The woods weren't silent anymore—not truly. The kind of silence that had fallen was a living thing, a vacuum that swallowed sound and replaced it with a pressure against the eardrums. It was the silence of a predator holding perfectly, unnaturally still. It pressed against Ace's skin, cold and invasive. The air itself felt wrong—thick, heavy, and old, like the atmosphere in a sealed tomb. It was the feeling that something massive, something ancient and patient, was holding its breath just beyond the edge of sight.
Crunch.
Ace's head snapped a fraction to the left, his eyes not following, his ears mapping the sound. The crunch of dry leaf litter under significant weight.
Not Cedric. Cedric was behind him, breathing too shallowly. This was heavier. A deliberate step.
Another sound followed—not the sharp snap of a twig, but the soft, groaning protest of a living branch being bent under a shifting weight, then released. Whatever it was, it knew how to move through its own territory. It knew how to be quiet when it wanted to be. That single detail told Ace everything he needed to know. This wasn't a mindless beast driven by hunger. This was an intelligent thing. A hunter.
Slowly, deliberately, Ace raised his gun. His arm was a straight, unwavering line, elbow locked, muscles coiled. His finger rested alongside the trigger guard, not on it. The cold metal of the sight was a familiar focal point.
He couldn't see it. The darkness between the pines was a solid wall of black.
But he could feel it. A presence, a displacement in the world, like a stone dropped into a still pond. The ripples were against his skin.
His father's voice, a ghost from a hundred training sessions in darker woods, echoed faintly but clearly in the vault of his memory. "Don't wait for your eyes, kid. In the deep dark, eyes lie to you. They show you shadows and call them monsters, or show you nothing and call it safe. Trust what the world tells you. The shift in the wind. The smell that shouldn't be there. The silence that gets too heavy. That's your truth."
The smell hit him next, confirming the ghost's lesson.
It wasn't a wave, but a seepage. The sweet, cloying stench of rotting vegetation, undercut by the pungent, oily smell of damp, matted fur. And beneath it all, the coppery, iron-rich tang of old blood—blood that had soaked into earth and dried, only to be reawakened by recent movement.
The smell was coming from his right. Ten o'clock. Slightly uphill.
Ace didn't aim with his eyes. He aimed with the map his senses had drawn. He exhaled half a breath, held the rest, and squeezed the trigger.
The gunshot was a violent, concussive CRACK that shattered the pregnant silence of the woods. The muzzle flash was a strobing, blinding white that etched the trees in stark, momentary relief.
A split second later, something screamed.
It wasn't a roar of pain, but a shriek of pure, incandescent fury—a high, tearing sound that seemed to vibrate in the marrow of Ace's bones rather than just in his ears. It was the sound of pride wounded, of territory violated.
THUD.
The impact shook the ground. Leaves, dirt, and decaying mulch erupted upward as a massive, unseen body slammed into the forest floor not twenty yards away.
Ace didn't waste a millisecond celebrating a hit. He was already moving, a blur of practiced motion. He shifted position laterally, boots skimming the ground, putting the thick bole of an oak between himself and the impact zone. He didn't look to see what he'd hit. First, survive. Then, assess.
His eyes, dilated from the muzzle flash, began to readjust to the gloom. Shapes resolved from the formless dark.
Slowly.
The thing in the leaves began to move.
It didn't lumber or scramble. It unfolded. It rose from the darkness like a nightmare pulling itself up by its own tendons. It was tall. Impossibly, wrongfully tall for the slender woods around it. Nearly nine feet of hunched, sinewy power, its silhouette a jagged blasphemy against the vertical lines of the trees.
Long, disproportionately arms, ending in hands that were more like articulated clusters of black talons, dragged slightly as it found its footing, the claws scraping with a sickening skritch-skritch against a partially buried stone. Its torso was a barrel of corded muscle under a pelt of coarse, dark hair, matted with burrs and dark, sticky patches.
Then it raised its head.
The head was goat-like, but elongated, stretched into something predatory. A long, narrow muzzle ended in flaring nostrils that steamed faintly in the cold air. A beard of filthy, knotted hair hung from its jaw. And from its brow erupted a crown of thick, twisted horns—not the graceful arcs of a ram, but cruel, corkscrewing spikes that swept back over its skull like nature's own barbed wire.
The head tilted, and two points of smoldering light ignited in the deep sockets.
Golden eyes.
