The forest felt different today.
Nana couldn't explain it—not in words that would make sense to anyone else. It was just a feeling. A shift in the air, a change in the quality of the silence. Like the trees themselves were holding their breath.
She'd come back to the same outskirts forest where she'd found the first camera. Same trail. Same dense canopy that swallowed the sunlight. Same eerie quiet that had unsettled her before.
This time she'd brought her motorcycle and parked at the edge, engine off, and sat for a moment listening to nothing.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Zayne:
**Zayne: Be careful today. I'm going to be at the research lab all afternoon looking into something. Call me if anything feelswrong.**
Nana smiled slightly and typed back:
**Me: Something always feels wrong in this forest. That's why I keep coming back. 💕**
**Zayne: That's not reassuring.**
**Me: It wasn't meant to be. Go study your aether cores, Dr. Brooding. I'll be fine.**
She pocketed her phone and checked her equipment. Gun loaded. Spare magazines. Communication device. Everything standard.
Zayne had been working overtime lately—more than his already demanding hospital schedule. Coming home late with circles under his eyes and that distant, calculating expression she'd learned meant his brain was working on something he wasn't ready to share yet.
She didn't push. They'd both been carrying secrets from each other—hers about Avalon, his about whatever he was researching. They'd find their way to full honesty eventually. They always did.
But today wasn't about secrets. Today was a routine solo patrol. Low-level Wanderer activity reported by civilians. Simple. Clean. In and out.
Nana grabbed her gun and headed into the trees.
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The first twenty minutes were uneventful.
She moved through the forest with practiced ease, her hunter instincts scanning for threats while her conscious mind wandered. The surveillance cameras—she glanced up at the branches occasionally, checking. Some were still there. The ones Zayne had photographed. Others had vanished, like the first one she'd found.
Someone was still watching. Selectively removing evidence when they thought she'd noticed.
Playing a game with her.
Nana didn't like being played with.
She was scanning a cluster of undergrowth when her hunter watch beeped. Wanderer activity. Close. She adjusted her grip on her gun and moved toward the signal.
Three low-level creatures. Same as last time—shimmering, unstable, barely more than concentrated energy shaped vaguely like something predatory. They were clustered near a fallen log, clawing at the bark with mindless aggression.
Nana holstered her gun.
No need. Not for these.
She walked up casually and kicked the first one square in the chest. The impact sent it flying backward, dissolving before it hit the ground. The second one turned toward her—too slow. Her boot connected with its midsection and it crumpled like paper.
The third one tried to flee. Nana caught it with a kick to what passed for its back, slamming it into the earth hard enough to crater the soft ground. It dissolved on impact.
Three Wanderers. Eight seconds. No injuries.
She pulled out her phone and checked the time. Still had an hour before she needed to head back.
As she turned to continue deeper into the forest, something caught her attention.
The surveillance camera. One of the ones that had been there during Zayne's visit.
It was blinking.
Not a steady indicator light—the kind Zayne had photographed. This was different. A rapid, rhythmic pulse. Like a signal. Like someone on the other end was actively operating it.
Watching her right now.
Nana stared at it for a long moment, her jaw tightening. Then she deliberately turned her back on it and kept walking.
She didn't have to wait long.
The Wanderers came from nowhere.
Not the low-level creatures she'd been dispatching all morning. These were bigger. Denser. Their energy signatures burned hotter, their movements faster and more coordinated than anything she'd encountered on a routine patrol.
Two of them emerged from behind trees on either side of the trail simultaneously—a flanking maneuver. Deliberate. Planned.
Wanderers didn't plan. They were mindless creatures driven by instinct and hunger. They didn't coordinate attacks. They didn't set up ambushes.
Unless someone was directing them.
Nana didn't have time to process that thought before the first one lunged.
She dropped her gun—too close for firearms—and met it with her bare hands. Her aether core flared blue, enhancing her strength as she caught the creature mid-leap and redirected its momentum, using its own force to slam it into the ground.
The impact cracked the earth beneath them. The Wanderer thrashed, claws raking at her forearms, but she held it pinned. One knee on its chest. Both hands locked around its unstable energy core.
