Fighting beasts was exhilarating in theory. In practice, Yuto’s entire body hurt and he never wanted to do it again.

Ah. Who knew hunting would be this stressful?

He winced as he shifted his weight, cataloguing the aches. His side where the tusk had grazed him. His tailbone. His palms. He checked his profile mostly as an excuse to stand still.

Name: Yuto

Rank: Disciple

Summons: 1/1

Soul Rank: Threat

Soul Cores: 7/30

Seven. He had started with one. That was six kills’ worth of progress, which was, he turned the number over, actually not bad. Twenty-three more cores before Paragon. That was going to take a while, but it was also considerably more than zero, which was where he had been this morning.

Progress was progress. He dusted off his palms and stood up.

Shiny was already busy with the hogs, moving through them in a methodical, unhurried way. He would punch his fist into a carcass, feel around, draw out the core, drop it in the bag. Then he moved to the next one. Then the next. He had the focused, businesslike manner of someone completing a checklist.

When the cores were done, he started on the heads. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Yuto watched him work and felt a small, helpless flicker of amusement. Shiny approached decapitation with the same composure he applied to everything else, which was thorough and slightly unsettling.

Six crystals. Six heads. Yuto looked at the bag and tried to estimate what that was worth and found he genuinely didn’t know. Full carcasses he might have felt confident about. But just the heads? He hadn’t thought to ask the woman at the stall what the going rate was, which, in retrospect, was a significant oversight.

He turned to Shiny. "We need six more kills before we head back."

Shiny gave a thumbs up. "No problem, Master."

They walked.

The change happened gradually and then all at once, the way those things tend to.

Yuto noticed the light first, the warm late-afternoon quality of it draining away, replaced by something flatter and colder, closer to dusk than it had any right to be given the time. Then the sounds shifted. The easy background noise of the forest, the chirps and small movements, went quiet, and what replaced it was harder to name. Eerie was the word that came to mind and stayed there.

He slowed down.

Shiny had already stopped walking. He was looking up through the canopy with a grim, sober expression, studying the sky with the focused attention of someone reading a warning sign written in a language they understood too well.

"You feel it too?" Yuto asked.

"Yes." Shiny lowered his gaze. "This place is different."

Yuto sighed. "Let’s get the six kills and leave."

Shiny nodded and they continued, until they weren’t continuing anymore because there was growling.

Both of them stopped. Yuto listened. The sound came again, low and layered, and it was definitely growling, definitely more than one source. Shiny moved toward it without being asked. Yuto followed on his heels.

The clearing they stepped into was small and ringed tightly by trees. In the center of it were four things. Two large grey wolves. A girl. And her summon, an eagle roughly the size of a large dog, which was watching the wolves with the kind of focused attention that meant it was already calculating angles.

The girl was another matter.

She was about his age and nearly his height. She wore a white nightgown. Her hair was blonde and fell loose all the way to her shoulder blades.

Her face...

Heat arrived in Yuto’s face without warning and he looked away quickly.

Her face was the most beautiful face he had ever seen, and that was the problem with it. It was the kind of beauty that wasn’t entirely natural, too precise, like something sculpted rather than born, the sort of face that made the part of the brain responsible for rational thought briefly hand over to something less useful.

The other thing about her face was that it had no expression on it whatsoever. None. A complete absence.

Yuto, once he had recovered sufficiently, noticed something else. She was fighting wolves in the middle of a forest in a nightgown. With her hair down. He didn’t claim to be an expert on combat hair, but he was reasonably sure that loose hair falling to the middle of your back was a disadvantage by any metric, and the nightgown wasn’t doing her any favors either. Yet there she was, looking completely unbothered by both choices.

He didn’t have time to work this out because the wolves had noticed him.

They turned from the girl and snarled in his direction. And the girl turned too, and looked at him for the first time, properly looked, the way you look at something you are filing away for later.

A faint flicker of recognition crossed her eyes. "You’re the one who summoned a human instead of a beast." Her voice matched her face. Completely flat. No judgment in it, or at least none that she was advertising.

Yuto felt heat climb his neck. Of everything he might be known for, and admittedly the list was short, that was the one she had. "Yes," he said. He gestured toward Shiny. "His name is Shiny."

The girl looked at Shiny.

Shiny looked at the girl.

Neither of them visibly reacted to the other in any way. They simply looked, with the same total absence of expression, like two mirrors placed facing each other and both coming up empty. Yuto glanced between them, baffled. They were also, he noticed with some discomfort, both equally and unreasonably good-looking, which made the whole scene feel like something out of a story where he was not the main character.

"Is he strong?" the girl asked, still looking at Shiny.

"Yes," Yuto said. He decided not to mention the Paragon rank. Let her draw her own conclusions.

She nodded once. "Good. We need the numbers."

Yuto looked at the wolves. Two of them. Large, yes, but acolyte-tier. The girl had a combat summon. Even accounting for the nightgown situation, a four-against-two arrangement seemed excessive.

He cleared his throat. "Not to be arrogant, but... four of us against two wolves seems like overkill."

The girl’s expression didn’t change. "Four against two would be overkill," she said. "But there aren’t two wolves."

Yuto looked at her. Then at the two wolves in front of them. Then back at her, waiting.

"Wolves move in packs," she said, in the same level tone. "And the pack leader is usually considerably stronger than the rest."

The understanding arrived slowly, and then all at once.

"Crap," Yuto said.