Fog presses low against the lake, thicker than before, heavier than it should be for morning. It does not drift. It lingers. It clings to the surface like a living thing unwilling to let go.
Boots sink into wet soil as both companies spread along the shoreline.
The ground here is softer than the rest of the village, darker, saturated with water that seeps up between roots and stones. Each step leaves a print that slowly fills back in, as if the land itself refuses to remember who walked here.
Aldo stands near the front, eyes narrowed into the gray wall ahead.
He can barely see ten meters out.
Maybe less.
The lake is gone.
Not visually.
Completely gone.
Replaced by a shifting curtain of fog that swallows depth, distance, and shape.
["This is wrong."]
He doesn't look at Teufel right away, letting his gaze drift instead to the edges—the uneven shoreline, the way the water laps softly against the mud. There's something wrong in it, a subtle disturbance. The rhythm feels off, unnaturally slow, almost deliberate, as if the lake itself is holding something back.
"We should choose another day."
His voice is calm, but it carries weight.
Not fear.
Calculation.
"Better weather. Better visibility."
Teufel stands slightly to his right, boots planted firmly, longsword already loosened in its sheath. The cloak on his shoulder shifts slightly as he turns his head toward Aldo.
His expression doesn't change.
"The elder told me the Drakolimne is responsible for the fog."
A pause.
Wind moves. Or something like it.
"This season… fog is not supposed to last this long."
He looks out again.
Into nothing.
"Yet it did."
Silence settles.
Comtois exhales sharply through his nose.
"So we either wait forever or fight blind. Nice."
His tone is light.
Too light.
["So be it …"]
Behind them, the soldiers begin to shift position as tension settles in, replacing the earlier looseness with something more deliberate. A few move closer to the shoreline, crouching low as they peer into the murky water, eyes straining to catch any hint of movement beneath the surface. Others withdraw instead, stepping back toward the tree line exactly as Teufel had instructed earlier—forming a second layer, quieter, more patient.
Reserve.
Ambushers.
Just in case.
The formation that takes shape is loose, but not out of carelessness. It is the looseness of uncertainty, of men adjusting to something they do not fully understand.
Aldo watches everything.
The spacing between men. The angles of their lines. The time it would take for each of them to react if something went wrong.
[Too many unknowns, too many variables layered over each other. Nothing here is stable, nothing predictable—and that's where mistakes begin.]
Then—
Something moves within the fog.
At first, it is barely more than a distortion, a shape where there should be none. Low against the water. Flat. Drifting slowly toward them.
A voice near the front breaks the silence, uncertain and hushed.
"...raft?"
It emerges piece by piece, as if the fog itself is revealing it reluctantly.
A crude raft.
Rough wood lashed together with rope, uneven and weathered. It floats without guidance, without any visible force pushing it forward. No sound accompanies it. No current disturbs the surface.
And yet, it comes.
Straight toward the shore.
As if it belongs there.
Aldo raises his hand.
Signals.
Formation.
The response spreads through both companies like a ripple across still water. Muskets are lifted. Stances tighten. Lines begin to form—not perfect, not flawless, but shaped by training and repetition.
Comtois mirrors the motion instantly, his voice cutting low but firm through the air.
"Hold… steady now, just hold…"
Teufel draws his sword. The sound of steel leaving its sheath is quiet, controlled—lacking any dramatics. It is not a gesture. It is preparation.
The raft drifts closer.
Closer.
And then—
They see it.
Not clearly, not all at once, but enough.
Scraps.
Dark shapes clinging to the wood. Wet, heavy fabric torn into uneven strips. Fragments of something that was once whole.
It is not clean.
Not orderly.
But it is unmistakable.
Blood.
Old and fresh, mixed together into something darker than either alone.
The air tightens.
One soldier swallows hard, the sound audible in the stillness. Another shifts his footing, just slightly, as if grounding himself.
"Bait… or something meant to be found, meant to be understood."
Aldo's fingers twitch once, barely noticeable.
"Or a message. Something deliberate, something calculated—not just feeding, not just instinct."
The raft reaches the shore.
It touches softly, almost gently, nudging against the edge of land as if guided by an unseen hand.
Nothing happens.
No movement follows. No sound breaks the quiet.
Only the slow, rhythmic lapping of water against wood and earth.
Seconds stretch.
Too long.
Too empty.
And then—
The lake explodes.
Not a rise. Not a surge.
An explosion.
