Free Web NovelChapter 300: City Slicker Hits the Wild (Bonus Chapter)
Sunlight. A gentle breeze. And trees the size of gods.
Massive beyond anything ordinary imagination could accommodate — colossal trunks rising in every direction, so enormous that the largest tree Miyabi had ever seen in all her years in New Eridu wouldn’t have measured up to even a fraction of a single one standing before her now.
And they were everywhere. Stretching on and on until they swallowed the horizon whole.
Thick branches coiled and crossed and tangled with each other overhead, each one straining instinctively toward the sunlight above, pressing and shouldering against its neighbors in that ancient, wordless competition. Where they met and overlapped, they formed vast natural platforms — layers upon layers of interwoven wood, some large enough to serve as proper landmasses suspended in the air.
It looked, from where Miyabi stood, like a garden floating in the sky. freeweɓnøvel.com
These platforms were stable enough to support the movement of monsters of considerable size — so stable, in fact, that anyone standing on them might lose their sense of whether they were on solid ground or hovering somewhere between earth and sky.
Had she not been standing right at the edge of the branch, Miyabi might not have registered at all that she was perched in a tree.
The morning light filtered down through gaps in the canopy, each shaft carving through the mist as though someone had split it open with a blade. A breeze moved through, and the leaves stirred — the scattered light shimmering and rippling like the surface of disturbed water.
Standing at the edge of the branch, Miyabi looked down.
Far below, the ancient roots of the enormous tree lay knotted and coiled against the forest floor. Moss had wrapped the stones in soft velvet. The air the breeze carried was thick and damp — rich with the sweetness of rotting leaves and wild blossoms, and beneath that sweetness, just barely perceptible, a faint metallic undercurrent. Like old blood. Like something living, and something dying, existing in the same breath.
Everything around her was speaking the same language, telling the same truth: the land beneath her feet was alive, in a way she had never encountered before.
New Eridu was nothing like this.
The world she had grown up in — the world the Hollows had long since claimed — had no true wilderness left. No forests. No nature in any meaningful sense. If humans hadn’t specifically set aside certain zones and cultivated them with deliberate care, even those last pockets of green would have already been lost. Swallowed. Erased.
As far as Miyabi’s understanding went, the concept of "nature" meant one thing and one thing only: the strip of the Outer Ring beyond the city walls — nothing but yellow sand and the occasional cactus standing in the heat. That was all. That was what "the natural world" looked like, as far as almost everyone in New Eridu had ever been given reason to believe.
They had never seen a world without Hollows. They simply had no frame of reference for what that meant.
Pressed relentlessly by the Hollows, scraping by in whatever corners of the world they could still hold — humanity had long since stopped having the luxury of looking up. Survival consumed everything. Just staying alive demanded everything people had.
Miyabi had known, in an abstract way, that something different existed. Old recordings kept by her family — footage of the world before — had given her that much. But it wasn’t until this moment, standing here, breathing this air, that she finally understood.
This was what ’nature’ meant.
The word she found for it was simple, and insufficient, and completely true: breathtaking.
The sheer force of it made her mind drift — involuntarily, inevitably — toward a thought she had carried for years without quite putting into words.
If the day ever came when she actually kept the vow she had made — the vow to destroy every last Hollow — would that scarred, desolate, hope-starved world heal? Would time be enough? Would the wounds close, gradually, until the world looked something like this — overflowing with life, loud with living things, fierce and beautiful and relentlessly, stubbornly alive?
What a picture that would be.
The thought was already beginning to unfurl into something larger when Miyabi drew it back.
She had never doubted for a single moment that humanity would, in the end, overcome the Hollows. That was not the question. The question that mattered right now — the only thing that mattered — was completing the task she had come here with Andrew to accomplish: securing whatever was needed to see New Eridu through whatever crisis might still be coming.
She refocused.
Below, Andrew had already landed — dropping straight down from the Rift’s exit and immediately shifting into a defensive stance the moment his feet hit the forest floor. Seeing that, Miyabi shifted as well, her own senses extending outward in a single, practiced release.
From childhood through adulthood, years upon years of training had honed every one of her five senses to an edge most people couldn’t fathom. She released them all now, the way she always did when entering a Hollow — completely, without reservation.
That was when the problem began.
Because this was not a Hollow.
She had been ready to jump down from the branch and join Andrew when her fox ears twitched on their own — a reflex, not a conscious action.
Whoosh. Whoosh.
From somewhere above, the rhythmic beating of enormous wings reached her. Not one set. Not two. A flock — Seikrets, cutting through the sky above the canopy in formation.
And once she had heard that — once the shell of stunned wonder cracked and she actually listened — the rest of the Ancient Forest came flooding in.
As a Void Hunter-class warrior, Miyabi’s senses operated in a completely different tier from any ordinary human. Her hearing, especially, was in a league of its own.
Not just the Seikrets overhead.
The low droning hum of enormous insects somewhere deep in the undergrowth. The wet, soft thud of frogs leaping across the ground. The tiny, dry rustle of some small creature — she couldn’t identify the species — threading through the thick layer of fallen leaves that blanketed the forest floor. And beneath all of that, so faint it was almost below the threshold of sound: the ghost of a hum from thin vines swaying in the breeze as it moved through them.
