Umbra moved carefully through the dense bush, placing each step with deliberate precision, and she found herself quietly grateful that the armour she wore had been forged with more than durability in mind. Despite its thickness and weight, it produced remarkably little sound when she shifted her limbs, the plates overlapping in such a way that they did not scrape or clatter the way ordinary metal would. In a different situation she might have appreciated the craftsmanship for its artistry, but here and now she appreciated it for the simple fact that it allowed her to move through the undergrowth without announcing herself to everything within a kilometre.
The spear in her hand had grown noticeably brighter over the past several minutes, the glow at its tip no longer a faint suggestion but a steady, insistent radiance that painted the surrounding leaves in pale light whenever she lifted it too high. The Witch’s corruption was close now. Close enough that Umbra could almost feel it pressing faintly against her senses, like humidity before a storm. It was not a physical pressure, exactly, but something more subtle and invasive, as though the air itself had been threaded with a foreign intention.
She slowed further, allowing her awareness to expand outward rather than relying solely on sight.
The signs were there, if one knew how to interpret them.
The most obvious was the silence.
In the height of summer, this part of the world was rarely quiet. Cicadas, some of the loudest insects on the planet, typically filled the trees with their relentless buzzing, a layered chorus that became so constant it faded into the background of human perception. Even now, she could faintly detect them far off in the distance, beyond what most human ears would register, their droning song continuing somewhere safely removed from this place.
But not here. Here… there was nothing.
No rustle of small mammals in the brush, nor wingbeats overhead, nor distant birds calling to one another across the canopy. Even the insects had withdrawn, leaving behind a hollow stillness that felt unnatural rather than peaceful. It was the kind of silence that suggested absence by force, not by chance. Umbra tightened her grip slightly on the spear as she advanced.
The weather, at least, worked in her favour. Wellington’s temperament had always been unpredictable, and today the sky had chosen to split open in a steady curtain of rain. Water poured through the canopy in uneven streams, pattering against leaves and soaking into the earth until the soil beneath her boots turned dark and pliant. The rain masked her scent, diluted whatever trace she might otherwise leave behind, and softened the sound of her footfalls even further. Each step sank slightly into the wet ground, absorbed rather than echoed. If she could maintain the element of surprise, she would do so without hesitation.
The forest she was ascending clung to the side of a hill that rose higher than any other point in Wellington, a place well known to locals who made the climb regularly for the view. On clear days, people gathered near the summit to look out over the city spread below, the harbour stretching wide and silver beneath the sky. It was a place associated with routine walks, with photographs, with quiet reflection above the noise of urban life. Now, however, it felt entirely different.
The higher she climbed, the stronger the spear’s glow became, and the more pronounced the absence of life felt around her. The rain streamed down her armour in thin rivulets, dripping from the edges of her pauldrons and trailing off the tip of her spear in glowing droplets. The path that hikers usually followed was somewhere to her right, partially obscured by thick growth, but she avoided it instinctively, choosing instead to move parallel through denser cover where she was less likely to silhouette herself against the skyline.
The Witch’s presence was no longer distant. It lingered ahead, somewhere near the crown of the hill where the trees began to thin, and Umbra advanced with measured patience, each step bringing her closer to whatever waited in that unnatural pocket of silence overlooking the city.
Umbra had just begun to adjust her path toward a thicker cluster of trees when she heard it—a subtle disturbance to her right, so slight that most humans would have dismissed it as rain shifting on leaves. Her head turned instantly toward the sound, the motion sharp and precise, and her dark eyes swept across the undergrowth in slow, searching arcs as she tried to separate imagination from reality.
For a heartbeat, there was nothing.
Then she caught it.
Something moved at the very edge of her vision, a shape slipping between tree trunks with unnatural speed. It did not crash through the brush the way a careless beast might. It glided, almost silent despite the wet foliage, and vanished before her eyes could lock onto it properly.
Whatever it was, it was fast.
A dozen possibilities surfaced in her mind in rapid succession, drawn from long and unpleasant experiences. There were creatures that relied on speed alone, others that combined silence with venom, and some that preferred to wound and withdraw, letting panic do half their work. Without a clearer look she could not be certain which variation she was dealing with, and guessing incorrectly could prove fatal.
For now, she chose not to react overtly.
Instead, she continued forward, though her pace slowed to a deliberate pace. She allowed her gaze to soften rather than focus too narrowly ahead, relying on peripheral awareness rather than direct sight. At the same time, she extended her attention outward in other ways, listening for movements that did not belong to her own careful steps and feeling for disruptions in the ambient mana of the area. Earth’s natural mana was faint compared to other worlds she had known, little more than a thin current beneath reality, but even that slight presence shifted when something unnatural moved through it.
Another sound followed. This time it came from her left.
Not loud, but distinct enough that she did not mistake it for rain.
A second movement answered from the right only moments later.
Whatever stalked her was not alone.
They were circling, positioning themselves carefully, trying to exploit the limits of her vision. That alone told her something important. Creatures that hunted this way were rarely mindless. They understood blind spots and timing, meaning these were most likely ambush predators.
That narrowed the list considerably.
They were almost certainly not nighthaunts. As much as she disliked the thought of encountering more of her own kind, she knew their patterns intimately. Nighthaunts were devastating opponents, relentless and brutal, and the only reason she had slain as many as she had in the past was due to a combination of fortunate circumstances, superior equipment, and the fact that while they were intelligent, they did not think on the level of true people. More importantly, they required significant material and preparation to create. The Witch of the Void should not yet have had access to the necessary resources, especially since Umbra had already confirmed that she was investing effort into producing other types of monsters.
