And the waypoint dropped them at the boundary of the Mantel Stone Realm in the early morning when the light was still low and the air carried the particular cold of a place that did not warm up in predictable ways.

Neil stood at the boundary marker and looked into the Realm without moving for a long moment.

The terrain beyond the line was unlike anything in the surrounding landscape.

Enormous stone formations rose out of the ground at angles that suggested the earth had been pushed and cracked by something vast and geological rather than shaped over time, dark and jagged and massive, their surfaces covered in a growth that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, pale blue-green in colour and dense enough in places to produce its own faint illumination independent of the sky.

Where trees existed their bark had mineralised, stone-grey and fused in places with the formations around them, their branches interlocking overhead into a canopy of dark wood and grey stone through which very little outside light reached the ground.

The sounds coming out of it were not familiar sounds.

That was the first meaningful piece of information. Not animal sounds that he could categorise from experience, not the expected baseline of a hunting ground he had read about somewhere.

Genuinely new sounds, which meant genuinely new creatures, which meant he was going in without a complete picture of what he was facing.

’Nemo.’ He said internally.

"Master." Nemo replied.

’What do records say about the Realm’s creatures?’

"Very little of use, since comprehensive records require people who enter the deep sections to come back out with reliable data, which does not happen consistently." Nemo said.

"The broad consensus is that dominant creatures incorporate the mineral composition of the environment into their physical structure in some way. Beyond that, the records become contradictory or simply absent."

’So I am going in mostly blind.’

"You have gone into worse situations with less preparation." Nemo said, which was accurate and not particularly comforting.

Neil looked down at Magnar, who had his nose up and his nostrils working steadily, reading the air flowing out of the Realm with the focused attention of something whose instincts were considerably more sophisticated than any secondhand record. His ears were up and his tail had gone still, which with Magnar meant concentration rather than caution.

He made a sound after a moment, short and low and certain.

"Yeah." Neil agreed, without knowing exactly what Magnar had identified. "Let’s go."

He stepped across the boundary line.

The air changed the moment he crossed it, heavier without being warmer, pressing against him with a density that took a few seconds to adjust to.

Sound moved differently inside, the stone formations catching and redirecting it in ways that scrambled direction, making it difficult to pinpoint the origin of anything without concentrating specifically on it.

The luminescent growth on the stone surfaces cast the pale blue-green light upward and sideways, creating an environment where shadows fell in unexpected directions and depth was harder to judge than it should have been.

Magnar pressed close beside him, low and alert, his body language shifting into the configuration he adopted in places where threat could come from multiple directions without warning.

Neil walked forward and let his senses adjust without forcing them, taking in the new environment at its own pace rather than trying to immediately map it according to frameworks that might not apply here.

He had covered roughly two hundred metres when the first creature dropped on him from above.

No warning sound. That was the first thing he registered, the total absence of the pre-attack sound that most creatures produced whether they intended to or not, just a displacement of air and then a large mass landing between him and Magnar with a solidity that suggested significant weight behind it.

He had time to take it in before it oriented on him.

Six limbs rather than four, built low and wide, the extra pair positioned at mid-body and angled differently from the locomotive limbs, clearly designed for surface adhesion rather than movement across flat ground.

Its skin was the exact grey of the stone formations around it, not pigmented that way but actually composed of the same material, overlapping plates of genuine stone embedded into the flesh in layered armour that covered most of its body. The head was flat and broad, wider than it was long, and it had no visible eyes anywhere on its surface.

It oriented on him anyway, the flat head swinging toward him with precision that did not require sight.

Neil stepped to the left.

The head tracked him immediately, following the movement faster than a sightless creature had any reason to be able to.

He stopped moving completely and held still.

The head swung in a short searching arc, then slowed, uncertain.

He looked at Magnar, who was two metres to his right, and with a very small gesture indicated the direction he wanted him to move.

Magnar took two deliberate steps to the left.

The creature’s head snapped toward him instantly.

Neil drew the elemental bow in one motion, pulled the string to full draw with his attention on the top of the creature’s skull where the stone plating met in a ridge but did not fully close, and released.

The arrow went through the gap cleanly and the creature dropped without making a sound, which was how it had arrived and was apparently how it intended to leave.

Neil lowered the bow and crouched beside it, examining the plating structure without touching it, mapping the coverage and the gaps with his eyes while his mind assembled the picture.

Vibration tracking through the ground, he concluded. The head design and the instant response to footfalls rather than to visual or auditory input both pointed there.

Six limbs for stone surface navigation. Stone plating for defence with the skull ridge as the primary weak point. Silent movement as a hunting adaptation.

He stood up and looked at Magnar. "Vibration tracking. Stay light on your feet." 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Magnar’s ears moved in acknowledgment.

The second one came from a lateral crack in a formation to the east, larger than the first, faster in its approach, covering the ground between the crack and Neil’s position in a scuttle that was quicker than the body size suggested.

Magnar met it before it completed the approach, shoulder-checking it hard enough to knock it off its line, and Neil put an arrow through the skull ridge while it was still processing the impact.

He collected what he could from both bodies, the material dense and heavy, gene-rich in the way of creatures well adapted to a difficult environment, and moved on.

By the fourth and fifth Stone Crawlers, which was the name he had settled on internally for simple reference, the pattern had become clear enough that he could work with it reliably.

They began appearing in coordinated pairs after the third kill, suggesting the vibration network served a communication function as well as a sensory one, the deaths of individual creatures apparently transmitting something through the ground that brought others.

Coordinated hunting required coordinated response, and Neil adjusted accordingly, using Magnar to anchor one target’s attention while he handled the other, then switching when the situation called for it.

Magnar’s magma breath turned out to be particularly effective against the stone plating, the heat differential cracking the embedded plates in ways that opened seams where there had been none and made the follow-up blade work considerably easier.

Neil started using this deliberately as an opening move when they had sufficient distance from the target to set it up, Magnar softening the plating while Neil positioned for the skull approach, the two of them developing the rhythm without needing to discuss it because they had been fighting together long enough that the communication happened through movement rather than direction.

The Bronze class creatures accumulated steadily, their gene material collecting, and Neil moved deeper.

The Silver class territory announced itself not through any boundary marker but through the quality of the creatures that appeared, the shift in size and plating density and tracking sophistication arriving all at once in a way that made the transition immediately obvious.

The first Silver class Stone Crawler was half again the size of the largest Bronze class one, the stone plating thicker and more uniform, the gaps between plates narrower and harder to find quickly under pressure.

Its vibration tracking operated on multiple simultaneous inputs rather than the single-channel reading of the Bronze class, picking up ground contact, subtle air displacement, and what Neil suspected was thermal differential all at once, which made it significantly harder to deceive with the simple stillness trick that had worked reliably before.

It was also faster than he had expected, closing distance with a controlled acceleration that suggested it was not burning everything on the initial approach the way the Bronze class ones had, pacing itself, which indicated a higher level of predatory intelligence behind the flat skull.

He took a blade cut at the plating on its flank and felt the impact travel back up his arms in a way that told him immediately that the Bronze class approach of finding a seam and pushing through was going to take considerably more effort here.

The plating deflected the blade rather than yielding to it, and he had to redirect mid-strike to catch the narrower gap at the articulation point between the shoulder plating and the neck coverage.

The creature’s mid-body limb came around during the exchange and hit him across the ribs with enough force to move him sideways, not damaging through the coat but a reminder that getting hit by things at this scale and speed had costs.

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading... adios