ShadowBound: The Need For Power

Liam shifted direction, following the signs Nyxie had shown him rather than the voice itself. The forest seemed to resist clean movement. Roots rose at awkward angles. Mist hid shallow dips. Branches hung low enough to catch on shoulders. He moved over and around them, pausing when necessary to compare the memory to the ground before him.

There, the crushed plants. There, a scrape in the mud where someone’s boot had dragged. There, another faint smear of blood, this one on a leaf. He did not hurry. Hurrying in mimic territory was how someone allowed sound to pull thought ahead of sight.

The pleading voice continued somewhere deeper, changing slightly now.

"Please... don’t leave me... I’m here..."

Liam ignored it.

After several minutes, he heard real voices.

Not the repeated lure. These voices were lower, strained, and close enough to carry naturally through the trunks. Liam slowed, then moved off the ground. He placed a boot against a root, caught a low branch, and climbed without shaking the leaves more than necessary. The tree was thick enough to hold him easily, its bark rough beneath his fingers and damp in the grooves.

He climbed to a broad branch angled toward a cluster of trees below, then crouched behind the trunk where the shadows gathered thickest. His dark field uniform blended well enough with the canopy’s gloom, and the leaves around him broke his outline. From that angle, he could see the ground below through gaps in the branches without being seen by those standing beneath.

There were four second-years in a shallow hollow between roots.

Two boys. Two girls.

The clearest-headed one was a girl with short dark-blonde hair tied messily at the back, her academy field uniform torn at the knee and stained with mud. Her right ankle was badly twisted, swollen enough that even from above Liam could see she was keeping most of her weight off it.

Despite that, she sat with her back against a root, one hand holding a field knife, the other pressed to the ground as if ready to push herself up if necessary. Her face was pale with pain, but her eyes were alert. She was watching the trees, not the voice.

’Useful.’

The other girl stood close to her, thin and dark-haired, clutching her communication insignia with trembling fingers. Her eyes were wide, her breathing too shallow, but she had not broken yet. She kept glancing between the injured girl and the direction of the false voice, trying to obey one fear while being pulled by another.

One boy stood a few steps away, sweating despite the cool air. He was pale, his lips parted, and every time the voice called, he shifted toward it like his body wanted to move before his mind could stop it. Panic had him by the throat.

The last boy was broader, with a short spear in hand and anger written across his face. Pride, mostly. The kind of anger people used when fear embarrassed them. He kept tightening his grip on the spear and looking toward the voice as if imagining himself charging in, saving someone, and returning with proof that he had not been afraid.

That one was dangerous.

"Someone is calling," the panicked boy said, voice cracking. "We cannot just leave them."

The injured girl answered through clenched teeth. "We do not know that it is a person."

"It sounds like one."

"That is the point, Ren."

The proud boy scoffed. "So what? We stand here doing nothing while someone dies?"

"We verify first," the injured girl said. "That is what the guide said."

"The guide also said we need to regroup," he snapped. "If we sit here because you cannot walk, we are just waiting to be found."

The scared girl flinched. "Tovan..."

"What?" the proud boy demanded. "We are in a practical assessment, not a nursery. If someone is close, we help them, gather them, and move."

The injured girl’s jaw tightened. "And if it is a mimic?"

"Then we kill it."

Liam stared down at him from the branch.

’What a walking lapse in judgment,’ he thought.

The injured girl was the only one thinking properly, but her injury made her position weak. She could not physically stop the panicked boy if he bolted. She could not chase Tovan if his pride dragged him toward the voice. The scared girl was close to breaking, and her panic might spread if one person moved. This was exactly the first failure point made flesh: scattered students, weak local structure, mimic lure, no commander present, and one person with sense lacking the ability to enforce it.

The voice called again, closer now. "Please... I can hear you... help me..."

The panicked boy, Ren, took a step.

The injured girl snapped, "Stop."

He stopped, but barely.

