At first, I could still make out the carriage wheels and the horse prints if I crouched low enough and squinted hard, but the storm got worse fast. The road turned into a muddy ss, and every fresh drop of rain blurred the grooves we had been relying on. The S-shaped horseshoe Brianna had ntioned was the only reason we were still on the right path for as long as we were. Every ti I spotted that curved imprint, I knew we were still chasing the sa horse.
Then even that disappeared.
The mud beca too soft, the rain too heavy, and the forest floor started swallowing every mark before I could read it. I stopped in the middle of the road, let out a long breath, and wiped water off my face with the back of my hand.
"This is useless," Ken muttered beside .
"Yeah," I said. "We’re done following tracks."
He frowned. "Then what now?"
I didn’t answer right away. I just stood there, staring at the broken road ahead while rain hamred against the leaves overhead. The storm had gotten properly ugly now. Water was coming down in hard sheets, and the forest around us looked darker by the second.
I opened the system map.
Ken had no idea I was doing that, so I made sure not to react too obviously. On the map, the area around us was still visible, even though the real tracks on the ground were nearly gone. I zood in ntally and spotted sothing small off to the side of the road, hidden near the edge of the forest. It looked like a square marker, tiny but clear enough to catch my attention.
A house. Or maybe a hut.
Either way, it was sothing man-made.
I frowned at the map for a second longer, then looked back up at the trees.
"Co on," I said. "Follow . I think I know a place we should check."
Ken blinked. "You found sothing?"
"Maybe."
I turned left off the road and started pushing deeper into the woods. The ground beneath us got rougher almost imdiately, and the rain kept pounding down so hard that it soaked through my clothes in no ti. We moved between thick trees and low branches, stepping over roots and muddy dips in the earth while the wind shook water loose from the canopy above us.
The further we went, the more the path looked wrong.
Not unnatural, exactly, but abandoned.
Old.
Forgotten.
Then the trees opened up a little, and I saw it.
A small pond sat in a clearing ahead of us, dark and still beneath the rain. Near the far edge of the water stood a tiny cabin, half-hidden by weeds and wet grass. It looked terrible up close. The door hung broken on its hinges, one of the windows had cracked clean through, and the wood on the outer walls had started to rot in places from years of damp weather.
Ken slowed to a stop beside . "You think this is it?"
"I think so."
We crossed the clearing carefully and stepped inside.
The cabin slled old, wet, and rotten. There was only one bed inside, pushed against the right wall, and a small window opposite it that looked out over the pond. The room barely had anything else in it. No table. No chair. No wardrobe. Just the bed, the cracked window, and the muddy floor.
Then I looked closer.
There was blood on the mattress.
Not a lot, but enough to make my stomach tighten imdiately.
The sheets had dark stains spread through them, and the mattress itself looked warped in the middle as if soone had spent far too long there. The walls around the bed also had deep scratch marks, long gouges carved into the wood like soone had fought hard enough to claw at the room itself.
I walked nearer and stared at the bedfra.
There were stains there too.
I clenched my jaw.
"This is the place," I said quietly. "This is where they brought Jelda."
Ken looked at the bed and then at . "That blood... did they cut her up here?"
"No," I said, forcing myself to keep my voice steady. "They... uh, they assaulted her here. This is where they took advantage of her before moving her again. But this still is not enough blood for the head wound. Her skull was split open sowhere else."
Ken’s face went pale.
He turned toward the other room, and the mont he saw the door fra, he stopped breathing for a second.
"Oh, gods," he muttered. "Fuck, Ace. Fuck, fuck, fuck."
I walked over to him and looked through the doorway he had pushed open slightly.
The second room was worse.
Much worse.
The floor was soaked in blood, enough to make the boards shine black-red under the dim light from outside. There were pieces of brain matter scattered across the walls and floor, mixed with splinters of wood and shattered debris. The impact had sprayed blood across the room in ugly arcs, and so of it had dried in streaks down the wall, as if soone had tried to clean it and failed badly. It looked like the killer had struck her head over and over again until the damage finally stopped being a skull and started being a ss.
I swallowed hard and looked away for a second.
"Yeah," I muttered. "Damn."
Ken had turned his back to the room entirely by then and was holding one hand over his mouth.
"Gods," he said in a shaky voice. "No, no, no. Poor Jelda. Nobody should have to go through sothing like this. What the hell is wrong with people?"
I did not answer.
I walked back into the first room and forced myself to keep looking. On the floor near the bed, partly hidden by mud and blood, I spotted the necklace Pix had described. It was covered in blood too, the clasp broken open and the charm scratched up from being dragged across the cabin floor.
I picked it up carefully.
Then I stepped back outside and held it out into the rain.
The storm washed the blood off in seconds, streaking red water down my fingers and onto the dirt at my feet. The necklace itself was plain enough once it was clean, but now that I held it in my hand, I could feel the faint magical residue clinging to it.
This was... sothing else.
I went back inside and found Ken still staring at the bed like he was trying to process the entire room all over again.
"The necklace," I said. "Who would even hear her if she pressed it here?"
"Yeah," he replied quietly. "She probably would not have had ti anyway."
"Hmm."
He glanced back at , then stopped when he saw what I was holding. "Wait. The necklace? Hold on... no."
Before I could answer, he reached out and took it from my hand. He turned it over once, frowned at the back, and then pressed the button.
A heartbeat later, Ken vanished.
Poof.
Just gone.
I stood there frozen for a mont, staring at the empty space where he had been standing.
"Ken?" I called out. "Hello?"
No answer.
My skin went cold instantly.
"Shit."
A... spell? A trap?
I could use Kingbreaker spell in the Warrior class. It would deactive any spells within a ten ter radius. But I didn’t know if that would even work because... I was pretty sure there weren’t any spells that had been cast.
Just in case, I cast the spell after changing my class. My mouth opened on its own and a roar escaped from my throat... nothing. I was right. Sothing else was going on. But what? How could he just disappear like that out of nowhere?
I spun around and looked through both doorways, then checked the window, then the floor, but Ken was nowhere in sight. The necklace was gone with him. I had no idea if he had been teleported sowhere safe or dropped into a trap or killed by whatever magic was built into that thing.
My chest tightened hard enough to hurt.
The whole room felt wrong. The blood. The brain matter. The broken bed. The scratches on the wall. It was all too ugly, too personal, too deliberate.
This was not a clean murder. It was not even a practical one.
It was cruel.
I stared at the room one last ti and felt anger rising underneath the shock.
"Ken?" I called out again, more sharply this ti. "Fuck. What happened?"
Still nothing.
I stepped outside the cabin, rain hitting my face imdiately. The pond around was rippling hard under the storm, and the trees shook with the wind.
No sign of him.
No sign of anyone.
I had to get back and find Sora. If Ken had ended up hurt because of , I needed help fast, and I did not want to search the forest alone while the rain kept wiping the trail clean.
I started back the way we ca, moving quickly through the mud while the wind whipped rain across my face.
Five minutes later, as I was getting close to where we had lost the tracks, I heard footsteps ahead of .
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