They kept appearing.
Hundreds of them. Skittering from the underbrush, spilling from trees, crawling over roots and broken stone. Each one about the size of a human, some pale and bone-white, others streaked in colors like blood and bile. No two looked the same, but all moved with the same purpose.
Their mother was dead.
And they were angry.
Jackal stood still at first, eyes half-lidded, breathing steady.
Then he spoke, voice low and amused, like we were still back on the aircraft.
"Now, as I am newly awakened, the fear I muster in creatures cannot yet be targeted. This means I'm most capable when there are a lot of enemies."
He lifted his sword onto one shoulder, smile stitched wider than ever.
"Which means I'm about to kill all of them."
The swarm surged forward.
Jackal vanished into it.
He didn't just fight, he carved. Each motion was a performance, limbs twisting with unnatural grace as his blade ripped arcs of blood and mist. Purple haze thickened around him like breath in cold air. The more they panicked, the more graceful he became.
Their fear was feeding him. Fueling him.
And he was laughing.
I drew my blade again, the last flickers of Hellflame fading from its edge.
No need to activate the Brand. These things were too weak, barely above feral. Best not to waste power.
I tightened my Crown instead.
The pressure behind my eyes surged, senses sharpening. Vision narrowed. Everything else faded.
And then I moved.
The first spider lunged, fangs open wide. I ducked beneath it and cut through the joint in its thorax, slicing it in half before it could even realize it had died.
My blade was going through them like they were butter. Coiled with Hellflame, these pitiful creatures could never be able to stop me.
I moved through the swarm like water through cracks, blade flashing left and right. Limbs hit the ground behind me. Carapaces split. Nothing stopped. Nothing slowed.
A few larger ones emerged from the swarm, limbs twitching with more coordination than the rest.
I appeared in front of them, slashing through the first one's head with a clean horizontal cut. Before the body even dropped, another came from the flank.
I felt it.
Twisting, I kicked the first corpse toward it and drove my blade through its open mouth. The edge split bone and tissue with ease. I twisted once, then tore half its head away.
The third tried to pounce.
I stepped onto the second's back, leapt high, and came down on the last one, driving my blade through its core with all my weight behind it.
More skittering. More death.
System notifications flickered at the edges of my vision, I was getting a bunch of cores from these spiders, but I ignored those for now.
Then Jackal spoke.
"Ravage."
His blade vanished, then reappeared in motion, like it had split into a hundred mirrors of itself. Arcs of silver tore through the swarm.
In seconds, the spiders around him were nothing but minced meat.
Their numbers were thinning fast.
The massacre didn't stop until only one remained. I cut it down without ceremony.
Silence fell.
Jackal turned, resting his sword across his shoulders again.
"What, that was it?" he asked, sounding almost disappointed.
Honestly, I agreed. That was fun. Wouldn't have minded a few more.
I glanced around. The ground was covered in spider corpses, twitching legs, burned silk, and pools of blood.
"Well," I said, lowering my blade, "we didn't even see where the mission is taking place. Could be a good opportunity."
So, without another word, we started walking deeper into the jungle.
We were trying to figure out where the actual boundaries of our mission lay—where the extermination zone began, and where it ended.
The map wasn't much help. The terrain was dense and overgrown, thick enough to block the satellite overlays. Vines, roots, and twisted canopies blurred everything.
"Was what we just did even part of the area where the outpost's supposed to be?" Jackal asked, casually stepping over a half-burned spider husk.
I wasn't sure myself. But I was in a good mood, so I shot back, "How could a Scarecrow even read a map? Better to hand it over to someone with eyes."
Jackal gave a quiet snort. I think that was a laugh.
He was a fun guy to be around. Well… not exactly a guy.
We continued walking, following the shifting light as it broke through the canopy. Vines draped low over our shoulders, roots thick as limbs coiled across the ground. The deeper we went, the more distorted the jungle became. Sound dulled. The wind stopped.
According to the projection, there was supposed to be a river along the western edge of the zone. About two hundred meters from the planned outpost perimeter.
We cut toward it.
The trees were slowly thinning. The air grew colder, damp with moisture. We were close.
Then we saw it.
The river.
Wide and slow-moving, its surface like black glass. No insects. No birdsong. Just water that didn't ripple, didn't flow. It looked still. Wrong.
And standing in the center of it, barefoot on a smooth stone barely jutting above the surface, was a woman.
She looked young, not human-young, but timeless young. Her skin was pale, so pale it seemed she hadn't seen sunlight in years, like the clouds had seeped into her and turned her to shade. Long black hair clung to her shoulders, heavy with moisture. The dress she wore clung too — dark, thin fabric that shimmered faintly as she moved, like it was always just a little too wet. What little light filtered through the canopy caught on her, but never seemed to stay.
There were no stars. Only mist, and the dim breath of a fading sky.
She was smiling.
Not the way people smile.
The way predators do.
Jackal stopped beside me.
"She's not scared," he muttered, almost surprised.
I nodded slowly, my fingers inching toward my blade.
Something about her presence felt off. Not hostile, but invasive. Like she wasn't part of the world, but the world itself watching us through borrowed flesh.
She tilted her head slightly, eyes catching the dim light like glass beads.
Then she raised one hand.
And beckoned.
Jackal took one step forward.
The woman's smile widened, just slightly.
And then she spoke.