"Now!" I yelled.
Gravity, as it turns out, is the ultimate equalizer.
The massive, papery hive I had dragged from my inventory materialized directly above Vance's head. For a split second, it hovered there, a glitchy grey outline that only I could see, before snapping into full, terrifying high-definition reality.
It was the size of a beer barrel. And it was heavy.
CRACK.
It smashed through the thin canopy of branches and landed squarely on Vance's shoulder, exploding on impact.
"What the—" Vance started, but his sentence was cut short by the sound of a thousand angry buzz saws.
Mana-Wasps aren't like normal wasps. They don't just sting; they discharge a jolt of static electricity that numbs your muscles. And they are very territorial.
The hive erupted. A cloud of iridescent blue wings swarmed Vance and his mercenaries.
"GAAH! Get it off!" Vance shrieked, flailing his wand wildly. A bolt of fire shot out, singing his own eyebrows and enraging the wasps further.
"Move!" I grabbed Cian's collar and hauled him up. "Don't watch the show! Run!"
We scrambled out from behind the log. Kaelen was already moving, his sword drawn but unblooded, cutting a path through the thick brush. Tybalt was running with his knees high, looking like a panicked gazelle.
Behind us, the screams of the "Elite Squad" were music to my ears, but I noticed something chilling.
While Vance was flailing like a child, the four mercenaries didn't panic.
I glanced back over my shoulder.
One of the thugs—a man with a scar running through his left eye—didn't swat at the bugs. He instantly dropped a smoke pellet and cast a localized Static Shell spell. The lightning from the wasps arced harmlessly over his shield.
"Contact rear!" the mercenary shouted, his voice calm, professional. "Target is fleeing North-North-West. Ignore the insects. suppression fire!"
Thwip. Thwip.
Two crossbow bolts whistled past my ear, embedding themselves into the tree trunk I had just passed.
"They're pros," Ria hissed, running beside me. "Those aren't student tactics. That was a military-grade callout."
"Yeah," I panted, dodging a low-hanging branch. "Vance brought a hit squad to a school field trip."
We sprinted for another ten minutes, the sounds of chaos fading behind us, replaced by the heavy, damp silence of the Forest of Whispers. The fog was thicker here, tasting of metal and ozone.
Kaelen held up a fist. We skidded to a halt.
"Stop," he commanded. "We need to break the trail. They have a tracker."
"A tracker?" Tybalt wheezed, leaning against a tree and clutching his chest. "How do you know?"
"Because they fired blindly through the fog and almost hit Ren," Kaelen said, eyeing the mist. "They can see heat signatures. Or mana signatures."
"If it's mana, I'm a lighthouse," Cian whispered, looking terrified. "I have three vials of concentrated Whisper-Sap in my pockets. It radiates magic."
I looked at the terrain. We were in a narrow ravine, flanked by steep, slippery slopes of grey shale. It was a natural choke point.
"We can't outrun them if they have thermal," I said, my mind racing. "So we stop running. We make them stop."
I looked at Cian. "The glue. Give it to me."
Cian fumbled with his bag, pulling out the glass vials filled with the thick, amber liquid. "Be careful. Once it touches air, it expands and hardens in three seconds. It's basically liquid cement."
"Perfect," I said. "Ria, Tybalt. I need you to string a tripwire across the path. Right there, between those two star-oaks."
"A tripwire?" Tybalt asked. "Ren, they have crossbows. If we trip them, they'll just shoot us from the ground."
"The wire isn't to trip them," I said, uncorking the first vial carefully. "It's to deliver the package."
I carefully coated the thin wire Ria produced with the amber sap. It didn't harden yet—the mana-seal on the wire kept it stable. Then, I poured the rest on the ground, covering the leaves and rocks in a wide, invisible puddle.
"When they step here," I explained, gesturing to the puddle, "they get stuck. When they struggle, they hit the wire. The wire snaps, releasing the secondary charge."
"Secondary charge?" Kaelen asked, looking at me with that mix of suspicion and respect. "You have explosives?"
"No," I said, pointing to Ria's belt. "Ria has flash powder. And Tybalt has Earth magic."
I looked at my roommate. "Ty. Can you make a pit? Just a small one. Right under the glue."
