Astra stumbled often now, consciousness fraying. Cuts blossomed bright and ugly across his skin—thin lines across his arms, deeper gashes along his calves, streaks of blood smearing leaves as he brushed past. "He's… learning," Astra gasped, voice raw and small. "Faster than us."
Noctis's jaw clenched. He bared teeth in something between a snarl and a desperate smile. At a narrow pass between two leaning stones, he turned and met the thing head-on. Their clash was violent and intimate: sword against bare forearms, fists thudding ribs, elbows striking faces. The thing's strength felt inhuman—every hit carried weight enough to crack bone. Noctis's arms shook with each block. Every successful parry cost him: a bruise, a cut, a flare of agony in old wounds.
Astra, staggering behind, flung a last-ditch weave. Light rippled through the dawn haze, an imperfect shield and flash meant to buy seconds. The thing tore through it as though tearing a spiderweb—wincing as the power bit at its skin, but not slowing enough. It slammed Astra to the ground with a single brutal motion, fingers knotting in his shirt, dragging him up like a broken doll. For a heartbeat, its eyes softened to something almost human—recognition, maybe, or hatred carved into familiarity.
Noctis's roar ripped through the forest, raw and animal. He threw his entire body into the thing, sword angling to wedge between them. Metal scraped bone; claws slashed his arm, ripping fresh lines of fire. The thing let Astra go, stumbling back half a step, repositioning.
This time, escape came in ragged fragments. The thing pressed them with mathematical patience, circling, forcing their path into tighter loops. It struck from odd angles—up from a crouch, sideways off a tree trunk, low then high—testing every defense. Noctis felt warm blood pooling in his boots, soaking the insides with each step. Astra's body hung heavier in his grip, eyes unfocused, lips cracked and dry.
Three walls of thorns rose around them, interwoven with roots. Ahead, only a tangle of branches left no obvious route. Noctis crouched, blade low, trying to shield Astra behind his own frame. The thing advanced a step at a time, moonlight—or what little filtered through the canopy—glazing its silhouette. The wild hair, the cut of jaw, the bare hands poised to kill—it looked like a twisted reflection of a boy who had never been allowed to be anything else.
In the suspended silence before the killing blow, the thing hesitated.
Its eyes flickered—not only with hunger's tension, but with something searching, deep and wordless. As if looking for a sign. As if waiting.
Noctis forced his voice through broken teeth and bruised lungs. "Why?" he rasped. "What do you want?"
No reply came. No language bridged the gap. Only motion.
A crack of bone—whether from a misstep, an old injury, or some inner restraint snapping—broke the fragile pause. Pain lanced Noctis's side as the thing moved, the impact sharp as lightning. The world spun: ground and branches trading places as his body hit earth. Astra's scream tore the air. The thing closed in, hands shaking now, as if something inside it fought itself—urge to kill grappling with an instinct it didn't understand.
The struggle stretched beyond reason, every second an eternity of flailing strikes, near-falls, half-formed weaves. Noctis's grip slipped, found purchase, slipped again. Astra's light sputtered, flared, died down. The thing's breathing grew heavier, shoulders lifting and falling with each restrained blow. Pain smeared into a single long blur. Hope refused to lie down.
Only when, for a fraction of a heartbeat, the thing met Noctis's eyes and faltered—something in its gaze cracking wide enough for uncertainty to leak through—did a gap appear. A narrow space between roots, a sliver of escape where none had been.
Noctis saw it. Astra felt it. They moved.
They slipped sideways through the gap, thorns tearing at their clothes and skin, roots clawing ankles. The thing lunged, fingers catching only trailing fabric, ripping it free. Noctis didn't look back. He half-dragged, half-carried Astra into the waking forest, branches whipping their faces, leaves exploding around them.
They didn't stop until the trees thinned and the sky blazed with rising sun.
Only then did the pursuit falter. The thing did not follow past some unseen line. Whether by choice or by rule, it let them go.
They were alive not because they had overpowered it, but because it—whatever it was—had chosen, in that small, broken moment, to let them slip away.
Dawn burned over the battered world as Noctis and Astra collapsed beneath a tangle of twisted branches, bodies folding into the damp earth. Breath tore from them in jagged bursts, each inhale scraping lungs raw. Dried blood stiffened their clothes into second skins, torn and stained—a crude map of every close call and every trap sprung. Cuts and bruises marred their skin, some still oozing, others already darkening, a constellation of pain.
Above, the canopy fractured the light into shards—soft rays filtering through leaves and weaving gentle patterns over their wrecked forms. It should have been peaceful, almost beautiful. Instead, it felt like mockery: a quiet, dappled lull after a night where they had existed only as targets, as prey learning to breathe between teeth.
Astra huddled against a moss-slick stone, knees pulled tight to his chest, shoulders hunched as if the forest itself were bearing down on him. His face was ghost-pale under streaks of dirt and drying blood, cuts spiderwebbing across his cheeks and jaw. The light in his eyes had dimmed to a faint shimmer, his astral power flickering at his fingertips like dying fireflies—there, then gone, never fully catching.
Noctis spat a curse into the raw morning air, the words tearing from his throat rough and hoarse. "Damn this place," he snarled, the sound half growl, half broken breath. "Damn him. Damn every trap in this gods-forsaken wood." The anger was more than heat; it rolled off him in waves, a shield against the shaking in his legs, the sting in every shallow breath.
The curses kept coming. At the thing that hunted them with human hands and a predator's patience. At fate, for stringing their lives between one narrow escape and the next. At himself, for not being faster, smarter, stronger. He tore at thorned roots tangled around the rocks, ripping them free even as sharp barbs bit into his palms. Blood smeared across bark and moss. He kicked loose stones with savage force, sending them skittering deep into the underbrush until the crashes faded. Each sore inhale became a vow hammered into his chest: never again—not like this, not on someone else's terms. If they bled, it would be on ground they chose.
"He's not like the others…" Astra's voice came out small and cracked, a whisper soaked in fatigue and something like reluctant awe.
Noctis's head snapped toward him, temper flaring. "He's not anything," he shot back. "Human? Beast? Demon?" His words broke, edged with bitterness. "He's worse than monsters because he thinks—because he plans." His fist crashed into the ground before he could stop himself. Pain sang up his arm as reopened wounds oozed, fresh blood welling between his knuckles. "We're not dying here," he ground out, breath rough. "Not because we ran out of ideas."
The forest swallowed their voices. They huddled there, pressed close to the stone, silence vibrating with aches and half-stifled breaths. Noctis's mind buzzed with the afterimages of traps and clever angles; Astra's power ticked low, an ember refusing to die. The Echoframe flickered weakly at the edge of Noctis's perception, its glow dulled, messages slow to form.
"Alert: Security risk. Perimeter breached. Recommended: defensive preparation; strategic withdrawal."
Noctis let the words settle like cold water over hot coals. He drew a shuddering breath, forcing his voice into something resembling control. "Right. Strategy," he muttered. "We stay alive, we change the rules."