Luke's voice cut through the oppressive hush like a blade through silk. His tone was low, measured, threaded with a gravity that made even the hush of the Wargon seem heavy.
"Ah… you've been deceived by your Emperor, I suppose?"
At the words, Vivy's body betrayed her. She leaned back slowly, her frame collapsing into the soft floorboards of the Wargon, eyes closing as though the weight of truth had shattered her. A delicate exhale escaped her lips—her entire form slackened, wrapped in shock.
Liora, still upright, stared at Luke with all her composure unraveling. Her hands balled into fists, knuckles white beneath trembling skin. Her amber eyes glimmered with betrayed disbelief—she dared not speak.
Kairo remained seated, but every muscle in his torso tensed, particularly around his waist where Lalula pulsed like a heartbeat. His breath hitched; a low growl formed in his throat, but he forced it down, grinding his teeth. "Ah… it's Lalula," he whispered internally, acknowledging the familiar sting of the Dancing Vine's presence.
He drew a deep, calming breath, locking his gaze on Luke with resolute steadiness. His voice was flat, taut. "Perhaps. Luke, what more do you recall from the Faithrend Epoch—especially about humans?" Each word was delivered with quiet intensity.
Luke's brow furrowed, his jaw clenching as if holding back an avalanche of memories. He placed a hand over his mouth, stifling a gasp that threatened to escape. After a pregnant pause, he sighed—tired, rueful, and resolute.
"I—" He broke off, then continued with a softer timbre. "I also want to delve deeper. But we cannot squander time here. We must move carefully—get out of Bleakroot Fen first. Deal?"
Kairo's body relaxed slightly, though tension still rippled beneath his palms. He averted his eyes, his voice tight with reluctant acceptance. "Yes… sorry. Our top priority." His gaze swept around—Liora had quietly shifted back to her spot, her fingers brushing the Wargon's floor, steadying herself. Vivy remained motionless at center, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths, eyes still shut.
The silence resumed—not the blank stillness of before, but a taut, anticipatory hush. The Wargon creaked as Luke repositioned himself on the beast, the animal's muscles coiling beneath him. A single shaft of mist-filtered light slanted through the fog-tinged window, illuminating dust motes that drifted like ghosts in the air.
Luke's voice broke the stillness again, gentler this time "We'll rest when there's safety. Keep watch, but stay quiet."
Liora nodded, exhaling a breath she'd been holding. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat then straightened, ready to face whatever came. Kairo reached over and pressed a reassuring hand on her shoulder before sliding off to peer through the front's smoky porthole.
Vivy stirred, eyelids fluttering. She sat up slowly, letting her legs fall free before pushing herself into a crouch. Her eyes, still heavy with emotion, flickered toward Luke. Her lips curved in a fragile smile—determination returning.
The Wargon creaked forward, the gentle hum of its engine syncing with the tense rhythm of their hearts. Outside, the fog pressed against the portholes like cold breath, the landscape shifting slowly.
With that, the quintet settled into a vigilant tempo, their breaths measured, their eyes sharp. The Fen's eerie fog glided around them like silent sentinels, and their path ahead was shrouded in uncertainty—their urgency as palpable as the chill in the air.
The Wargon moved with unrelenting determination, its vast sinewed frame sliding along the fen's charted course — one carved in whispering secrecy through half-rotted maps and forgotten war paths. Outside its thick, breathing hide, the Bleakroot Fen stretched on in an endless procession of skeletal trees and fetid mosses, their bodies warped and twisted as if writhing eternally in silent agony. A sluggish fog crept low across the gnarled terrain, coiling like diseased breath across the Wargon's flanks. In the murk beyond, ancient branches clawed at the air like bone fingers craving to reclaim the living.
Inside, silence held for a long while — the kind of silence that hums in the marrow. The kind that breathes down your neck when the world forgets how to make noise.
Luke glanced at his pocket watch. The hands ticked with hollow precision — nightfall had long arrived. He exhaled through his nose, ready to signal the beast to halt, to anchor for a few brief hours. But then—he froze.
