Chapter 7 : THE ROTFIEND TERRITORY
The forest smelled wrong.
Aldric crouched behind a fallen oak, scanning the treeline ahead while his lungs worked to process air that carried the particular sweetness of advanced decay. Behind him, Edvard and Dunn held position with the practiced stillness of men who'd learned patience in places where impatience cost lives. Two soldiers flanked the group, their breathing too loud despite three days of noise discipline training.
"Nest is northeast," Aldric murmured. "Two hundred meters. Collapsed farmstead—you can see the chimney stones through the canopy."
Edvard's eyes moved in the direction indicated. His face gave away nothing, but his hand shifted slightly on his sword grip—an unconscious tell that Aldric had learned to read over the past month.
"Wind?"
"Southwest. We're upwind. They shouldn't scent us from this position."
"Shouldn't." Edvard's voice was flat. "Rotfiends hunt by sound as much as smell. That one—" he gestured at the younger soldier on the left flank, whose leather creaked with every breath "—needs to stop moving."
The soldier went rigid. The creaking stopped.
Aldric had briefed this hunt with unusual precision that morning: territorial range based on the games' mechanics, behavioral triggers extrapolated from wiki entries he'd memorized in another life, optimal approach corridors calculated from the territory sense that now mapped this forest as clearly as his own heartbeat. He'd felt confident. Prepared. Ready.
Edvard had listened to the entire briefing without comment, then added three adjustments—wind direction protocols, ground cover selection, noise discipline standards—that Marcus Kessler's theoretical knowledge hadn't weighted correctly. Each adjustment was delivered in the same flat tone, without criticism or praise.
File updated, Aldric had thought at the time. Edvard is better than estimated.
Now, watching the veteran scan the terrain with eyes that missed nothing, he understood that "better than estimated" was still an underestimate.
"Movement," Dunn said quietly. "Northwest. Single specimen."
Aldric turned his head slowly, controlling the motion, and saw it: a shape that might have been human once, hunched and swollen, picking through the underbrush at the forest's edge. Its skin had the particular grey-green pallor of something that had died and refused to acknowledge it. Its movements were jerky, uncoordinated, but purposeful—a creature following the scent of something it intended to eat.
"Not our target," Aldric said. "We're observing the nest, not hunting singles. Let it pass."
The rotfiend shambled closer. Thirty meters. Twenty-five. Its head swung from side to side, sampling the air, and for a long moment it seemed to look directly at their position.
Then it continued past, disappearing into the deeper forest.
Aldric released a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.
"Good call," Edvard said. It was the first time he'd acknowledged any of Aldric's decisions as correct.
---
The nest was larger than expected.
Aldric counted them through a gap in the vegetation: eight rotfiends, not the four his intelligence had suggested. They moved through the collapsed farmstead with the aimless wandering of creatures operating on instinct rather than purpose, occasionally clustering around something on the ground—a corpse, probably, or what remained of one.
The dominant specimen was easy to identify. Larger than the others, its chest cavity distended with the particular luminescence that indicated a fire-aligned core. In the games, these cores had been crafting materials. In the Architect's Knowledge that had settled into his consciousness over the past weeks, they were something more specific: a key component for the Sovereign Forge's activation sequence.
Malleus Dominatus, the knowledge whispered. The Hammer of Lords. The forge that transforms monster essence into weapons that remember what they were made from.
He needed that core.
"Eight," Dunn said, his voice barely audible. "Double what we planned for."
"I counted the same." Aldric's mind was already calculating: retreat routes, reinforcement requirements, timeline adjustments. A hunting party twice this size, minimum. Better equipment—silver-tipped weapons, fire resistance charms, the kind of specialized gear that a minor barony couldn't easily afford. And his body needed to be approximately eighteen months more developed before he could contribute meaningfully to the actual engagement.
One thousand days, the dread sense reminded him. The countdown had crossed that threshold three days ago. He was still cataloging how that number felt—round and terrible and somehow more real than the ones before it.
"We retreat," he said. "Coordinates logged. We return at Month 5 with a proper force."
"Agreed." Edvard's hand signal sent the two flanking soldiers moving backward in careful steps, their attention fixed on the nest.
The plan was working. The plan was good. The plan—
A second rotfiend emerged from the eastern treeline, upwind of their position, and stopped.
