Chapter 4 -

  The forest went still and quiet.

  Not the quiet of safety, just the kind that settled when something had decided to wait.

  Coleen felt it. A pressure at the edges of her awareness, like the woods were holding their breath. She lifted a hand instinctively, fingers curling as if to signal wait, but the moment was already breaking.

  Two shapes burst from the brush.

  They were wolves, but larger than any animal had a right to be. Their shoulders rose nearly to a man’s chest, muscles shifting beneath coarse fur, yellow eyes sharp with hunger and something colder. They didn’t snarl. They didn’t rush.

  They watched.

  Mikel stepped forward, dagger already in hand.

  “Get ready,” he said quietly. “Anything you’ve got.”

  Around them, the rest of the survivors, nearly a dozen figures pressed close together, scrambled. Branches were snapped free. Weapons that were picked up from the bus ambush appeared in shaking hands. Someone whispered a prayer under their breath. Someone else swore, voice cracking.

  Someone near the back gasped under their breath, fingers trembling as they tightened around a broken branch. Another survivor shifted closer without realizing it, shoulders brushing as the space between them collapsed.

  Rod moved to the front beside Mikel, gripping the short sword he’d taken from one of the fallen attackers. His hands were stiff, grip too tight, but he didn’t retreat.

  “Branches!” Coleen shouted. “Big ones, raise them up! Make yourself a target too large to be attacked!”

  People obeyed unevenly. Some lifted their makeshift weapons high, trying to look larger than they felt. Others hesitated, glancing around as if waiting for permission to panic.

  Colin bent and tore a thick limb from the undergrowth, holding it like a staff. His stance settled without him thinking about it, feet apart, weight centered. Grandpa Dan’s training surfaced on instinct, even as his pulse thundered in his ears.

  Paul wasn’t moving.

  He crouched low, clutching a branch to his chest like a shield, breath stuttering as if it couldn’t decide whether to keep going. One of the wolves noticed immediately. Its head tilted, attention narrowing.

  Shelby saw it.

  Later, she wouldn’t remember deciding anything, only that Paul’s name ripped out of her throat as she ran.

  The wolf lunged.

  Shelby slammed into Paul, knocking him flat as jaws snapped shut inches above where his head had been. Dirt and leaves sprayed. Paul screamed, not in pain, but in raw terror, and something in him finally broke loose.

  She dragged him up, nearly losing her footing, and they staggered back toward the others as Mikel surged forward.

  The wolves paced now, circling the line, testing. Hackles rose. Teeth showed.

  Someone stumbled.

  A man Coleen didn’t know caught his foot on an exposed root and went down hard, the breath punched from his lungs. Panic rippled outward, someone shouted his name, someone else backed away too fast.

  That was enough.

  The wolves attacked.

  One launched straight for Mikel.

  Light flared around his arm, sharp, white-blue, and he met the leap head-on.

  “Power Thrust!”

  The dagger struck deep as he rolled with the impact, driving again and again until the wolf collapsed in a heap, and its body went still.

  The second wolf sprang toward the fallen man.

  Colin reacted without thinking.

  He thrust the staff upward, catching the wolf mid-leap and twisting hard, using its own momentum to slam it sideways into a massive tree. The impact cracked through the forest.

  Rod was there a heartbeat later. He stabbed, once, twice, grimacing as the blade met resistance. Colin brought the staff down on its head with everything he had.

  The wolf collapsed.

  For a moment, no one moved.

  The forest rang with harsh breathing. Someone laughed once, short, hysterical, before clapping a hand over their mouth. Another survivor slumped to the ground, legs giving out now that the danger seemed over.

  “Anyone hurt?” the young woman in scrubs from the bus asked immediately, already moving through the group. She didn’t wait for answers, hands quick as she checked arms and shoulders, pressing where she found blood.

  Coleen forced herself to keep scanning the tree line.

  “If you’re looking for drops,” Mikel said, already kneeling beside the corpse, “there won’t be any.”

