# Chapter 48 — Gloom Forest
The gate closed behind them with a sound that was already fading by the time Shogan had taken his third step. Kael, Arjun, and Daniel fell in behind him — or tried to. Kael kept drifting to the side, hand near his blade, energy looking for somewhere to go. Arjun was already talking, asking Daniel whether he thought the Hollow Stags would be grouped or spread out, whether Gloom Forest was actually as straightforward as the briefings suggested, whether this would take all day or just the morning. Daniel gave him short answers without looking at him, his eyes already moving across the terrain ahead with the quiet, systematic attention of someone inventorying a space before committing to it.
Shogan said nothing. He let them talk. He had his map out and was reading it while walking, which was itself a kind of discipline — he didn't need to stop to navigate, and he didn't need to perform focus for their benefit. After a few minutes he said, without looking up:
"Guys, we have to go south to reach our destination — Gloom Forest."
He folded the map and kept walking. That was the navigation briefing. Kael glanced at Arjun. Arjun shrugged. Daniel watched Shogan's back for a moment, reading something in the economy of the man's movement, and said nothing.
Shogan was not the kind of leader who managed energy. He was the kind who observed it — cataloguing what each person in his team revealed when they thought they were just walking. Kael wanted to arrive. Arjun wanted company in the arriving. Daniel wanted to understand what he was arriving at. He filed all three and kept moving south.
Gloom Forest announced itself before they reached it. Not through darkness — the light didn't diminish so much as flatten, losing the quality that made depth readable. Colors became slightly less certain of themselves. The recruits noticed it and didn't know what to call it. Kael said it looked weird. Arjun agreed immediately. Daniel said nothing and shifted his attention to the tree line, watching it the way you watch something you're not sure has noticed you yet.
At the edge, Shogan stopped the team and turned to face them properly for the first time since the gate.
"Our aim is to capture two Hollow Stags alive," he said. "Apart from those two — kill as many as you want and collect their Relics."
He let that sit for a moment, then added:
"One thing you should know. Not every Hollow Stag you kill will drop a Relic. Kill enough and you'll get one eventually. These are the easiest Vestiges in the Southern Region — that's why their Relics flood the market. Anyone can hunt them. Don't expect something rare. But don't leave empty-handed either."
He looked at all three of them in turn.
"Two rules inside. Stay in formation. Do not engage anything that isn't a Hollow Stag."
Then he entered the forest and they followed, because the alternative was standing at the tree line alone.
Inside, Gloom Forest was not supernatural. It was simply difficult in the specific way that dense, acoustically wrong environments are difficult — canopy thick enough to compress the light, distances that looked shorter than they measured, and sound that arrived from the wrong directions. A branch snapping to the left registered as if it had come from ahead. Footsteps behind felt closer than they were. Shogan moved through it with the automatic adjustments of familiarity. The recruits experienced it as a wrongness they couldn't locate the source of, which was worse than understanding it would have been.
They found the first group of Hollow Stags within forty minutes — six of them scattered across a natural clearing where the canopy thinned enough to let pale light reach the ground. The creatures were exactly what the briefings described: slow, deliberate, partially translucent in irregular patches across their bodies, utterly unaware that anything had entered their territory. Shogan stopped at the tree line and watched. He did not move into the clearing. He signaled the three recruits forward with a simple gesture and stayed back.
This was not laziness. It was the first real assessment of the day.
Kael moved first, which Shogan had expected. He crossed the clearing at a pace that was slightly too fast for optimal approach and killed the nearest Stag cleanly and without hesitation, the blade doing exactly what it was designed to do. The Stag went down without drama. Kael looked back at Shogan with the expression of someone who had trained for months and found the examination easier than the preparation. Shogan's face gave him nothing.
Arjun and Daniel took the remaining five between them — loose coordination, a few miscommunications that they corrected without speaking, the kind of functional teamwork that came from training rather than instinct. It worked. All six Hollow Stags were dead within minutes, and the recruits spread across the bodies checking for Relics. Not all six dropped one — four of them did. Daniel crouched beside his kills and came up with two Relics, which he pocketed without making a production of it. Arjun got one. Kael got one and held it up and examined it with open satisfaction. The two empty bodies drew a brief look from Kael and nothing from the other two.
Arjun grinned and pocketed his Relic and immediately started describing one of the kills to Daniel as if Daniel hadn't been standing two meters away during it. Daniel listened with half his attention and gave the other half to the last Hollow Stag he'd killed. He crouched beside it and studied the translucent patches on its body — the irregular, semi-transparent areas distributed across its flank — tracing the edge of one with the tip of his finger without touching it, examining the boundary between normal tissue and something that had decided to become partly absent.
