He hadn't gone twenty meters when a new tab unfolded in his menu without his asking.

[CRAFTING — Unlocked.]

[Oh,] ALICE said, with the faint warm interest of someone introducing an interesting topic. [That's new. Crafting works the way you'd expect — you can combine materials to make useful items. Weapons, armor, potions. But you need recipes, and you don't have any yet. They're found in dungeons or bought from merchants. Some require certain competences and the right tools. Some need a Master to teach you. So for now, the tab is decorative.]

(*Decorative crafting. Excellent.*)

[Yes. Sorry. Eventually it will be useful.]

He flicked the tab closed and kept walking.

---

The forest changed as he went deeper.

The trees got bigger. The canopy closed over him. The gold roads of light from the cave mouth became thin slanting threads. The understory was dim and crowded — ferns past his waist, clusters of pale mushrooms, a slow constant *drip* of moisture from somewhere he could never see.

The colors were *off*. Things that should have been brown were black. Things that should have been green had a faint blue tint at the edges.

Sounds *everywhere*. Layered. ALICE was active, low-volume, narrating only when something mattered.

[Movement, two o'clock.]

He looked. Something the size of a cat scurried across an exposed root and was gone before he could focus. Brown fur. Ears too big for the body. ALICE supplied:

[Long-Eared Hare. Not hostile. Herbivore. Uses oversized ears to detect predators at distance.]

He kept walking.

Twenty minutes later, the Sixth Sense pricked him — not the sharp warning of *dodge*, but a smaller signal, an *attention*, almost a tap on the shoulder.

[Ten o'clock. Larger.]

He looked. Through a gap in the ferns, twenty meters off, a *boar*. Bigger than a boar should have been. Dark-furred, muscled, with two ivory tusks curving up from the lower jaw like sabers. It was rooting in the dirt, ignoring him completely.

He stopped breathing.

[Tusked Boar. Potentially hostile if provoked. Territorial. Avoid direct contact.]

He stood very still. The boar didn't look up. He took small careful steps backward until the ferns hid it from view, then made a wide quiet arc around the spot. The boar didn't come after him. It hadn't even known he was there.

(*That's two for two. Don't pick the fight if you don't have to.*)

(*The goblin picked it. The boar didn't. So the boar survived.*)

He noted it.

He kept walking.

---

The afternoon stretched. The trees got bigger. The path *if there was a path* curved in ways that didn't seem to make sense — or maybe he just couldn't read them. After what he was sure had been three hours of due-east walking, he came around a particular root cluster and stopped.

The ferns in front of him had a specific arrangement.

He had passed this exact arrangement before. He was almost sure. There was a particular small white flower growing out of the left of the largest fern — bent at an unusual angle — and he remembered noticing it the first time *because* of the angle.

He stood there.

(*That's not right.*)

(*ALICE.*)

[Yes.]

(*Have we been here before.*)

A pause. ALICE was checking something he didn't have access to.

[The Sixth Sense's spatial mapping suggests that we have. Yes. Approximately ninety minutes ago.]

(*I've been walking due east the whole time.*)

[You believe you have.]

(*Have I not been?*)

[You have been walking in what felt to you like a consistent direction. The sun is no longer where it should be for that direction. Either you have been turned around without realizing it, or —]

She didn't finish.

(*Or what.*)

[Or you have been turned around without realizing it.]

He looked up. The canopy was thick enough that the sun was a vague brightness somewhere up there, not a position. He couldn't have used it to navigate even if he'd known how. He had been picking his direction by the *feel* of east, the way you picked a direction in a dream.

(*I'm lost.*)

[Yes.]

(*I'm lost in a forest where things have already tried to kill me.*)

[Yes.]

(*Okay. Okay. It's fine. People have been lost in forests before. The cat said the village is east. I just need to figure out which way is east.*)

He picked a different direction — what he now estimated, by the very faint slant of the available light, was probably east, and probably not the direction he had just come from. He started walking again.

He walked until the light started to fail.

---

By the time the gold threads coming down through the canopy had gone copper, then thin pink, then nothing, he hadn't found the edge of the forest.

He hadn't found anything at all.

Twice more he had passed places he recognized. Once a particular fallen log with a pale fungus growing along the underside. Once a small clearing where a tree had been struck by lightning years ago and left a black spire of charred wood that the moss had begun to climb. He was not making progress in any direction he could measure. He was making *circles*, or something that looked like circles to a brain too tired to track properly.

When the light failed entirely, he stopped.

The forest at night was a different forest.

