away from the edge of the branch, as if the movement alone might draw their attention. Every rustle of leaves now sounded like bone scraping bark—dozens of limbs brushing over the forest floor.
He'd seen monsters before.
He'd fought monsters before.
But this wasn't that. This wasn't a confrontation—it was an ecosystem. And he was out of place. A wrong thing balanced above a feeding ground.
"They're… sniffing," he muttered, the realization forming slowly as his eye followed their movements. "They're tracking something."
Hero's voice darkened. "Yes. Perhaps the wolf's scent. Or the energy I released before you suppressed my light."
Kealix's gaze snapped to the wolf's carcass. It hung limp across a neighboring branch, its fur now a dull gray, matted with dried blood. A grotesque smear of death. A scent trail. A signal.
He swore under his breath, almost inaudibly.
"They can't climb," he said, more a question than a statement.
There was a pause.
"I do not believe so," Hero replied carefully. "But this forest changes. What they cannot do now does not guarantee what they will not do later."
That didn't help.
Kealix pressed the back of his head against the smooth trunk behind him, trying to steady his pulse. The air felt different now—thinner. Pressed in against his skin, like the forest had narrowed its lungs just to watch him breathe.
Below, the rustling stopped.
Kealix's good eye snapped open.
Every creature on the forest floor had frozen mid-crawl. Dozens of them. Maybe more. All motion halted as if someone had flipped a switch. And then—without warning—they tilted their heads upward in perfect unison.
He saw them fully now.
Or what passed for them.
No eyes. Just warped skin where sockets should have been—stretched taut like parchment over a skull. Their mouths weren't mouths, but thin, trembling slits that quivered as if sensing the air itself.
They didn't blink.
They didn't breathe.
But they were listening.
Kealix didn't move. Didn't even swallow. The silence grew so thick it rang in his ears.
Even Hero, ever vigilant, stayed deathly still.
A single second stretched into ten. Ten into a hundred. Kealix could feel the weight of their attention, like invisible wires tightening around his limbs. The wrong movement, the wrong thought, might bring them up the trees like locusts.
Then—one creature moved.
Not forward. Backward.
It stepped away from the base of the tree with jerky, unnatural precision. Another followed. Then another. Slowly, silently, the entire swarm began to retreat—one malformed limb at a time—vanishing into the trees as if dissolving into mist. Not a single sound. Not a snapped twig. They simply... left.
It took several minutes before Kealix let himself exhale.
His back slumped against the trunk as tension fled his body in trembling waves. He shut his eye tightly, pressing a knuckle against his brow. The silence that remained wasn't empty now—it was watching.
"They knew I was here," he whispered. Not a question. Just the truth.
Hero's voice responded after a long moment. "Yes."
"But they left." Kealix opened his eye again, the image of those faceless heads still burned into his memory. "Why?"
"I do not know."
Silence swallowed them once more. But now, it didn't feel passive. Not the calm before a storm.
No.
It was the kind of silence a predator makes just before the next step.
Kealix remained still, gaze locked on the shadows beyond the branches. He couldn't shake the sense that something was still out there. Not moving. Not watching.
Waiting.
Kealix didn't speak for the rest of the night.
The idea of sleep felt... wrong. Unthinkable. After seeing those things—those eyeless, quivering things—any sense of safety had been shredded. He stayed pressed against the trunk, unmoving, thirty meters above the forest floor. Yet even from that height, he had seen them clearly.
They must've been massive, he thought uneasily, brow furrowed. Nothing that big should move that quietly.
The hours dragged. He counted them by the slow shift of moonlight and the rise and fall of the wind. His legs ached. His back stiffened. But he didn't move. Not until the first rays of dawn broke through the crimson canopy.
When they did, it felt like something had unlatched inside his chest.
The weight was still there—but it loosened. He finally exhaled, breath steadying for the first time in what felt like days.
"Hero," Kealix said, rubbing his eyes, "you can shine again. I don't think those things like sunlight much… We should be alright now."
Silence.
Kealix blinked and glanced down at his attire. His coat had reverted to its usual pale white, threads no longer glowing faintly with golden light.
Hero was gone.
Dismissed—without him even noticing.
Just as confusion crept in, another voice piped up from the pocket of his coat.
"Hey, kid," came the drawl, sharp and exasperated. "Hero's around, sure, but let's talk about me for a second. How long are you planning to keep us stuffed in this damn pocket? It's not exactly a five-star suite in here, y'know?"
Kealix smiled despite himself. Betrayal.
The familiar sarcasm was almost comforting.
But his silence, apparently, wasn't welcome.
"Hey! Can you even hear me, you earless monkey?" Betrayal shouted, voice echoing through the card's dark magic-tinged aura.
Kealix sighed. "Damn it, Betrayal. You don't have to throw a tantrum like some spoiled child."
