Free Web NovelChapter 15: Crazy person in the forest
Word spread the way it always did inside a stronghold with too many people living too close together.
Not all at once. In pieces. One account picked up by someone who hadn’t been there, passed along with additions, stripped of details that seemed too strange to repeat and replaced with ones that sounded more believable. By the time the story circulated through the smaller circles inside the walls, it had taken on a particular shape.
A figure in the forest. Moving between summoners who were hunting alone or in pairs. Summons being impaled, which was a specific and unusual detail that no one quite knew what to do with. No clan marking anyone recognized. No summon of the conventional kind accompanying the figure, only something large and humanoid that people who had seen it weren’t willing to describe in too much detail.
Ghost was the word that stuck.
Then the second piece of news followed the first and changed the temperature entirely.
Vincent. Fifth elder’s grandson. The one who had crossed into tier 8 within a year of his ritual and then sat at the edge of everyone’s awareness ever since, present but not pushing, waiting for the moment that was actually worth his attention.
He had gone into the forest.
After that, the calculation for most people became simple. Whatever was happening between a tier 8 summoner and a figure who impaled summons was not a situation to be anywhere near. The younger talents pulled back from the deeper sections of the forest without needing to be told directly. The outskirts stayed populated, but the interior thinned out quickly.
It made things harder.
[1/2 blood samples, 14/15 impaled Tier 9, 50/50 impaled ordinary]
Ethan stood in front of a tree covered in hanging vines and looked at the count.
Fourteen of fifteen. One away from closing the impalement requirement, and the forest had emptied out precisely when he needed it least. The summoners who had been moving through the interior two days ago were gone or staying close to the walls, and the ones still out here were moving in groups large enough that the approach he had been using wouldn’t work cleanly.
He looked down at himself. Several rips across his clothes from the last few days, the fabric holding together in places it had no reason to. He hadn’t been back to the brothel. Hadn’t been back to the stronghold at all except to move through the gates at odd hours when attention was elsewhere.
"I’ll need more money for the tier 8 ritual summoning."
He said it to the air, not to anyone specifically.
Once Vlad reached tier 8, the system would open a slot for a second summon. That was the structure of progression, each tier bringing additional capacity. But the ritual required resources he hadn’t accumulated yet, and the clan infrastructure that most summoners could lean on for support wasn’t something he had access to. The Algar clan and everything connected to it had become hostile territory the moment Jacob’s group came out of the forest in the state they did.
He pushed that aside.
The more immediate problem was the second blood sample.
He had drawn blood from several of the summoners he had ambushed in the forest. Technically the contact had been made. But the requirement hadn’t registered it, which meant the conditions were specific in ways the surface reading of the quest hadn’t fully communicated. The blood sample with Ella at the brothel had registered cleanly. Whatever made that instance count, the others didn’t share it.
His thoughts moved across the circumstances of that night before he redirected them.
A few meters away, half hidden by the shadow between two large trunks, a figure stood watching. She had been there for a while. She didn’t pretend otherwise and she didn’t move closer.
Hela.
She had been monitoring him since their conversation in the forest, keeping her distance, present enough to be visible when she wanted to be and gone when she didn’t. Her mother had warned him she would circle. Her mother had been accurate.
Getting the blood sample from her was the obvious solution and also the most complicated one. She was tier 8. He was tier 9. That gap in power was not a technicality. Taking anything from her by force wasn’t currently possible, and the circumstances that had made Ella’s sample possible required a specific kind of situation he couldn’t manufacture with someone who had already made clear she was watching him specifically.
He looked at her for a moment, then looked away. freewebnoveℓ.com
One problem at a time.
The last impalement was the first priority. With the summoners gone he needed a beast, which meant going further into the forest than he had been operating. The deeper sections held higher concentrations of tier 9 creatures, the kind of beasts that didn’t wander close to areas with heavy human activity.
He had been watching the trails for the past hour.
Then he found it.
Not by sight first, but by what it left behind. A trail of dead ordinary beasts running through a section of forest two kilometers east, the carcasses still fresh enough that the blood hadn’t fully dried. Something large had moved through that stretch and killed everything it encountered without stopping to eat. A creature that killed on the move, not out of hunger, just out of whatever drove it.
He followed the trail until the thing itself came into view.
A giant salamander, easily twice the length of any beast he had faced in the open. Its body displaced the undergrowth as it moved, ordinary beasts scattering or dying in its path without offering it any real resistance. Its skin caught the light in dull flashes, wet and heavy, the mass of it moving with a slow deliberate momentum that made speed feel irrelevant.
Direct confrontation wasn’t the answer.
Ethan watched it from the canopy above and mapped the direction it was moving. Ahead of it, the terrain dipped into a natural suppression, a downward hollow covered by a ceiling of leaves and low branches. Dense, enclosed, the kind of space that offered a creature that size no room to use its body properly.
He moved before the salamander reached it.
Working quickly and without sound, he positioned himself along the approach. He found two trees standing close together at the edge of the hollow’s entry point, their trunks angled just enough, and drew the moon blade across them in measured cuts. Not through. Just enough that pressure from the right direction would finish the work.
Vlad picked up a large boulder from the depression floor and held it, waiting.
Ethan laid a long rope across the ground, running it through the undergrowth to where the boulder was positioned, the tension set so that the right trigger would send it. He scattered cut grass across the obvious spots and left it loose where it would catch the eye, redirecting attention without announcing itself.
Then he climbed back into the canopy and went still.
The salamander moved toward the hollow below, its body cutting through the last stretch of open forest, the ground shifting under each step.
Ethan settled the crossbow against his shoulder and waited.
