The image of Johnn’s desperate, wide eyed devotion, the way he looked at her as if she were a celestial event flashed in her mind. It triggered a sudden, poignant mory: the early, fragile days of her marriage, back when her husband looked at her with that sa unfiltered, protective adoration.
She rembered the gentleness in his touch, the way he would insist on carrying the heavy loads just to see her smile, and the feeling of absolute, uncomplicated safety in his presence.
A shadow passed over her expression.
"I just hope... he never changes."
She quickly shook the thought away, scowling as if she’d tasted sothing bitter.
She turned her gaze toward the tent wall, intending to check on him through the silhouette his form should have cast against the fabric. The fire outside was still burning, and the light should have been casting a clear, protective shadow of the Hero as he paced his rounds.
But as Maddy looked at the spot where his shadow should have been, her breath hitched.
The tent fabric remained illuminated by the fire, bathed in a steady, golden glow but it was completely empty. There was no silhouette. There was no movent of a man pacing, no outline of his broad shoulders, no shadow of the weapons he carried.
The forest outside was silent—unnaturally, terrifyingly silent. The fire was crackling, but the man who had been so adamant about guarding her was nowhere to be seen.
Maddy’s hand dropped to the hilt of her sword, her muscles coiled like a spring. The protective, contented mother vanished, replaced in an instant by soone’s partner.
"Johnn?"
There was no reply. Only the indifferent, howling wind of the Active Forest.
Maddy didn’t waste a second. She grabbed her gear with a fluidity that betrayed none of her internal panic, her movents silent as she slipped through the tent’s opening and into the night.
"Johnn!"
The na died in her throat, swallowed instantly by the vast, suffocating darkness of the Active Forest. She scanned the periter—the spot where the fire had been crackling was now just a pile of dying embers, the wood turned to grey, lifeless ash. He was gone. There were no tracks in the soil, no signs of a struggle, not even the faint, lingering scent of his armor.
"Sh*t... this is why I hate sleeping!"
She closed her eyes, forcing her breathing to slow, and pushed her senses to their absolute limit. She reached out, trying to ping the specific mana/fla signature that defined Johnn’s physical vitality.
It was a nightmare.
"Argh... damn it, my senses are picking up everything in this cursed, living forest!"
The forest was a living, pulsing machine. Every tree, every vine, every root was shifting, dragging their own magical signatures across her senses like a frantic, unending static. The noise was deafening; the topography was rearranging itself so rapidly that her mind couldn’t latch onto a single, stationary coordinate. She was trying to track a grain of sand in a blizzard of mirrors.
"Focus, Maddy. He will not going to die. Not soone, no one who just popped into your damn life. Not again. Focus."
She bit the inside of her cheek, drawing a bead of blood to shock her system into deeper clarity. She pushed harder, ignoring the strain that threatened to overwhelm her neural pathways, sifting through the shifting chaos of the woods.
Suddenly, a prickle of sensation spiked on the left side of her neck—a sharp, sudden rise in temperature. Maddy did not even needed to think, her hand blurred, drawing her blade in a single, fluid arc of steel that humd with latent power.
She reacted. She pivoted on her heel, the ground beneath her cracking as she channeled every ounce of her frustration into a devastating horizontal slash toward the source of that sudden, unnatural heat.
The air hissed as her blade cut through the gloom, slicing through thick vines and hardened bark like they were made of silk. The forest groaned, its shifting layout montarily paralyzed by the sheer violence of her strike.
Where the foliage had been, a man shaped silhouette tumbled backward, and that was... Johnn, his eyes wide as saucers, his jaw hanging open in a pitch high, unmistakably feminine shriek of terror.
"GYAAAAAAH!"
"YOU... IDIOT!"
Maddy shouted back, she didn’t hesitate. She lunged forward, her hand clamping onto the back of his armor with the strength of a closing bear trap. She hauled him upward, jerking him clear of the spot just as the forest floor began to ripple and fold, attempting to reclaim the space they stood on.
She didn’t stop until they reached a patch of stagnant, older earth. With a surge of strength she hadn’t fully intended to unleash, she pivoted and flung him aside.
The "Hero" hit the ground with the force of a falling anvil, kicking up a cloud of debris as he skidded into the dirt. He scrambled to his feet, breathless and wide eyed. He let out a pained groan, struggling to sit upright.
"HEY—"
He didn’t get another syllable out. Maddy was on him before he could even blink. She lood over him, her eyes flashing with a terrifying, protective fire.
"Are you trying to get yourself killed?! HA?!"
She shrieked, the poise of the professional adventurer utterly shattered. She poked a finger hard into his chest, her voice echoing with the frantic, exhausted tone of a mother who had waited up all night for a child who didn’t check in.
"Do you have any idea what ti it is? Do you know what kind of ss this forest is? You just wander off into the dark without a word? Do you think you’re invincible just because you are the Hero?!"
Maddy’s voice cracked like a whip in the cold night air, the force of her fury silencing the nearby insects. She didn’t give him a chance to defend himself, her words coming out in a jagged, breathless torrent.
"This is a freaking place where you do not go alone! You at least tell where you are going! I was searching for you! I was—!"
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