The path beyond the Custodian's clearing did not welcome them. It accepted them.
The air in the deep Weald grew thicker, richer, the light dimming to a perpetual twilight filtered through canopies a hundred meters high.
The trees here were pillars holding up the sky, their bark etched with histories no player could translate. The pulse Sai Ji felt through his Primal Resonance was a slow, deep drumbeat now, pulling him forward like a tide.
The Heartwood Chamber was close.
Midnight Wolf's lenses were constantly active, shimmering with data streams. "Ambient mana density is off the charts. We're not just in a high-level zone anymore; we're in a ley line convergence. This place… it's alive in a way that should break the server's physics engine. It's old enough to have its own rules."
"Which is why we're here," Aeliana said quietly, her eyes scanning the unnatural stillness. "If the Observers' Hunt can track systemic anomalies, a place that exists partly outside the system is the best refuge."
"And the worst trap," Nyx murmured, his hand resting on the hilt of his blade. "A cage of living wood."
They walked in wary silence, the triumph of the trial fading under the weight of the Custodian's warning and the ever-present knowledge of the Hunt.
The forest watched, but now its gaze felt different—less judging, more… expectant.
Sai Ji felt it first. A hitch in the resonant pull of the fragment. A static-like distortion in the Weald's deep hum.
He raised a fist.
The party froze.
Fern shifted, his greatsword sliding silently from its harness. Lura melted into the dappled shadow of a giant fern. Nyx simply ceased to be a distinct figure, blending into the background. Aeliana's fingers traced a silent warding sigil in the air. Midnight Wolf's lenses clicked, shifting to a thermal overlay, then to mana-tracing.
"What is it?" Aeliana breathed.
"The forest just… flinched," Sai Ji whispered back.
Then, the system betrayed them.
A localized, silent prompt flickered at the edge of everyone's vision, crisp and cold, devoid of the usual Verdant Weald's organic glyphs.
[LOCAL ENVIRONMENT UPDATE – HUNTER PROTOCOL: INITIATED]
[Subroutine: 'Silent Garden']
[Effect: All auditory-based skills, detection spells, and communication channels are suppressed. Mana signatures are dampened to background levels. Duration: Until neutralization or target expiration.]
The world went dead silent.
Not the silence of quiet, but the silence of void. Sai Ji's enhanced hearing heard nothing—not his own heartbeat, not the rustle of his clothes. He saw Fern's mouth move in a warning, but no sound emerged. Party chat was greyed out. They were deaf, mute, and blinded to each other's magical presence.
This is how they hunt, Sal Vera's voice cut through the cognitive silence, sharp with alarm. They don't break the rules. They change them.
From the surrounding trees, they emerged. Not from stealth, but from un-reality. Three figures resolved into being as if stepping through a curtain of misaligned pixels. They wore form-fitting suits of matte grey that seemed to drink the dim light. Their faces were smooth, featureless ovals of the same material. No eyes, no mouths. In their hands were weapons that hurt to look at—jagged shards of crystallized null-space, humming with a frequency that caused the very air to warp sickly around them.
[ENTITY IDENTIFIED: HUNTER CONSTRUCT – TYPE: NULL]
[Objective: Systemic Anomaly Neutralization]
[Traits: Adaptive Immunity, Environmental Rule Manipulation, Existential Dissonance Aura.]
Midnight Wolf's frantic hand signals confirmed it: First Wave. Hunters.
The central Hunter tilted its head. A speaker on its chest emitted a flat, synthesized tone that bypassed the silence field, vibrating directly in their bones. "Anomaly Sai Ji. You have been designated for reconciliation. Surrender the bonded Primordial and submit to nullification. Non-target entities: stand aside. Interference will be logged as systemic corruption."
Fern didn't wait for a translation. Soundless, a mountain of moving steel, he charged the Hunter on the left, his greatsword a cleaving arc of pure, physical force. The Hunter didn't dodge. It raised its null-blade.
The collision made no sound, but Sai Ji felt the impact in his teeth. Fern's empowered strike, which could shatter castle gates, met the crystallized shard—and slipped. The physics were wrong. The force didn't transfer; it dissipated, unraveled by the blade's dissonant hum. The Hunter retaliated with a thrust faster than thought. Fern twisted, but the edge grazed his pauldron. Where it touched, the mythril didn't dent. It… unmade. A smooth, perfect section of the armor ceased to exist, leaving a geometrically precise hole.
Fern recoiled, shock on his face. This wasn't damage. It was erasure.
Lura struck from the shadows behind the right-hand Hunter, her daggers aiming for the seamless joints at its neck and knee. The Hunter's form flowed, the grey matter redistributing like liquid metal, her strikes hitting only smooth, resistant planes. A whip-like tendril of the same material shot from its wrist, wrapping around her ankle. Where it touched, her boot and the skin beneath didn't burn or freeze—they greyed, desaturated, losing all vitality as if turning to ash.
