Even with his senses sharpened, Ezra barely saw the hawk move.
One moment it was only a smear of shadow above him—wings cutting across the thin, filtered light. The next it was a streak of dark and bone-white feather, the air folding around it as it threaded through the canopy with predatory certainty.
AMP flared.
A thin golden line snapped into existence across his vision, not a suggestion but a verdict—straight through his chest. Numbers bloomed at the edge of his sight, cold and precise.
Angle. Velocity. Impact time measured in fractions of a heartbeat.
Too fast.
There wasn't room for clever. There wasn't even room for fear to fully form.
Ezra's fingers clenched around the stone he'd been idly rolling in his palm—something he'd picked up earlier without thinking, a habit born from restlessness. He twisted his wrist and threw.
AMP locked the movement in and corrected it: a tiny adjustment of degrees, a ridiculous whisper of speed.
[≈ 90 m/s]
The number hit him harder than the wind.
Three hundred kilometers an hour—more than double what any athlete back on Earth could manage. Not with a human arm. Not without tearing ligaments clean off bone.
The stone met the hawk beak-first.
A perfect hit.
Ezra's chest surged with a stupid, hopeful flare of yes—
And then reality crushed it.
The impact didn't shatter anything. It didn't crack the beak. It didn't even send the creature spinning away.
The hawk flinched.
That was all.
Its head snapped aside, feathers ruffling, the line of its dive shifting only a hair's breadth in Ezra's vision.
Not enough.
What the hell is that beak made of?
He jumped.
Mana surged into his legs as he kicked off the branch as hard as he could—straight up into the thick tangle of leaves and half-light.
The hawk roared past beneath him, talons scything down. Wood exploded where his ribs had been a breath ago. Splinters spun outward like shrapnel. The branch shuddered, bark peeling under the violence.
For one heartbeat Ezra was weightless—ten meters above the forest floor, cloak flaring, the world suddenly wide and tilted.
Adrenaline surged so hard it tasted metallic.
This is my first actual battle, he realized, somewhere between terror and giddy awe. Is this what people get hooked on? This… edge?
AMP tried to give him a trajectory, a neat dotted curve showing exactly where he would fall. He ignored it long enough to rip his dagger free.
Below him, the hawk had overshot. It flared its wings and angled up hard, climbing to loop back.
He snapped his arm forward and let AMP correct the throw.
The dagger flashed—steel catching a sliver of light against green—and buried itself into the hawk's left wing.
The blade punched on and lodged in the branch beyond.
Flesh tore. Feathers ripped. The wing half-crumpled with a sound Ezra felt in his teeth more than heard.
The hawk shrieked and tried to climb anyway, furious and stubborn, but its left side dragged uselessly. It began to tumble, flapping hard, losing altitude in drunken lurches.
Ezra's upward momentum died.
Gravity caught him by the ankle and yanked.
He fell toward the branch he'd launched from, cloak snapping around him. For once, he tried to make it look good—knees bent, weight centered, like Evan had drilled into him in a hundred tiny corrections.
AMP quietly suggested where to place his feet.
His heel came down on something soft and slick.
A feather rolled under his boot.
His foot shot sideways.
"MAMA!" Ezra yelled as the world flipped, the word ripped out of him by some stupid, ancient reflex before he could swallow it. He even inadvertently used mana to enhance his vocal chords out of instinct.
He scrabbled for the dagger as he fell past it, fingers brushing the hilt. The blade tore free of the wood instead of catching him, tumbling alongside him as he plunged through leaves and empty air.
His scream hit the forest and came back wrong—echoing between trunks and branches until it sounded like a dozen voices crying at once.
Rycharde's helmeted head snapped up. "What in the hell was that?"
They all heard it—every knight, every horse.
Galwell had his bow half-raised, eyes locked upward, body set like a man expecting the next problem to arrive at speed. "Cub, I'd wager," he said, voice matter-of-fact. "Small and brown—tumbling, not flying. Fell hard."
Evered's fingers tightened on his reins. His gaze stayed up, but his jaw set as if the sound itself offended doctrine. "That did not sound like any cub I've heard."
Oswyn snorted softly, adjusting his grip on the pike across his saddle. "Goes to show you Irriton's pretty spooked. Beasts scream like people, people scream like beasts. Take your pick."
Dynham didn't bother staring into the leaves long enough to get hypnotized by it. He spat to the side and rolled his shoulder like he was shrugging off a bad current. "Reckon it's dead or it's gone. Either way, don't stand gawpin'. Move—before whatever owns that scream comes nosin' in."
