Reborn as an Adventurer: I Gain a Skill From Every Monster I Eat

Chapter 35: Chapter 35 — What Came Out of the Dark

The search perimeter fanned out slowly through the tree line, torches held low to preserve night vision, and Arlen found himself paired with a young Rank D scout named Ilvera, the two of them working the northeastern edge of the search grid while Petra’s group covered the ground behind them.

”Stay close,” Ilvera murmured, crouched at the base of a massive, splintered tree that had been snapped clean through at chest height, the wood inside pale and freshly exposed. ”Whatever did this went through here recently. Wood hasn’t even started weathering yet.”

Arlen studied the break, running a gloved hand carefully along the splintered edge. The clean, sheared quality of the damage matched nothing in the guild bestiary’s descriptions of any creature at Rank 5 or below — not a bite, not a claw strike, just raw, overwhelming force applied without any apparent effort.

”This isn’t right,” he said quietly.

”None of tonight’s right.” Ilvera moved forward, careful and low, following a trail of similarly broken vegetation deeper into the tree line. ”Guild’s never dealt with anything this size in the Ashen Frontier before. Whatever’s out here, it shouldn’t be. Not this close to Greyhaven.”

They pressed on for perhaps twenty minutes, the destruction growing steadily more pronounced the further they went — trees snapped or uprooted entirely, the earth churned and gouged in wide, sweeping furrows, the unnatural silence from earlier deepening around them until even their own careful footsteps seemed too loud against it.

Then Ilvera froze, one hand rising sharply to signal a halt, and Arlen went still beside her, every sense straining against the darkness ahead.

Something was breathing.

It was a low, massive sound, slow and deliberate, carrying through the trees from somewhere not nearly far enough away, deep enough that Arlen felt it as much as heard it, a faint vibration passing through the ground beneath his boots with each exhale.

”Signal for backup,” Ilvera breathed, barely audible. ”Now. Don’t wait.”

Arlen reached for the small signal horn Petra had issued each member of the search grid, fingers fumbling slightly against the leather cord in the dark — and in that same instant, something shifted in the deep shadow ahead of them, vast and slow, and two eyes opened in the darkness at a height that made Arlen’s breath catch in his throat.

They weren’t the eyes of anything he recognized. Pale, faintly luminous, spaced wider apart than any creature he’d ever read about in the guild’s bestiary, set into a shape that the darkness only partially revealed — enormous, easily three times the height of the greatstag he’d glimpsed at the middle forest boundary, its outline wrong in some way Arlen couldn’t quite name, too smooth, too still, as though it had been waiting there in the dark rather than simply resting.

Ilvera’s hand found Arlen’s shoulder, gripping hard. ”Don’t move,” she whispered, barely a breath of sound. ”Don’t—”

The creature’s head turned toward them.

Whatever instinct had kept Arlen alive through the jackal den, through every careful, deliberate choice he’d made since walking through the guild’s doors, screamed at him now that stillness alone wasn’t going to save either of them. The pale eyes fixed on their position with an awareness that felt, impossibly, deliberate — not the blind, instinctive threat-response of an ordinary predator, but something that recognized, specifically, that it had been found.

”Run,” Ilvera said, no longer whispering, already moving. ”RUN—”

The forest exploded into motion.

Arlen didn’t see the creature move so much as he registered, in fragmented, adrenaline-sharp pieces, that the space between them had somehow collapsed — a vast shape surging forward with a speed that shouldn’t have belonged to something so large, the ground erupting beneath its passage, trees Arlen had been standing beside moments earlier splintering apart like kindling.

He threw himself sideways, Enduring Vitality carrying him through a scramble that should have left him breathless and didn’t, rolling hard against the base of a tree as something massive tore through the space he’d occupied a half-second before. He caught, in the chaos, a horrifying fragment of detail — a limb, if it could be called that, longer and stranger than anything a natural creature should possess, trailing something that glistened wetly in the scattered torchlight.

Ilvera’s scream cut through the din, cut off too abruptly, and Arlen’s chest seized with a cold, immediate horror that had no room left in it for careful thought.

He scrambled upright, sword already in hand though every rational piece of him understood, distantly, how little that blade would matter against whatever this actually was, and found the creature’s pale eyes fixed on him again, closer now, close enough that he could see, in the shifting torchlight, that its form seemed to bend and blur at the edges in a way that made his mind recoil from trying to properly process it.

Somewhere behind him, distant shouts were rising — Petra’s group, alerted by the noise, closing in far too slowly to matter in the next several seconds. Arlen understood, with a terrible, absolute clarity, that whatever happened next would happen long before any help could possibly arrive.

The creature’s massive head lowered toward him, and for one suspended, endless moment, Arlen found himself staring directly into those pale, luminous eyes — inhuman, ancient, and utterly, deliberately aware of him in a way nothing he had ever faced before had been.

It opened its mouth, and the sound that emerged was not a roar.

It was something closer to a word.

Arlen didn’t understand the language, if it even was one, but the weight of it struck him like a physical force, driving the breath from his lungs, and in that same instant the creature surged forward the final distance between them, vast and unstoppable, and the last coherent thought Arlen managed, as the world dissolved into a blur of shadow and pale, terrible light, was the absurd, distant realization that he had never gotten the chance to write tonight’s entry in his journal.