Three weeks and four days after waking under that bright western sky, Nhilly finally got bored of not dying.
The sanctuary he'd found was a bowl of stone cupped in the hands of the mountains—a shallow valley, ringed on all sides by cliffs and slopes too steep for anything big to bother with unless it could fly. A small river cut through it, the same one that had given him his first meal. Pines fringed the edges. Rocks warmed quickly under the sun and cooled fast at night.
On paper, it was perfect.
On Nhilly, it sat wrong.
For the first three nights, paranoia kept him propped up against a rock with his sword within arm's reach and his eyes gritty. Every crack of stone, every twig settling in the cold, every whisper of wind through pine needles made his heart slam against his ribs. He'd jerk awake from half-sleep convinced something was standing over him, only to find the same silence, the same indifferent stars.
Nothing came.
No teeth. No claws. No glowing cores in the dark.
By the end of the second week, the quiet itself was starting to feel hostile.
"Float," he muttered now, more to break the silence than anything.
The Star answered like a muscle he'd finally taught to listen.
Gravity loosened; the ground's claim on him slipped. His boots left the dirt by a careful centimetre, then ten, then more. He rose slowly, arms out a little for balance, the familiar, unnerving lightness running through his bones.
It had taken him nineteen days to get here—not to mastery (that was a generous word), but to something he could call "not instant suicide."
Naming things had helped.
He'd sat one evening with his back against a stone and his jacket over his shoulders, watching the light drain out of the sky, and given his gravity multipliers stupid, simple names.
It felt like making a menu for his own death.
Float
Use: Nearly nullifies his personal gravity. Leaves him almost weightless—good for gentle ascents, hanging in the air, or pretending he's a balloon.
Drift
Use: Halves his gravity. Gives him precise control and stable movement. Perfect for long jumps, slow falls, or not smashing his face in after Float.
Swift
Use: Slightly increases his personal gravity to boost acceleration and responsiveness. Good for sudden dashes, course corrections, or last-second "oh shit" adjustments mid-air.
Overload
Use: Pushes his personal gravity to the limit. Lets him plummet, dash, or flick his body around at blistering speed. Needs to be chained into Drift at the last instant unless he wants his bones to exit his body.
Used right, in combat, those four settings turned his movements into a series of controlled accidents: every strike or dash at the bleeding edge of what his human body could handle, his natural strength multiplied by velocity and timing instead of raw muscle.
Used wrong, they turned him into paste.
He'd sampled both outcomes.
Now, as he floated above the sanctuary floor, he flicked between them in quick, practiced bursts.
"Drift."
Weight returned, but less than full. He slid sideways through the air, body angling, boots skimming just above the ground.
"Swift."
His descent tightened; he cut across the small valley in a shallow arc, landing lightly on a rock and immediately pushing off.
"Float. Drift. Swift. Float—whoa—"
He tumbled, twisting, one leg a fraction behind the other, hands windmilling for balance that didn't exist in mid-air. From the outside, he knew it must look ridiculous.
"I swear," he muttered as he righted himself, "if anyone saw this, I'd look like a drunk ballerina."
He smirked despite himself, then glanced around, as if half-expecting some hidden audience to start applauding.
No one. Just mountains. Trees. His own breathing.
The morning sun warmed the side of his face as he rose higher, clearing the tops of the pines. The sanctuary spread beneath him, familiar now: the scuffed patches where he'd crashed, the flattened grass where he'd slept, the blackened circle where he'd nearly set the forest on fire on day seven.
He could stay.
Keep practicing. Hunt flower-fish, refine his Star, pretend the rest of Yarion wasn't out there grinding people into statistics. Live in a quiet bowl where nothing came to eat him.
The thought made something in his chest curl up.
"I didn't drag myself out of a hospital queue for early retirement," he said under his breath.
Boredom had become its own kind of weight, pressing down on him harder than Overload ever could. Every day he spent here was a day he wasn't moving toward… anything. Scenario. Death. Some kind of answer.
He needed to see what waited beyond the stone lip.
So he climbed.
"Float."
He rose, clearing the last jagged edge of the mountain ring. For eight slow, careful minutes, he let himself drift upward and outward, adjusting with Drift when gusts of wind nipped at him, dropping into Swift to steady himself when his trajectory threatened to go sideways.
The world unrolled.
And there it was.
The labyrinth.
It didn't look like any forest he'd ever seen on Earth, or in the safe illustrations from the school books about Yarion.
From above, it was a vast, tangled mat of dark green, so dense it might as well have been a second ground laid over the world. Trees—if they were trees—grew in twisted networks, trunks braiding together, branches arching and swooping like the ribs of some colossal creature.
