Insomniac Player

The aerial train came to a gentle stop, doors sliding open with a soft hiss. Cold air rushed into the cabin, carrying the smell of damp earth and pine.

Damien stepped onto the platform first. Daria followed a moment later, pulling her coat tighter over her clothes.

The station sat dead quiet. Too quiet. No crowds, no shops, no floating ads, no hovering vehicles, just a small steel platform hanging above an endless stretch of wilderness.

Damien’s eyes caught on something about thirty meters off, a glowing figure sitting perfectly still on an empty bench.

Another ghost. This one stared out into the distance without moving at all, translucent edges catching the platform lights.

"...So there are more of them." He filed the thought away for later, maybe another quest hiding in there somewhere. Now wasn’t the time, though, and explaining "sorry, I was just talking to a dead man" to Daria sounded like more trouble than it was worth.

"...Later," he muttered, and kept walking. The ghost watched them go without a word.

◇◇◇

Beyond the platform, nothing but wilderness stretched out in every direction: no roads, no lights, just an ocean of trees reaching so high the canopy looked more like architecture than nature. Forty, fifty meters up in places, ancient enough to be holding up the sky itself.

Daylight barely made it through. Everything below sat wrapped in shadow.

Daria frowned. "...Darker than I thought it’d be."

Damien could see fine. His nocturnal eyes had already kicked in without him consciously triggering anything, the dark folding back to show every tree trunk, every root, even the faint animal trails threading between them.

"...I can see."

She blinked at him. "You can?"

"Pretty clearly, yeah."

"...Lucky." She said it like a small personal insult.

He pulled out the map, hand-drawn on ordinary paper, courtesy of a man who technically didn’t exist anymore. A route wound through the trees toward a circled destination, roughly two hours out on foot.

He folded it back up. "I’ll lead."

◇◇◇

The deeper they went, the quieter the forest got. No birds, no insects, even the wind seemed to have decided this place wasn’t worth the trip. Only their boots against dead leaves broke the silence.

Damien stopped and turned. "One rule."

Daria raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"Don’t make unnecessary noise."

"Mhm."

"And." He looked ahead into the dark. "No light."

"...Why?"

"If something here hunts by sight, we don’t want to be seen. If it doesn’t, it’ll definitely notice fire."

She studied him a second, then nodded. "...Understood."

He moved ahead, quietly avoiding dry branches and loose stones out of pure habit. Years of sneaking through the orphanage without waking anyone had turned into a strangely useful skill set.

Behind him:

CRACK.

A twig, snapped clean in half. He glanced back. Daria offered an apologetic smile. "...Sorry."

"It’s fine."

Five minutes later.

CRUNCH.

A patch of dry leaves this time. "...Sorry."

A few minutes after that, she caught a root with her boot and nearly went face-first into the dirt. "...Ow."

Damien sighed. "Careful."

"I am trying." She apparently had a natural talent for finding every loose object in a hundred-meter radius. At this rate she was going to personally set off a wildlife census.

The dark kept thickening, invisible to her, business as usual to him. She stretched both hands out in front of her like someone feeling around a dark room for a light switch that didn’t exist. "...I genuinely cannot see anything."

He slowed his pace. "I know. I’ve got you." He called out obstacles as they came. "Root. Rock. Small ditch. Branch."

She still managed to clip half of them anyway, until she finally stopped dead. "...I’ve had enough."

He felt the trouble coming before it arrived. "Dariaaaaa!!"

Too late. A fire orb bloomed above her palm.

Whoosh!

Orange light flooded the trees around them, throwing long shadows in every direction. He rubbed his forehead like a man watching a toddler light a firework in a library. "...Seriously?"

She glared at him. "I’d rather not break my neck out here. This is much better."

"It really, really isn’t."

"Relax." She smiled, entirely too confident for someone standing in an unmapped forest with a lit torch for a hand. "We’re only...."

The forest moved. Not a metaphor, not a figure of speech. Leaves shook in unison, branches trembled, and the ground itself started buzzing under their feet like something enormous had just woken up annoyed.

Her smile dropped fast. "...Damien?"

He stared into the dark. "...Run."

Something huge tore through the tree line.

BOOOOOOM!!

A centipede the length of a city bus erupted out of the forest floor, plated in crimson chitin, hundreds of legs scraping stone loud enough to hurt, mandibles clicking with clear enthusiasm for the flame still burning above Daria’s hand. Dozens of glowing green eyes locked onto it like it was the best thing they’d seen all year.

Daria’s staff came up on instinct. "...Fire Lance!"

A spear of flame shot out and slammed into the shell.

BOOM.

It screeched, and for one glorious second she looked thrilled with herself. "...See?"

Then it plowed straight through the smoke, mostly unbothered, one small scorch mark the only casualty, and somehow moving faster than before.

"..."

His eyes went wide. "...RUN!"

The thing charged, trees folding like toothpicks in its wake. She turned and bolted, and it became immediately, painfully clear that mages were not built for track and field. The gap between them and several tons of angry centipede started closing fast.

He glanced back once. "...Damn it." No time to be polite about it. He grabbed her around the waist.

"Wha—?!" Her face went red instantly. "Damien!"

"Sorry! No time to ask permission!"

Shadow pooled beneath his feet.

➤[Skill Activated: Shadow Dash]

CRACK!!

They vanished, the whole world smearing into a streak of black, and reappeared hundreds of meters clear. The centipede plowed straight through the empty space they’d been standing in a second earlier and shrieked in what sounded a lot like genuine offense.

Daria shoved him off the second her feet hit the ground. "What were you thinking?!"

He held both hands up. "I said sorry!"

"You grabbed me!"

"It was that or become bug food. I picked the option where you keep all your limbs."

She opened her mouth, closed it again, cheeks still faintly pink. "...Ask next time."

"If there’s a next time, I promise to send a formal request."

They kept moving until the thing finally lost interest somewhere past its territory line, and only then did either of them stop to actually breathe.

He leaned against a tree. "...No more fires."

"You win." She shot him a look that was half glare, half genuine surrender. "I’ll trust your night vision. Feel free to gloat quietly to yourself about it."

"I appreciate the permission."

◇◇◇

Another hour passed, this one blissfully centipede-free, both of them moving exactly the way he’d said the first time around.

The forest eventually changed shape entirely. Ordinary trees gave way to walls of thick green vine, some thicker than tree trunks, wound around rocks, cliffs, whole sections of ground swallowed under living growth that shifted slowly, almost like it was breathing on its own schedule. The air turned thick and wet.

Daria stared at it. "...What is this place?"

He pointed toward the tangled mass stretching out ahead, nearly a square kilometer of it, the vague outline of some structure buried somewhere underneath. Botanical Research Facility, according to Anthony, though at this point it looked more like the forest had eaten a building and never bothered digesting it.

He smiled and tightened the straps on his new suit. "...There it is."

Somewhere in the wall of vines, something shifted, slow and deliberate, like it had just heard him say it.