A creature stood among the stones, head lowered over something on the ground. At first I thought it was an animal. Then it lifted its face and I saw the split jaw and the eyes set wrong in its skull.
Beginner class.
Its hide was patchy and dark, stretched too tightly across a frame more canine than human but wrong in every joint. It tore at the body beneath it, some dead traveler, maybe, already too ruined to tell, and lifted its blood-slick muzzle when it scented me.
My whole body went still.
The monster stared.
Then it stepped away from the corpse and bared its teeth.
Finn's voice came calmly. "You are tired. Your spirit power is low. Avoid it."
The creature lowered its body into a crouch.
I looked at the dead traveler. At the blood. At the monster's mouth.
My hand tightened around the sword.
"No."
"Mark."
I ignored him and shifted my grip.
The monster sprang first.
I stepped sideways too slowly and felt claws rake across the sleeve of my injured arm. Pain flashed bright. I brought the sword up badly, almost one-handed, and the creature twisted past the swing. It landed, spun, and came again with startling speed.
"Wider stance," Finn said. "Both hands."
I planted my feet harder and got the second grip right just before the monster lunged again. This time when I slashed, the blade met it with enough force to open its shoulder. Dark blood sprayed. The creature shrieked and stumbled but didn't fall.
"Do not hack at it like firewood," Finn snapped. "Cut through the line of movement."
"That means nothing to me!"
"It means stop aiming where it is. Aim where it is going."
The monster came low.
I watched its shoulders bunch, saw where the weight shifted, and this time when it sprang I swung not at its face but through the path it had to take.
The sword cut across its neck.
Not clean enough to kill. But enough to stagger it hard.
It hit the ground twisting, blood pouring down one side. I stepped in before it could recover and drove the sword down into the base of its skull with both hands.
The creature convulsed under the blade, claws scraping violently at the dirt and broken stone. Then it went still.
I stood over it breathing hard.
Blood ran down the fuller of the sword and dripped from the point into the dust.
For half a second, satisfaction flared through me. Sharp. Clean. Vicious.
I killed it.
And immediately after came the cold disgust.
I yanked the blade free and stepped back as if distance from the corpse would somehow separate me from the feeling.
"I hate that," I muttered.
"You hate monsters," Finn said.
"No. I mean that feeling."
"The satisfaction?"
"Yes."
A pause.
"It is not unusual to feel satisfaction after killing something that meant to kill you."
"It was more than satisfaction."
"Yes," he said quietly. "I know."
I looked down at the dead creature again, jaw tight. The disgust remained. So did the darker flicker underneath it, and that was worse.
I dragged my gaze away.
"You said you could advise. So advise."
Finn did not comment on my tone.
"Your grip is too tense," he said. "Your shoulders lock before you strike. You rely too much on anger to commit to the blow. Anger can drive an attack, but if you let it rule your timing, you become predictable."
I started walking again, more to burn off the feeling than because I was ready to move on.
"And spirit power?"
"You are reaching for it as if it is a fire to throw. Stop that."
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
"Sense it first. Do not command what you cannot even feel properly."
I frowned. "How?"
"Turn your attention inward."
"That's not helpful."
"It was not meant to comfort you," Finn said. "There is a cold depth inside you now. The well. The pact made it easier to feel. Find it."
I kept walking, mostly because I didn't want to stand beside the corpse any longer, and tried to do what he said. It felt stupid at first, trying to sense something inside me while covered in blood and ash, body aching, half-starved and exhausted on a ruined road. But after a few breaths I noticed it again.
The well.
Cold. Quiet. Dense somehow.
"I feel it."
"Good."
"Now what?"
"Do not seize it. Touch it."
I focused harder.
For a moment nothing changed. Then a faint pressure moved up my arm, not outward, not explosive like before, just a subtle current sliding beneath skin and muscle. The sword in my hand suddenly felt a fraction lighter, more aligned with my grip.
I stopped walking.
"That was it?"
"That was the beginning."
I tried again, carefully this time, and the current returned, small and controlled. Not enough to do anything dramatic. But enough to feel.
"Better," Finn said. "Use it to support the body before you use it to alter the world."
I let the feeling fade after a few breaths, unwilling to drain myself again.
We walked on in silence for a while after that. The roads narrowed. More trees appeared. The land ahead rose and dipped into broken hills and low woods—the first outer edges of the forested stretch that separated Astralon's region from the lands leading toward Sylarion.
