Kal turned clockwise, completing a spin as he searched for signs of Mira.

“What is it?” Hallard asked.

“This’s a trap,” Kal said. “It has to be.” He did another spin. “I know you’re out there! Come out. I just want to talk!”

Only swaying branches and chittering bugs met his words.

“I messed up, okay?” Kal yelled. “I’m kinda a dick sometimes. And mean. But… I didn’t mean to piss off your brother or call out Aiden. I just thought you’d be… pissed.”

Despite his pleas, no answer met his words.

“No one’s anywhere near us,” Lysan said.

“What?” Kal asked.

“There’s no one within a quarter mile of this place,” she said. “I just checked.”

“Me too,” Hallard said, followed by the other. “I’ve also been checking during the hike. The place is empty.”

“But it is a trap, right?” Kal asked. “That river isn’t natural, and I’ve never heard of a white brantor growing near blue ferns. Have you?”

“No,” Hallard said. He turned to the other three, who shook their heads.

“Let me ask my guide…” He searched through his library of books, including two diamond requests on poisons and alchemic resources in the Areswood Forest, and found none. “It’s not there…”

“You think it’s like the bramble?” Lysan asked. The guide didn’t work in the Bramble, but scholars who studied what people saw within the Bramble noted that Brindle Grask, the notorious druid who authored the books on Areswood biota before fighting and dying in the Jacksmore War, did not write on the plants in the Bramble. It was clear that there were plants he intentionally didn’t mention, but few were documented.

“Maybe…” Kal said. “Or… they’re soul plants.”

Kal’s heart raced. If the ferns were soul plants, he was staring down a field of gold. Soul plants were the most profitable plants from harvests because they were so rare. And since they were so rare, there were few soul alchemists throughout history. Families chose, instead, to sell any plants up the domains and obtain fortunes.

“Maybe…” Kal whispered as he reflected on it.

2.

Tyler sat by a fire, hugging his knees. He didn’t know why, but he felt dread percolating in his stomach over Mira’s absence, and no one would explain where she was or why he felt something off about it. Kalas and Hackle knew both, but they wouldn’t tell him, and it was driving him crazy.

Tyler approached Brexton, who had just woken up against his will and judgment and was lying on the ground like a starfish, sweating profusely.

“Where’s my sister?” Tyler demanded.

Brexton groaned. “1000 hawks and I’ll tell you.”

“No.”

“Okay, ten hawks. I’m not in the headspace to negotiate.”

Tyler retrieved ten gold coins and flicked them at Brexton one at a time.

“That’s ruuuuuuuuude,” Brexton moaned, turning over. “She’s out east. Went to the river. That’s what she said.”

“And where’s Kal?”

“2000 hawks.”

“Twenty.”

“Deal.”

Tyler dumped them on Brexton’s body. “Tell me.”

“He went out east to check out Mira’s campground. It’s down by the river. It was where Aiden spent the week with her. Chances are, there’s a bunch of cores there.”

“So he’s robbing her?”

“Doubt it.”

“Fuck just tell me.”

“This is provocation,” Brexton warned. “If you provoke a legacy intentionally, the Dante will not protect you. Now shoo, shoo. If you’re worried about Mira, go after her. Your people have the power to protect her.” He flicked his hand at Tyler.

Tyler then looked at Kalas and Hackle and decided to confront them.

“Mira’s in danger,” he said.

“She told me to keep you here,” Hackle said. “So don’t bother.”

“Fuck that!” Tyler yelled.

“Calm yourself,” Kalas said firmly. It wasn’t a chilling tone but it sure as hell left goosebumps blistering up Tyler’s arms. “Mira is a warrior,” Kalas said. “If she asked to fight alone, that’s up to her. If she dies; that’s her will.”

Tyler’s blood boiled. “Okay. Let’s do it this way. I’m going up north, and Hackle’s going to follow me. ‘Cause that’s his job. And you’re free to join if you want.”

Kalas took a deep breath as Tyler readied his gear. Then Tyler returned with a fierce expression. “I’m here to learn. And right now, we have a bullshit situation that I caused. And I have to learn from that. Now you have the power to protect my sister. And I hope that, as my teacher, you’ll teach me how to protect her.”

3.

Kal sat there for five minutes before Saska, one of the silent elites, broke the silence.

“Do you mind if I give my thoughts?”

“What is it?” Kal asked.

“I think they are soul plants. Mira has a soul core and knows soul cooking. So it’s not a stretch. And I think that if she did find them, and left a plant like that around, it’s a problem.”