His spine straightened before he even turned, the hairs at the nape of his neck rising. A presence — malignant, razor-thin and reeking of old blood — pressed against his back like a dagger poised over flesh. The mist at the rear of the Wargon shimmered — not from light, but from motion. From something within the mist. Something moving.
Luke's head snapped around. His gaze sliced through the haze. His pupils shrank.
No form. Not clearly. But it moved — a twitch, a blur, wrong angles of motion that no natural thing could replicate.
He didn't hesitate.
"Move!" he shouted, his voice sharp, urgent, cutting through the still air like a blade.
He jammed two fingers down onto the Wargon's nape — a signal long practiced, never yet used in this journey. The creature beneath them emitted a low, guttural hum — then roared forward, flesh-grinding gears clunking beneath its armored skin, accelerating with a sudden thrum that jolted the interior.
The floor lurched.
Vivy, Liora, and Kairo reacted instantly. Vivy snapped upright from her lean against the wall, her boots scraping as she slid into a ready crouch, hand already at her crossbow. Her face was sharpened — alert and feral, but confusion knit between her brows.
Liora instinctively gripped the spear beside her, eyes scanning rapidly, lips parting as though words were forming but refused to come. Her braid whipped over her shoulder as the momentum shifted.
Kairo braced with his knee, hand gripping the spine-ridged floor. His other hand went to his side — the dagger, covered in thick veins, pulsed faintly. Just readiness. Just breath held tight in his chest.
Nymei, sitting slumped near the rear, finally lifted its head — eyelids half-mast, face tilted like someone disturbed from the edge of dreams. Its voice, heavy with laziness but tinged with recognition, rose as it turned toward the outside.
"Hey, hey, hey..." Nymei muttered, stretching like a cat before cracking its neck, eyes narrowing as if squinting through the Wargon's flesh. "How far do we need to go to leave this place again?"
Luke kept his eyes locked on the rear, hand still pressed to the Wargon's control node. His voice was calm, but firm. "If we moved as planned — five days. If we don't stop, no sleep, full-speed — three."
Then he paused, his eyes still tracking that shifting presence. His voice lowered, more to himself than anyone.
"No. Maybe even two."
Nymei snorted, its eyes sharpening, mouth stretching into something that wasn't quite a grin. "Then we better make it two," it said as it pushed itself to its feet with a fluidity that suggested its joints weren't entirely human. "'Cause that thing out there… that's the same bastard that always interrupted my sleep."
The air inside the Wargon changed — snapped tight like wire drawn to the breaking point.
Liora's face turned slowly toward Nymei, a look of disbelief etched across her features. Her mouth parted slightly, brow furrowing as if the statement refused to compute. She didn't say anything, but the shock was palpable — like a hand gripping her throat from within.
Vivy, less subtle, exploded toward the wall, one palm slapping it as her other hand gripped the hanging iron chain above for balance. Her eyes flared wide, irises nearly eclipsed by pupil. "What!?" she barked, incredulous, furious. "You knew something was here and didn't say anything?! That it's been following—?!"
Kairo turned to Nymei with a narrow glare, the color drained slightly from his cheeks. His grip around the dagger hardened. A muscle twitched in his jaw before he gave a curt shake of the head, as if trying to discard some building rage. He didn't speak — just planted his feet harder and lowered his stance, preparing for impact.
Luke's expression remained unreadable. Not frozen — calculating. His lips pressed together for a heartbeat before he muttered under his breath, "Fuck..."
He glanced down at the floor, at the groaning flesh of the Wargon beneath their feet. "This is as fast as we can go now," he added louder. "Without stopping."
The Wargon shrieked — not in fear, but in momentum. It surged ahead with blinding speed, steam venting from its sides like exhaled agony. The trees outside blurred into melted shadows, flickering past like dying dreams. The mists thickened, coalescing behind them, writhing and twisting as if something ancient hunted at their heels.
