Umbra arrived at the last known location of Team Eight with a growing sense of unease settling heavily in her chest, because even before she saw the signs clearly, she could feel that something was wrong. The clearing they had been assigned to secure was no longer quiet in the natural way a forest should be quiet; instead, it carried that strained stillness that follows violence, where even the birds seem reluctant to return.
She moved slowly through the area, scanning the ground with practiced attention. There were footprints, multiple overlapping patterns pressed deep into the soil, and the flattened remains of brush that had been crushed under boots. A few shell casings glinted faintly near a tree trunk. Then she found one of their radios lying several metres away, half-hidden beneath disturbed earth, as though it had been knocked from someone’s hand mid-struggle.
She picked it up carefully. The casing was cracked along one edge, and when she pressed the transmit button, only a weak hiss of static answered her. No voice, no signal.
Her gaze shifted outward, and she began to notice the more troubling details. The undergrowth had been torn apart in places, branches snapped not by careful movement but by force. There were dark stains soaking into the dirt, that of blood, and too much of it to dismiss as minor injury. She followed the pattern of destruction with her eyes until she found what she had been expecting and yet still hoped not to see: long drag marks cutting through the foliage, two distinct paths leading away from the clearing.
Unlike Team Two, however, these trails veered in an entirely different direction.
Umbra straightened, her grip tightening subtly around the broken radio. She did not know whether the Witch of the Void had already established multiple spawning points or whether this divergence was meant to divide her attention and waste her time, but neither possibility was comforting. The Witch had proven capable of planning ahead, and Umbra would be a fool to assume this was coincidence.
Setting the radio aside, she brought her spear forward and let her mana flow into the runes etched along its length. The enchantments responded immediately, lines of faint light tracing along the weapon’s surface like veins filling with luminous blood. The detection web they had anchored through the buried bones stirred to life at her command, threads of magic stretching outward in invisible strands across the forest.
She held the spear out before her, watching as a glow formed at its tip, subtle at first but steady.
Then she began to walk.
For a short distance the light remained consistent, neither strengthening nor fading, and she continued forward with cautious optimism. After several dozen paces, however, the glow dulled slightly, enough for her to notice. She halted at once and retraced her steps until the brightness returned, then angled herself a few degrees to the left and the glow intensified, so she followed it.
The spear would not guide her directly to the Witch herself; that would be too convenient, and the Witch was rarely careless. What it would do, if the enchantment functioned correctly, was lead her toward the densest concentration of void corruption within range. If there were multiple nests or clusters forming, the spear would react to the strongest one nearby, and from there she could reassess.
It was, in many ways, no different from tracking a spawning pit years ago.
The thought pulled her unexpectedly into memory.
Back then, she had not been Umbra the monstrous Countess. She had been Genevieve the human, who had been uncertain and underprepared, wearing armour that did not quite fit and carrying a spear primarily because it was inexpensive and relatively simple to learn compared to more specialised weapons. A shield had been strapped to her arm not out of confidence in her skill, but because it statistically increased her chances of surviving long enough to matter.
She had been placed into a full party despite barely having proper training.
Leondro had led them through the Yuritch forest with an ease that bordered on dismissive arrogance, though he rarely meant it cruelly. He simply understood terrain in a way that others did not, navigating dense undergrowth as if invisible trails had been drawn only for him. It had taken him months to remember her name, and even then he said it awkwardly, as though surprised she had lasted that long. Despite his lack of faith in her potential, she had learned from him constantly, observing how he read the land and adapted without hesitation.
Bortida had been the opposite of cautious. A gifted swordswoman with undeniable talent, she carried herself like someone already destined for greatness, and every successful skirmish had reinforced that belief. When they located the spawning pit, she charged ahead with reckless confidence, assuming that a larger nest of monsters would fall as easily as the scattered packs they had previously encountered. She cut down dozens in spectacular fashion before being overwhelmed, her confidence finally meeting something that did not bend before it.
As they descended deeper into the caves beneath the pit, the atmosphere grew suffocating, thick with rot and something far worse. Brute, their normally unshakeable archer, began to unravel. Umbra still remembered the expression on his face when fear finally surfaced, raw and unmistakable. He attempted to retreat, abandoning the formation in a moment of panic, only to be butchered by a nighthaunt that had been shadowing them through the tunnels.
Jav had stayed, despite shaking hands and muttered curses. Crude and perpetually half-drunk, he had nevertheless held the line when it mattered, throwing himself into the fray with fists and stubborn loyalty. He survived that mission, though the experience hollowed something out inside him, and he never truly returned to the life of a warrior afterward.
Leondro died near the end.
A bloodbite lunged for Genevieve during the chaos, and he stepped in front of it without hesitation, absorbing the brunt of the attack. She escaped with little more than a scratch; he did not.
At the very bottom of the pit, they found the broodmothers, grotesque and swollen shapes that made Farah retch immediately upon seeing them. Even so, Farah did not retreat. She stood beside Genevieve and fought with unwavering resolve, never once doubting that she could endure.
They succeeded that day. They destroyed the broodmothers and collapsed the spawning chamber, and despite her inexperience, Genvieve had slain more monsters than the rest of the party combined. It had been the first time she understood that whatever she lacked in refinement, she made up for in relentless endurance.
The spear’s glow brightened again in her present hand, drawing her back from memory.