Still, uncertainty lingered.
Umbra adjusted her grip on her shield and spear, angling her body slightly to reduce the space behind her without appearing to do so overtly. She continued forward, listening, feeling, waiting for the moment when patience would give way to action.
Her instincts flared a fraction of a second before the attack came.
The pressure in the air behind her shifted ever so slightly, a subtle displacement that only someone attuned to such things would notice. She reacted instantly, pivoting her torso and whipping her shield around to cover her back. The impact came hard enough to reverberate through her arm, a loud metallic clang erupting as bone hit metal.
The force of it confirmed that whatever had attacked her possessed considerable strength, far more than an ordinary predator.
Without hesitating, Umbra thrust her spear outward from behind the shelter of her shield, angling the weapon around its edge in a practiced motion. The glowing tip cut through the rain-dampened air and met resistance. She felt the spear bite into flesh, not deeply but enough to score a grazing wound before the creature recoiled with a sharp, scraping sound against her armour.
She pulled her shield back into a forward guard and stepped into the space the attacker had vacated, refusing to yield ground.
That was when she saw it properly for the first time.
When Umbra finally saw the creature clearly, illuminated by the pale glow of her spear and the thin wash of rain sliding from the canopy above, she almost let out a sigh of relief, though the sound never quite made it past her throat.
It was only a corpsestalker.
To the average person, the word “only” would have been laughable. Corpsestalkers were the kind of monsters that featured in the final pages of incident reports and in the worst recollections of survivors. They stood slightly taller than a human and carried themselves with a disturbing, feline grace, their movements fluid and predatory in a way that felt wrong on something shaped even vaguely like a person. Their torsos were lean and corded with unnatural muscle, their limbs elongated just enough to make their proportions unsettling without being obviously distorted.
The most disturbing feature, however, was the face.
Where flesh should have been, there was none.
The skin around the skull had been stripped away entirely, leaving pale bone exposed to the open air, rainwater tracing thin lines through the hollows of its cat-like eye sockets and along the ridges of its cheekbones. Its mouth was little more than a permanent skeletal snarl, and when it shifted its head to look at her, the empty sockets somehow still conveyed intent.
Its claws flexed as it crouched, and Umbra noted their structure automatically. They were jagged and layered, as though someone had taken several curved blades and stacked them one atop the other without bothering to smooth the edges. The result was a grotesque approximation of talons, thick and ridged, capable of rending flesh with brutal efficiency.
Terrifying to a civilian but manageable to her. She’d killed thousands of them.
Corpsestalkers were fast, designed to close distance in a heartbeat and retreat just as quickly, but Umbra had long ago surpassed the speed they were built to exploit. Before the one she had grazed could fully regain its balance, she pivoted sharply, her armour shedding droplets of rain as she turned, and drove her spear toward the second presence she had sensed in the undergrowth.
The weapon struck true.
The glowing tip pierced through the creature’s skull with a crack of splitting bone, the enchantment flaring briefly as it met corrupted flesh. Umbra did not pause to admire the precision. Instead, she allowed the momentum of the impalement to carry through her body, using the weight of the skewered corpsestalker to fuel a controlled spin. The limp form lifted from the ground as she turned, rainwater and dark ichor scattering outward in an arc.
She released the corpse at the apex of her rotation, hurling it directly into the first monster just as it prepared to spring again.
The impact sent both creatures tumbling together into the mud. Umbra stepped forward immediately, drawing her spear back and angling it downward in a decisive thrust meant to pin them both to the earth at once. For a moment it seemed as though the maneuver would succeed, the tip descending toward the tangled shapes.
But the surviving corpsestalker reacted faster than she anticipated.
With a sudden convulsive motion, it shoved the body of its fallen counterpart upward and outward, using the limp mass as a projectile. The corpse struck Umbra squarely before she could bring her shield fully into position. The force of it, though not devastating, was enough to stagger her half a step back, her boots sliding slightly in the rain-softened soil as she absorbed the impact.
By the time she regained full footing, the living corpsestalker had already disengaged, its lean form darting into the trees with uncanny speed. Within seconds it melted back into the forest, its pale skull-face vanishing between trunks and shadow as though it had never been there at all.
Umbra lowered her spear slowly, rain continuing to fall in steady sheets around her.
She clicked her tongue in quiet irritation.
The encounter could have gone worse, certainly. Neither strike had penetrated her armour, and she had eliminated one of them cleanly. Even so, she recognized the small imperfections in her execution. Her timing had been slightly off. Her shield had been half a second too slow. Under ideal conditions, she would have ended both creatures before either had the opportunity to retreat.
They were newborns, she realized after a brief moment of consideration, barely settled into their forms and still clumsy in certain transitions. A fully matured corpsestalker would not have relied so obviously on its companion’s body as a distraction. It would have coordinated more cleanly and struck with greater precision.
That thought unsettled her more than the skirmish itself. Still, there was little sense in pursuing the fleeing monster. Giving chase through unfamiliar terrain would cost her time, and time was the one resource she could not afford to squander. The Witch remained the greater threat, and the spear in her hand still pulsed insistently toward a deeper concentration of corruption further uphill.
The surviving corpsestalker would likely attempt another ambush once it recovered its nerve, or she would encounter it again during the inevitable cleansing of this hill. Either way, it was no longer the immediate priority.
She cast one last glance toward the direction it had fled, then resumed her ascent.
All she could do was hope that, in the meantime, it did not cross paths with anyone unfortunate enough to be walking these trails, unaware of the horrors nesting near their city.