Rycharde let the silence hang for the space of a breath, then nodded once, decision made. "Right. Galwell—keep your eyes up. Call anything that moves."
Galwell's bow never fully lowered. "Aye."
Deimos was already at the bear's flank, knife working in efficient, practiced cuts, as if screams in the canopy were just another kind of weather.
"Don't bother too much, these woods have a way to mess with your heads," Deimos spoke as he worked."Gets worse at night."
He was already at the bear's side, knife working with efficient, practiced cuts. Fur parted under steel; steam rose from the opened body in pale curls.
"I'm taking what I can carry," he said, voice steady. "Choice cuts first. This stretch of Irriton isn't bad yet—stray felbeasts, things like this." He jerked his chin at the dead bear. "Further in, it gets quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that means something else is hunting."
He sliced through a tendon in one clean motion, as casually as a man trimming rope.
"Once we hit the meeting site, we make a real camp, eat, and rest," he continued. "After that, we push. Fourteen hours, minimum. No fires. No sleep in the inner Grove unless you want to wake up without your face."
Rycharde shifted the hammer on his shoulder. "Why take so much meat if we can resupply at Anticourt?"
"The meat isn't for us," Deimos said.
He didn't glance up, but his tone sharpened anyway.
"It's bait."
That finally made them all look at him.
Deimos paused and looked into the trees—not the direction the scream had come from, but deeper, as if he saw a memory laid over the present woods.
"The Order uses these woods for training," he added. "And for culling. There are things here that follow blood and fat for miles. It's easier to choose where they come to you than stumble into them while you sleep."
Rycharde grunted once. "I see."
"We'll do as you say," Evered finished, and that was that.
Deimos went back to cutting.
Ezra didn't hit the ground.
He hit a branch first.
It caught him across the ribs and stomach like a badly placed punch, knocking the breath clean out of him. Pain flashed bright and stupid. He bounced, arms flailing, and clawed at the trunk on instinct.
His fingers scraped bark until they found purchase.
Mana flared through him without permission—hardening skin, bracing bone, reinforcing organs. The second impact, when he slammed back into the wood, still jarred him, but it didn't turn him into paste.
For a moment he just clung there, halfway between canopy and forest floor, gasping like a landed fish.
He forced a breath in—shallow at first, then deeper—and eased himself onto the branch, back against the trunk.
"Okay," he muttered. "Ow. But okay."
Mana threaded through the worst of it, numbing bruises, nudging cells to knit faster. His heart, however, was not interested in slowing down. It hammered like it had decided the only acceptable pace was panic.
I should stop getting into a habit of screaming "Mama" when I'm in danger, he thought, equal parts amused and irritated. When the hell did that become a thing?
The habit—MAMA—had started somewhere between the kidnapping attempt and the accidental core explosion. The part of him that was Ezra reached for that word when things went sideways.
Admitting it didn't make it less embarrassing.
He huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh and then immediately winced, because laughing pulled on bruises.
He shifted and peered down through the branches.
From this lower vantage he couldn't see the knights at all—only a mess of trunks and shadow and ferns. Deimos and his party might as well have vanished.
They heard me, he thought. They had to have.
If they investigated, he needed to be gone before their eyes found him.
His injuries were fading quickly under the steady trickle of mana. The shaking in his hands subsided into a manageable tremor.
They should still be nearby, Ezra decided. If they didn't bolt, I've got a window.
He looked up.
The canopy rose above him like layered ceilings, branches overlapping in a way that promised effort.
He smiled anyway.
"Higher, then," he whispered.
He got his feet under him and started up—pushing off one trunk to grab another, using mana in short, controlled bursts to lighten his weight or harden his grip. The trees grew close enough that he could bounce from one to the next—kick, grab, pull, repeat—like climbing a ladder designed by someone who hated symmetry.
By the time he broke back into higher branches where light was a little better and the air moved, his mood had shifted.
The fear and pain were still there.
Underneath them, something like exhilaration hummed.
This is what freedom feels like, he thought. Not castle courtyards and supervised "exploration." This.
He paused on a broad limb and looked around.
The Grove stretched out in every direction, massive trunks and tangled green. Somewhere not too far ahead, Deimos and the knights were still cutting their way through it.
Ezra's attention snagged on the hawk.
Its broken shape lay wedged in a fork of branches lower down, wing torn, head lolling at an ugly angle. Up close it looked even more wrong—too big for its frame, bones too dense, feathers edged.
The animals here are huge, he thought, turning slowly. Not just a little bigger. Oversized.
