The peaceful dark of the Verdant Weald curdled.
The last echo of the tearing-foil sound faded, but the wrongness remained—a chemical tang in the air, a silent hum at the edge of perception. The forest's benevolent neutrality tightened into something wary. The trees seemed to hold their breath.
"Perimeter scan complete," Midnight Wolf whispered, his voice tight. His lenses glowed with frantic, scrolling data. "They're not breaching yet. They're… mapping. Analyzing the Weald's rule-set. Looking for an exploit."
"How long?" Fern's voice was gravel. He already had his greatsword free, resting point-down on the moss.
"Minutes. Maybe less. Their processing speed is… not of this world."
Sai Ji rose.
The Primal Resonance in his chest was no longer a gentle pull toward the Heartwood Chamber. It was a thrumming alert, a radar blip screaming of approaching nullity. The egg against his skin felt warm, a low, protective pulse from the sleeping Sol within.
They are antithesis, Sal Vera whispered, her voice sharp with a dread Sai Ji had never felt from her. They are not alive. They are erasers.
"We cannot defend a static position here," Nyx said, his form a coalescing shadow. "The forest permits us but will not fight for us. We must move. Toward the Chamber."
"Toward the other apex predator?" Lura snapped, but she was already packing her kit with lethal efficiency. "Great plan."
"It is the only terrain that matters," Nyx replied, his silver eyes catching the moss-light. "The Guardian may be an enemy, but it is a natural one. It exists within the world's logic. The Hunters do not."
Aeliana finished sealing her herbal pouch. "He's right. This is a choice of calamities. We choose the one that can be understood, or at least… bargained with."
There was no more time for debate. The air ten yards away shimmered, like heat haze over a desert, but cold. Reality itself seemed to reject the phenomenon, pixels of wood and leaf fracturing before reassembling.
From the distortion, they stepped.
Three of them. They wore form-fitting suits of a grey so absolute it seemed to absorb the moss-light, leaving afterimages of void. Their faces were smooth, featureless ovals. In their hands, they held jagged shards of crystallized nothing—weapons that hurt the eyes to look upon, warping the space around them with a nauseating, silent hum.
[ENTITY IDENTIFIED: HUNTER CONSTRUCT – TYPE: NULL]
[Objective: Systemic Anomaly Neutralization]
[Traits: Adaptive Immunity, Environmental Rule Manipulation, Existential Dissonance Aura.]
The central Hunter's head tilted. A speaker on its chest vibrated, emitting a flat, synthesized tone that bypassed the ears to vibrate 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."
The words were a wave of pressure. Sai Ji felt the command in them, a system-level imperative trying to overwrite his will. The Werewolf King's instinct roared against it, a snarl of pure defiance.
Fern answered first. Not with words, but with motion. Soundless, a mountain of moving steel, he closed the distance in two strides, his greatsword a cleaving arc of pure, physical force aimed to bisect the leftmost Hunter.
The Hunter did not dodge. It raised its null-blade.
The collision made no sound, but Sai Ji felt the wrongness in his teeth. Fern's strike, which could shatter stone, met the crystallized shard—and slipped. The physics dissolved. Force didn't transfer; it unraveled, consumed by the blade's dissonant hum. The Hunter retaliated with a thrust faster than thought. Fern twisted, but the edge grazed his mythril pauldron.
Where it touched, the metal didn't dent or cut.
It ceased to exist.
A smooth, geometrically perfect section of the pauldron simply vanished, leaving clean edges as if it had never been there. Fern recoiled, shock on his face. This wasn't damage. It was erasure.
Lura was a blur of shadow, striking from behind the right-hand Hunter, daggers aimed at the seamless joints at its neck and knee. The Hunter's form flowed, the grey matter redistributing like liquid metal. Her strikes hit 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, desaturating, losing all texture and vitality, turning to a crumbling, ashen state.
A silent scream contorted Lura's face.
"They negate what they touch!" Aeliana's voice, boosted by a desperate surge of raw spiritual energy, punched through the unnatural silence for one second. She flung a lance of pure, green healing light at Lura's leg. The light fought the greying effect, a desperate battle of restoration versus nullification, slowing but not stopping the creep.
The central Hunter began its advance 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. "You will not touch him." His blades met the null-sword. For a moment, Nyx's unwavering will, his devotion, held. The null-blade's dissonance met a force as absolute as it was. Then, with a grinding, silent screech felt in the soul, the obsidian began to dissolve at the atomic level.
Midnight Wolf wasn't fighting. He was scanning, his lenses cycling through spectrums. "They've imposed a localized rule-set! They're turning off kinetic integrity and molecular cohesion in their weapon's AOE! It's a system-admin cheat! You can't fight a cheat with a sword!"
He is right, Sal Vera cried. You cannot dominate a rule that says you cannot exist!
Sai Ji's mind raced, cold clarity cutting through the panic. Combat was useless. Force was their language, and the Hunters had deleted the dictionary.
The Custodian's trial echoed. Authority Without Violence. Collective Intent.
The Heartwood's pulse thrummed against his soul—older than the system.
He stopped trying to fight the Hunters. He stopped trying to command his pack.
He closed his eyes, and instead of reaching for the fury of the King, he reached for the permission the Weald had granted. He pushed his will, his newfound, non-dominant sovereignty, into the ancient roots beneath them, the watching trees, the air the 'Silent Garden' protocol was trying to stifle.
He did not ask it to fight for him.
He asked it toremember what it was.
To reject the foreign code.
The lead Hunter raised its null-blade for a final, erasing strike at the disintegrating cross of Nyx's swords.
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 millennia in an instant, 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 Verdant Weald awoke in defense of its own integrity. Vines descended as bindings of immutable growth. Moss swarmed over the grey suits, not attacking, but integrating, converting the foreign material into something organic and wild. The imposed silence shattered under the weight of a billion leaves whispering in a language older than code.
The Hunter constructs struggled, their adaptive algorithms frantically trying to process this illogical response. 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, forever frozen in postures of futile struggle.
Sound rushed back—their ragged breaths, the creak of wood, Lura's gasp of pain.
They stood, wounded and stunned, in a clearing that now held three new, twisted trees.
[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. "You… you didn't beat the system admin. You got the original developer to patch over them."
Lura slumped against a tree, Aeliana working fiercely on her leg. The greying had stopped, leaving a dead, numb patch of flesh and leather. "It doesn't hurt," Lura muttered, which was worse. "It just… isn't there anymore."
Fern touched the perfect, smooth void in his armor. Nyx held the hilts of his dissolved swords, his face grim.
"They will return," Nyx said. "And they will be prepared for this."
Sai Ji, his connection to the enraged, violated Weald humming in his veins, looked toward the source of the pulse. Through the trees, a vast, arched opening in the base of a tree wider than a fortress beckoned, veiled by luminescent fungi. 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.