They didn't glow with an inner fire. They were dull, like ancient coins retrieved from a peat bog, but they caught and reflected the faintest ambient light with a chilling, intelligent clarity. They locked onto Ace's position.
Watching.
Calculating.
A chill, sharper than the night air, crawled up Ace's spine and tightened his scalp. This was no frenzied animal. This was a thinking enemy.
"So," Ace muttered under his breath, forcing the corner of his mouth into a tight, controlled smirk. It was armor. "Nice to finally meet you. Been looking for you."
The Goatman's response was a low, rolling growl that seemed to originate from deep within the earth and vibrate up through the soles of Ace's boots. It wasn't a roar of rage—not yet. It was a sound of profound irritation. The annoyance of a master chess player whose opponent has made an unexpectedly bold, clumsy move. How dare you?
Ace's eyes flickered sideways for a nanosecond.
Cedric was still on his knees a dozen feet away, one hand braced against the ground. He was breathing hard, ragged gulps of air, his fingers digging into the leaf litter as if trying to physically anchor his mind to the present. He was fighting his way back, but he wasn't combat-ready. Not yet.
Ace turned his full focus back to the creature. It was the only thing that mattered now.
The Goatman took a single, deliberate step forward. Its hoofed foot, cloven and broad, pressed deep into the soft earth.
Ace raised his gun again, the barrel seeking the center mass of that monstrous chest—
The creature stopped.
Its head tilted again, ears—long, pointed, and mobile—twitching independently as they sampled the air. It wasn't looking at Ace's gun. It was looking past him, at Cedric, at the trees, at some calculation only it could see.
Then, with a speed that belied its size and wounds, it turned.
Branches, thick as a man's wrist, snapped like gunshots as the Goatman bolted. It didn't crash through the undergrowth; it flowed through it, its massive frame becoming a blur of shadow and motion, weaving between trunks with an eerie, unnatural grace. The sound of its footsteps—heavy thumps—rapidly grew lighter, smarter, fading into the deeper woods not with panic, but with purpose.
Ace lowered his gun slowly, his muscles singing with unused tension.
"…Yeah," he exhaled, the word tasting of cold realization. His jaw was tight. "That figures."
It wasn't retreating in fear of the bullet.
It was recalculating. The equation had changed. The prey was armed, had drawn first blood, and was not alone. It was falling back to a better position, to a different tactic.
Ace's hands moved before his conscious mind had fully processed the thought. He ejected the partially spent magazine from his pistol—the standard, lead-and-brass kind that might bruise but wouldn't kill a thing like that—and let it fall into his waiting palm. From a padded pouch on his belt, he drew another.
This one was different.
It clicked into place with the same solid, metallic finality, but as it seated home, a faint, cerulean light pulsed from beneath the polymer casing. Tiny, intricate symbols—sigils etched at a microscopic level along the base of each bullet—shimmered for a moment before settling into a soft, persistent glow, like bioluminescent fungi on a cave wall.
Enchanted ammo.
In the world of hunters, enchanted ammunition wasn't just rare; it was a significant investment, a declaration of serious intent. It wasn't about flashy bolts of energy or fiery explosions. That was movie magic, wasteful and unstable.
Real enchantment was subtle, precise, and brutally efficient. Each brass casing had to be painstakingly inscribed with ancient, resonant sigils—a language of binding and unmaking. The process required ritual, focus, and a source of energy that was neither cheap nor safe to handle. The result wasn't a magic missile; it was a bullet that carried a payload of negation. It bypassed the unnatural resilience, the psychic shields, the very rules of reality that creatures like the Goatman used as armor.
Normal rounds could annoy it, slow it, make it bleed a substance that might not even be blood. Enchanted rounds? They could kill it. They could speak the word "stop" to a thing that had forgotten how to obey.
That's why Ace hated using them.
Loading an enchanted mag wasn't just a tactical choice; it was an escalation. It was admitting that this was no longer a scouting mission or a defensive action. It was a contract of annihilation. Once these bullets started flying, there was no stepping back. It was a fight to the death, and the price for losing had just skyrocketed.
He slid the glowing magazine into the well, the faint blue light casting eerie shadows on his grim face. He exhaled slowly through his nose, a long, controlled breath that steadied his racing heart and sharpened his focus. The cool weight of the gun in his hand now felt different. Heavier with purpose. Colder with finality.