"Spoiled child?!" the card snapped. "If I weren't a card right now, you'd be a smear on the forest floor, you ungrateful little—"
"Enough, Betrayal," Hero's voice interrupted, calm but firm. His golden glow pulsed through his own card, a stark contrast to Betrayal's jagged black aura.
"Young Master," Hero continued, his tone more serious than before, "we need to move quickly. We don't know what else the night will bring, and it would be unwise to linger here any longer. Putting as much distance between us and those creatures as possible would be... prudent."
Kealix didn't respond right away. His eye shifted to the corpse of the mutated wolf still draped across the branch beside him.
They had carried it all this way. A dead weight, literally and symbolically. He stared at it, expression unreadable—caught somewhere between contemplation and detachment.
"I agree," he said quietly.
Without another word, he began descending the massive tree, using his golden daggers to dig into the bark and slide down with practiced grace. At the base, he laid the wolf's body carefully on the ground.
If they're following the blood… this might keep them busy.
He didn't look back.
Kealix moved steadily through the forest, boots crunching on fallen leaves and ash-covered roots. He had traveled for hours, the morning sun now trailing across the canopy in slanted beams. The oppressive atmosphere of the night before hadn't fully lifted, but it was lighter now—less suffocating.
To pass the time, he spoke with the cards.
Some were more talkative than others. Hero, of course, offered measured insights and guidance, his voice calm and ever-watchful. Betrayal interjected often with sarcasm or biting commentary, usually at the expense of either Kealix or the others. But as the conversation deepened, Kealix began to learn more about the abilities each card possessed.
Truth was a particularly dangerous one. It allowed Kealix to see hidden answers—through visions, memories, or fragments of what was or might be. But the truths it showed were not always gentle. Sometimes they were brutal. Wounds disguised as knowledge. Hero had warned him: do not draw Truth lightly.
Then there was Flow, a card that let him slip into what athletes called the zone. Total immersion. Heightened awareness. Every breath, every motion, would feel effortless—like moving through water with no resistance. In combat, it would be priceless. But like all the others, Flow had its own conditions to activate. Timing. Intention. Focus.
Each card, it seemed, demanded something. A price. A trigger. A rhythm.
It was frustrating—but not unexpected. No power ever came without consequence.
He sighed. Of course it's complicated. Can't just press a button and win.
What struck him as odd, though, was Awakening. Even after recovering, it remained silent. Distant. Not even a word of acknowledgement. As if it wanted to be left alone.
Kealix didn't push.
Not all cards wanted to bond. Some, like Betrayal, couldn't wait to speak. Others carried their own burdens. Their own scars.
Most of the cards, at least, seemed familiar with each other—likely from past intersections on the spiritual plane, wherever that was. They interacted like old allies, occasionally like rivals. But two of them stood apart.
The Wheel of Fortune.
And...
The Unity.
Kealix still wasn't sure what to make of Unity. He could swear that, before the cards had revealed their abilities, it had been called something else. The World, maybe? But now... not only had the name changed, but so had the feeling around it. He didn't know how to explain it.
It didn't glow like the others. No aura. No voice. No pull.
It just was—quiet and unmoving, like a stone at the bottom of a well.
It should have unsettled him more. But oddly enough, it didn't feel threatening. Just... out of place.
Still, Kealix filed it away for later. There was no point worrying about it now.
By late afternoon, the trees began to thin, and the forest floor gave way to rising rock and scattered boulders. He finally saw it—a low mountain, maybe nothing grand by normal standards, but to him it was a refuge. A promise of height. Of safety.
He climbed steadily, using his daggers to dig footholds when needed, until he found what he was looking for: a shallow cave nestled into the mountainside. It overlooked the treetops below, a clear vantage point, and more importantly—distance from whatever still lurked in those woods.
Kealix sank to the stone floor with a heavy breath.
The tension didn't leave him entirely. It probably wouldn't—not until he was far, far away from this cursed forest.
As he began setting up a basic camp, laying out his cloak, checking the edges of the cave for old nests or worse, his stomach let out a low, angry growl.
He froze. Then groaned.
Right… I haven't eaten in two days.
He leaned against the cave wall, hand over his midsection, frowning at his own carelessness.
"I need to hunt tomorrow," he murmured to himself, voice flat with exhaustion. "Seriously. First thing."
One by one, the card lights dimmed as he dismissed their colors. Even Betrayal didn't offer a last snide remark. Hero stayed silent, perhaps sensing Kealix's need for quiet.
Night fell swiftly, shadows claiming the land in long, reaching strokes.
Kealix lay back against the cool stone, eyes open for a while longer. He thought of the eyeless creatures. Of the stillness. Of the way they all turned their heads in unison.
Cold sweat prickled down Kealix's spine as the memory clawed its way back. Those things—whatever they were—weren't normal. Not even by the twisted standards of mutated beasts. There had been something else in them. Intelligence. Awareness. A kind of hunger that knew what it was looking at. And then... the darkness claimed him.
Sleep came slowly.
But it came.
But sleep would not have claimed Kealix for long.