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  Coleen blinked. “What?”

  He worked quickly, practiced hands opening the body with precise movements. “Regular animals don’t pop. Only Manaborn or Corrupted beasts, and they'll also have a crystal core. These are just wolves.”

  Colin swallowed, chest still heaving. “No drops, whatever that means. So… just meat and hide?”

  “Exactly. Harvest the body, nothing else is worth taking,” he said as he made a small bundle from the wolf pelt and a few pieces of meat he was able to harvest.

  “What’s that about crystal cores? I’ve never heard about that before,” Coleen asked.

  “Well, it’s simply a core made of crystal. Every creature has one. The size is determined by how powerful the creature was,” Mikel instructed.

  Coleen committed it to memory immediately.

  Drops from the kill.

  Crystals from the body.

  Understanding settled in, rules, patterns, something she could hold onto. Around her, the group reacted unevenly. A few leaned in, listening intently. Others turned away, suddenly exhausted. One man argued in a low voice that they should leave now, while a woman snapped back that they needed food first.

  Coleen’s shoulders loosened, just a fraction.

  That was when the brush behind them exploded.

  The third wolf was enormous. It also has a faint purplish aura coming from it.

  It hit like a battering ram.

  Biting at Colin, Mikel shoved him aside, the force knocking him off balance as jaws closed around Mikel’s torso instead. Blood sprayed as the beast slammed him into the ground, the crushing weight driving the air from his lungs.

  “Corrupted,” Mikel snarled, the word torn out between breaths.

  Someone screamed.

  Coleen didn’t hesitate.

  She grabbed Mikel's fallen dagger and ran.

  The wolf reared, towering over her, too fast, too strong. She barely had time to sidestep the wolf as it came down, but the maneuver put her in the right position, and she drove the blade forward with everything she had, straight into its eye, and back to pierce its brain.

  The beast collapsed.

  A strange pressure rippled through the air.

  Pop.

  Light scattered like dust caught in sunlight.

  A chainmail shirt fell to the forest floor, appearing from nowhere.

  For a heartbeat, no one understood what they were seeing.

  Then Colin was at Mikel’s side, hands slick with blood, heart pounding as he tried to make sense of the damage. Mikel’s eyes found him.

  “Town,” he rasped. “Find… Renin…”

  Then his breath left him- and didn’t come back.

  No one spoke.

  Some of the others drifted away instinctively, unable to watch. A few stayed, frozen, staring as if waiting for him to move again.

  ***

  They buried him beneath the trees.

  There were no words worth saying. Only the scrape of earth, the dull thud of soil, the quiet weight of what had been lost. When it was done, the space he left behind felt wrong, too open, too undefined.

  An older woman knelt near the edge of the clearing, bowing her head once before helping gather fallen branches. Her movements were slow, deliberate, as if refusing to let the moment pass without respect.

  They divided what little there was. They had taken belongings from Mikel after he passed, whatever they thought would be useful. Coleen had argued, at first, but Rod said how Mikel had wanted to help, and he can keep helping by letting us use his stuff. She reluctantly agreed.

  Colin pulled the chainmail over his head, the weight settling against his shoulders like something earned and unwanted. Rod took the sword, jaw clenched tight. Coleen fastened Mikel’s belt around her waist, the leather worn smooth by someone else’s life. As her hand reached the hilt of the dagger, she gripped it hard, and made an internal vow: This world will not beat me!

  Around them, the group shifted, some watching her now, others avoiding her gaze, a few already arguing in hushed voices about what came next.

  One of the larger men adjusted the packs without comment, redistributing weight and tightening straps where he could. Coleen hadn’t noticed when he’d started, only that things were suddenly more ordered than they had been a moment ago.

  She looked up as he finished, catching his eye for a brief moment before he moved on to check another survivor, then stepped back into place like it had always been his role.

  When they finally moved on, the forest closed behind them.

  And nothing felt simple anymore.

  —