She squeezed.
The creature dissolved beneath her grip, dust and sparkles scattering in the dim forest light.
The second one was already on her before the first had fully dissipated. Nana rolled, coming up in a crouch just in time to avoid its claws passing through the space where her head had been.
Bigger than the first. Faster. Its movements had an almost intelligent quality—adjusting, adapting, learning from its predecessor's failure.
Nana kicked it. Hard. The force of the impact sent a shockwave rippling through the undergrowth, bending nearby saplings and scattering leaves in a burst of displaced air.
The Wanderer staggered but didn't dissolve. It recovered faster than anything she'd fought in months and came at her again—claws extended, energy crackling.
She caught it by the throat—if it could be called a throat—and slammed it into a tree trunk. Once. Twice. Three times until the creature's energy destabilized and it finally burst apart into dust.
Nana stood there, breathing hard, her forearms scratched and bleeding slightly where the first creature's claws had caught her.
Stronger. They were getting stronger.
She thought about Tara—her fellow hunter, her friend. Tara who'd come back from her last solo mission with deep claw marks across her chest that had required twelve stitches. Nero with a broken arm and cracked ribs from the same encounter.
Both of them injured badly. Both of them fighting the same kinds of creatures Nana had just dispatched with her bare hands.
The disparity was impossible to ignore.
Tara was a skilled hunter. Class A. Trained for years. She could fight. She could survive. But the Wanderers that had nearly killed her were the same level of creatures Nana could defeat without breaking a sweat.
What was wrong?
The question that had been nagging at Nana for weeks crystallized into something sharper, something that cut.
Was something wrong with her friends? Were they just not strong enough?
No. That wasn't fair. Every hunter in the Association trained relentlessly. They were among the strongest, most capable people in the world. They couldn't be a hunter if they were weak—the training alone weeded out anyone who wasn't exceptional.
So it wasn't them.
It was her.
She was the anomaly. The outlier. The one who could do things no other hunter could do, who could fight creatures that injured or killed others without sustaining serious harm herself.
Something about her was fundamentally different. Something that went beyond training or experience or natural talent.
Something she still didn't fully understand, even after Zayne's examination, even after the discovery of the surveillance cameras, even after everything.
Nana looked down at her hands—the hands that had just killed two enhanced Wanderers bare-handed—and felt something cold settle in her stomach.
What am I?
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She decided to head back.
The mission was done. The Wanderers were cleared. She'd accomplished what she'd come here for, and the unsettling feeling of being watched—of being tested—was making her skin crawl in a way that had nothing to do with the forest's natural eeriness.
Nana turned toward the trail that led back to where she'd parked her motorcycle and started walking.
She was maybe five minutes from the parking area when the big one appeared.
It dropped from the canopy above—a massive Wanderer, easily three times the size of the ones she'd fought earlier. Its energy burned white-hot, distorting the air around it in waves of heat shimmer. Its movements were deliberate and fast, nothing like the mindless aggression of standard creatures.
This one was different. This one felt... purposeful.
Nana barely had time to register its presence before it struck.
The creature's claws caught her across the left side, raking through her jacket and into the flesh beneath. The force of the blow sent her sideways—not just staggering but launching, her body leaving the ground entirely as the impact drove her toward the edge of the hiking trail.
Pain exploded across her ribs. Something cracked—she felt it more than heard it, a deep grinding sensation that stole her breath.
She hit the ground rolling, instinct taking over as her body tried to recover from the blow. But the trail's edge was right there—the rocky cliff that dropped sharply down into a ravine below.
Nana's momentum carried her over.
For one stomach-dropping second she was airborne, the forest canopy above her and rough stone rushing up below. Then she hit the slope—not the bottom, just the rocky face of the cliff—and the impact drove the air from her lungs in a violent cough.
Blood. She tasted blood. Coughed it up—bright and red, spattering against the grey stone beneath her.
Broken rib. Definitely broken. Maybe two.
Nana lay there for a moment, gasping, her vision swimming. The cliff face was steep but not vertical—she could climb back up if she could get her body to cooperate.