Higher oxygen could do it. Back home there were theories about giant insects in the Paleozoic because the air was richer—bigger bodies, better gas exchange—
He frowned.
But if it was just the air, Bren's animals should look like this too. They didn't. The horses were big, yes, but not four-meter-wingspan goshawk big.
AMP flickered when his gaze settled on an oak-like trunk nearby.
Its internal model warped around the tree, lines bending in subtle wrong ways. The numbers it offered didn't quite match anything he knew.
So something's different here. Not globally. Locally.
Environmental? Magical? Both?
He plucked a leaf and turned it between his fingers. The veins were laid out in a pattern that didn't match any oak or beech he'd ever seen, and when AMP tried to overlay it, the edges picked up that faint metallic shimmer again.
"I'd kill for a microscope," he muttered.
His pack was already heavy. He couldn't start filling it with bark and insects, no matter how much he wanted to. For now he'd have to rely on memory—and maybe one small trophy pressed flat somewhere later.
Something crawled across the bark near his hand.
Ezra froze.
An ant.
Except… not.
Its body plan was close—three segments, six legs—but its mandibles curved forward like a tiny hooked beak. Faint ridges ran along its carapace that looked disturbingly like gills.
"What are you?" he murmured.
The ant snapped its beak-mandibles at nothing and scuttled away into a fissure in the bark.
Ezra watched it go, filed it away as new weird thing number forty-seven, and dragged his focus back to what mattered.
The knights were moving again.
He felt them before he saw them—distant hoofbeats, the rhythmic clink of armor, all filtered through the trees. Deimos must have finished carving the bear.
"Right," Ezra whispered. "Back to work."
He set off, shadowing them from above, branch to branch, keeping just far enough back that he had time to adjust if they stopped.
After a while, something broke the pattern of trunks ahead.
A stone pillar rose out of the earth, maybe three men stacked high—too smooth to be natural, pared down with deliberate intent. Runes crawled up its sides, half-hidden by moss and lichen.
And around its base, the forest floor changed.
Grass stopped abruptly in a perfect ring, five meters across. The soil inside was bare and slightly darker, as if it had been burned a long time ago and then forgotten.
Ezra's eyes narrowed.
AMP pulsed and threw a thin outline around the circle, clean and bright.
[Radius: 5.00 m. Deviation: < 0.01 m.]
Perfect.
On a forest floor that should have been messy and uneven, it was an exact, manufactured curve.
That's not natural, Ezra thought. That's a switch someone built into the earth.
The knights drew their horses up short as they approached.
Before anyone could speak, a shadow dropped from the branches above the bare patch.
A man landed in the circle without so much as bending his knees.
He wore leathers and a long coat cut in the same style as Deimos's hunter gear, but darker, more worn. A coiled whip rested in his hand like an extension of his arm. His eyes swept the party in one quick pass—assessing weapons, stances, threat.
"The creed," he barked.
The still air took his voice and carried it flat and sharp.
Deimos nudged his horse forward one step and raised his right hand, palm out.
He spoke in a low, steady cadence, not like a man saying something, but like a man unlocking something carved into him.
The sun bears witness to our oath; in darkness I bear my blade and my vows.
By ancient charge I am called. I answer with steel and spell.
I am the guardsman of the day. I am thesentryof the night.
The sword of the common folk, the dagger to the hearts of hellspawn.
The warden of the rift, the steward of the abyss.
I pledge my life—my steel and my spell—
until the Rift's days are ended, or my own days are come.
As he spoke, something flickered in his palm.
Not fire. Not ice. Not wind or earth.
It was light that couldn't decide what it wanted to be—bright white to deep black, oscillating through shades that hurt to look at directly.
That's not elemental Ezra thought, pulse quickening. That's… something else.
Below, the Blackfyre knights exchanged bewildered looks. Even Deimos's posture held a thread of tension, like he didn't love that this display was necessary.
The man in the circle relaxed by a fraction.
"Deimos," he said. "About time."
He eyed the bear meat lashed to one of the spare horses, then let his gaze sweep each knight in turn, weighing them.
"I see you've brought help," he went on, whip hand resting lightly at his side. "Good. We'll need all of it."
Ezra shifted on his branch above, heart ticking faster.
AMP drew thin lines around the new hunter—whip length, stance, center of gravity—then flicked back to Deimos's palm as the strange radiance faded.
Shadow Walkers, Ezra thought, a thrill tightening his chest. Finally.
He leaned forward as far as he dared, careful not to rustle leaves, not wanting to miss a single word.