The forest had gone silent again.
Save for the groans of half-dead men.
The air was filled with smoke that clung to the ground like fog, crawling between the trees where the fire had kissed everything black.
And scattered across lay still twitching, half-melted men, barely recognizable.
While Laro sat slumped against a tree trunk, his legs sprawled uselessly before him.
Every breath came in a jagged hiss, every movement a flare of agony.
His leathers had fused to his skin in patches that had burned red and black and wet.
His fingers trembled uncontrollably as he tried to flex them. He could see the bone beneath the split skin on his left arm.
But none of it terrified him half as much as what was happening a few feet away.
The charred body that lay on its side, that of the same boy who'd thrown hell at their feet.
Laro watched frozen in horror as a faint shimmer appeared beside the boy's blackened hand.
And a beat later, a small bottle of red liquid flickered into existence with a crack of blue light before the boy's trembling fingers closed around it, dragging it close.
And with groans of his own, he drank.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the change began.
Skin that had been split and burned began knitting back together, but unevenly, crudely, as if the potion didn't know where to even begin.
Patches of raw tissue smoothed over in blotches as blistered skin tightened and hissed with faint steam.
The hole in his gut sealed itself halfway, closing around the blade still embedded there until the blood stopped flowing.
Laro could hear it. That wet sound of muscle pulling against itself, of skin reattaching where it had melted apart, making his stomach twist.
The boy then let out a low and guttural groan as he pushed himself up on shaking arms.
He moved wrong. His every motion was a spasm of pain and sheer will.
The burns still covered him from head to toe. His face was still half-mended and half-mangled.
His hair and brows were gone completely, replaced by a dark and blistered scalp.
But his eyes…
When they opened, his violet eyes gleamed sharp, unblinking, and alive with something unholy.
And then he smiled.
Not in relief.
Not in victory.
But in that fractured, animal way that made the world itself seem to recoil.
Laro's throat went dry.
His pulse hammered against his neck as the boy slowly got to his feet, unsteady but upright, with the sword still lodged in his stomach like a grotesque ornament.
Steam curled from his skin as he took one shaky step forward.
And, then another.
A crossbow materialized in his hand, its shilloutte glowing faintly before turning solid.
Laro's breath caught. His body screamed to move, to crawl away, to do something, but the pain anchored him in place.
His arms and legs refused to obey.
And all he could do was watch as the boy limped closer, dragging the crossbow in one hand like a child with a toy too heavy for his hands.
The boy stopped just in front of him.
Even this close, Laro could barely recognize a human face.
All he saw was just a mess of burns with a grin cut into it, and bloody teeth glinting behind lips like a demon straight out of hell.
"See this crossbow?" the boy rasped, his voice broken and wet with blood.
Laro's breathing hitched higher.
"It belonged to my mother," the boy continued, eyes trembling with fury and madness in equal measure. "That's right. The same woman you lot killed in the middle of that street… just for having basic dignity."
He loaded a bolt with shaking fingers. The sound of the mechanism clicking into place echoed too loudly in Laro's ears.
Laro's body began trembling uncontrollably.
He tried to raise a blistered, half-charred hand in a feeble attempt at surrender.
The motion alone sent a wave of pain tearing through him, forcing a choked gasp from his throat.
But the boy didn't stop.
"Fitting, isn't it?" he said, voice curling into something close to a laugh as he raised the weapon, "The little ten-year-old you kicked away like trash… now standing before you… about to kill you with his mother's… that woman's crossbow."
He lifted the weapon slowly, levelling it at the man's forehead.
Laro's breath came fast and shallow. His burned hand shook in the air, eyes wide and pleading, heart pounding so hard he could hear it in his skull.
While the boy grinned wider, his violet eyes locking on him like a predator savouring the last heartbeat before the kill.
Laro's throat tightened as the boy spoke again.
"Hey," the boy said, tilting his head slightly, "Didn't you pretty little girl came of age a couple of years back?"
The words hit him harder than the burns ever could.
His eyes went wider.
Wider than they should've been able to after all that heat.
"What do you think the Chief or his son will do once they find out you're gone?"
The raised hand in surrender began to tremble violently. His chest heaved in sharp and uneven breaths.
He tried to move. To crawl, to run, to beg properly, but the pain pinned him like iron through the ribs.
The others, though they still clung to life, had been burned to the bone.
Laro's body was that of a mid-stage Tier-1warrior.
But that strength had now become his greatest curse.
The weaker ones had already lost consciousness.
But he didn't, and to add to the agony he had nerves that still worked, and that meant he could feel everything.
The boy took another half-step forward, crossbow trembling in his hand more out of pain than anything, while his violet eyes shone through the soot like a monster wearing human skin.
Laro's voice broke into a rasp, wet and shaking, "Ple–please..."
That was all his throat could manage.
"And remember," the boy said as his grin spread until the corners of his mouth tore, "my name is Arlen Hale, not Trash."
-Thwing!
The sound was small.
The effect wasn't.
The bolt punched clean through the center of Laro's forehead as his head snapped back against the tree with a dull thud.
The raised hand twitched once before falling limp.
-Ding!
{Vice-Captain, Laro slain.}
{Enemies neutralized: 1 / 16}
And for a moment, the forest was silent again.
Then a beat later, a low chuckle broke the air. Rough, strained, and pulled through burnt chest.
It came from the boy, still standing amid the bodies with a sword in his gut.
[I did it.]
The thought hissed through his mind like static, his lips curling upward through pain.
[I killed one of your murderers, ma! Are looking? Are you watching?! Look, I just killed him! I just killed one of those monsters!]
The chuckle swelled before bursting into a full, manic laugh.
He threw his head back, laughing until it became something else entirely.
"I did it! I did it! I did it! I did it! I did it!! MA!"
The sound tore through the forest, sharp enough to wake even the unconscious men.
To them, the boy wasn't human anymore.
He was a thing dragged out of the same fire that had killed them.
A burnt silhouette with a sword still stuck in his stomach, laughing like the flames had chosen him as their child.
"Alright," Arlen muttered between uneven breaths, wiping blood from his mouth with the back of his wrist. "Now only the Captain, the Chief, and his son remain."
And then he sighed. Too calm of a sound for what had just happened.
"Four more to go… No," he smiled faintly, "let's not get ahead of ourselves."
His gaze drifted toward the men still twitching in the dirt. Their faces were melted beyond recognition.
And that grin returned, wide, broken, and gleaming with something not sane
"We've got work to do," he said softly.
The forest itself seemed to have shuddered with the weight of those words.