The Dead Forest did not live up to its name. There was entirely too much movement within it; it was just that the movement felt completely alien to anything living.
We crossed beneath its canopy at dawn on the third day of our trek. The boundary was stark. Just yesterday, swamp mire had sloshed beneath the oxen’s hooves, but today the ground underfoot was dry and brittle. The trees grew like a solid wall. Their bare, barkless trunks intertwined high overhead, forming the semblance of a natural crypt.
There was no wind here, yet the branches twitched continuously, producing a grating scrape.
"Masks!" Mortis commanded. In the dead silence, his voice snapped like a whip. "Press them tight to your faces. Anyone who breathes in the gray mist is no longer one of us."
The alchemists pulled on their "beaks" in unison. The mercenary guards wrapped their faces in cloths soaked in vinegar and tar.
I left my face uncovered. My internal analyzer suggested that any piece of cloth would only hinder oxygen filtration; furthermore, the real threat lay on an entirely different plane.
I could see them. Thin, almost translucent ribbons of gray haze drifted through the stagnant air. It was a suspension of residual energy—hungry fragments of consciousness that had once belonged to living humans. A macabre sight.
They lunged toward me practically the second the first wagon crossed the invisible boundary. I could feel their chill against my skin. But the moment they drew near my face, they recoiled in sheer terror.
In the wake of my training, my "mana" had compressed into a dense cocoon of high energy pressure. To breach my lungs, a spirit would have to overcome a threshold of resistance it simply lacked the power to break. Simply put, I was too dense for them.
"You... why aren't you covering your face?" Klop whispered, sitting beside me on the wagon. His voice sounded muffled and frightened beneath his mask.
"They have nothing here to infect," I replied. "Watch the road."
"They're everywhere, Iron," the boy trembled, pointing toward the wayside. "They're watching us."
"So what?" I answered.
Four hours into the journey, the caravan ground to a dead halt. The narrow trail, squeezed between two rocky outcroppings, was blocked by a windfall. A massive dead tree had collapsed, dragging a mountain of boulders and stone debris down with it. Bypassing the obstruction was impossible—the thorny thickets on both sides of the road stood as an impenetrable wall.
Mortis stepped forward, inspected the barrier, and swore.
"It's two days' travel back," he spat. "And we wouldn't clear this blockage in a week. We can't camp here for the night either. Once darkness falls, the spirits turn aggressive; they'll eat right through your tar filters."
The mercenaries fell into a grim silence. No one wanted to turn back.
I hopped down to the ground. A dull ache vibrated in my legs, and my back was stiff from the prolonged sitting.
"Do you have crowbars and a pair of heavy chains?"
"You want to try hauling this apart with oxen?" one of the guards snorted. "You'll just run the beasts into the dirt for nothing. These rocks are wedged tight."
"I don't intend to pull." I surveyed the debris. The tree trunk was acting as the keystone. If I shattered it from beneath the rocky fragments, the rest would collapse under its own weight. "I just need you to secure the chain to that outcropping over there."
The alchemists reluctantly complied. While they ran the chains, I calculated the point of force application. A standard leverage problem, if not for the weight.
I pressed the palm of the Centurion against the cold, withered wood. I took a deep breath.
The spirits, sensing the sudden surge of my energy, swirled around me in a dense swarm.
The Skill activated.
"Pull!" I breathed.
Crack!
The tree trunk snapped precisely where my hand touched it, splintering into thousands of sharp shards. Stripped of its support, a massive boulder rumbled downward with a roar, clearing the path.
The dust hadn't even settled when I deactivated the Skill. The world violently snapped back to its usual track.
I wiped my face with my sleeve—blood. The world spun around me, and a fine tremor seized my left hand.
"The path is clear," I said, leaning heavily against the cold rock face. "We move out."
Mortis shot me a look of undisguised suspicion but held his tongue.
By evening, we set up camp in a small clearing. The surrounding forest seemed to close in. The gray trails of the spirits now floated in dense layers, almost completely obscuring the outlines of the trees. The mercenaries built a campfire, throwing some foul-smelling alchemical additive into the flames to ward off the undead.
We ate our dinner in silence.
Suddenly, one of the mercenaries sitting slightly apart broke into a ragged, strained wheeze.
"Berg? What's wrong with you?" his companion called out.
Berg didn't answer. He began to slowly rise to his feet. His filtration mask had been torn away, dangling by a single strap.
I realized what had happened instantly. He must have caught his mask on a branch while clearing the debris, tearing the fabric.
The mercenary turned his head. His pupils had dilated to the point where his eyes appeared entirely black, and his skin had taken on a sickly, corpse-like gray pallor.
"He... he breathed in the mist!" Klop shrieked hysterically, pressing himself against the side of the wagon.
Berg drew his knife. His movements were unnatural. He didn't even look at his comrades. He looked straight at me.
Something bubbled in his throat, warping into a chilling, unhuman whisper:
"Too... much... light... Hunger..."
He lunged at me. The other mercenaries hesitated—after all, Berg was their comrade.
I thrust my Centurion arm forward. The exact millisecond he tried to slash me with the knife, I locally compressed the air directly in front of his chest.
The impact of the compressed air fist hurled the possessed man five paces back. The knife flew from his fingers. Closing the distance instantly, I delivered a short, calculated strike to his jaw, knocking him out cold.
The entity inside him screeched—a sound I felt in my bones rather than heard with my ears—and vaporized, unable to withstand direct contact with my aura.
"Bind him," I barked to the guards who had rushed over. "He'll come to by morning. Just purge his lungs with your tinctures."
Mortis approached. He looked down at the sprawling Berg, then shifted his gaze to me.
"Spirits don't attack the weak, Iron, when someone like you is standing nearby."
"Perhaps."
I didn't sleep at all that night. I simply stared into the impenetrable dark of the Dead Forest. Between the black trunks, thousands of faint, blurred embers flickered continuously. They circled the camp, never daring to draw closer.
The weakness from using the Skill had nearly receded, leaving behind nothing but a barely perceptible throbbing in my temples.
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