[You have killed 9 Bandits lvl 3; No experience gained due to level disparity]

  [You have killed 5 Bandits lvl 4; No experience gained due to level disparity]

  [You have killed 3 Bandit scouts lvl 4; No experience gained due to level disparity]

  [You have killed Bandit Leader lvl 6; No experience gained due to level disparity]

  Del leads the way, boots pressing into damp earth, each step heavy with the weight of what lies ahead. The forest is quiet now—too quiet. No night-birds, no insects, not even the rustle of leaves. Just the low hush of wind threading through branches and the distant crackle of dying fire.

  Misty moves ahead, a streak of ginger shadow gliding between trees, her tail flicking in short, impatient snaps. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t pause—she prowls. Always within sight, never quite still. Every so often she looks back, her gold eyes catching the moonlight, then flicking forward again like a signal: keep up.

  Del watches her go, then casts a glance at Elara, shadowed behind. She doesn’t speak either. Her bow is loose in her hand, fingers resting lightly, but the tension’s in her shoulders. She knows. Not all of it. But enough.

  The air begins to change.

  They cross a line invisible to the eye but felt in the bones. Grass gives way to churned soil. Saplings bend and snap where bodies crashed through them. A trail of broken branches leads forward like a wound, and there—half-hidden under moss and boot-scuffed bark—is a smear of blood gone rust-brown with time. Not old. Not fresh. Just settled.

  Del’s hand tightens on the hilt of his blade. Dried blood flakes beneath his grip. He hasn’t cleaned it. Can’t remember the last time he even thought to.

  He slows his pace. Something behind his ribs begins to coil.

  ‘They’re going to see it. She’s going to see it.’

  He tells himself it was necessary. That it was right. That Naomi—taken, drugged, bound—justified what followed.

  But his other voice chimes in, quieter, colder: ‘And you enjoyed it, didn’t you? Even if only a little. That moment when you let go.’

  Del clamps his jaw and pushes the thought aside.

  A faint orange glow appears between the trees—low, flickering, uneven. Firelight.

  Not far now.

  The air thickens. Warmer. Stagnant. Smoke drapes low to the ground, curling around trunks and hanging in curtains that sting the eyes. Beneath it lies the stench—blood, meat, piss, old iron and ruin. It clings to the throat, to the teeth.

  Even the wind seems reluctant to carry it.

  Misty halts up ahead. No growl. No posture. She simply stops—one paw raised, body still. Ears forward.

  Del catches up, heart tight behind his sternum. He knows what they’re about to see. He was the one that made it.

  Del glances at Elara. Her face is tight, wary, eyes already scanning the dark beyond him. He nods toward the light.

  “The camp’s ahead,” he murmurs. “It’s... a mess.”

  They reach the edge of the clearing in silence. The fire still burns, reduced now to a low heap of glowing coals and half-charred logs. Its light dances over a scene carved straight from nightmare.

  Blood has turned the ground to mud—thick, black-red sludge pooling in shallow dips and glittering wetly in the firelight. Limbs lie where they fell—some whole, some not. A leg is wedged improbably in the crook of a tree. A hand hangs from the branch above it, fingers curled as if still grasping for help that never came.

  Weapons are everywhere—axes, blades, broken hafts—thrown or dropped mid-panic, some buried in bodies that no longer move.

  Misty pads into the clearing at last, tail low, ears forward. The fire casts a low, flickering glow over the ruined ground, and for a moment, she pauses—right at the threshold. Her nose twitches. Her pupils narrow. Something unreadable moves behind her golden eyes.

  She steps forward slowly, paws silent in the blood-slick mud. Her fur brushes against the hanging edge of a torn canvas tarp. It sags across a broken crate like discarded skin. Beneath her feet, the earth is thick with what was once men.

  She stops beneath the branch and looks up.

  A severed leg dangles there, caught high like some grotesque offering to a god no one worships. Misty lifts one paw and swats it lightly. It swings once. Twice.