Above them, in the crisscrossed ceiling of the beast's body, the flesh dimly glowed — reacting to the threat with something like instinct. Pulses of light mapped themselves along the arches, as if the Wargon's nerves were communicating in some strange, bioluminescent code.
Inside, tension carved its claws into the very air.
Liora stared down at her trembling hands, slowly balling them into fists.
Vivy paced near the rear, her breath coming harder, faster — like a war drum slowly gaining rhythm. "I hate being hunted," she growled.
Kairo took one last look toward the rear, then stepped beside the wall, dragging a strap down and hooking it across his waist. "Let's hope we can outrun a nightmare."
Luke didn't answer. His eyes were still locked behind them — not blinking.
Whatever it was, it hadn't shown its full form yet. But the they knew it.
The Wargon surged forward, its translucent, veined chassis absorbing the low thrum of tension pulsing from within. A breathless stillness swept across its inner chamber — no one spoke, but every motion was taut, every breath sharp. The mist outside thickened, congealing like curdled milk in the air, pressing against the beast's hide with a suffocating presence.
Inside, the others moved like silent shadows preparing for war.
Kairo sat low, his knees bent and body coiled. His fingers never left the hilt of his dagger, his knuckles pale with pressure. His breath was steady, but his eyes darted constantly, the whites bright against the dim lighting of the Wargon's bioluminescent tendrils.
Liora crouched beside him, spear in hand — no longer just a weapon but an extension of her breathing. Her grip was firm, her brows drawn low, teeth pressing faintly into her bottom lip as she leaned into the rhythm of the Wargon's pulse.
Vivy had taken a post near one of the side panels. Her crossbow was already loaded, the tip gleaming with a faint sheen of alchemical residue. Her gaze was narrowed, tracking the shadows outside as if waiting for them to breathe wrong.
And Nymei… was the first to move.
Its body leaned outward, eye half-lidded as if still too drowsy to care. But in an instant, its pupil blew wide, dilating like a black eclipse. There was a shift in the air — one too sudden, too subtle for normal sight — and then Nymei was gone.
A rush of smoke.
A violent exhale of shadow.
The smoke burst outward, swirling like liquid night through the inner hull of the Wargon. It wrapped every edge and curve before pulling toward the rear, where it condensed like stormclouds being swallowed by a singularity.
Then came the sound.
A screech — primal, ragged — as something surged from the mist outside, tearing forward like hunger given form.
The wargon shook beneath them as it lunged from the fog. The beast — no, the thing — that emerged defied sane geometry. Its body was hunched and massive, vaguely draconic in silhouette, but corrupted — altered — malformed. Two hind legs thundered through the fen's mucky terrain while two arms — too long, too gnarled — hung at unnatural angles. Its flesh was a patchwork of rotting bark, festering muscle, and writhing clusters of mismatched foliage, as if its very existence was stitched from a forest's corpse and a madman's dream.
One of its grotesque arms reached forward, fingers stretching like gnarled branches.
The moment it touched the Wargon's rear, the flesh across its arm detonated — explosions of pus-ridden bark and fresh, raw sinew bursting outward in a cacophony of sickening sound.
Nymei was already there.
Its body absorbed the explosion — or rather, devoured it. The smoke that made up its form sucked in the blast force like air into a collapsing lung, then — with a shriek of compounding pressure — exhaled it all back.
What followed was a sound like thunder rupturing itself.
A massive, air-shattering boom echoed across the swamp as Nymei compacted the explosion into a concentrated mass of kinetic force — a bullet of atmosphere sharpened into oblivion — and fired it from their chest.
The projectile tore through the air, obliterating every sound in its wake, and struck the beast's shoulder. The impact split the creature's bark-flesh in half with a sickening crack, sending slivers of bone and bark spiraling into the mist.
Inside, Vivy stumbled back, her breath caught in her throat. Her eyes widened, not just from the sheer power unleashed — but from what it meant.
Liora's face twisted in stunned horror, her knuckles whitening on the shaft of her spear. She whispered something under her breath, inaudible, then flinched as another screech echoed from outside.