Hallard’s facial muscles slackened into a frown. “Yeah… it’s also suspicious. This place isn’t far from base camp. It had to be cleared out. I can’t imagine a freshly integrated woman just… planting hundreds of rare plants near the Bramble. At the same time, it’s also not something we can ignore.”

Kal nodded. “Then we’ll treat it like a trap. Let’s go around.”

4.

If Kal said something, I would never know. I was a mile away, watching his soul signature like radar. I’m not sure if I have ever felt so much strain on my heart as I did then, watching Kal and his goons approaching the freeters. They were dangerously close as is, but the risks were too low for certainty. For five gruesome minutes, I watched them contemplate it—only to feel cold anxiety pump through my veins.

They were leaving.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

They were so close, but whether it was their experience, rightful paranoia, or general fear of the unknown, they decided not to risk it. They didn’t even send one person in—so it never triggered.

I could still freshly remember what it was like to enter the pact with the plant.

Nearan plants had the collection of consciousness, and these plants collectively made a single frankenstitched nightmare that spoke in a different tone of voice per sentence.

You can speak to us? it said with the hawking caw of a bird.

I have magic to make pacts with you, I replied.

How strange, it said with a bearish growl.

Yes. I’m here to make a deal. I will try my best to lure victims to you in the next two days if you trigger your self-defense spore mechanism if they get within a guaranteed impact zone.

Hmmm… it cackled. Very well.

It was a very simple exchange but powerful and currently fucking useless. They were thirty feet tops before the thing would’ve exploded like a fucking claymore and sent spores into their faces. Now, they were a mile out, walking away, and I didn’t know what to do.

I looked at a spore container I collected, wondering if I should face them. The answer turned out to be no. I wasn’t strong enough. And if I tried to trigger it, I would be giving myself all my trump cards. It was all or nothing.

I had to choose.

I had five seconds.

Ten maybe.

That’s it, I thought.

I looked up into the trees. “I need your help.”

Suddenly, I heard a thump and rumble of pine needles beside me, and Kline released his active camouflage. I petted his ears and said, “This’s the plan.”

5.

Kal hadn’t walked ten feet when he heard a blood-curdling scream in the distance. He whipped his head to Hallard. “Was that Mira?”

Hallard froze. “Yeah… that was her voice, but…”

“She doesn’t seem like a screamer…” Lysan said.

“Yeah…” Hallard turned to Kal. “What are your orders?”

“I…” Kal’s heart rattled in his ribs. He didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, he felt a strange desire to save her—or at least see what was happening—just because that was how humans were sometimes. The other part of him realized that Mira was a serious problem, and if she just died, it would be to their benefit.

Mira screamed again, this time coughing. The echo was louder and seemed to get more deafening by the second. And, as if Mira was 501 meters away and teleported, her choking scream suddenly grew near.

“What are your orders?” Lysan yelled.

“Prepare to fight,” Kal said, unsheathing his sword with a pounding heart.

Mira’s body suddenly flew into view. She was in the jaws of a large orange and black cat and was bleeding profusely—and they were moving right for the blue ferns.

Kal didn’t think. He bolted toward her against his better judgment, followed by his guards, chasing after him, yelling, “It’s a trap!”

Kal stopped twenty feet from the ferns and said, “What?”

Then Mira and the cat suddenly disappeared into nothing, as if they were nothing but an illusion. The next second, Kal barely heard the words, “Barrier!” before the plants exploded in all directions like a blizzard in the fall-time air.

He put up his hand and screamed—but nothing hit him. He slowly opened his eyes and saw a barrier around him.

He took rapid breaths, laughing and feeling amazed to have survived what was certain to be certain death. And in that moment of laughing and hyperventilation, something tickled his nose and sucked into his nostril. He sneezed.

4.

They must’ve seen my spore barrier, I internally screamed as Kline, and I disappeared into the woods. I had plausible deniability if I showed up to camp with wounds on my stomach. “What? That sure as hell wasn’t my barrier on the cat eating me, you fucking prick!” But I knew these people wouldn’t buy it.

They turned down a 180,000 hawk plant over a fern they didn’t know about, then managed to see through my trap instantly and prepared for battle. These people were going to return to camp, rob me blind, and then wage war.

This was just the reality of the situation: I was new to this world and these people had been harvesting for years, decades, centuries. Who the fuck knew how long. They were stronger and more experienced. I was warned about them. Legacies. Not bandits or robbers or any bullshit like that. Legacies.

