The forest thinned marginally as they moved.
Not enough to change the character of it—the canopy was still dense above, the air still heavy with the particular weight that had settled over this place long before Damien arrived and would probably remain long after he left. But the terrain had shifted slightly.
Fewer of the massive, fused root formations that dominated the deeper sections. More open ground between the larger trees. Small changes that added up to sothing fractionally easier to move through.
Damien noticed but said nothing.
They had been moving for a while now, long enough that the aftermath of the fight with the mana beast group had faded behind them and the imdiate weight of it had settled into the background.
Cerbe padded forward at Damien’s left, its three heads occasionally turning at separate intervals to track sounds and movents in the surrounding forest.
Aquila maintained its surveillance arc above the canopy, a presence more felt than seen from below. Fenrir moved at his right, its large paws finding the quietest path through the terrain without any apparent effort.
Luton trailed just behind.
Recently, the stellar sli was always just behind. Guarding the pack.
There was sothing almost companionable about the sli’s consistency—the way it maintained its position relative to Damien regardless of terrain or pace, adjusting without drama, present without demanding acknowledgnt. It had been that way since early on. A quiet constant in the middle of everything else.
Damien’s reserves were continuing to climb.
He hadn’t redirected his attention back to the conversion process since the mana beast encounter, but the background work continued regardless. Eighty-six now. Eighty-seven. Slow but steady. He would take it.
They moved in relative quiet for a ti.
The forest offered nothing imdiate. There were no shifting presences, no clustered auras ahead, no disruption in the ambient essence patterns that suggested anything organized in their path. Just the ordinary life of the place going about its ordinary rhythms, as indifferent to their passage as it had been when they first entered.
Damien was tracking ahead.
Not actively—not in the way he focused when he expected sothing—but the passive awareness he maintained as a baseline while moving through territory that had already proven it could produce surprises. He had learned early that surprises were mostly just things you hadn’t been paying attention to yet.
He paid attention.
Which was why he caught it before Fenrir did this ti.
Faint. Scattered. A loose distribution of presences moving slowly through a section of forest roughly two hundred ters ahead and slightly to the left of their current path. It was not moving toward them—not the directed drift of sothing that had caught a scent or registered a presence. Just moving. The unhurried, directionless movent of creatures going about their own business in their own space.
He asured them.
Six. Maybe seven.
Grade Four. Possibly low Grade Three on the larger ones—he wasn’t certain from this range and the ambient essence in the area made precise reading slightly unreliable. However, he was certain they were in that range. Below what the previous group had presented.
They were not a threat.
Not even an obstacle if he chose to route around them.
He didn’t adjust course.
He kept walking and let his attention settle on Luton instead.
The sli had already noticed. He could tell from the slight shift in how it was moving—a subtle increase in density, the way its surface tension changed when it was paying attention to sothing specific rather than just existing at rest. It was tracking the presences ahead without being directed to.
Damien said nothing.
He simply watched as they advanced forward.
The presences ahead continued their slow movent, unaware.
Then the first one registered sothing—a change in the air, a trace of unfamiliar essence, so threshold of proximity that crossed from ignorable into relevant. Its movent paused.
The others nearby slowed too.
That brief, collective hesitation of animals that had suddenly beco uncertain about their environnt.
Then Damien looked at Luton.
Without a word from its summoner, Luton pulsed once. It understood the ssage behind that look Damien had made.
And so the Stellar Sli moved.
Not the rapid, violent expansion it used when the situation called for imdiate wide coverage. This was different. This was patient.
The sli simply bounced forward.
That was the only word for it—bounced. A smooth, rolling motion that covered ground with a quiet efficiency that had sothing almost casual about it. No aggression in the approach. No telegraphed threat. Just Luton moving through the forest the way it always moved when it wasn’t in a hurry.
The beasts hadn’t identified it yet.
They were still processing the trace of essence they had caught, orienting toward it, and trying to decide whether what they had sensed was worth concern or could be classified as background noise and ignored.
They were still deciding when Luton reached the first one.
It didn’t announce itself.
It arrived beside the beast—sothing heavy and low to the ground, covered in layered scales of dark green, its body wide and built for the kind of slow, powerful movent that served it well in dense terrain—and then, with a motion that was almost unhurried, expanded upward and over it.
The beast had half a second of confusion.
Pure confusion. It registered sothing touching it, registered the surrounding sensation of Luton’s surface closing in, and had not yet processed what that ant before Luton had already finished.
The beast was gone.
No sound. No struggle. No trace of what it had been beyond the slightly fuller quality to Luton’s form as the sli landed and bounced forward again toward the next one.
The second beast reacted faster.
It had felt the disappearance of the first—not seen it, but the sudden absence of a nearby presence registered as wrong in the way that sudden absences always registered as wrong to creatures that lived by their instincts. It turned and imdiately located Luton.
It did not know what it was looking at but it was now on guard against whatever its opponent was.
Luton bounced toward it anyway.
The beast moved. It did not charge, but chose to retreat, the instinct to create space between itself and the unknown thing approaching it. It was not fast enough.
Luton’s trajectory was not a straight line. It curved slightly, cutting off the retreat without making the adjustnt look deliberate, arriving at the beast’s position in the sa unhurried manner it had used on the first one.
The sa expansion. The sa closing motion.
The sa absence where the beast had been.
Luton landed and moved toward the third.
The remaining beasts had scattered by now—the kind of panicked dispersal that happened when sothing in a group vanished twice in quick succession without warning and without any identifiable threat to flee from. They scattered in different directions, which under most circumstances would have been a reasonable survival strategy.
Against Luton it just ant more ground to cover.
The sli took the closest one first. Then adjusted direction without pause and took the next. A bouncing, patient, thodical progression through the forest that had nothing dramatic about it. No fire. No impact. No sound that carried beyond the imdiate area.
Just Luton, moving from one to the next, and each one gone as it arrived.
The last beast had made significant distance—more than the others, driven by whatever combination of instinct and desperation had pushed it harder. It had found a narrow gap between two massive root formations and pushed through, putting solid terrain between itself and whatever had been taking its group apart behind it.
Luton found the gap as well.
Without hesitation, it went through it.
A brief pause on the other side—barely longer than it took to locate the beast—and then the sa quiet motion.
It was gone, its space now replaced with silence.
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