The gnawing emptiness in his stomach was a universal language, he supposed.
A misery shared by all living things, not some exclusive torment reserved for him. Was there some pathetic comfort to be found in that? In being just another starving creature? If there was, he sure as hell couldn't find it.
No, what truly sent a chill crawling up his spine wasn't the hunger. It was the silence. The utter, absolute, and profoundly unnatural lack of anything trying to sink its fangs into his flesh.
Why?
Why was the unnerving peace more terrifying than an open threat?
Because his very soul screamed the fundamental truth of this world. In the marrow of his bones, he knew the rule.
Eat or be eaten. Kill or be killed.
That was the unbreakable contract.
So, for the predators of this forest to completely ignore a walking, talking, and undeniably easy meal—a scrawny, pathetic looking target practically begging to be torn apart—it didn't compute. The equation was wrong. The only logical conclusion was that the mistake wasn't with the world.
It was with him.
He'd screwed up. He'd made some sort of fatal misstep, taken a wrong turn somewhere down the line.
——Which was, of course, an absolutely moronic thought.
Lacerta: ["Haaa.... A wrong turn? That would emphasize that there is a 'correct way' to go, at least..."]
What a joke. This was a damn forest! An endless, sprawling sea of identical trees. There were no paths, no signs, no 'turns' to take! You just walked—or in his case, stumbled—forward.
Crouching over the beast—no, the remains of the beast—a single, paralyzing thought seized him. The smell of iron and viscera, a thick, coppery miasma, clung to the humid air, but that wasn't the problem. The problem was… how? How was he supposed to turn this gruesome testament to what was a life violently extinguished into something edible?
With my bare hands... well....
The image flashed through his mind: fingers slick with gore, tearing flesh from bone like some feral creature of the woods. A surefire way to be marked as a monster by anyone who wasn't already trying to kill him on sight. A terrible, terrible first impression.
He'd spent too long deliberating. Precious seconds, bled away by indecision. A fatal flaw. A mistake. And the price for that mistake was—
SNAP—
A single, sharp sound. A twig under a heavy boot. Then another. And another. A discordant symphony of snapping branches and rustling leaves, growing closer, louder, undeniably plural. They were coming. They had caught up.
Dammit, dammit, dammit! I should have just done it! Who cares what I looked like! Dead is a much worse look than dirty!
Instinct overrode intellect. Lacerta's body moved before his mind could issue a formal command, launching him backward, away from the corpse and into the welcoming embrace of the forest's deep shadows. He became another patch of darkness amongst the many, his breath held tight in his chest, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs.
——And soon enough, the verdant curtain of the forest was torn asunder.
A crude blade sliced through a screen of dangling ivy, and a man stepped through the violation. Then another, and another, until a brutish assembly of several men materialized in the clearing, their faces grim, their hands clutching worn steel.
Bandit: ["Tch… Why the hell's the boss got us trekking through this damn place for one scrawny brat? With all due respect, he's gotta know how damn dangerous the Buddheim Jungle is… 'specially with them folk around."]
The grumble came from a burly man, his words a low growl aimed at the back of the man in front—the clear leader of this pack.
The leader, a man whose grey hair and a vicious scar cleaving one eye spoke of countless bloody days, clicked his tongue in annoyance. He didn't even grant the man a glance.
???: ["And what of it? Nothing we can do. We stay out of the Shudrak's affairs, and they stay out of ours. Simple. Unless they're lookin' for a war, and I don't think they are."]
Bandit: ["Ah… well, if you say so, but Glenn…"]
Glenn: ["Hrn.. told y'not to call me that while workin' you know... but I'll let y'get away with it this time. As for the brat… who knows. The big man doesn't tell me a damn thing, just that we're to find him and——"]
His good eye, a chip of cold granite, narrowed. His gaze locked onto something ahead, something that made the air itself seem to freeze solid around his unsaid words.
Bandit: ["...Boss—?"]
Glenn: ["Stop."]
The word was not shouted. It was a low, guttural command, yet it carried the weight of absolute law. All movement, all sound, all breathing from the group ceased in an absolute instant—
The forest, once a chorus of their clumsy approach, fell utterly, terrifyingly silent.
Glenn's single eye locked onto the ravaged corpse of the beast—its belly split wide, entrails strewn like grotesque offerings across the forest floor. The gore itself didn't faze him; it was the implication, the unspoken truth carved into the carnage, that made his jaw tighten.
Glenn: ["...Shit."]
A strangled noise escaped one of the bandits behind him—not a word, just a sharp intake of breath, the sound of a man realizing death had brushed too close. The others stood frozen, their faces painted not with disgust, but with the pallid hue of fear. The kind that seeped into bones, slow and inevitable.
Glenn: ["That stupid, reckless brat... somehow had to go and piss right in the den of one of those things."]
His fingers curled around the hilt of his weapon behind his back, knuckles whitening—yet he didn't draw. Not yet.
Glenn: ["We're retreating."]
One of the bandits—stupid or desperate—opened his mouth.
Bandit: ["Boss, the big man'll—"]
Glenn: ["Tsck... what he'll do to us is a mercy compared to what happens if we stay. You all know that."]
His eye flicked back to the corpse, the unspoken thing that had done this lurking just beyond the trees.
Glenn: ["The brat's as good as dead. Whatever sick game the boss was playin'—not our problem anymore. Now move."]
As if possessed by a singular, unified instinct, the pack of bandits reversed their charge, their forms dissolving into the oppressive greenery with a speed that defied their ragged appearances.
Silence, thick and heavy, descended once more.
Only then did Lacerta allow the breath he hadn't realized he was holding to escape his lungs—a shaky, shallow thing. The tension drained from his muscles, leaving behind a void filled with gnawing uncertainty.
How would he have fared? Were those wretched figures the dregs of this world's warriors, or was he, in his amnesiac state, so laughably weak that even such scum could pose a threat?
The questions coiled in his gut, venomous and unanswered.
Lacerta: ["...Not worth the risk. More importantly—"]
A deeper unease prickled at the back of his neck, cold and instinctual. It wasn't just the obvious gap in his memory; it was their words.
They had seen something in him, named something he didn't recognize, and that unknown seed, planted in the soil of his ignorance, blossomed into a chilling foreboding.
—The only sane choice was to leave. Now.
Yes, to turn away from this ominous place was the logical, the rational—
—Crack.
Not a branch. Something heavier. Much heavier. The sound of a tree trunk sundered not by an axe, but by sheer, reckless mass moving at impossible velocity.
His thoughts, still clinging to the concept of 'rational,' were utterly obliterated.
Lacerta: ["——!?"]
There was no time to process, to turn, to even breathe. The world compressed into a single point of catastrophic impact.
An unimaginable force, a moving mountain of flesh and fury, slammed into his side.
The sensation was not of being hit, but of the very concept of 'standing' being violently erased. The air was punched from his lungs, his vision strobing white and black as his body became a projectile, torn from the earth and hurled through the jungle.
He carved a brutal trench through the undergrowth, a ragdoll as if something impossible had struck him, before his flight was savagely concluded by a colossal tree trunk.
The sound of the impact was a sickening, wet crunch of wood and bone, a thunderclap that echoed the end of something. The ancient tree, a silent witness to centuries, shuddered violently, a spiderweb of fractures exploding up its base from the point where his broken form had smashed against it.