Huge fallen trunks lay sideways, swallowed by creeping vines thick as a man's torso, barbed with thorns that glinted faintly when the light caught them. Those trunks crossed and recrossed each other to form jagged ridges and hollowed channels: paths that weren't really paths, more like the suggestion of them.
The tallest trees didn't just reach up; they bent.
Their trunks grew straight for twenty, thirty meters, then curved gracefully, arching overhead before drooping back down to stab into the leafy mass again, forming natural vaults. From up here, it looked like someone had grown a cathedral out of living wood and then given up halfway through, letting it rot and tangle into itself.
There was no bare earth visible. Just layers upon layers of leaves and vines, a shifting, woven carpet. In places, the foliage bulged and sank, like something breathing under a blanket.
Sunlight barely pierced the canopy. What little light made it through filtered down in sickly green beams, swallowed quickly by the shadows below.
"Of course," Nhilly muttered. "Why would it be simple. Why not give me a haunted hedge maze from hell."
Hovering there, he scanned the horizon.
The labyrinth went on. And on. An ocean of tangled green, stretching toward the line where the sky blurred into distance. No obvious fortifications. No banner-bearing walls or smoke of cooking fires. If there was a city out there, it was hiding.
He thought of the books he'd read about the western continent. Tamed monsters. Towns with domesticated cores working in mills. Returnees joking about "easy mode" scenarios near the big cities.
Whatever this was, it hadn't been on the curriculum.
"This defies all advertising," he said. "I'd like to file a complaint."
No one answered. The wind tugged at his clothes.
His chest did that annoying thing again where fear and a smaller, sharper thrill tangled together.
"This is it," he muttered. "First actual map. First actual death trap."
The sanctuary had been a cradle. This was teeth.
He exhaled, long and steady. The river far below the mountain ring glittered where it cut past the labyrinth's edge, then disappeared under the green. No safe water down there he could see, no open rock to aim for.
"Alright," he said. "Time to stop floating like a drunk idiot and actually… figure this out."
He began his descent.
Easing his gravity down, lowering himself toward the shifting green surface.
The labyrinth rose up to meet him with unnerving eagerness.
At ten meters above the foliage, he switched.
"Drift."
Weight returned, not full, but enough to make his movements more precise. He angled his body, sliding sideways to avoid a cluster of branches that reached up like fingers. Up close, the leaves weren't soft at all; their edges looked stiff, almost serrated. Vines coiled around trunks in patterns that were a bit too deliberate to be comforting.
He threaded between the first arching beams of wood, ducking past a curved trunk that sagged overhead like the neck of some enormous animal.
His fingers found Draco's hilt without him thinking about it. Just knowing the relic was there made his heart rate drop half a notch.
As he moved, his mouth did what it always did when his brain got busy: it narrated.
"Left branch looks rotten," he muttered. "Avoid it. That arch bends too far, probably snaps if I land on it—not auditioning for 'man impaled on tree.' Drift over. Good. Okay. Okay. Just… survive."
He lowered himself until he was hovering roughly twenty centimetres above what passed for a "floor"—a dense mat of leaves and compacted undergrowth that felt springy even without touching it.
The labyrinth felt alive.
Not in the general "plants are living things" way. In the way of something watching him walk into its mouth.
Shadows didn't behave right. They stretched along the underside of branches in directions that didn't match the sunlight. Glowing moss clung to some trunks, its pale light coming in slow pulses that reminded him uncomfortably of breathing.
He drifted forward.
A vine twitched at the edge of his vision.
"Yeah… yeah, I could swear something's watching me," he said, voice low. "Probably just… leaves. Totally leaves. Not a death trap disguised as foliage. Nope."
He snorted, but the sound came out thinner than he liked.
He moved on, drifting between two huge, arching trunks that formed a natural doorway. The air under them felt cooler, stiller. The light thinned. Somewhere deep in the labyrinth, something creaked.
No one's coming to save me, he reminded himself, not unkindly. Just you, your Star, and a very pretty sword.
He stopped.
Hovering in place, gravity dialled to Float just enough to keep him from sinking, he held himself there and listened.
Leaves whispered.
Branches complained somewhere overhead.
The glowing moss on a nearby trunk pulsed once, twice, a slow roll of faint green spreading along the bark.
Movement.
Just at the corner of his eye. Too smooth to be a falling leaf. Too deliberate to be the wind. Something slid back into stillness on a nearby branch.
He turned his head slightly, not enough to give away that he'd noticed.
"Tch," he breathed, tightening his grip on Draco's Shroud. "Either I'm imagining things or—"
The leaves two meters ahead of him bulged.
Something large pushed up from underneath, a hump rising in the green carpet, vines stretching, thorns scraping softly as they slid across one another.
"Oh, nope," Nhilly whispered, every hair on his arms standing up. "Not imagining."
And the labyrinth, finally done pretending, began to move.