The forest in this specific patch seemed quiet... an eerily and suffocatingly quiet. It was not the natural calm that precedes the dawn, but an artificial stillness, as if the giant trees with their twisted trunks were themselves holding their breath in anticipation of a momentous event. As if the deformed nature of the Falus forest realized that fresh blood was about to be spilled to feed its thirsty roots. The sparse, pale light that struggled to seep through the thick green canopy fractured through the diseased leaves to paint long, sharp, and distorted shadows on the ground covered in thorns and rotting leaves, making the terrain look like gaping maws waiting to swallow whoever stepped upon them.
Dex walked with steady steps and a calm rhythm, trying to maintain the appearance of an exhausted traveler. But beneath this relaxed exterior, his senses were operating at maximum capacity. Thanks to the mythical core in his chest, his senses were no longer limited to human sight and hearing; he had become like a true "Phoenix," picking up the slightest thermal changes and subtle vibrations in the surrounding air. Dozens of meters away, his nose caught a scent that did not belong to the forest: the smell of cold sweat, freshly tanned leather, weapon maintenance oil, and above all... the scent of adrenaline emanating from men preparing to kill. His ears, honed in the darkness of solitary confinement cells to pick up the whispers of guards, clearly heard the faint squeak of metal scraping against leather, and the rapid, muffled heartbeats hiding behind the massive trunks and thick shrubs surrounding the path from every side.
They had entered a kill zone.
"Lumia... stop,"
Dex whispered in a very low voice, its tone barely escaping his lips, raising his right hand in a slow, calculated movement to halt her advance. He did not turn to her, but kept his gaze fixed on the shadows ahead.
Before Lumia had the chance to ask why, or even tilt her silver head in inquiry, the air pressure suddenly and violently changed. The thick shrubs and shadows around them split open simultaneously, causing a startling rustle. In less than two seconds, the duo found themselves surrounded within a tightly planned tactical circle consisting of ten men.
They were not ordinary bandits in tattered clothes, nor amateurs looking for an easy catch. They stood in firm combat stances, blocking all avenues of escape. They wore dark black leather armor, reinforced with heat-treated steel plates to protect vital organs, armor that did not reflect light to facilitate stealth. On their left chests, over the heart, a faded silver emblem was engraved, yet it carried a terrifying significance to anyone who knew the underworld of the Empire: a giant raven's claw brutally clutching a cracked human skull.
They were the "Black Claw" mercenaries. Elite killers, outcasts from the official adventurers' guilds for their bloodthirstiness, who were hired exclusively to do the dirty work, political assassinations, and caravan annihilations that legitimate guilds deemed beneath them.
The line of mercenaries parted at the front to make way, and from it stepped their leader, revealing himself with a deliberate slowness aimed at instilling terror. He was a hulking man named "Garrick." He easily stood over two meters tall, his broad shoulders blocking the horizon. He was so muscular that the veins on his neck and bare arms pulsed visibly beneath crisscrossing old scars. He casually carried a double-bladed axe on his right shoulder, a heavy, brutal weapon the size of a grown man, and from his body emanated a heavy, suffocating mana pressure, clearly classified at Rank (B)—a rank capable of crushing ordinary soldiers with spiritual pressure alone.
Garrick stopped five meters away from Dex and placed his rough hand over his left eye, where he wore a complex glass lens surrounded by intricate brass gears. This lens was an expensive magical tool used in the black market to measure mana flow and determine the rank of opponents to avoid clashing with disguised mages. Garrick turned a small gear and scanned Dex's body with a long, scrutinizing look, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
A moment of absolute silence prevailed before Garrick threw his head back and erupted into a booming, rough, and echoing laugh—a laugh that shook the leaves of the trees and startled the birds perched high above. His men followed with intermittent, mocking laughter, loosening their grips on their weapons slightly.
"What absolute irony! By all the demons of hell, look at what we've caught today deep in Falus, men!" Garrick shouted in a stentorian voice, pointing the massive blade of his axe toward Dex, his eyes watering from laughing so hard. "We followed the trail of destruction and white ash for two whole leagues; I thought we'd face a mythical guardian beast, or a catastrophic Rank (A) mage who annihilated the Hellhounds... but it seems fate decided to send us a bad joke!"
Garrick took another step forward, his laughter fading into a smile of contempt. "This scrawny boy is wearing a necklace bearing the crest of the ancient 'Williams' family," he pointed to an old necklace dangling from Dex's neck, amidst the remnants of his torn clothes. "But look at his reading through my lens... Rank (E)! Do you hear me? A pathetic Rank (E)! He's not even an apprentice mage, just noble scum, a spoiled brat kicked out of his mansion or ran away seeking false glory, and decided to play hero in the forbidden forest."
The eyes of the ten mercenaries, carrying the cruelty of professional killers, shifted between Dex's exhausted body and Lumia, who stood behind him in her usual silence. Their gazes held a viscous mixture of disdain, arrogance, and absolute greed.
"And on top of all this stupidity, he wanders the danger zone with a breathtakingly beautiful maid, as silent as an expensive doll," Garrick added, running his tongue over his dry lips with a filthy, predatory look toward Lumia, detailing her slender body and angelic features. "Did you think, boy, that the Falus forest was your father's backyard to take a stroll in? Or did you get bored of life and came to deliver this beautiful gift to us yourself so we could take it to the slave markets in the capital?"
At that exact moment, amidst the mercenaries' mockery and their muffled laughter, Dex realized something crucial and astonishing about the nature of his new body. The "Phoenix Core" burning in his chest was not just a mindless energy source; it possessed an innate intelligence, a cosmic survival instinct. The core was "suppressing" its mighty fiery aura, pulling the massive waves of mana inward, concealing its true power to appear to detecting devices as a very tiny flame, barely pulsing with life.
The mercenaries and Garrick's magical lens did not see the advanced Rank (D) that Dex had reached, and they certainly did not sense the heat of the dormant Phoenix that had melted the Hellhounds hours ago; they only saw what Dex's body wanted them to see: a weak, lonely, exhausted noble boy, an easy prey trembling with fear.
Dex lowered his head slightly, letting the strands of his ash-filled black hair hide his blue eyes. Slowly, the corners of his lips began to rise.
Dex smiled.
But it was not a smile of fear, or submission, or even the usual arrogant smile of nobles who think their guards will save them. It was a very cold smile, devoid of any human warmth, and as sharp as a razor blade slowly drawn across the skin. A smile carrying within its folds fifteen years of darkness, cruelty, and accumulated madness.
When Garrick saw that smile, he stopped laughing abruptly. He felt a strange, inexplicable clenching in his stomach, without understanding the logical reason for it. Garrick had killed hundreds of men, and he knew what the face of a scared man looked like, but this boy's face did not belong to the realm of the fearful.
In a fraction of a second, Dex remembered his long, dark years in the prison cell. There, at the bottom of the world, the new inmates, the true monsters hiding their strength, always feigned weakness, illness, and cowardice. They would sit in the corners, shivering, to attract the attention of naive bullies and gang leaders. And as soon as the bully approached, confident in his victory, the "weak" one would pounce, slitting the bully's throat with a piece of broken glass or a sharpened bone in a dark corner out of the guards' sight.
"In prison, the best victim... is the one who thinks he is the hunter," Dex thought, while his eyes began to gleam from beneath his hair with a faint blue light, a deadly and calculated glint that no one in this world notices unless they are standing right on the precipice of death. "You are not hunters, men of the Black Claw... you are just dead meat walking on two legs."