Behind him—
Gasp.
The sound was sharp, wet, and utterly pained.
Ace turned on his heel, instincts overriding all else.
Cedric had collapsed forward, one knee hitting the ground with a solid thump. His service pistol slipped from nerveless fingers and landed in the moss with a dull, disrespectful clatter. His hands flew to his head, not clutching, but clawing, fingers tangling in his own hair and pressing against his temples as if he could physically tear the invading thoughts from his skull.
"Cedric!" Ace was beside him in two long strides, crouching, his free hand going to Cedric's shoulder.
Cedric's breathing was a wreck. Shallow, rapid hitches that didn't seem to bring any air. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, but they saw nothing of the forest around them.
"I—" Cedric choked, the word a ragged tear in the quiet. Then he stopped, his mouth working soundlessly. When he spoke again, his voice was a hollow, haunted thing. "I can hear him."
Ace's jaw tightened into a vice. Not again. Not now.
"Hey," Ace said, his voice low but firm, a command. He gave Cedric's shoulder a sharp shake. "Look at me. That's not real. It's the backlash. It's in your head."
Cedric didn't seem to hear him. He was miles away, years away.
"I told him I'd be back," Cedric muttered, the tremor in his voice deepening into a sob he was too proud to release. "I told him—he said it'd be quick. 'Just a recon, Ced. A small nest. In and out. You hold the perimeter.'" He repeated the words like a cursed mantra, his father's ghost speaking through him.
Ace's stomach turned to lead. This was worse than a simple hallucination.
This was memory manipulation. The Goatman wasn't creating false images; it was finding the raw, unhealed nerve of Cedric's greatest failure and pressing on it with a psychic scalpel. It was weaponizing his grief.
"Cedric," Ace snapped, his voice cutting through the spectral memory. "That's not him! It's the thing! It's using you!"
Cedric's hands were shaking violently now, the tremors running up his arms. His eyes, still unseeing, brimmed with a moisture that reflected not fear, but a soul-crushing, bottomless guilt.
"I left him," Cedric whispered, the confession dragged from a place he kept locked and buried. "I heard the gunshots… the screaming… and I held my post. I held my post. I should have gone. I should have been with him."
That did it.
Ace's open hand came up and struck Cedric hard across the cheek.
The slap was a sharp, shocking crack that echoed unnaturally in the silent woods. It wasn't an act of anger, but of brutal, necessary medicine.
Cedric's head snapped to the side. His breath hitched, a sudden, startled intake that broke the cycle of panic. His eyes, previously lost in the past, blinked rapidly, swimming back into focus. He sucked in a deep, ragged gasp of cold forest air, as if breaking the surface after nearly drowning.
"Fuck—!" Cedric groaned, one hand flying to his stinging cheek, the other still pressed to his throbbing temple. "Shit—shit, my head—"
Ace didn't offer comfort. He grabbed a fistful of Cedric's jacket collar and hauled him upright, forcing him to sit straight. "Stay with me," Ace commanded, his voice low and intense, a lifeline thrown into choppy waters. "You're here. I'm here. That thing is gone. For now."
Cedric groaned again, a sound of pure, physical and mental agony. He pressed the heels of his palms hard into his closed eyes, as if to push the visions out. "It felt so real," he muttered, voice raw. "Like I was back there. The same smell of cordite and wet wool. The same… cold in my fingers."
Ace reached into his open duffel, rummaged past gear, and pulled out a plain water bottle. He unscrewed the cap and shoved it into Cedric's free hand.
"Drink," he ordered, his tone brooking no argument. "Slowly. Don't choke."
Cedric didn't argue. He brought the bottle to his lips and gulped greedily, water sloshing over his chin and down his neck before he forced himself to slow, to swallow, to breathe.
"Hypnosis backlash," Ace said, his own voice calming now that Cedric was responding. He stated it clinically, making it a known problem with a known set of symptoms. "Headache, nausea, disorientation, emotional overload. It'll pass. Your mind is just… rebooting."
Cedric let out a shaky, humorless laugh, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. "I know the damn symptoms, Ace. Knowing doesn't make my brain feel any less like scrambled eggs."
"It does," Ace replied, his gaze steady. "Because it means you're not losing your mind. You're reacting to an attack. There's a difference. One is a breakdown. The other is a wound. Wounds heal."
