The forest around them stood silent as they waited. Guin clutched her spear as her senses went wild, picking up all the sounds and movement around them—what very little there was of it.

They had been running, chasing a Cat Fox when Starshine got distracted by the general change in the area. All that Starshine could say was the area had just changed suddenly: a large patch of dead trees, and she wanted to investigate a bit.

Of course, StarShine didn’t have Veil Sight.

The moment they saw the area, Drakov and Guin exchanged a glance, but before they could say anything, they were sucked in like quicksand, with Corrupted Gobos coming at them from all sides. Not an ideal situation for a group like this...

But they had lived—no matter how surprising it seemed.

Even for Guin, corruption of this level was far different than what she had experienced in the tutorial. Even the word ‘forest’ seemed inaccurate. Corruption ate away at the remains of trees and fauna that already looked as if rot had overtaken them. Everything was dead. Decaying. The trees were leafless, black; their trunks moist with strange guk that Guin was afraid to touch. The ground was nearly swamp-like—and the smell.

The world around her was like a personification of the zombie she and the group had fled from in the catacombs. Dripping. Rotting. Raw.

Closing her eyes, she balanced herself as she swayed. The adrenaline of the discovery and the battle that had helped her during the fight had worn off.

“Liorax,” she muttered, low enough so that BronzePaw wouldn’t hear. “Can you change buffs to dull my sense of smell?” Relief swept over her as she watched the buff icon switch over. The scent was still there but mild enough for her to focus.

Corruption had not been in the cards for this little adventure of hers—though now she felt she should have expected it. This was Miala De Ri. Even among the Mist clan territory, they had the largest population of spirits. Surely, it was easy to offend them.

Is it the hunters again? She wondered bitterly. They would be the most obvious suspects—and if they weren’t still in a starting zone, she’d say they were almost too obvious. But the hunters there did keep to a very, very strict code, and in a city this big, she couldn’t imagine that they had eyes on everyone at all times.

“Is everything all right, Guin?” BronzePaw asked her in her very perfect English.

“Why?”

“You seem... Concerned.”

“Sorry,” Guin said, shaking her head. “It’s just unexpected.”

BronzePaw handed Guin some of the loot they had found. “You were supposed to be hunting beasts, right? I haven’t really seen any in this place. Should we turn back once we find the others?”

“Well...” Guin pulled up her map and furrowed her brows. “We were going off speculation, originally. I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked there aren’t any animals here. The Corruption makes this a whole different story, though.”

“Corruption? You mean the dead trees? Why would that change anything?” she asked. “We could just move to a new area.”

Guin bit her lip. “I suppose that’s true,” she murmured. Unlike the obligation she had to White Fox Forest, this one was nothing to her. And yet... “This should have been caused by something... “

“Is it?”

“It could lead to a very lucrative quest,” Guin told her quickly. Even she wasn’t sure of her own motives, but there was no way she could investigate alone. “Though it could be quite time-consuming.”

BronzePaw shrugged. “I have all day,” she said. “And most of tomorrow. As long as you guys are willing to take me along, I’m good for it.”

Guin nodded but didn’t respond.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Annoyed with both herself and the others, she poked at her various screes.

Running her tongue along the smooth surface of her teeth, feeling the sharpness of the tips, she growled and switched the screen over to her stats—which didn’t show her anything new, really. She was getting to that point where her stats were no longer something she’d keep track of.

Though now her class progress had been put on hold. Amikavi could wait.

Furrowing her brow, Guin looked up and around again.

Silence. Stillness.

Where had all the spirits of the forest gone?

“This isn’t right,” she muttered. Maybe it’s just this area?

“Hmm?” Bahena went but was interrupted by a mildly exasperated:

“Noona!”

Guin lifted her head to see Drakov running over to her, out of breath. “Catch your breath,” she told him. “It doesn’t look like you’ve got anyone following you.”

“Yeah, not sure what happened,” he said, waving his hand behind him. His clothes—and his face—were covered in mud.