Its head turned. Its nostrils flared.
Wrong direction, Aldric's mind screamed. Wrong position. The territorial analysis said—
The creature shrieked.
Everything happened in the space between heartbeats. The nest rotfiends turned toward the sound. The second creature charged. Aldric's tactical awareness diagnosed the situation—counter-move required, left flank, draw the single while the others provide cover fire—and sent the command to his body.
His body didn't move.
Three full seconds. An eternity in combat. He stood frozen while the rotfiend closed the distance, while Edvard stepped in front of him with a movement too fast to track, while the veteran's sword came down in a clean overhead strike that split the creature's skull and dropped it twitching to the forest floor.
The nest rotfiends were moving now. Eight shapes shambling toward the disturbance with the single-minded purpose of things that hunted by group instinct.
"Fall back," Edvard said. No panic. No accusation. Just command. "Now."
They ran.
---
[Forest Edge — Late Afternoon]
The ride back to the barony was quiet.
Aldric's forearm burned where a branch had torn the skin during the retreat—a minor scrape, nothing serious, but a reminder that his body registered as vulnerability rather than merely inconvenience. His hands were still shaking slightly, the aftershock of adrenaline and failure working through muscles that hadn't learned to process either.
Three seconds. The number kept repeating in his mind. Three seconds of freeze. Time enough for a rotfiend to close fifteen meters. Time enough to die.
The Combat Module—his tactical awareness, his strategic assessment, everything Marcus Kessler had built through years of competitive fencing and military history study—had performed exactly as designed. He'd seen the threat. He'd diagnosed the correct response. He'd issued the command.
And his body had done nothing.
"You knew the counter-move."
Edvard's voice broke the silence. He was riding beside Aldric, close enough for private conversation, his posture relaxed despite the afternoon's chaos.
"Yes."
"Your stance was correct. Your positioning was sound. You were already shifting weight for the draw before the freeze hit."
"Yes."
"The body didn't cooperate."
Aldric didn't answer. The answer was obvious.
Edvard rode in silence for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. The other soldiers were well behind them—Dunn bringing up the rear, maintaining the spacing that protocol required.
"The first time I froze in combat, I was sixteen," Edvard said finally. "Skirmish against Kaedweni irregulars near the Pontar. My sergeant at the time was a man named Krel. Big man. Cruel in the ways sergeants can be cruel when they're responsible for keeping idiots alive."
"What did he do?"
"Knocked me down with his shield and stood over me until the engagement ended. Then he made me run laps around the camp until I vomited." Edvard glanced at Aldric. "He said the freeze was normal. Everyone freezes the first time. What mattered was whether you let it happen a second time."
"Did you?"
"Once more. Six months later, different engagement. Shorter freeze—maybe half a second. After that, never." Edvard's expression shifted slightly. Something that might have been the foundation of respect. "You're fourteen. You have time to train it out. The question is whether you're willing to do the work."
The dread sense pulsed. One thousand days. The clock doesn't negotiate.
"I'm willing," Aldric said.
Edvard nodded once, the motion sharp and final, and said nothing more.
---
[Varnhagen's Keep — Evening, Day 95]
The physical training schedule filled two pages by the time Aldric finished.
He sat at his desk—his father's desk, though it felt more like his own now after four months of late-night work—and reviewed what he'd written. Dawn drills with Dunn had been working his body into adequate shape. But adequate wasn't enough. The freeze had proved that.
He needed combat conditioning. Real stress exposure. Training that simulated the chaos of actual engagement, that forced his body to process commands under duress until the freeze couldn't happen.
Eliminate it, he wrote at the bottom of the schedule, before the real hunts begin.
The rotfiend nest was logged: coordinates, population count, behavioral observations, the fire-aligned core confirmed present in the dominant specimen. Month 5 would give his soldiers time to train with the new equipment he'd already requisitioned. It would give his body time to develop the reflexes the Combat Module required.
The boundary marker where he'd stood on Day 28—the cracked stone post facing south—flickered through his memory. Rolan's intelligence about Nilfgaardian merchant traffic. The weight of the dread sense, pressing always southward.
One thousand days. And one freeze that could have ended everything.
He closed the schedule and reached for the next document.
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