Cedric took another, slower sip of water, his breathing finally beginning to even out from frantic gasps to deep, deliberate pulls. The color was slowly returning to his face, replacing the ghostly pallor.
"…Never thought a fucking goatman would pull that shit on me," he muttered, a flicker of his old defiance returning. "Guess I got cocky. Thought I was immune after the bog hag."
Ace didn't smile. The memory of the bog hag was a cheap trick compared to this surgical strike.
"They learn," Ace said, his eyes scanning the tree line where the creature had vanished. "Especially the old ones. And especially when they're injured. A wounded predator is twice as cunning."
Cedric followed his gaze, then looked down at Ace's pistol, still held loosely but ready. His eyes narrowed on the faint, ethereal blue glow emanating from the magazine well.
"You switched mags."
"Yeah."
Cedric's gaze flicked back to Ace's face, understanding dawning. "…Enchanted?"
Ace gave a single, grim nod. "Didn't want to. Waste of good money on a physical entity." He glanced back toward the oppressive darkness. "But after that? After what it just tried to do to you? No more warnings. No more trying to scare it off."
Cedric swallowed hard, the implications settling over him. Enchanted ammo meant they were no longer trying to solve a problem. They were trying to erase one.
"Next time it tries that," Ace continued, his voice flat and final, "I don't aim to wound. I put it down. Permanently. No running. No psychological games. A bullet with its name on it."
Cedric pushed himself to his feet, his legs still shaky but holding his weight. He reached down, picked up his fallen gun, and brushed the dirt from it with a stiff, deliberate motion.
"Then let's not give it another chance to try," he said, his voice regaining some of its steel. He racked the slide, checking the chamber with a practiced ease that was comforting in its normality.
Ace gave him a brief, assessing nod. The partner was back. For now.
The woods around them had settled back into that watchful, heavy quiet.
Too quiet.
And somewhere in that layered darkness, something old, intelligent, wounded, and now furious was licking its wounds and planning its next, undoubtedly more vicious, move.
***
There was a reason, a terrible and simple reason, why Cedric had gone down so fast and so hard.
Mental attacks of this caliber didn't work on just anyone—not with such devastating effect. Hunters, from their earliest training, were drilled in psychic hygiene. They learned to recognize the "taste" of false voices, the slippery texture of implanted memories, the tell-tale shimmer at the edge of a hallucination. Most could, with effort and training, shake off an assault, building mental walls as they built physical muscle.
But some wounds didn't heal with drills or meditation. Some griefs were tectonic, leaving fault lines in the soul that never fully sealed.
Cedric had grown up in the shadow of death, but also in the light of a hero. He'd watched his father, Ronan Hawthorn, leave for hunts with a calm, unshakable confidence, armor strapped tight, every weapon checked and re-checked. His father was a fortress. One evening, Ronan had ruffled his hair, his smile easy. "Just a recon, Ced. A small nest reported up north. In and out before midnight. You hold the fort with your mom." A routine promise. An easy mission.
He never came back.
No body. No last stand. No heroic final transmission. Just… silence. A void where a giant had stood.
And silence was the most fertile ground imaginable for a creature like the Goatman. It didn't need to construct elaborate lies. It didn't need to break into a fortified mind. It only needed to find that one, unanswered, agonizing question—"What happened in those last moments?"—and amplify it. It replayed the last words, twisted the memory of his father's confident smile into a mask of betrayal, and injected the guilt Cedric had battled for years directly into his bloodstream. The monster didn't conquer Cedric's mind; it simply turned his own heart against him.
Cedric flexed his fingers around the grip of his gun, feeling the checkered texture bite into his palm. A real sensation. A grounding one. He took another slow breath, letting the cold, clean night air fill his lungs, pushing out the psychic residue.
"Next time it won't work," he said quietly, more to himself than to Ace.
Ace glanced at him, his expression unreadable in the dark. "You sure?"
Cedric nodded, the movement stiff but definite. "Yeah. It caught me with my guard down. Used a cheap shot. Won't happen again."
Ace didn't argue. He'd learned long ago that you couldn't argue someone out of their determination. But in the quiet of his own mind, he didn't fully believe it. A wound that deep could be reopened. The Goatman had found the key. It would try the same lock again.
They moved deeper into the woods, but their pace had changed. It was no longer a pursuit. It was a deliberate, tactical advance. Slow. Methodical. Every sense extended like a net.