“Are you okay?” Guin asked with a laugh, rubbing his face off with one of the paws that hung from her hood.

“Ahh. Do I look that bad?”

“You’re covered...”

“How embarrassing...” he laughed.

StarShine flew overhead on her broom and did a round around the clearing before she landed gracefully back on the ground. Despite being dressed head to toe in leather that gave her a bit too much of a dominatrix impression, she was clean as a whistle—and obviously unhappy. Grimacing, Drakov moved to hide behind Guin.

Pointing at Drakov with her broom handle, she said, “Don’t you hide from me, little boy! Get out here and apologize!”

“Okay, okay,” Guin put her hands up between them in surrender. “Let’s yell at each other when we know we are in a safer location, okay?”

Though StarShine grumbled, she withdrew and leaned on her broom with a cranky-sounding, “Fine.”

“What’s supposed to be on your tail?” BronzePaw asked.

“Not sure,” said StarShine, shaking her head. “I counted about ten at some point - but I think a few of them rubber banded.”

“Ten?” Guin asked in alarm. “You’d better be hoping to hell that they rubber banded!”

Drakov looked down at his feet as he clutched his bow, “Sorry, Noona...”

“What the hell is going on with these things, anyway?” StarShine asked, tilting her witch’s hat forward. “This isn’t the first time I’ve fought Gobos—I mean, aren’t they a level one monster? But these things are...”

“Strong?” BronzePaw suggested.

“I was going to say ‘weird,’ but ‘strong’ works too,” said StarShine.

“It’s the corruption. This forest is corrupted. Bad.” Drakov told them, turning to Guin. “This kind of corruption should have taken decades to get this bad. It’s so powerful—could this one of the lost spirit lands?”

“I... to be honest, I don’t know anything about that,” Guin told him. “I’ve fought corrupted monsters before, so I got that much, but what do you mean by ‘lost spirit lands’?”

“The lost spirit lands are the ancient homes of the great spirits of Uldarin,” Drakov explained. “They are also some of the biggest rumor-inspiring things running around the higher levels, right up there with the Compasses and the Tenmath. It is theorized that corrupted areas change based on player actions and decisions made within an area, and if the players aren’t careful, the whole of Uldarin will become corrupted and start a Ragnarok kind of event.”

“Why would they design the game that way?” StarShine asked as if it were the stupidest thing she had ever heard.

Drakov shrugged, “Who knows? This game is nuts. But it would give a sort of consequences-of-actions element to the game that’s not quite so dependant on NPCs.”

“Interesting,” Guin said, thinking about her history with the tutorial. “White Fox Forest had three great spirits - but one of them was missing when I was in the tutorial, and I know for a fact that another one has been slain. The third...” Guin’s mind returned to the painting she had seen on the dais in the catacombs. Could Tethaigou have also been slain?

“Three?” Drakov exclaimed. “Three... that lived together? That’s.. Unusual. If any of them had been killed, the balance of that land could be completely out of whack.”

“I do hate to interrupt this little meeting of the minds here, but,” BronzePaw pointed to into the depths of the forest. “But... something is coming.”

They looked over to where BronzePaw was pointing.

It was only then that Guin noticed the mist. When they had first entered the forest, it had been more a haze, but now, it was rolling in so thick that when the gobos began appearing out from it one by one, it was as if it was melting together with them.

“W-Why are they so slow?” StarShine asked.

First came the big ones who carried massive clubs on their shoulders. Then smaller ones appeared, a handful with short bows and a few with small curved blades. Compared to other groups of gobos they had seen in the forest thus far, they were organized and apparently in no rush to attack, as if they knew that their prey would not—or could not—run. Looking behind them quickly, Guin felt a shiver run down her spine.

There was nothing but the mist, thick as pea soup.

“One, two, three...” BronzePaw began counting. “Oh, Mother Mountain...”

“So much for rubber banding,” said StarShine, hugging her broom.