Kairo stood frozen for half a second, until something broke within him — not physically, but internally.
A voice cut through him like a cold whisper beneath skin.
"Oh my... now this is entertaining," came Lalula's voice — feminine, lilting, a blend of laughter and mockery that slithered around his waist like vines drunk on blood.
Then another, a youthful male voice — crisp, sneering, almost bored "What a circus. You're in the middle of a swamp, surrounded by monsters. Honestly, Kairo — only you could end up in such a poetic catastrophe." Lurue.
And then… the oldest voice — gravel dragged across old bark, slow, enduring "The wheel grinds on, and your truth is again delayed. Always delayed." Xuran's tone wasn't disappointment. It was inevitability — as if he had known it would come to this.
Luke gritted his teeth. He didn't look back.
"What the hell's happening back there?!" he barked, voice sharp and tight, thrown over his shoulder like a whip.
From behind, Kairo's voice answered with breathless urgency. "There's a monster! Nymei's holding it off!"
Luke's stomach turned. That wasn't just a monster. That meant him. Or worse — someone behind it. He muttered a low curse under his breath, eyes narrowing as he wrestled with the Wargon's pulse, urging it faster. If this is what I think it is… damn it all, not here, not now.
They had to get out.
Kairo gritted his teeth, one hand twitching around his dagger's hilt. His heartbeat pounded like ritual drums in his ears. But he didn't answer them — not yet. Not while the mist still boiled with violence and Nymei's form drifted through the fog like living dread.
He could feel their presence— awakening.
No longer silent.
And whatever approached from that shrouded waste, it wasn't done yet.
The Wargon pushed forward, faster now, like it too felt the weight of unseen fangs chasing through the mist.
And above them, far beyond the veil of fog, the moon bled pale light like a wound that would not close.
Then — a rush of wind, a distortion of heat and pressure, and Nymei exploded into view, no longer scattered as smoke but compressed into a palm-sized form, hovering mid-air before settling atop one of the spine ridges lining the Wargon's back. Its voice — tinny and echoing with a sleepy lilt — broke the tension.
"Even though I can keep doing this until we get out," Nymei said, "I don't know about that man, though."
Kairo's eyes snapped to her. "Explain. Now."
The miniature form of Nymei flickered, a small coil of mist escaping her cheek as she crossed her arms. "Never seen that guy before. That thing's come after me plenty, always interrupting my damn sleep — but this time there's someone on its head. Don't know who. But I'm telling you, we should take him out."
Liora's voice was taut, uncertain. "He might be the one controlling it..."
Vivy turned her head slowly, brows furrowed in a dark, unreadable expression. She said nothing, her mouth set in a thin line as her eyes locked once again on the creature behind them, now little more than a blur in the mist — a shadow of shape and rage, kept at bay only by Nymei's defenses.
Kairo moved swiftly to the front, gripping onto one of the internal frames of the Wargon as he leaned in toward Luke. "Nymei says there's someone on that monster. Maybe controlling it. Liora thinks the same. What do we do?"
Luke didn't hesitate.
"No," he said sharply, his voice like a blade drawn across stone. "We can't stop. Unless he blocks our path ahead — we do not engage. That thing is a distraction. Or bait. Either way, we take no chances. We leave this fucking place alive."
Kairo stared at him — Luke's back to him, shoulders tensed, posture like tempered iron. There was no hesitation in his voice. No fear. Just grim calculation.
And Kairo understood.
With a sharp breath through his nose, Kairo nodded once. "Understood." He turned and made his way back, ignoring Nymei's fluttering, irritated noise behind him. "We're not taking the shot," he said flatly.
"You're serious?" Nymei's tiny voice rasped.
Vivy tilted her head. "He's right. It's too risky."
Liora clenched her jaw, lowering her spear fractionally. The wind howled outside now — a long, drawn breath from the fen, like the land itself waited to devour them.
The Wargon tore through the night-soaked marsh, mist swirling around its flanks, chased by something too old for names and too hateful to be silenced.
The silence ahead was no comfort.
It only waited to be broken.