The world still smelled of smoke.
Every breath tasted of scorched meat and charred wood. The serpent's body lay in a steaming heap, half-tail twitching, as if its nerves hadn't gotten the message yet.
I clenched the memory card in my palm.
Sixteen megabytes. Too small to hold what we had just witnessed, and yet somehow, impossibly, it had survived.
My camera… not so much.
I crouched where I had dropped the broken thing. Its lens was cracked straight across, a spiderweb scar that split its glass eye in two. The shell was blackened, the battery casing swollen. But when I jammed the card back inside, the faintest click answered me.
The old beast wasn't dead yet.
Neither was I.
---
The witch limped beside me, robe torn at the edges, one shoulder streaked in serpent blood. Her staff glowed faintly, embers pulsing at the tip like a tired heartbeat.
"You should have died with it," she muttered, not quite looking at me.
I forced a laugh, though my throat ached.
"Yeah. Should've. But it seems the Goblin Pro has more lives than sense."
Her lips twitched, just for a second.
Not quite a smile.
But enough.
We began walking, boots sinking into the soft earth still trembling from the blast. Every step carried the crunch of burned leaves, the hiss of cooling sap.
The forest no longer sang.
No cicadas. No owls.
Only silence and smoke, a graveyard where trees leaned like broken crosses.
---
I lifted the camera, tried to power it on. The screen flickered, showed static, then cut out. Still, the lens shifted faintly, grinding like an old man's knees.
"Well," I said, holding it up to my shoulder. "Guess we're back to potato-quality until I get an upgrade."
She glanced at me. "Potato?"
"Never mind. Just… don't judge what you see through here too harshly."
For the first time, she laughed—a short, sharp sound that almost startled me more than the explosion had.
The forest seemed a little less heavy after that.
---
We didn't look back.
Not at the crater.
Not at the serpent.
But I could feel it pressing at my spine.
As if the forest itself remembered what we had done, and wasn't sure whether to let us leave alive.
At the tree line, I turned once, just for a heartbeat.
The smoke rose in long, thin pillars, fading into the night sky. It looked almost… peaceful.
The card pulsed faintly in my pocket.
Whatever had chosen to survive that blast—me, the witch, the cursed little sliver of data—
it wasn't done with us.
Not yet.