Tybalt swallowed. "A... a hole? I can do holes."
"Do it. Shallow, but wide. Cover it with leaves."
We spent three frantic minutes setting the trap. It was crude. It was desperate. But it was all we had.
"They're coming," Kaelen warned, his head tilting to the side. "Two hundred meters. Moving fast."
"Into the trees!" I ordered. "Up high. If they have thermal, the leaves might scatter our signatures."
We scrambled up the rough bark of the star-oaks. Kaelen helped Tybalt, practically throwing the smaller boy onto a branch. I hauled myself up last, scraping my shin.
We froze, merging with the canopy.
Below us, the fog swirled.
Five shadows emerged. They looked worse for wear. Vance's face was swollen on one side, looking like he'd gone a few rounds with a boxer. The mercenaries looked annoyed, brushing dead wasps off their armor.
"I'm going to kill him," Vance muttered, his voice thick with rage. "I'm going to find that grey-coat rat and feed him to the boars piece by piece."
"Quiet," the scarred mercenary said. He held up a hand. "Signal stopped here."
He scanned the ravine. His eyes glowed with a faint red light—thermal magic.
"They went up," the mercenary said, looking at the slopes. "Or they're hiding."
He took a step forward.
Squelch.
His heavy boot landed right in the center of Tybalt's disguised pit, which was filled with Cian's super-glue.
"Contact!" the mercenary shouted, trying to pull his foot back.
But the glue had already reacted to the air. It hissed, expanding into a hard, amber foam that locked his leg into the earth like a vice.
"What the—"
The mercenary beside him lunged forward to help and stepped into the puddle.
Squelch.
"It's a trap! Adhesive!"
Vance, standing in the back, looked horrified. "Glue? They're fighting with glue?"
"Tybalt, now!" I whispered.
Tybalt, clinging to the branch next to me, closed his eyes and shoved his hand downward.
"Earth Spike!"
The ground beneath the trapped mercenaries rumbled. It didn't spear them—Tybalt wasn't a killer—but it shoved the earth upward violently.
The sudden shift in terrain knocked the other two mercenaries off balance. They stumbled backward, their arms flailing... straight into the tripwire Ria had strung up.
Snap.
Ria dropped her flash-powder packet from the tree directly onto their heads.
BANG.
A blinding white light turned the ravine into a strobe-lit nightmare.
"My eyes!" Vance screamed, clutching his face.
"Go! Go! Go!" I yelled, dropping from the tree.
We landed behind them. We didn't stop to fight. We sprinted past the blinded, glued, and disoriented hit squad.
"Ren!" Vance screamed blindly, firing a wand blast into the trees. "I know it's you! You're dead! You hear me? Dead!"
We ran until my lungs burned and my legs felt like lead. We didn't stop until the sun began to set, turning the grey fog into a bruised purple.
We found a small cave hidden behind a waterfall—a classic RPG save point location.
"Okay," I gasped, sliding down the cave wall. "I think... we lost them."
Tybalt collapsed face-first onto the stone floor. "I want to go home. I want my mom. I want a blanket that doesn't smell like fear."
Cian was checking his pockets. "I used all the glue. That was three weeks of work."
"Worth it," Ria said, grinning. She looked exhilarated. "Did you see the look on the Scar-Guy's face? He was stuck like a fly on paper. That was art, Ren. Pure art."
Kaelen didn't sit down. He stood at the cave entrance, watching the waterfall. He cleaned his sword with a rag, though he hadn't used it.
"They were military," Kaelen said quietly.
The cave went silent.
"What?" Tybalt asked, lifting his head.
"The mercenaries," Kaelen said, turning to face us. "The way they moved. The formation. And the Scar-Guy... he had a tattoo on his neck. I saw it when the flash went off."
"What was it?" I asked, dread pooling in my stomach.
"A broken chain," Kaelen said. "Wrapped around a black sun."
Ria stopped smiling. "That's not a military crest. That's the symbol of the 'Iron Covenant'. They're a radical faction. They believe magic should only belong to the strong. They hunt 'weak' nobles and mixed-bloods."
"Why would Vance hire radicals?" Cian asked. "He's a Thorne. They're traditionalists."
