The woods were dead quiet.
Not silent — dead. Like even the wind refused to breathe here.
Taro adjusted the dial on his wristlight, its faint glow slicing through the haze. Every sound felt too loud: the crunch of frost beneath his boots, the soft jingle of metal clips, his heartbeat pounding in his ears. He'd been separated from Kael and the others for nearly an hour now, following the faint trail of broken branches and boot marks that led deeper into the forest's heart.
"West sector… clear," he whispered into the comm. Only static answered.
"Lira? Rin? Captain?" Nothing.
The static hissed, swallowing his voice whole.
He shut the line. The air here warped signals. That wasn't new — but somehow, tonight, it felt deliberate.
A smell drifted through the trees.
Iron. Wet. Old.
He stopped, scanning with his wristlight — snow-dusted roots, torn bark, a smear of something dark trailing toward a hollow trunk. The light flickered. His breath turned white.
Something moved ahead.
Taro froze.
The movement stopped too.
He angled his blade forward, body low — eyes darting between shadows. His mentor's words echoed in the back of his mind: "If the forest starts listening to you, you're already too loud."
He swallowed and took another step. The ground crackled beneath him.
That's when he heard it — faint, dragging, uneven steps… human, but off.
A voice followed, broken and low, as if scraped raw from a throat that shouldn't still be speaking.
"...Help… me..."
Taro stiffened. The light shook in his hand.
The voice came again — closer this time, from somewhere just beyond a cluster of trees.
"Please… help… me…"
He wanted to call out, but his throat closed around the sound.
Instead, he crept forward, careful, deliberate. When he reached the clearing, his stomach dropped.
There was a man kneeling beside a half-buried body — or what used to be one.
The man's hands were slick with blood. His back trembled, bones pushing unnaturally beneath the skin. His breath came in short, wet rasps.
The man turned his head slightly, and Taro saw the edge of his face — pale, cracked, eyes sunken deep like a starving animal.
"They said… help would come…" the man wheezed. His lips tore as he spoke, revealing rows of teeth sharper than they should've been.
"Please… I didn't want… to eat…"
Taro's pulse spiked. He took an instinctive step back — the crunch of snow too loud.
The man twitched. His head jerked toward Taro's direction, neck bending a few degrees too far. The bones in his jaw popped like splitting ice. His body quivered, convulsing between human and something else entirely.
"Help… me…"
Taro's blade slid from its sheath with a whisper.
He didn't attack — not yet. His mind screamed to run, but something about the man's trembling, broken plea rooted him in place.
The forest held its breath.
The man started crawling toward him.
Each movement left trails of blood in the snow.
His voice dissolved into wet gurgles and crunching cartilage.
"I— can't— stop— hungry— please—"
Taro stepped back. His hand trembled.
He wanted to help — he always wanted to help — but this wasn't human anymore.
He knew that look. That hunger. He'd seen it before, on corpses that no longer remembered their names.
Then the light flickered — once, twice — and when it steadied, the man was gone.
Only footprints remained, pressed deep into the snow, circling around him.
Taro's breath hitched. He turned slowly, blade raised.
A whisper scraped the air just behind him.
"You smell alive."
He spun —
—but there was only empty forest, shadows twisting with the frost.
The comm crackled suddenly — a faint voice cutting through static:
"Taro… report. You reading me?"
Kael's voice.
Taro inhaled sharply, fumbling to reply.
"Y-yeah. I… found something. I think—"
He looked down again. The footprints were gone.
Only the blood remained, slowly freezing into the white.
He didn't finish the sentence.