Now, the question was, what should I do?

I’m sure that the rational brain would have had a different idea, but the reptilian part of my brain was processing the world in black and white and war, and my immediate thoughts were:

I failed; now, kill.

So we blinked out of sight, circling them as I pulled Nymbral out of my chest and charged a hurricane arrow.

When we curved back, two of the guards were choking on the ground, and the other three were running.

“I’ll take the man, you take the woman, then we’ll corner Kal. No biting.”

Kline nodded and zagged through three more shadows, preparing to strike.

5.

Kal ran forward with adrenaline pulsing through his veins. He didn’t know why. They were still stronger, right? So why did they feel like prey? He didn’t understand.

Saska and Rosa hit the ground, coughing after the blast. God knows what happened to them. Now, Mira was trapping them. Or was she? Wasn’t she in the jaws of a fucking cat?

What was going on?

Kal ran on until he reached the fake river, feeling hatred jutting through his veins. He tried to reach out to that fucking cunt, and what did she do? Try to kill him! No discussion. Fuck her. If he found her—

His thought was cut off when that cat suddenly flew in front of them, Mira in its jaws. There was blood on her body, so he thought it was real for a split second. Then he saw a golden glint and saw a bow in her hand and a glimmer of water.

“Barrier!” Hallard yelled.

Jaska threw up a heavy orange barrier, but a violent explosion of water hit it a moment later, and it cracked and shattered, sending water raining down on them. It was harmless water, but what followed was far from innocuous. Without warning, something hit Jaska from the back, sending her flying forward, and another force flew into Hallard.

Then Kal was alone, afraid—unable to move.

He was trained his whole life for battle. He was stronger than most other people his age. But everything was happening so fast, so savagely. He had everything. Now, everything was in disarray, and his mind wasn’t working quite right. It wasn’t working right at all. He felt like he was losing touch. And what if he was? What if the spore reached his brain and was going to kill him? He needed to make it back and see a healer as soon as possible. And he had to warn people of Mira and her cat.

In a daze, he took a step forward in the chaos. Then another. A third. It got easier with each, and by the fifth, he found himself running, using the bounding arrays on his shoes to blast through the forest.

Kal needed to stay out of Hallard and Lysan’s way to make it back to camp. That was his job—and he planned to do it.

6.

I watched Kal run away with a pounding heart. Then, I was punished for watching when a wind blade flew into my chest and sent me flying across the ground.

It was a savage attack that cut straight through my armor and chest. If I didn’t have an Illyndra elixir pumping in my veins, I might’ve died. But I did, and it snapped my body back together in time to avoid another attack.

“You fucked with the wrong people!” the man I’d later know as Hallard said. He coughed into his elbow. “You’re dead!”

Suddenly, Kline flew into a tree with a vicious crack as well. Ten wind blades flew at him like a blender, and he barely warped away before they cut the tree to shreds, sending wood chunks flying in all directions. Without slowing down, the woman I’d laster know as Lysan, turned to me and thrust her hands on the ground.

I cranked Moxle Dilation to the max and hopped around with quick dexterity as she activated an earthquake spell, forcing me to jump onto splitting rocks as it shook the trees. Full trees waved back and forth, increasingly unstable, until I could see root networks rip out of the ground.

This was happening in seconds.

Things only got worse from there. As I was dodging, Hallard flew backward and threw a catastrophic gust of wind at me. I could only watch in horror as full boulders broke and flew at me in ultra-slow motion. In a second of real-time, I would suffer a hail storm of massive rocks to my face.

Suddenly, Kline blinked to my side at a relatively insane speed, and I barely grabbed his fur and jumped through a portal before the world sped up and the rock storm blew up the entire section of forest beside me.

I remember seeing that right then and there and realizing the true extent of our power disparity. That should have made sense, conceptually, considering that these were the top elites of the outside world. Still, the thought that they could unroot ten hundred-foot trees and then blow boulders in a hailstorm that turned an entire meadow to shrapnel was far out of the realm of my understanding.

“Run!” I screamed.

Kline did, bolting through a dozen warp steps as the Melhan elites flew at us at a similar speed.

7.

Tyler wasn’t the only one searching for Mira. Six giants with dark mossy fur and calcified masks slunk through the forest, thinking, Pure… pure… with one-tracked minds, ignoring adventurers that ran from them—savagely killing the ones that did. This was the last full day of the harvest, and the pure core finally left the base camp. So they spread out in search of her in all directions—determined to not let her return to the safety of the Bramble.