She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. Blood dripped from her mouth, from the gash on her side where the Wanderer's claws had torn through. Every breath sent fire through her chest.
Above her, she could hear the massive Wanderer crashing through the undergrowth at the trail's edge. Coming down after her.
Move. She had to move.
Nana started climbing. Hands finding holds in the rough stone, feet searching for purchase on the slope. The pain was enormous—each movement pulled at her broken ribs, sending waves of agony through her torso that made her vision white out at the edges.
She was maybe three meters up the cliff face when the Wanderer appeared below her, having found its own way down the slope. It was still massive. Still burning with that unnaturally intense energy. Still moving with that unsettling purposefulness.
It lunged.
Nana kicked off the cliff face, launching herself sideways to avoid the creature's reach. She landed on a narrow ledge—barely wide enough to stand on—and pressed her back against the rock, gun drawn, bleeding and breathing hard.
The Wanderer turned its attention to her, and for just a moment, something strange happened.
Its energy flickered. Destabilized. Like something external had momentarily interrupted its power source.
Then it stabilized and lunged again.
Nana shot it—three rounds, center mass. The bullets disrupted its energy enough to make it stagger, but didn't dissolve it. She fired again. And again. The creature kept coming, slower now but still advancing, still driven by that purposeful aggression that no normal Wanderer possessed.
She was running out of ammunition.
Nana holstered the gun and braced herself. When the creature lunged again she met it head-on—both hands catching its claws, her aether core blazing blue as she poured every ounce of strength she had into holding it back.
The force of the impact sent a shockwave rippling outward. Stone cracked beneath her feet. The ledge trembled.
With a scream that was more fury than fear, Nana drove the creature downward—slamming it into the ground with everything she had. The impact was enormous, the earth cratering beneath the force, and the Wanderer's energy finally destabilized completely.
It dissolved. Dust and light and the fading echo of something that had almost killed her.
Nana stood over the remains, chest heaving, blood still dripping from her wounds. She was shaking—not from fear but from the aftermath of adrenaline, from the pain she'd been ignoring, from the sheer intensity of what she'd just survived.
"Backup," she muttered through gritted teeth. "I definitely need backup now."
She turned to look for a way back up the cliff—
And stopped.
There, partially hidden behind a section of overgrown rock face, was a door.
An iron door.
Old. Rusted. Almost completely invisible beneath layers of moss, dead leaves, and decades of accumulated debris. If the Wanderer fight hadn't sent her tumbling down this specific section of the cliff, if she hadn't been looking for handholds in exactly this spot, she never would have seen it.
It was set directly into the rock, flush with the cliff face, as if it had been built into the stone itself. No handle on the outside—just a seam where metal met rock, barely visible beneath the rust and growth.
Nana stared at it.
An iron door. In the middle of a cliff face. In a forest that was full of military surveillance cameras and increasingly powerful Wanderers that seemed to be specifically targeting her.
"What the hell is this?" she whispered.
She reached out—one bloody hand hovering over the rusted surface—
The second Wanderer hit her from behind.
She hadn't heard it coming. Hadn't sensed it. It had been hiding somewhere in the shadows of the ravine, waiting for the right moment, and it struck with a force that drove her forward into the iron door with enough impact to shatter the rust-weakened metal.
The door didn't open.
It collapsed inward.
The entire section of cliff face gave way as the ancient iron buckled and broke, stone and debris cascading around Nana as she was propelled forward through the gap by the force of the Wanderer's attack.
For one brief, disorienting second, she registered the feeling of falling—not down the cliff but through it, into something beyond the rock, beyond the forest, beyond anything she'd encountered on the surface.
Then her head struck something hard.
The world went white.
Then black.
Then nothing at all.
When consciousness eventually returned—if it returned—it would not bring the familiar aches of a hunter who'd taken a bad fall.
It would bring something worse.
Something much, much worse.
Because on the other side of that iron door, in the space carved out beneath the forest floor where no civilian would ever stumble, where no hunter patrol would ever reach—
The nightmare wasn't waiting.
It was already running.
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To be continued.