Shogan watched this from the tree line. The clearing was still, the recruits loose-limbed and confident, six dead Hollow Stags and four Relics between them and no injuries. Everything the first phase of a mission was supposed to produce. Kael was already scanning for movement in the undergrowth. Arjun was asking whether they'd find more in this direction or further south. Daniel straightened and looked at the far tree line with the same systematic attention he'd been applying to the dead Stag's patches.
Shogan raised one hand and waved.
Not at Kael. Not at Arjun or Daniel. The gesture was directed at the far tree line — deliberate, slow, the signal of someone communicating with something that was already watching for it.
Every remaining Hollow Stag in the surrounding area reacted simultaneously. The undergrowth erupted — Hollow Stags scattering in every direction at once, translucent patches flickering rapidly as they crashed through vegetation with none of the deliberate slowness they'd displayed minutes ago. The chaos was total and instantaneous. The recruits spun, weapons rising before their minds had fully processed the stimulus, searching for what had triggered it.
A roar split the air from the exact direction Shogan had waved — deep, heavy, and close enough to feel in the chest before it was heard properly. Then the source emerged from that same tree line. Two meters of dense, brown mass built along the lines of a gorilla-like creature — but scaled past what that shape should have been able to contain — stepped into the clearing with the unhurried confidence of something that had never needed to hurry to end a situation. Its presence changed the weight of the air. The three recruits pointed their weapons at it before they consciously chose to.
The silence that followed the roar was absolute. Then the only sound was the rapid thump-thump, thump-thump of heartbeats the recruits could hear in their own chests. The gorilla-like Vestige stood in the field and did not charge. It simply occupied the space it was in, its shadow reaching further across the clearing than its size should have allowed.
Kael drew his bow. He pulled the string back to his ear with the practiced motion of someone who had done this ten thousand times in training, sighted down the shaft, and released.
Swoosh! The arrow cut through the air and struck the gorilla-like Vestige dead-center in the chest. The creature did not flinch. Did not look down. Did not register the impact in any way that suggested it had experienced the arrow as different from the air around it. The shaft hung there for a moment and then dropped away, and the chest beneath it was unmarked — hitting that creature with an arrow was like trying to pierce a reinforced wall with a single strand of hair. It left nothing.
The cold reached Kael's face before the fear reached his thoughts. Arjun looked at the Vestige's chest — intact, indifferent — and completed the calculation in the same instant Kael did: nothing they were carrying would change the surface of this creature. The confidence that six dead Hollow Stags had built over the last hour dissolved in the time it took the arrow to hit the ground.
All three of them ran — Kael, Arjun, and Daniel together, sprinting hard toward the tree line where Shogan was positioned, the gorilla-like Vestige thundering behind them with heavy, ground-shaking strides. They were halfway across the clearing when Daniel peeled away without warning, breaking hard from the group and running in a completely different direction, drawing a sharp angle away from Kael and Arjun and pulling the distance between himself and them as fast as his legs would carry him.
"Keep going!" he screamed at them without slowing. "Get to Shogan — don't stop!"
The gorilla-like Vestige's attention snapped to Daniel instantly and completely. Its pursuit of Kael and Arjun became irrelevant in the same moment. Then its speed exploded — a sudden whoosh of displaced air, the ground cracking under the force of its acceleration, the clearing compressing beneath its stride — and it closed the entire distance between them in almost no time at all. Daniel had barely taken three more strides when the hand came down around him. The grip clamped shut with a violent crunching sound of pressure meeting resistance, his body locked inside something that did not recognize the difference between holding and crushing at this scale. He fought against it with everything his training had given him — every muscle, every instinct — and produced nothing measurable in response. He could not move. He could breathe, barely.
Held like a ragdoll in one massive fist, Daniel watched the ground surge beneath him as the gorilla-like Vestige turned and charged at full speed toward the tree line where Shogan was standing.
Kael hit the tree line and didn't stop, crashing through to where Shogan stood and turning immediately, already screaming:
"Mr. Shogan — do something! Kill it! Stop it!"
Shogan was not running. He was not reaching for a weapon. He stood exactly where he had stood when he raised his hand toward the far tree line, watching the gorilla-like Vestige cross the clearing with Daniel locked in its grip, his expression carrying none of the alarm filling Kael's voice.