After a while, I said, "Tell me how you became a spirit."
Finn did not answer.
I kept my eyes on the path. "You were human. Everyone knows that much. Everyone knows you died fifteen years ago. So how are you here?"
Silence.
"There are no human spirits," I said. "Not supposed to be. So how did you become the first?"
Still nothing.
My irritation sharpened. "Did someone do this to you? Did you do it to yourself? Did you die and just... refuse to stay dead?"
At that, I felt a slight shift in him, not movement exactly, more like a weight settling deeper beside my soul.
"That is enough."
"No, it isn't."
"It is."
I let out a sharp breath. "You live inside my head. I think I deserve an answer."
"You deserve survival," Finn said. "You deserve training. Answers are another matter."
"That's convenient."
"Yes."
I nearly tripped over a root jutting across the road because his tone made it impossible to tell whether he was mocking me or simply stating a fact.
"You expect me to just accept this?" I asked. "That the Finn Silver, the strongest human, deceased, is now some kind of spirit in my soul and won't explain how?"
"I expect you to continue walking."
I clenched my jaw.
The mystery sat there, raw and irritating. Every child in Kalidar knew his name. Everyone knew the story of the man who had stood against The Great Calamity and died saving humanity. Now he was inside me, alive in the most impossible way imaginable, and he treated questions about it like he was swatting flies.
I hated that I needed him.
I hated even more that I believed he had reasons for keeping silent.
The road narrowed further as the tree line thickened. What had been open countryside became scattered brush, taller grass, and the first real shadows cast by overlapping branches. The air changed too. Cooler. Damper. It smelled of pine, wet soil, and things growing where sunlight didn't always reach.
I slowed without meaning to.
The wilderness felt different from the roads. Less exposed, but less predictable. In the city, danger had been visible, smoke, screams, monsters in the streets. Here it felt hidden. Watching from behind trunks and under roots and in every stretch of shade where the eye couldn't quite reach.
"Outside the walls," Finn said, "everything is more dangerous."
I glanced sideways into the trees. "Even beginner-class monsters?"
"Especially when you are tired, wounded, thirsty, and alone."
That was fair.
A distant roar rolled over the land.
I froze.
Not the three-headed lion. Different. Deeper through the chest, less explosive, but strong enough to carry through the trees and make the birds erupt upward from somewhere ahead.
I tightened on the sword immediately.
"What was that?"
"Something you do not fight."
My pulse quickened. "How far?"
"Far enough if you keep moving. Near enough if you make stupid choices."
I stared into the trees. The roar had come from somewhere deeper in the forest, not from the road. Still, every nerve in my body lit up with the same warning.
Another monster. Stronger than the ones I had fought. Maybe much stronger.
And for a moment, beneath the fear, another thought rose.
One day.
One day I would stop having to fear sounds like that. One day I would hear something monstrous in the dark and know I could kill it.
The thought sharpened into something harder as another memory flashed, Astralon burning behind me, the three-headed lion leaving me in the rubble, Nate's body in the street.
One day I would return strong enough to kill that lion.
Not run from it. Not survive it. Kill it.
I looked back once, though the city was hidden now beyond the rise of land and the thinning haze on the horizon.
"I'm coming back," I said quietly. "For that thing. For all of them."
Finn's answer came just as quiet.
"Then survive this day first."
I breathed out slowly.
Ahead, the road dissolved into a narrower trail where roots buckled the ground and branches reached toward each other overhead. The forest began there in earnest, dark enough in places that it looked almost like an opening mouth.
I stepped toward it.
The instant I crossed into the first line of shadow beneath the trees, a foreboding feeling slid down my spine.
I stopped.
It wasn't a sound. Not exactly. The forest was full of sounds—leaves shifting, branches creaking, something small scurrying through undergrowth. But this was different. A pressure. A sense that something ahead was wrong in a way I couldn't name.
My grip on the sword tightened.
"What is that?"
Finn was silent for one beat too long.
Then, "I do not know."
That answer did more to chill me than if he had named some monster outright.
The wind moved through the branches overhead, and the shadows beneath them shifted like something breathing.
I stood there at the edge of the forest, wounded, half-trained, carrying a sword that still felt too heavy and a dead legend inside my soul, and stared into the dark path
leading toward Sylarion.
Then I took another step.
And another.
And with that foreboding feeling still clinging to me, I entered the forest.