She screamed, a horrible, silent twist of her face.
"They negate what they touch!" Aeliana's voice, boosted by a desperate expenditure of raw spiritual energy, punched through the silence field for a single second. She flung a lance of pure, green healing light at Lura's leg. The light fought against the greying effect, a battle of restoration versus nullification, slowing but not stopping the creep.
The central Hunter began walking toward Sai Ji. "Your authority is a data error. Your bonds are corrupted files. We are the defragmentation."
Nyx materialized directly in its path, his obsidian short swords crossing to block its advance. "You will not touch him." His blades met the null-sword. For a moment, Nyx's unwavering will, his devotion, held. The null-blade' dissonance met a force as absolute as it was. Then, with a grinding, silent screech, the obsidian of Nyx's sword began to dissolve at the atomic level.
Midnight Wolf wasn't fighting. He was frantically scanning, his lenses cycling through every diagnostic he had. "They're not using magic! They're enforcing a localized rule set! They've turned off kinetic integrity and molecular cohesion in their weapon's area of effect! It's a cheat! A system-admin cheat!"
Sai Ji's mind raced. Combat was useless. Their strength, their skills, were being deleted by the very rules of the engagement. The Werewolf King's instinct roared: UNLEASH. DOMINATE THE RULES.
But the Custodian's trial echoed louder. Authority Without Violence. Collective Intent.
He looked at Fern, holding a line with a damaged weapon. At Lura, crippled and fighting a creeping void. At Nyx, his devotion literally disintegrating. At Aeliana, burning her own spirit to hold back the nullification. At Midnight Wolf, trying to understand the apocalypse.
Violence wouldn't win. Force was their tool.
The Heartwood Chamber's pulse thrummed against his soul. The ancient power there was older than the system. It had its own rules.
He made a choice.
He stopped trying to fight the Hunters. He stopped trying to command his pack.
He reached out, not with dominance, but with a sovereign's request. He pushed his will, his newfound authority, into the Verdant Weald itself—into the ancient roots beneath them, the watching trees, the very air that the 'Silent Garden' protocol was trying to stifle.
He did not ask it to fight for him.
He asked it toremember what it was.
The lead Hunter raised its null-blade for a final, erasing strike at Nyx.
The root beneath its foot moved.
Not with violence, but with undeniable, slow certainty. It coiled upward, not to pierce, but to encase. The Hunter's null-blade struck the root. The wood didn't unravel. It darkened, hardened, becoming petrified, swallowing the nullifying energy and rendering it inert. The Heartwood's power was not a force to be negated; it was a fact to be accepted.
All around them, the forest awoke. Vines descended, not as weapons, but as bindings of immutable growth. Moss swarmed over the Hunters' grey suits, not attacking, but integrating, converting the foreign material into something organic and wild. The 'Silent Garden' protocol flickered, then shattered under the weight of a billion leaves whispering in a language older than code.
The Hunter constructs struggled, but their rule-manipulation failed against the Weald's primordial reality. They were not being destroyed. They were being… assimilated. Transformed into gnarled, silent statues of wood and stone, their featureless faces now bearing the serene, empty expressions of ancient forest guardians.
The silence broke. Sound rushed back in—the party's ragged breaths, the creak of wood, the distant call of a bird.
They stood, wounded and stunned, in a clearing that now held three new, twisted trees where their assassins had been.
[HUNTER PROTOCOL – FIRST WAVE: NEUTRALIZED]
[Method: Environmental Override – Anomalous Symbiosis]
[Verdant Weald Sympathy: INCREASED]
[Warning: Hunter Adaptive Algorithms Updated. Subsequent waves will incorporate anti-symbiosis countermeasures.]
Midnight Wolf sank to his knees, staring at the petrified Hunter. "You… you didn't beat the system admin. You got the original developer to patch over them."
Lura was panting, the greying effect on her leg halted but leaving a dead, numb patch. Aeliana knelt beside her, face pale from exertion.
Fern examined the perfect hole in his armor, then looked at Sai Ji with an expression beyond reverence. It was understanding.
Nyx retrieved the hilts of his dissolved swords, his face grim. "They will return. And they will be prepared for this."
Sai Ji, his connection to the Weald still humming in his veins, looked toward the source of the pulse. A vast, arched opening in the base of the largest tree he had ever seen stood before them, veiled by hanging moss. From within, a deep, rhythmic sound echoed, like the heartbeat of the world.
The Heartwood Chamber.
And guarding it, something that remembered kings of claw and fury.
They had survived the system's first attempt to delete them. Now, they had to face a guardian from a time before systems existed, to claim the power that made them a target in the first place.