The temperature dropped fast. The constant low background of daytime insect noise gave way to *other* noises. Lower. Heavier. Things that breathed wetly somewhere not very far away. A distant *snap* that was a branch being broken by something with weight. A long low *call* from somewhere ahead of him that was answered, faintly, from somewhere behind.

The Sixth Sense was quietly noisy now — not the sharp warning of immediate threat, but a low sustained sense of *being in a place where being noticed was bad.*

(*Up. I need to get up.*)

He found a tree he could climb — barely; his shoulder still hurt and his arms were not strong arms — and got himself onto a low branch, then a higher one, then a higher one. About six meters up he found a fork wide enough to wedge himself into. He pulled the hood of the dark robe forward over his face. He activated *Conceal Presence*.

The forest, faintly, *forgot him*.

He sat in the fork of the tree with his back against the trunk and his daggers across his lap and his stomach loud with hunger and watched the dark below him for as long as he could keep his eyes open.

He must have slept eventually. He didn't remember it.

---

He woke just before dawn, stiff and aching, and the forest was quiet again.

He climbed down.

He kept walking.

By midmorning the hunger had gone past *uncomfortable* and into the territory of a low mean ache that radiated out from his stomach into his arms and head and slowly rearranged what he could think about. He had eaten nothing since the cafeteria cutlet a lifetime ago. ALICE had been pointing out edible things along the way — a particular small red berry, a kind of mushroom that grew in specific places — but the berries had been few and the mushrooms scarce, and what he'd managed to find had only sharpened the hunger rather than satisfying it.

He stopped under a tree at midday and looked at his hands.

They were shaking. Not from fear this time. From sugar.

[You need protein,] ALICE said. The words were neutral. Practical.

(*I know.*)

[There are rabbits in this forest. You watched two of them earlier this morning. You have daggers. You have Conceal Presence. You have a competence in Hunting that will activate the moment you commit to the act.]

(*I know.*)

He sat with it.

The thought was not — it really was not — about the rabbit. The thought was about *the hand on the goblin's throat*. The thought was about how fast his hands had learned. The thought was about the absolute certainty that if he killed the rabbit, his hands would do it cleanly, would skin it cleanly, would butcher it cleanly, and that he would feel less about it tomorrow than he felt today.

(*I can't keep walking on nothing. I have to eat.*)

[Yes.]

He stood up.

---

He found one twenty minutes later. A long-eared hare, exactly like the one ALICE had identified the day before, sitting on a flat stone in a patch of dappled light, ears swiveling slowly, completely absorbed in its work of being a rabbit.

He activated *Conceal Presence*.

He felt the soft weight of it settle around him.

He drew one dagger. The other stayed in its sheath at his belt.

He moved.

He moved well. Conceal Presence did what it was supposed to do — the rabbit's ears didn't even twitch as he closed the distance. Athletics kept his footfalls quiet across the moss. He came up on the rabbit's blind side. He thought, with the small grim discipline he had been learning to carry: *clean. Quickly. Don't make it suffer.*

He brought the dagger down.

The rabbit did not have time to be afraid. The neck snapped. The body went limp.

[Creature defeated: Common Hare.]
[XP: 1.]

He stood there with the rabbit dangling from his hand by its long ears, breathing too fast.

(*Okay.*)

(*Okay, that — I did that. I can —*)

He did not finish the thought.

Because at that exact moment the forest around him *changed*.

It was a small change. He felt it before he understood it. The constant background hum of birdsong and insects didn't *stop*, exactly — it *thinned*. As if every small thing in the forest had, in the same moment, decided to be very quiet. The sustained low *background* of his Sixth Sense, the one that had been telling him for a day that he was being watched by uninterested observers, *sharpened*.

Three points of attention. Then five. Then more than he could count.

All of them suddenly, *very* interested.

[*Dante.*]

ALICE's voice was different. Tight.

[*Dante, they felt the kill.*]

(*What?*)

[*Conceal Presence hides your* presence*. It does not hide your* intent. *The intent to kill — to predate — flares like a torch to creatures that hunt by it. You just lit one. They felt it.*]

(*All of them?*)

[*All of them.*]

He looked at the rabbit in his hand. The small still warm body of it. He had killed it with such *intent* — with such focused conviction, *clean and quick, do it right* — and that intent had been a *signal*, a beacon, a flare into the dark that had announced to every magical predator in the forest that a *killer* had just made a kill.

The forest around him went *silent*.

Then, very far off and not far enough, something *howled*.

It was not a wolf howl. It was something *like* a wolf howl that had been altered by something else — pitched too low at the bottom, too high at the top, with a strange wet quality in the middle that he didn't have a word for. It rose. It was answered. From three directions at once.

His body went cold from the inside.

(*Run.*)

[*Run.*]

He ran.