"Alright," Ace whispered, halting beside the massive, moss-covered trunk of a fallen oak. He crouched, becoming part of the shadow. "We don't chase it. Chasing is what it wants. We're in its house now. We hunt it."
Cedric knelt beside him, his back to the log, eyes scanning the opposite arc. "Agreed. We hunt smart. On our terms."
Ace tapped his own temple with a gloved finger. "It's injured. We know that now. That means two things. One—it will try to avoid a direct, fair fight. It's a predator, not a brawler. Two—" he looked pointedly at Cedric, "—it will try even harder to turn this around. To isolate us, disorient us, make us the hunted in our own hunt."
Cedric's eyes were hard chips of flint as they scanned the shifting patterns of moonlight and shadow. "So we flip the script. We use its own tactics against it."
A faint, grim smirk touched Ace's lips. It was the first genuine expression since the creature had appeared. "Exactly."
They laid out the plan in hushed, shorthand terms born of long partnership. No grand speeches. No shouting orders.
The Goatman's power lay in confusion, in fear, in isolation. So, they would be the opposite. They would be a united, calm, predictable force. They would stay close enough to maintain visual contact—a glance, a nod—but far enough apart that a single ambush couldn't take them both down. Ace, with the enchanted rounds, would be the anvil—the direct threat, drawing its attention, forcing it to react. Cedric would be the hammer—circling wide, silent, watching not for the creature itself, but for the signs it couldn't hide: a trail of fresh blood black in the moonlight, a suddenly still patch of ferns, the direction of the crows that had gone quiet.
"If it messes with your head again," Ace said, his voice losing all inflection, becoming pure protocol, as he loaded a second enchanted round into the chamber with a soft click-clack, "you don't try to push through it. You don't 'fight it off.'"
Cedric opened his mouth to protest, the instinct of a hunter to never show weakness rising up.
"You fall back," Ace cut in, his gaze locking onto Cedric's, leaving no room for debate. "Immediately. You signal me. You disengage. No hero shit, Cedric. That's how it wins. That's how it kills you."
Cedric hesitated, the words battling with his pride. Finally, he gave a short, sharp nod. "…Fine. Protocol."
The forest around them felt profoundly different now.
It didn't feel empty. It felt aware. Hyper-aware. Every creak of a branch overhead seemed deliberate, a footstep on a hidden stage. Shadows no longer just existed; they stretched and deepened in ways that defied the faint light, suggesting shapes that vanished when stared at directly. Every snapped twig, every rustle in the dry bracken, felt intentional—a feint, a probe, a piece of stagecraft in the creature's theater of fear.
Ace suddenly raised a clenched fist.
Cedric froze mid-step, becoming a statue.
Both of them ceased breathing, their ears straining against the silence.
A sound drifted through the trees, faint at first, weaving between the trunks like mist.
"…help…."
It was a voice. Thin. Weak. Human.
Ace's jaw clenched so tight a muscle bulged in his cheek.
Cedric swallowed, his throat suddenly dry again.
It sounded so real. So desperately, vulnerably real.
Ace shook his head slowly, a minute movement. His lips formed a single, silent word. Don't.
Cedric forced his eyes away from the dark archway of trees from which the plea had seemed to emanate. He focused on the rough bark of the tree in front of him. "I know," he breathed, the words barely audible. "It's bait. A lure."
The voice came again, clearer now, closer. Carried on a non-existent breeze.
"…Ace… over here… it's me…"
Ace felt his blood turn to ice water in his veins. The voice was different now. It was familiar. It was…
He exhaled slowly, a plume of vapor in the cold air, and tightened his grip on his pistol until the checkering bit into his palm. The pain was an anchor.
"Yeah," he muttered, the word heavy with disgust. "It learned our names. Of course it did."
Cedric's eyes, when Ace glanced at him, had hardened into glacial ice. "Which means it's been listening. Watching. Not just hunting… studying us."
Somewhere ahead of them, not in the direction of the voice but off to the left, a thick branch snapped.
Not the accidental snap of something fleeing.
A deliberate, sharp CRACK, like a signal. Like a taunt.
Not here. Over here.
Come and find me.
Ace and Cedric exchanged a single, lightning-fast look. In that glance passed a universe of understanding. The dynamic had shifted irrevocably.
This was no longer a chase.
The Goatman had stopped running.
It had chosen its ground.
And it was waiting for them.
The countdown had begun.
