The man started begging. Full sentences at first, then just fragments, then just the word please repeated until it didn't sound like a word anymore.
It didn't help.
The scream that followed was the kind that didn't sound human by the end of it. It started high and kept going higher, tearing through the grey trees and bouncing off every trunk until the whole forest was full of it, until it was impossible to tell where the scream ended and the echo began.
Then it stopped.
The silence after was worse than the scream.
Connor was behind the tree. Both palms flat against the bark. Not moving. Not thinking. Just existing in the smallest possible way, like maybe if he took up less space the thing out there wouldn't notice him.
Diego had his hands so hard over his ears his knuckles had gone pale. His eyes were shut. His lips were moving slightly, no sound coming out, which for Diego was something nobody had ever witnessed before and nobody wanted to be witnessing now.
Zhang had slid down the trunk until he was basically sitting on the roots, both hands still over his eyes, his whole body pulled inward like he was trying to become a smaller version of himself.
Andre hadn't moved at all.
That was the scariest part. Andre, who laughed at everything, who had been unbothered by an entire fantasy world landing on him, who had said hm to a war axe strapped to his back — Andre was completely, totally still. Both hands over his mouth. Eyes wide and fixed on nothing. Breathing through his nose in slow careful increments like he was rationing it.
Out in the dark, the figure moved.
Unhurried. The sound of its robes dragging across the forest floor was low and continuous, like something being erased. Its footsteps didn't crunch the way theirs did. They landed heavy and final, each one settling into the earth like a period at the end of a sentence.
It was moving away.
None of them moved for a very long time after the sound stopped.
Connor's glasses had fogged from his own breathing. He didn't fix them. He just stood there with the bark against his back and the cold in his lungs and the sound of what had just happened still sitting somewhere in his chest where it was going to stay for a while.
Zhang's voice came out first. Barely a whisper. "Connor."
"Yeah."
"I want to go home."
A beat.
"Yeah," Connor said. "Me too."
Nobody moved.
Then a branch snapped.
Close. Too close. Somewhere just beyond the tree line to their left, something shifted its weight and the forest floor gave a single sharp crack that cut through the silence like a gunshot.
All four of them looked at each other.
Nobody said anything.
Nobody needed to.
They ran.
Not organized running. Not the kind with a plan or a direction. Pure animal running, the kind that happens below thought, where the body just decides and the brain finds out afterward. Connor's robes caught under his feet immediately and he nearly went down, caught himself on a root, kept going. His hat flew off somewhere in the first ten seconds and he did not stop for it. Zhang was faster than any of them had any reason to expect, his shadow rogue armor doing exactly what it was designed for, his footsteps finding gaps between roots with an instinct that wasn't his. Diego's white and gold paladin plate rattled with every stride, loud and rhythmic and deeply unhelpful for not being noticed. Andre just ran, long legs eating up the ground in huge strides, his axe bouncing against his back, his face doing nothing except forward.
The trees blurred past on both sides.
The path, what was left of it, twisted and forked and the four of them stayed together purely by accident, by the fact that nobody wanted to be the one who went a different direction and ended up alone in this forest with that thing.
Behind them, nothing chased them.
That was almost worse.
Because they could hear it. Not footsteps. Not movement. Just presence. The way the forest sounded different in the direction they'd come from, heavier and closer to silence, like the air itself was being displaced by something too large to move quietly and too patient to bother trying.
"LEFT," Connor screamed.
Nobody asked why. They went left.
The path dropped suddenly, a sharp downward slope that sent Connor stumbling, his glasses sliding down his nose, his arms windmilling. Zhang grabbed the back of his robes without breaking stride and kept him upright. They hit the bottom running.
"IS IT BEHIND US," Diego screamed.
"DON'T LOOK BACK," Andre screamed.
"I WASN'T GOING TO—"
"YOU WERE ABOUT TO—"
"I WASN'T—"
A sound rolled through the trees behind them. Not a yawn this time. Lower than that. Quieter. The sound of something that had noticed something small moving through its forest and found it mildly interesting.
All four of them ran faster without discussing it.
Connor's lungs were burning. His legs had stopped sending useful information to his brain and were just operating on emergency protocols. His staff bounced against his back with every step. The Codex box flickered in and out of his vision as he ran, trying to display something, and he ignored it completely because whatever it had to say could wait until he was not about to become a footnote in whatever this place's history was.
The trees began to thin slightly. Not much. But enough.
"THERE," Zhang said, pointing.
Ahead, between two massive trunks, a gap. Wider than the path had been. Lighter, somehow, the grey of the sky visible through it in a way it hadn't been for what felt like hours.
They hit it at full speed.
All four of them burst through the gap together and collapsed on the other side, hitting the ground in various states of disaster. Connor went down on both knees. Diego rolled. Zhang somehow stayed upright for two extra steps before sitting down very suddenly on a root. Andre just stopped, hands on his knees, head down, chest heaving.
Silence.
Just their breathing. Ragged and loud and completely undignified.
Connor pushed his fogged glasses up with one shaking finger and looked back at the gap in the trees.
Nothing followed them through.
The Dark Forest sat where it was, still and dark and patient, its edge defined by those two massive trunks like a doorframe nobody should ever have walked through in the first place.
They stayed on the ground for a long time.
Zhang spoke first. "I lost my chips."
Nobody responded.
"I had one left," he said quietly. "It was a good one."
Andre slowly sat down on the ground next to him, still breathing hard. He put his hand on Zhang's shoulder once and took it off.
Zhang nodded.
Diego was flat on his back staring at the wrong colored sky, his white and gold armor catching the grey light, shadow blood from Tiger Woods still dried on the chest plate from what felt like a completely different lifetime ago.
"Connor," he said.
"Yeah."
"I hate this game."
Connor sat on the cold ground with his robes twisted around his legs and his hat gone and his notes long dissolved into whatever magic had brought them here, and looked at the gap in the trees where the Dark Forest waited, and thought about the man who had been crawling, and the voice that had been almost pleasant, and the scream that had kept going.
"Yeah," he said. "Me too."
A beat.
"We still gotta get to level five though."
Diego closed his eyes. "I know."
"So."
"I know Connor."
"We should probably—"
"I KNOW." Diego sat up. Looked at the other three. Looked at the forest. Looked back at them. "Give me like two minutes."
"Yeah," Andre said.
"Two minutes," Zhang agreed.
Connor nodded.
They sat in the cold grey air of Valdenmoor and gave themselves two minutes, which was the least they deserved, and the Dark Forest waited behind them like it had all the time in the world.
Because it did.