"Maybe he didn't hire them," I said, the pieces clicking together in my head. "Maybe they hired him."
If the Iron Covenant was involved, this wasn't just about a school rivalry. They were infiltrating the academy. And Kaelen—a commoner with S-Rank Darkness magic—was exactly the kind of 'threat' they would want to eliminate.
"We need to get to the Relay Point," Kaelen said. "We need to signal the professors. If the Covenant is here, no student is safe."
"Agreed," I said.
I opened my status window while the others started organizing a meager dinner of rations.
[Status Update]
[Mental Stability: 78%]
[Hive of Angry Mana-Wasps: Consumed]
[Asset Library: Empty]
I rubbed my head. The wasp stunt had cost me. My vision was swimming slightly, and every time I blinked, I saw lines of code scrolling down the waterfall.
"Ren?"
I looked up. Lysandra... no, wait. We left her at the academy.
It was Ria. She was holding a piece of dried beef.
"You're spacing out," she said softly. "You good?"
"Just a headache," I lied. "Side effect of being a genius."
Ria sat down next to me. "You know, for a guy with no magic, you sure act like a wizard. Summoning hives? Where did you even keep that thing? Your pockets aren't that big."
"Sleight of hand," I said. "Magician's secret."
Ria looked at me, her eyes searching. Then she took a bite of the beef. "You have secrets, Ren. Big ones. But you saved us back there. So I won't pry. Yet."
"Thanks."
"But," she added, pointing the jerky at me. "If you turn out to be the Demon King in disguise, I get to say 'I told you so' before I stab you."
"Fair enough."
We ate in silence. The sound of the waterfall was soothing, masking the terrifying noises of the forest at night.
As the others drifted off to sleep—Kaelen taking the first watch—I stepped out to the edge of the water, careful to stay behind the veil of the falls.
I looked up at the sky.
The fog had cleared slightly above us. The moon was full.
But it wasn't right.
I activated [Observer Vision].
The moon flickered.
For a second, it wasn't a white orb. It was a wireframe sphere. A polygon mesh with a texture pasted onto it. And right in the center, there was a black pixel. A dead pixel in the sky.
[Warning: Local Reality Degradation Detected.]
[Cause: Excessive Narrative Manipulation.]
[Estimated Time to Sector Collapse: 14 Days.]
I stared at the text.
"Fourteen days?" I whispered.
I had saved the team. I had humiliated the villain. But every time I used my powers—every time I 'edited' the story or pulled an asset—I was breaking the world a little more.
Vance and his mercenaries were a problem.
But the sky falling down? That was the real threat.
"Ren," Kaelen's voice came from behind me.
I jumped, deactivating my vision. The moon snapped back to normal.
"Yeah?"
Kaelen stepped out of the shadows. He looked at the moon, then at me.
"You saw it too, didn't you?" he asked.
My heart stopped. "Saw what?"
"The glitch," Kaelen said. He used the word awkwardly, like he had heard it but didn't fully understand it. "The sky... stuttered."
He looked at me, his dark eyes intense.
"You're not from here, are you, Ren?"
It wasn't a question. It was a realization.
I looked at the Hero. The protagonist. The guy who was supposed to be dense until Volume 3.
"Kaelen," I said carefully. "If I told you the truth, you'd think I was crazy."
"I have darkness inside me that talks," Kaelen said dryly. "Crazy is relative. Just tell me... are you on our side?"
I looked at the cave where Tybalt was snoring, where Cian was clutching his book, where Ria was sleeping with a knife in her hand.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm on your side. Even if the world isn't."
Kaelen nodded. He didn't ask for more. He just turned back to the cave.
"Get some sleep, Ren. Tomorrow, we hunt the hunters."
I watched him go.
[Narrative Bond Deepened: Kaelen (Confidant)]
[Story Stability: 92.0%]
I looked back at the glitchy moon.
"Two weeks," I muttered. "I need to fix this script fast."
I went back inside. The Forest Expedition was just the beginning. If the Iron Covenant was real, and the world was breaking, I needed more than just glue and wasps.
I needed to find the next Source Code fragment. And I had a feeling it wasn't in a library.
It was probably right where we were going. The Relay Point.
"Of course," I sighed, closing my eyes. "It's always the boss room."