  She watches the arc, then lets out a soft chuff through her nose.

  ‘Well,’ she says at last, voice dry as summer grass, ‘someone’s been busy.’

  Her gaze travels across the clearing—slow, clinical. Limbs strewn like kicked-off boots. Skulls caved. Weapons rusting in blood. One corpse still twitches with the leftover fire of nerves misfiring.

  She sits.

  Tail curled neatly around her paws, head tilted faintly, she stares toward the centre of the wreckage.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  Her voice slips into Del’s mind like a whisper too close.

  ‘You didn’t leave much for the scavengers. Even I would’ve shown more restraint. And I’m the one with claws.’

  Del says nothing.

  She turns her head slightly, ears flicking as Elara steps up beside him. The elf’s breath catches in her throat. Not fear. Not horror. Not yet. But the moment before.

  Misty watches her, then flicks her gaze back to Del.

  ‘She’s going to see you differently now. You know that, don’t you?’

  Del doesn’t reply.

  He watches the fire. And says nothing at all.

  Elara stands behind Del, and for a long moment, says nothing. Her eyes roam across the carnage, pausing on each detail: a smashed-in skull; a crumpled figure with no visible face; the scorched remnants of what used to be a man, now a blackened shape twisted into the dirt.

  Karth lies near the dying fire, sprawled on his back, arms flung wide, one leg twisted at an unnatural angle. His throat is opened from ear to ear—a clean, deliberate cut that left no room for final words. Blood pools thick beneath him, soaking into the dirt like ink spilled on old parchment.

  His face is pulp. One eye swollen shut, the other fixed and staring, mouth slack, cheek split open from the arc of Del’s backhand. Fingers on one hand are mangled, shattered inwards like broken twigs, the other missing a digit entirely. His chest has caved under the weight of too many blows, the tunic clinging in sodden patches over crushed ribs and torn flesh.

  There is no chaos here. No frenzy. This is precise, clinical ruin left by a man who made a choice and never looked back.

  Elara says nothing. She just stares.

  She’s seen death. Fought beside Del in blood and fire. Taken lives of her own. But nothing compares to this. This isn’t war. It isn’t survival. It’s a message.

  Elara moves deeper into the clearing, boots slipping slightly in the blood-slick mud. She doesn’t speak at first. Her gaze moves from body to body—one crumpled against a log, another with limbs folded the wrong way, faces broken or missing altogether. None of it seems real. Like theatre props, too red, too still.

  Then she sees Karth.

  The gaping wound across his throat, the ruin of his chest, the mangled hand splayed at an unnatural angle.

  She stops.

  For a long moment, the only movement is the flicker of firelight catching the curve of her cheek. Her eyes linger—not on the gore, but on the precision of it. The deliberation. The care taken not to spare him.

  She turns to Del, searching his face. There’s no rage left in it. No breathless triumph. Only a quiet stillness.

  “Del?” she says, voice barely above the hush of wind through trees.

  He meets her gaze. There’s weight behind his eyes, but no flinch.

  “I know,” he says quietly. “I lost control. When they took her.”

  Elara doesn’t reply at first. Her silence stretches—not cold, not recoiling. Just... thinking. Weighing.

  Her eyes go back to the bodies, then return to his.

  “You’ve fought before,” she says, slowly. “I’ve seen it. But this wasn’t a fight.”

  Del doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.

  She breathes in, shallow, steady. “They took Naomi,” she murmurs. “I understand.”

  Her hand tightens faintly on her bow, not in fear, but reflex. Then relaxes.

  “But understand this too,” she adds, softer now, “what you did here—it’s more than vengeance. It's something you don’t come back from unchanged.”

  Her words aren’t a warning. Not quite. More like an observation made aloud, a truth placed gently between them like a stone at the foot of a trail.

  Misty shifts her weight, tail swishes once. Watching.

  Del nods once. A single, heavy movement.

  “I know.”

  And the clearing settles again. Not quiet—never quiet—but still.

