Neo and Alice spent two more days together.
The tower no longer felt like some distant thing meant to mock him from the horizon. It still stood far ahead, rising above the jungle like a dark promise, but the difference was obvious now. Each morning it looked a little larger. Each evening it felt less untouchable. At this pace, they could probably reach it in a few days.
That should have been good.
Instead, the road there had grown stranger.
They found almost no Soul Beasts.
For two days, the jungle gave them long stretches of nothing, broken only now and then by the carcass of something that had already been killed. A spider torn open near a wall of roots. Another one half-eaten beneath a broken arch. Once, the remains of a larger beast dragged halfway across the ground, its Soul Core long gone.
Neo did not like that.
A place this alive did not go quiet for free.
