Chương 65: Forest of the Dead

The young man walked through the forest, glancing warily from side to side, gripping the axe tightly in his hands.

The canopy overhead closed in thick above him, letting through only scattered patches of sunlight that trembled across the ground in strange, shifting shapes, while the silence around him felt unnatural — no familiar birdsong, no rustle of small creatures in the underbrush, just his own footsteps landing dully against the leaf-covered ground, and the occasional creak of old branches somewhere high above.

The air was thick and damp, saturated with the smell of decaying leaves and moss, and with every step that smell seemed to grow heavier, wrapping around Lloyd from every direction.

"Three days and three nights, huh." Lloyd scratched his chin, still scanning the thicket ahead intently, trying to make out anything suspicious among the tangle of trunks and shadows. Every step he took was careful, deliberate — he tried to walk in a way that kept the dry branches underfoot from crunching too loudly, though he was frankly pretty bad at it.

"Where am I even supposed to find water around here? Well, I guess I'll hope this place doesn't require it." Lloyd walked on like this for dozens of meters without really finding anything, aside from the same monotonous tree trunks and the occasional shrub snagging its thorny branches on his pant legs.

The forest around him seemed endless, identical in every direction, as if he were walking in circles — though of course he had no compass, and the sun barely broke through the dense canopy, giving him little to orient by. But then he noticed something in the distance — a barely visible gap between the trees, as if the forest suddenly opened up there, letting in more light.

"No way, is that..." He picked up his pace, then broke into a run outright, eager to confirm his suspicion as quickly as possible. Branches whipped at his shoulders, leaves stuck to his hair, but he paid it no mind. His heart pounded in his chest, whether from the running or from a growing unease mixed with some strange, almost superstitious dread. A few meters on, he finally managed to make out what lay ahead. It was a clearing — an entirely ordinary clearing, the kind the forest could easily have had hundreds of.

But among all these endless trees, it looked somehow different, unsettling — too quiet, too still, as if nature itself were holding its breath here. And indeed, there was something different about it — something lay there, though Lloyd couldn't yet make out what. He ran closer and burst out from between the trees into the open space of the clearing. Before he could properly take it in, his foot caught on something and he went sprawling to the ground, slamming his shoulder painfully against the hard earth.

— What the hell. He rubbed his bruised forehead, where a scrape was already starting to swell, and turned to see what exactly he'd tripped over so painfully. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. It was a person. A corpse, to be more precise.

A body marked with several deep gashes and traces of severe burns, as if the very cuts themselves had been made by some kind of flaming weapon — the edges of the wounds looked melted, blackened, the skin around them covered in blisters, burst and dried out. The clothing on the body had charred in places into brittle black scraps, crumbling apart at the faintest touch of wind.

Lloyd nearly screamed, but managed to hold it back, clamping a hand over his mouth and breathing hard through his fingers, feeling a hot, sour wave of nausea rising in his throat.

"What the hell is going on here?" Lloyd pulled himself together a little, got to his feet, brushing off his knees with hands that were still shaking, and slowly turned to take in the entire clearing. Scattered across the open ground lay more bodies just like the first, all bearing the exact same kind of wounds — as if the same merciless force had caught every single one of them, leaving no chance of escape.

Some were missing limbs, sliced off cleanly in a single stroke, an almost surgical cut, while others were burned so badly their bodies had twisted into charred, blackened shapes, barely distinguishable amid the trampled grass, frozen in the postures of a final, desperate attempt to flee.

The ground around them was scorched black, still smoking in places with thin, bluish wisps curling up toward the treetops, and the air still carried the faint, sickening smell of burnt flesh mixed with the metallic tang of blood, so thick it felt like something you could almost taste. The grass at the edge of the clearing had blackened and curled, as if scorched by one single, powerful, searing blast.

Lloyd sank down onto the ground, feeling his legs give out beneath him, cold sweat trickling down his face and mixing with the dust, nausea rising in his throat again, forcing him to swallow hard, again and again.

"What kind of monster did this? Taking down this many Players at once. This is insane." Lloyd swept his eyes across all the bodies, counting them silently, and with each one felt the sticky, animal fear inside him growing stronger, tightening around his chest like a band, making it hard to draw a full breath. He counted at least a dozen bodies scattered across the clearing in a chaotic, unnatural pattern, as if they'd been thrown by an explosion rather than cut down in a deliberate attack.

And he slowly rose to his feet, trying to steady the treacherous shaking in his knees, gripping the axe handle so tightly with his free hand that his knuckles went white.

"Could this be the Nightmare? But if it is, then it has to be somewhere nearb—" Lloyd didn't get to finish that thought, because a sound came from behind him — quiet, barely perceptible, as if someone were moving carefully through the trees, trying to stay unnoticed, breaking dry twigs underfoot as softly as they possibly could. He spun around instantly, raising the axe toward the trees with both hands, ready to block a strike at any second.

His whole body broke out in a cold sweat, his heart pounding so hard it felt like it might burst from his chest, the sound thudding dully in his own ears. His eyes darted frantically from one dark gap between the trunks to another, searching for the source of the sound.

"What an idiot I am — standing in the middle of an open clearing, exposed like a blank sheet of paper." Suddenly the bushes stirred, and Lloyd gripped the axe even tighter, hard enough to hurt his knuckles, feeling another cold bead of sweat trickle down his spine, his breath catching somewhere in his chest, refusing to come out.

"Is this really it?..."