  Beneath the surface, a scream—silent, white-hot—rips through him.

  ‘Menolly.’ The name is a raw wound in his mind. ‘I need you.’

  His hands curl tight. Blood from someone else flakes from his knuckles.

  ‘I need you. I need you now, damn you. I am losing grip.’

  And the world stops.

  Only two things move.

  Misty, prowling a slow circle through the blood-slick camp, her ears twitching at sounds only she hears.

  And Del.

  She flicks a glance at him, head tilting slightly—then looks past his shoulder.

  Del turns.

  Menolly is there.

  She steps lightly through the carnage, bare feet unsoiled by blood, picking her way between severed limbs and broken steel as if walking through wildflowers. Her presence alters the air—quieter, stiller. Reality breathes differently around her.

  A chair waits where there hadn’t been one a moment before. Carved wood. Polished. Absurdly civilised in the middle of the battlefield.

  She sits with perfect grace.

  “You’ve been busy,” she says, surveying the wreckage. Her tone is calm, clipped, almost disinterested. Her eyes, however, remain fixed on Del.

  She gestures with a hand—open, elegant—toward the scene around them. “I see you’re adjusting to your strength. But this”—her fingers trace the outline of a corpse without touching it—“will not accelerate your cuvat’s progress.”

  Her gaze sharpens, needle-point precise.

  “Nor will summoning me like a lapdog.”

  Her words land cold. Not angry. Worse—disappointed.

  ‘You thrust us into this like lab rats,’ Misty’s voice slashes in, razor-edged. ‘So if not a lapdog, are you our guard cur instead?’

  Menolly’s brow lifts, amused despite herself. She gives Misty a slow blink. “No,” she says at last. “But point taken.”

  Her eyes return to Del. “Why call me?”

  He draws a breath, rough and unsteady. Anger still prickles beneath his skin, raw and unresolved.

  “It’s Elara,” he says. “She’s… important. To me.”

  Misty moves to his side, sits, and curls her tail neatly over her paws. A sentinel. A partner.

  “To both of us,” Del adds.

  He doesn’t know how to shape the rest. The words coil too tight.

  “We’re too much,” he tries. “Too strong. Too fast. Even a blind man would see it.”

  His hand motions vaguely to the ruin around them. “For strangers, for people we pass in a day, that’s fine. They’ll chalk it up to luck, or skill. But Elara’s been with us since the start. She’s watching.”

  ‘What the idiot is trying to say,’ Misty says, tail flicking, ‘is Joel’s family will think we’re just competent. But Elara’s been there since the beginning. She sees it.’

  Del nods, voice steadier now. “She does. She knows I’m not like the others. And Misty... well, Misty’s never been normal.”

  Menolly studies him—one long, unreadable pause.

  “And what would you have me do about that?” she asks, calmly. “Isn’t this a mess of your own making?” She motions again at the camp. “There were other ways. Quieter ones.”

  “I know,” Del says. “Don’t think for a second I liked who I became here.”

  He takes a breath—tight, slow—and forces the next words out like they might fight him.

  “But they took Naomi.”

  His voice hardens. “She’s a child. She was mine to protect. What happened here is on them.”

  Menolly tilts her head slightly. “So this was justice?”

  Del hesitates. “Yes. No. I don’t know.”

  ‘It is the guardian’s duty to defend the nest,’ Misty says flatly. ‘And to destroy what threatens it.’ Her tone has cooled. No venom, only truth.

  Del nods. “Misty’s right. It wasn’t clean. But it had to be done. And I was the one who had to do it.”

  Menolly’s eyes narrow slightly, as if adjusting a lens.

  “Good,” she says. “Conviction without purpose is noise. But conviction rooted in duty—that is the beginning of growth.”

  Her voice remains neutral, but something shifts behind her gaze—approval, maybe. Or recognition.

  Del exhales. His shoulders lower. The adrenaline hasn’t gone, but it’s fading.

  “So what about Elara?” he asks.

  Menolly raises a brow.

  “What about her?”