The forest shifted again.
It always did. The trees leaned in closer. The light thinned like smoke. Even the roots underfoot felt wrong—like veins, not wood.
Adel walked point, eyes scanning, hand on the hilt.
Behind him, the group was quieter than ever. Nobody joked. Nobody cried anymore either. Even grief was starting to fade into something colder.
Survival.
Then they smelled it.
Rot.
Not like the corpses they'd buried. This was... older. Heavier. Wrong.
Troy gagged. "Gods... what the hell is that?"
They found it ten minutes later.
A clearing. Tents shredded. Armor torn apart. Blood soaked into the dirt so deep it looked black.
Crows circled overhead.
No bodies.
Just limbs. Half a ribcage. A severed jaw stuck in a tree trunk, still twitching with flies.
Someone vomited.
Yara turned away, shaking.
Finley didn't move.
He was staring at a torn banner.
West-2.
"We knew some of them," he muttered.
Adel walked deeper into the camp. Bits of charred fabric clung to branches. Swords lay bent, snapped, tossed like toys.
Then he saw the sigil etched into a shield.
He knelt.
Touched it.
A line of dried blood led out from the center of the camp—drag marks. Dozens of them. Long grooves like someone had been pulled. No footprints. No clawmarks.
Just silence.
Troy whispered, "They were taken."
Finley looked at him. "Taken?"
"Not killed. Not here. Whatever did this… dragged them away."
Adel stood up, eyes on the trail of blood.
He said nothing.
Later that night, they made camp nearby—but no fire.
No talking.
Adel took first watch, staring at the dark horizon.
Finley curled beside his spear, whispering again.
Troy stared at the stars, but they didn't shine here.
They'd survived the first slaughter.
But now they knew the forest was still hunting.
And it was dragging its prey away alive.
The blood trail faded after a day. They didn't follow it far—too risky. Instead, they turned east, away from where West-2 vanished.
And for the first time since entering the Black Forest… nothing came.
No howls at night.
No shifting shadows.
No corpses in the dark.
Just birdsong, cold wind, and long walks through ancient, haunting silence.
They built routine.
Adel led quietly, his voice steadier.
Finley started making dumb jokes again, just under his breath.
Troy taught two younger recruits how to brace properly with a spear.
They trained. They hunted.
They buried two more—wounds from before finally caught up—but they didn't scream this time.
Just quiet prayers, soft dirt, and a little less fear.
Some of them smiled again.
Yara made stew one night. Real stew. With mushrooms and boar meat. It almost felt like home.
Adel stood watch that night and dared to close his eyes.
Only for a second.
It had been twenty-nine days since the gates of Silver Spear closed behind them.
Three weeks of madness.
Of blood. Screams. Fire.
Of friends torn apart.
Of learning how to kill before being killed.
And then…
Three weeks of silence.
The last half of the trial passed in the outskirts of Sector West-2—semi-peaceful, if only because the monsters had already fed. The trees there were less twisted, the wind less cruel. For the first time, they caught their breath.
They built crude shelters. Learned to hunt, to move without sound, to sleep with one eye open. No one laughed—not truly—but they spoke again. Shared rations. Patched wounds. Stood guard for each other.
In that fragile calm, they remembered what it meant to survive.
And on the thirtieth day, they emerged from the woods—filthy, thinner, eyes older than their years.
Out of fifty, seventeen returned.
The gates of Silver Spear opened with a thunderous groan. The courtyard buzzed with cheers, with officers shouting, with the sound of boots rushing forward.
But the seventeen didn't run.
They walked.
One by one.
Adel looked back at the treeline—where the forest loomed quiet, heavy with the ghosts they'd left behind.
It felt like something had been carved out of him.
Not grief. Not rage.
Just… a missing piece. Hollow and cold.
Troy didn't speak. He only watched the ground ahead of him.
Finley clutched a pendant he'd taken from one of the fallen and whispered their names.
Adel just walked, his sword heavy on his back, his heart heavier still.
Out of the nearly 3,000 recruits who had marched into the Black Forest with steel in their hands and fire in their hearts…
Barely 2,000 returned.
Some limped.
Some were carried.
Some came back with thousand-yard stares—and others with blood still on their hands.
But all of them… were different.
The trial was over.
They had survived.
But they hadn't returned whole.
Some part of them would always remain in those woods—where the screams never really stopped, and the blood never truly dried.
And deep in the Black Forest, the mist stirred again…
Waiting for their return.