Tovan lifted his spear. "I am checking it."

"No," she said.

"You are not in charge."

"No one else is thinking."

That hit him exactly where pride hated being touched. Tovan’s face hardened, and he turned toward the trees. "Fine. Stay here and tremble."

The mist ahead shifted.

Liam saw the Choir Demon before the students did.

It was crouched between two trees, partly hidden by hanging leaves and the bent spine of an old trunk. Its body was thin and folded wrong, limbs stretched too long, elbows and knees bending in places they should not. Its skin was a pale gray-brown, close enough to bark in the dark to blur its outline, but too smooth in patches where throat sacs bulged along its neck and upper chest. Its ribcage opened slightly as it breathed, not fully, but enough for Liam to see wet movement inside.

Uneven mouths, or voice-slits, ran down the hollow of its throat and across its chest, some barely open, some trembling around broken human-like teeth arranged without symmetry. Its face looked unfinished, as if something had tried to imitate human grief by carving eyes too wide, cheeks too hollow, and a mouth that did not understand where pity ended and hunger began.

The sacs swelled.

A voice came from its chest, not its face. "Help me..."

Now that Liam could see it, the wrongness was obvious.

Tovan still stepped forward.

Liam moved.

He summoned a dagger from his shadow as he dropped from the branch, the weapon sliding into his hand without a flash or flourish. A controlled burst of low-output fire snapped from his free palm, not large enough to roar, only bright and sudden enough to cut through the creature’s dark-adjusted sight. The flame flared across the hollow in a brief orange-white blink.

The Choir Demon recoiled, throat sacs collapsing with a wet hiss.

Liam landed between the students and the creature, knees bending to absorb the drop, then drove forward before either side could recover. The demon’s left arm unfolded toward him too fast for its ugly frame, fingers ending in narrow claws that cut through the air toward his face. Liam shifted inside the reach, letting the limb pass over his shoulder while his dagger carved a line across the inner joint. The flesh split thinly, releasing a sour smell, but not enough to cripple it.

The creature snapped its ribcage wider.

A different voice burst from three slits at once, high and panicked. "Behind you! Behind you!"

One of the girls gasped.

Liam did not turn.

’Too simple.’

He twisted low as the demon’s other limb whipped from the side, the claws passing where his neck had been. He answered with another small burst of fire, this one aimed not at the body but at the mist near its legs. Heat punched into the damp air, scattering the low fog just long enough to reveal how its lower limbs were positioned. Too many joints. Weight leaning right. Preparing to spring left.

Liam stepped right before it moved.

The demon sprang left, exactly into the line his dagger was already cutting.

The blade sank beneath one of the throat sacs and ripped sideways. A wet, broken chorus spilled out of the wound, three voices overlapping into a sound that was almost human and almost choking. The Choir Demon thrashed backward, limbs scraping bark, chest-mouths opening and closing in frantic sequence.

Liam pressed.

A root rose behind the demon’s right heel. It had avoided it earlier when stalking, which meant it knew the ground, but pain and blindness had disrupted its rhythm. Liam feinted toward the wounded side, forced it to recoil, then kicked a loose stone into the root cluster. The sound drew one of its mouths instinctively. Its head twitched toward the wrong cue.

That was enough.

Liam slid in, ducked beneath a desperate claw, and drove the dagger up beneath its jawline, angling toward whatever passed for its central throat. A small controlled flame crawled along the blade’s edge at the moment of impact, not an explosion, just enough heat to cauterize and burn through the soft inner tissue.

The Choir Demon convulsed, its ribcage fluttering open and shut, voice-slits releasing fragments of old pleas.

"Please... I can’t... help... don’t..."

Liam twisted the dagger once and pulled free.

The creature collapsed sideways into the roots, limbs folding under it in ways that made it look even less natural dead than alive. Its throat sacs deflated slowly, leaking pale fluid into the soil.

For a moment, no one spoke.

The four students stared at him.

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