“So… What the hell are we doing here again? I wasn’t listening before”

  “Man, you really need to pay attention to the quests we take”

  “This helm just blocks out all sound, I am telling you!”

  “Then take it off to listen”

  “When it’s such a pain to put on and take off? I don’t think so”

  “You two, stop arguing like an old couple and pay attention!”

  Standing before the entrance to a small village, a group of three adventurers was to be found: One man in heavy armour, wielding a sword and shield, one man in lighter armour carrying a bow and a bag full of what might look like junk at a glance, and a woman who was obviously a mage.

  The last even had a crest stitched upon her robes, marking her as a student of one of many schools of magic.

  Looking around, the trio couldn't help but think that the village looked quite gloomy and eerie despite the fact that people were walking around and children were playing like normal…

  The mage readjusted her glasses with a smug expression.

  “Indeed, I can sense a copious amount of negative energy, and its derivatives! The quest wasn’t lying, this place does indeed seem to be encountering trouble”

  The two men didn’t say anything. They couldn’t ‘sense’ anything like she could, but even they could tell that something was off purely by the atmosphere. It felt like when your instincts warned you that you were being watched or followed.

  It was quite the disturbing feeling, but the village itself was perfectly normal. All over the place, wolf-like symbols were to be seen. Children played a game they called ‘Frozen Wolf’, which was basically just ‘Tag’.

  And the handful of local shops, which didn’t even number above five, all had names that had something to do with wolves…

  “You must be the adventurer group who accepted our request. Welcome to Wolfome! I sincerely thank you for your time!”

  An old man with a curved back and a cane approached them, immediately recognising them as adventurers.

  “Hello, Sir… We read the quest that was posted. Is there anything else we need to know?”

  Asked the man in light armour, naturally taking the lead in the conversation.

  The elder nodded with a grim look on his face.

  “Unfortunately, you aren’t the first group of adventurers to accept this quest, I fear! There have already been a few groups who went by yesterday and today, but they quickly left in fright… Oh… The group from just before, in particular, they were quite the daring lads, they pushed further than most into the woods”

  The old man shook his head dejectedly.

  “It might make you change your mind, but the quest we posted doesn’t have the right danger level, it seems! The previous group came back with one of their members missing, and another had lost an arm!”

  “Well… This is the forest of Louwoods, isn’t it? It has some monsters and beasts deeper into the forest, so shouldn’t that be expected to happen?”

  The man in heavy armour spoke up. This wasn’t anyone’s first time here. Louwoods was an enormous forest, the largest in the region, and a contender for the largest in the entire kingdom. It had many villages living off of it nearby, and many towns also enriched themselves from the sale of wood from here.

  Naturally, since dangerous creatures lived within it, it was common for adventurers in the area to take on quests relating to it. Most never went deep, mostly protecting lumberjacks or clearing out groups of monsters that had neared too close to habitations, but it was safe to say that even the depths of the woods weren’t particularly dangerous as long as one was careful.

  But ‘not too dangerous’ still meant that there was danger. It was simply that the odds of running into something that could actually challenge a group of adventurers were rare.

  “They must have run into a forest ogre unexpectedly. They can get quite aggressive if they think you're trying to steal their food or near their burrows”

  Added the man, quite confident in his analysis.

  The old man, however, shook his head.

  “Unfortunately, as you know, the woods have been… Changing in the past few months. It all started four months ago, when someone first spotted a strange figure watching them from behind a tree, and when they went to check on what he had first thought to be his daughter playing a prank, he found nothing”

  “From then on, things have been getting worse, strange silhouettes have been spotted by villagers here, but also from other villages, and the more it happened, the more sinister the forest seemed to become. Nowadays, the birds are quiet, and the small goblins we used to run into are no longer showing up at all… Our hunters are not catching anything anymore, and feel like they are being constantly watched”

  “The village can keep operating relatively normally despite it all, but we worry that it will keep getting worse if a solution is not found”

  The elder was clearly quite aggravated, the thought was in the back of everyone’s mind, but so far, nothing too bad had happened, so everyone still felt like it was only a temporary thing, that it would go away like the seasons eventually.

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  Glancing around, the old man leaned forward and continued in a hushed tone.

  “The group I mentioned. They said that what attacked them was not a monster they had ever seen before. They called it an abomination, a sort of chimaera even… They claimed their weapons did nothing to it and that they could only run away whilst being constantly pursued by evil spirits”

  “Only I heard about this so far, and I would prefer if you kept it to yourself… I don’t want to cause a panic in the village”

  The group of three looked at one another.

  “Sir, did the previous group say anything specific about the creature that attacked them?”

  Asked the mage, she had come here under the assumption that the main targets for this quest were a bunch of ghosts, but ghosts typically didn’t rip off arms with brute strength, and if a ghost could use powers to tear someone’s limbs off, then, surely, they wouldn’t have allowed anyone to escape alive.