The water does not lift—it tears upward, bursting through the fog in a violent column that shatters the stillness. Droplets scatter outward like shards of glass, catching what little light there is before vanishing again into gray. The sound follows half a second later, a deep, crushing roar that doesn't just echo—it reverberates, traveling through bone, through armor, through the fragile structure of thought itself.
Something massive moves within it.
Coils—thick, heavy, and wrong in their proportions. Not merely large, but unnatural in scale. Thicker than a carriage, their length extending beyond what the eye can comfortably follow, slipping in and out of visibility as the water churns violently around them.
And then—
Eyes.
Not the dull, instinctive gaze of an animal.
Eyes that focus.
Eyes that look back.
Human.
Too human.
Too aware.
For a fraction of a second, everything stops. Breath, movement, thought—held in suspension under the weight of that gaze.
Then—
"FIRE! Now, all lines—fire!"
The command fractures the stillness.
Volleys erupt in immediate response. Muskets discharge in staggered synchronization, bursts of flame and thunder tearing through the air. The sound rolls outward, echoing violently into the forest behind them, scattering birds into frantic flight, shaking loose branches, and sending unseen animals crashing deeper into shadow.
Smoke blooms between soldiers and water, thick and choking, blurring the line between target and distance.
Shots strike.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The Drakolimne reacts.
But only slightly.
Its immense body recoils—not from pain, but from contact, like something acknowledging an irritation rather than a threat.
Then—
It moves.
Faster than anything that size has any right to.
The water does not resist it. It does not slow it. Instead, it folds around the creature as if it belongs to it, as if it answers to its presence, shaping itself to its motion.
A coil lashes forward.
Three soldiers disappear.
Not gradually. Not dragged screaming across the surface.
Taken.
Pulled beneath in a single, fluid motion so fast the eye struggles to follow it.
Their voices cut off instantly.
No struggle.
No aftermath.
Gone.
As if the lake itself chose them.
The water surges outward in response. A wave rises—not towering enough to be called a tsunami, but violent and sudden enough to break the fragile structure of the formation. It slams into the shoreline with force, knocking soldiers off their feet, throwing others backward into mud and shallow water.
The line collapses.
Muskets slip from hands slick with water and panic. Shouts overlap, merging into something incoherent. One soldier stumbles and falls. Another reaches out, grabbing him before he goes under. Somewhere to the side, someone doesn't rise immediately.
Then—
Just as suddenly—
The water retreats.
Not naturally. Not with the slow pull of tide or current.
It withdraws sharply, as if something beneath it is pulling everything back. Foam, debris, disturbed sediment—all dragged inward, swallowed by the same force that created the chaos.
The surface closes.
The motion ends.
The Drakolimne is gone.
Back into the fog.
Back into absence.
Silence follows.
Heavy.
Unreal.
Aldo is on the ground.
Mud presses cold and heavy against his armor, seeping into every gap. His ears ring faintly, a high, persistent sound that dulls the edges of everything else. But his eyes remain fixed—locked onto the place where the creature vanished, as if expecting it to return at any moment.
"Too fast… far too fast for something that size. Too precise in how it moved, in what it took. That wasn't blind aggression—it was selection. Controlled. Deliberate."
Beside him, Comtois forces himself upright, pushing against the mud with more effort than he wants to show. His breathing is heavier now, uneven beneath the attempt to appear steady.
When he speaks, his voice rises too quickly.
"We go in now, you hear me? We hit it before it resets, before it disappears again—otherwise we're just waiting to starve like we did after the wolves, and I'm not doing that again!"
He gestures sharply toward the lake, his movements wide, almost erratic.
"We turned that whole damn rebellion around—we were outnumbered, outmatched, and we still did it. This? This is just one thing. One target. We can handle that."
His eyes are wide.
Too wide.
"Not again… we're not falling into the same trap, not walking blind into something we don't understand and calling it control. That's how it breaks us."
Aldo doesn't look at him immediately.
His gaze stays on the water, on the place where absence feels heavier than presence.
Then—
"If we go in now," he says, his voice quieter, stripped of urgency, "we don't hit it—we feed it. One by one, just like that."
There is no anger in his tone. No argument.
Just certainty.
"Fall back. Regroup. We're not ready for what that is."
A pause follows, but it is not empty.
His gaze flickers—not outward, but inward.
Memory surfaces.
Snow, blinding and endless.
Blood cutting across white.