There would be no party at her side now, no scout to guide her path or archer to watch her blind spots. There would be no one to intercept a fatal strike meant for her.
If she failed here, there would be no one to correct the mistake.
Umbra adjusted her course as the light intensified and moved forward into the trees, following the corruption wherever it chose to lead her.
Sally gripped the steering wheel of the van hard enough that the tendons in her hands stood out starkly beneath her skin, and the strain pulled sharply at her already injured shoulder, sending a dull ache down her arm. She felt it distantly, like a notification she chose not to open. The pain barely registered compared to the storm of thoughts crowding her mind as she drove back toward the station.
Everything that had happened in the last ten minutes kept replaying in merciless clarity.
When she had first seen the creature—no, Countess Umbra, she corrected herself automatically—her brain had struggled to process what her eyes were telling it. At first glance, she had assumed it was some sort of elaborate costume. Wellington had its share of eccentric events and devoted hobbyists. She had seen people on stilts before, dressed in towering fantasy outfits with faux fur glued carefully along seams, loose fabric draped to hide the mechanics beneath. Movie-quality, sometimes.
But those had always had tells.
A slight wobble when shifting weight. The unnatural sway of fabric hiding metal supports. The faint creak of structure underneath.
Umbra had none of that.
From the very beginning, she had stood with solid, impossible weight. When she walked, the ground reacted. There had been no hollow sound, no artificial lift and the proportions had been wrong in a way that no stilts could convincingly achieve. She had been too balanced, too seamless, too tangible.
Sally had been called in alongside Officer Williams to guard what the hospital had described, somewhat unhelpfully, as a “non-hostile anomalous individual.” The report had mentioned that the being had been struck by a bus and transported in for evaluation, yet showed remarkably little injury. That alone had been enough to raise eyebrows at the station.
The disbelief had only deepened when Umbra woke up barely an hour later, as if being hit by a bus were an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.
Creatures like that did not exist. They were the stuff of late-night fantasy films and paperback novels with dramatic covers. They did not get admitted to Wellington Hospital. They did not sit upright in hospital beds and thank nurses politely for their assistance.
And yet she had.
Not only that, Umbra had carried herself with an unsettling composure, a noble air that felt strangely authentic. She had spoken calmly, formally, as though this entire situation were a minor detour in a much larger life. If she was to be believed—and Sally still did not know what she believed—she truly was some kind of displaced countess from somewhere that was not Earth. Being assigned as her escort had been deeply unnerving.
Sally prided herself on professionalism, but it was difficult to feel entirely at ease beside a being whose claws looked capable of slicing through reinforced steel. They curved slightly at the tips, dark and sharp, and every time Umbra shifted her hands, Sally found herself tracking the movement involuntarily. Her teeth had been worse—long, jagged, more suited to something that lurked in the abyssal depths of the ocean than a humanoid figure standing under fluorescent hospital lighting. More at home on an angler fish, she had thought at the time, and then immediately felt guilty for the comparison.
Still, she had done her job. She had stayed at Umbra’s side, answered questions when she could, and occasionally stepped away to report back to the station regarding the creature’s claimed Earth identity. There had been procedures to follow, forms to file, superiors to inform. The bureaucracy of it had been oddly grounding despite the strangeness the whole situation held.
Gradually, almost against her will, she had begun to acclimate. Umbra had been measured in her speech, cooperative, even courteous. It had become possible, if not comfortable, to stand beside her without constantly anticipating sudden violence.
Right up until just before, when that illusion had shattered.
When Umbra revealed her monstrous side in full, when the air itself seemed to shift with something unseen and predatory, Sally had been certain that she was about to die. In that split second, every instinct had screamed at her that the act was over, that whatever civility had existed was merely a facade. She had bitterly wished she had been armed, wished she had something between herself and those claws.
She remembered the cold certainty of it: this is how it ends.
But it hadn’t.
Instead of killing her, Umbra intervened between her and the monster that leapt out form between the trees. She had used something Sally could only describe as magic to ease her injuries, warmth spreading unnaturally through her body, knitting flesh that should have required stitches and weeks of recovery. Then she had instructed Sally to return to safety before turning and sprinting away with such impossible speed that Sally had barely had time to comprehend the motion before the figure vanished into the distance.
The entire encounter was over in seconds.
Now, as the van hummed along the road toward the station, Sally finally loosened her grip on the wheel, becoming aware of how rigid her posture had been the entire drive. Her hands trembled faintly as the adrenaline began to ebb, leaving behind a hollow exhaustion.
She had nearly died.
Not in a traffic accident or a routine confrontation gone wrong, but at the hands of a monster that, by all logic, should not exist on Earth.
Neither the attacking creature nor Umbra herself fit into any framework Sally understood. Their very presence felt like a violation of natural law, as though something fictional had slipped through a tear in reality and refused to leave.
The station came into view sooner than she expected.
She pulled into the rear lot, parked the van with mechanical precision, and turned off the engine. For a long moment, she simply sat there, staring at the blank concrete wall ahead of her through the windshield.
Her reflection stared back faintly from the glass—wide-eyed, pale, alive.
She remained there without moving, letting the reality of it settle over her in slow, uneven waves, unsure whether she was more disturbed by the monster that had tried to kill her or the one who had chosen not to.
“We have to listen to her.” Sally breathed. “We cannot make her our enemy.”