  “They didn’t say much as there was a bit of an emergency with their fellow losing blood rapidly. Though they did mention it seemed to control the evil spirits”

  “Very well, thank you for the information… My team and I are going to discuss this”

  The man in light armour spoke, and soon, the trio was huddled together at a distance.

  “Do any of you know who it was that went before us? I didn’t hear anything about anyone losing an arm or someone dying”

  “You really need to stop wearing that helm all the time. We were literally there when they burst into the guild asking for a healer”

  “I must have been asleep”

  “Listen, you two… The group before us was newbies. We might actually have a shot at this… Clara, you’re confident that your spells can work on spirits, right?”

  “Of course! Being able to affect the noncorporeal is a course at my school, and I am quite good in this class”

  “Great, and you, Hoolt, we agree that you can block attacks from an enraged cave troll?”

  “Yes, but I need a good footing, otherwise I’ll get thrown around”

  “Perfect, then I reckon we have the means to tackle this quest. We can deal with the evil spirits, we can deal with whatever creature the others ran into, and with my tracking abilities, we should be able to find out what is causing the woods to feel so sinister”

  “I feel like the cause is probably that monster… So you might be superfluous, Alintel”

  “Shut up”

  The adventurers then told the old man that they were going through with the quest despite what they learned, and set out into Louwoods under the eyes of the village elder, who stroked his grey beard with a contemplative look in his eyes.

  “Oh… Why do they never turn back? It seems like she’s going to feed again…”

  The terrain of the forest itself was rather simplistic, made up of tall coniferous trees, but mostly made up of shorter, deciduous trees, which were the main source of lumber that gave Louwoods its high value.

  Normally, at this time of the day, the forest would be loud and rife with sounds, but currently, it was nearly dead silent. The distant singing of birds sounded like a haunting lullaby, and the scurrying of forest animals became a source of dread in the ambient quiet.

  The lack of sound most of the time turned the smallest of noises into a moment of fright, and this feeling only intensified when deeper parts of the forest were reached, where the landscape changed, trees became sparsers, but in turn, they became far larger, with their thick roots visible above ground all around them, their wide canopies created pockets of dark shadows even during the middle of the day.

  And to make things worse, ferns now grew in excess all over the place, nearly reaching the waist in certain areas, making it easy to trip over something you couldn’t see.

  Clara’s mage robes weren’t exactly the best fit for such an environment, but at the moment, she was more focused on sticking by Hoolt in case danger showed up. She wasn’t exactly the fastest caster around, so she tended to hide behind other people for safety, as it was likely that anything she was throwing spells at to close the distance when she was busy weaving a spell…

  But eventually, her robes got caught on something, making her stumble forward, forcing her to grab onto Hoolt to avoid eating fern.

  “Are you alright?”

  He asked her, noticing that she was still grasping onto him after several seconds.

  “Is something the matter?”

  Alintel asked as well. He was standing behind the mage and had noticed her go stiff right after narrowly preventing herself from falling.

  “There is something… In the fern, a bit to the right… In front of us”

  She voiced out slowly, and both men turned in that direction. Expecting to see a regular monster or beast, but instead, they saw a head with blue skin and blue hair, peeking out from the tall vegetation.

  A corpse-like girl with red eyes stared straight at them.

  It was there for a second before diving down into the fern, disappearing from sight as a small giggle echoed over the area.

  All three adventurers suddenly sprang up into action, expecting a fight, an ambush, something, anything.

  Nothing happened. What they assumed to be one of the spirits was nowhere to be seen, the woods were calm, and everything was back to what it had been moments prior.

  The heart rates of the three slowly went down as they lowered their guards, casting suspicious glances all around them.

  But still, nothing happened.

  “That was… A bit disturbing”

  “That’s understating it, that thing was horrifying”

  “Why didn’t you throw a spell at it?”

  “Did it look like I had time to do that? I frankly wasn’t certain what I was seeing at first… It looked like a demon”

  “Its face was all messed up, it looked like someone had repeatedly smashed something heavy against it”

  “I suppose that’s how the spirit died… Quite gruesome, no wonder it would come back as an evil spirit”

  The three adventurers exchanged words for a little while, calming their nerves as the encounter had strangely shaken them. Unfortunately, it was but the appetiser of a long meal.

  From this point onward, they caught sight of several more spirits. Every time, they would disappear within just a few moments, vanishing entirely. They left no time for the adventurers to react properly.

  One moment they were here, the next they were gone.

  Each encounter would instil a subtle sense of apprehension and fear within them, up until they reached a place that was definitely not natural.

  There was a sort of small lodge sitting in a clearing. The fern had been removed, and a simple shack had been erected.

  Outside, corpses were hanging by their feet from a tree branch, including the corpse of what was certainly the slain adventurer the elder had spoken about.

  They had reached the beast’s den.