Voices shouting over each other, breaking, fracturing into panic.
Chaos that nearly swallowed them whole.
"We almost broke back then. Not from losing—but from not understanding what we were fighting, from thinking force alone was enough."
His jaw tightens slightly.
"This… this wasn't supposed to turn into that. This wasn't meant to spiral into something we barely survive."
He exhales slowly, the breath steady but heavy with something unspoken.
"It was supposed to be quick. Clean. Something we finish and walk away from."
But the lake says otherwise.
And it is still waiting.
...
Teufel stands still.
Sword half-raised.
Eyes fixed on the ripples where the creature vanished.
His voice is steady.
Too steady.
"It remembers faces."
A beat.
"Wait for dark."
He shifts his grip slightly.
"Let it come to us."
Ryong kneels a short distance away, forcing himself into stillness even as his hands betray him, trembling with a restrained urgency. It is not fear that drives the motion, but the pressure to remember, to hold onto something that refuses to be held. He lowers his gaze to the paper and begins anyway.
Charcoal moves.
Fast.
Lines scratch into the surface, overlapping, correcting, chasing something already gone. Curves form, then break apart. Fragments of coils twist across the page without ever resolving into a whole. He sketches the eyes last—or tries to—but even they refuse to settle into something complete.
"Incomplete… it's all incomplete. I saw it, I know I did, but it moved too fast, too fluid—there's not enough here, not enough to understand, not enough to use."
His teeth clench, pressure building in his jaw.
"Not enough… not nearly enough to matter."
Because the creature never gave itself fully.
Only glimpses.
Pieces.
Moments that shattered as soon as they appeared.
And his sketch reflects that truth—broken, unfinished, more absence than presence.
Nearby, Onaga crouches at the waterline, unmoving for a long moment before he slowly reaches down. His fingers hover just above the mud before committing, careful, deliberate. Something there catches the faint light—a strange yellow liquid, thick and glistening where it seeps into the earth.
Viscous.
Unnatural.
He studies it in silence, his brows drawing together as thought replaces instinct. Then, without a word, he retrieves a small container and collects a sample, sealing it away with practiced precision.
No commentary.
Only observation.
Hano stands a few steps back, hatchet still in his grip. His breathing is slow—too slow, controlled to the point of strain. The tension gathers in his jaw, visible, unhidden.
"We did nothing… we stood there, fired, watched—and it changed nothing. Not a single thing."
Beside him, Lei says nothing at all. The sharpness that usually defines him has dulled, replaced by a quiet that feels heavier than any outburst. His eyes remain fixed on the lake, unblinking, as if looking away might invite something worse.
Tyrone of the 205th shifts his footing, adjusting his stance as though reclaiming balance. The confidence he carries does not disappear—but it fractures, just slightly.
Enough to be felt.
Around them, movement resumes in fragments. Soldiers begin helping one another up, slow and unsteady at first. Hands reach out—gripping shoulders, pulling bodies upright, retrieving dropped muskets from mud and shallow water. Some check for wounds, others simply steady themselves.
No one raises their voice.
No one laughs.
No one pretends this was anything but what it was.
Aldo pushes himself to his feet. Mud slides from his armor in thick, slow drops. His gaze moves across the formation—or what remains of it now.
He counts.
Automatically.
"Three gone… in seconds. Not even a fight. Just gone."
His voice cuts through the silence.
"Retreat."
Firm.
Clear.
Immediate.
Comtois turns sharply, the word catching him off guard.
"Wait—"
But it's already too late.
The soldiers are moving.
Not hesitating. Not questioning.
Instinct. Training. Trust.
They follow Aldo.
Not him.
Comtois stops where he stands, the moment stretching just long enough to sting. He spits into the mud, the gesture sharp, bitter.
Frustration.
Humiliation.
"Damn it… damn all of it."
Then he turns and follows anyway—because even his own company, even the men who should look to him first, chose differently.
The distance between the two captains grows.
Not in steps.
But in something less visible.
A fracture forming beneath the surface.
Small.
But real.
"Two more joints… just TWO MORE, and we're done. That's what this was supposed to be. That's what we told ourselves."
The thought lingers—but it no longer holds the same weight.
As they move back toward the village, the silence deepens. Boots drag more than they should. Shoulders sit lower. Eyes flicker, again and again, back toward the lake as if expecting it to follow.
The fog remains unchanged.
Unbothered.
Untouched by what just happened.