The range of what Miyabi could hear was vast. Under normal circumstances, that was a gift.
The problem was that she had opened herself up to all of it using the same method she used inside a Hollow — the method built on the assumption that every sound had to be processed, every source accounted for. In the Hollows, that approach was flawless. Perfect, even.
Because in a Hollow — where the only things that moved were humans, human-controlled Autonomous Mechs, and Ethereals — everything that made a sound mattered. There were no irrelevant noises. If it wasn’t a person, it was a threat. Full stop.
Even the Hollows with persistent atmospheric phenomena — rain, wind — produced vanishingly little ambient interference compared to the real world. The Hollows were compartmentalized, divided into distinct spatial sections. The noise floor was manageable. Controllable.
And in New Eridu’s urban environment, she had long since internalized and filtered out every sound human civilization produced. The city was loud, but it was a familiar loud — her brain had catalogued it all and knew what to discard.
But the Ancient Forest was something else entirely. Something that had been growing and breathing and dying and being born again for longer than anyone could count.
Compared to any space Miyabi had ever operated in before, the sheer volume of sensory information embedded in a single cubic meter of this place was not just greater — it was exponentially greater. A completely different order of magnitude.
And Miyabi had no reference framework for any of it. She had zero knowledge of the Monster Hunter world’s ecosystems. She couldn’t identify a single creature from its sound alone. Which meant she had no way to filter. No way to sort. Every sound arrived on equal footing, and she had to attempt to assess every single one of them from scratch.
So when Miyabi opened her senses wide — the way she always did — every last piece of that information hit her all at once.
Hundreds of sounds. Thousands, maybe. Each one carrying context she couldn’t read, dragging fragments of meaning she couldn’t decode, all of them crashing into her mind at the same moment in the same wall of noise.
And to make it catastrophically worse: Miyabi’s warrior instincts — the same instincts that had kept her alive through every battle she had ever fought — classified at least two-thirds of those sounds as potential threats. Which meant she couldn’t simply tune them out on reflex the way she could with something she knew was harmless. Every flagged sound demanded processing. Every flagged sound demanded a response.
The end result was inevitable.
Miyabi’s brain, suddenly receiving that volume of unclassifiable high-priority data, did the only logical thing.
It crashed.
Complete systems failure.
This state — this absolute suspension of conscious processing — was something she had only ever entered voluntarily before. The deep, inward stillness she sometimes reached at the extreme end of high-intensity mental cultivation. Or the blank, hollow emptiness that came after pushing those sessions past her limits. Both of those had been deliberate. Both had been chosen.
This was a first. The first time an external cause had forced her into it.
And the sensory overload wasn’t even the whole problem.
As her hearing opened wide, her spiritual energy had also reached outward on instinct — and in doing so, it brushed against something. A current. A presence woven into the very air of this world, flowing through everything around her in a way that was entirely unlike anything she had encountered before.
The moment that energy sensed Miyabi’s spiritual touch, it responded. ƒree𝑤ebnσvel.com
Without hesitation. Without restraint. It poured into her — rushed into her body as though it had been waiting for exactly this invitation — and then, to her complete bewilderment, simply... settled. Made itself comfortable. Showed absolutely no intention of moving.
For a moment, Miyabi genuinely did not know what to make of that.
Her combat instincts fired immediately. Years of battle-honed reflex answered before rational thought could: she pushed back, beginning to repel the intruding energy from her body.
But then she paused.
Something about that energy was naggingly, unmistakably familiar.
Wasn’t this — wasn’t this the same kind of energy Andrew had used when they fought together?
Right. Of course.
Andrew had come from this world to hers. So naturally it would be the same energy. The source and the user were connected. It was the only thing that made sense.
Once that clicked into place, Miyabi stopped resisting.
She let the energy in. Let it spread through her. And once it was inside, she turned her attention inward and began to examine it carefully — methodically, the way she examined everything.
It didn’t take long for the nature of it to become clear.
This energy was the polar opposite of Ether energy. Where Ether’s essential quality was erosion — the corruption and destruction of all things — this energy was its mirror image, its antithesis.
It was the vitality of the natural world.
Life force, in its most primal form.
But she was quick to note the distinction: life force did not mean harmless.
Quite the opposite, in fact. The more life force this energy contained, the more terrifying the destructive potential it could release when directed outward. There was nothing peaceful about it in the way the word ’life’ might suggest.
It was both faces of the divine in a single breath — the compassionate gaze of the bodhisattva, and the wrathful eyes of the guardian demon.
The growth and renewal of living nature. And the crushing, absolute devastation a human being felt when standing before a natural disaster and comprehending, for the first time, how small they truly were.
Two faces. One truth.
As for how one translated that life force into destruction —
The answer surfaced in Miyabi’s mind before she had even finished asking the question.
Andrew. Hollow Zero. The moment he had faced Nineveh — that sweeping, devastating technique. The one that carried the name: Spirit Helm Breaker.
She couldn’t explain why she was certain. She simply was. Bone-deep and immediate: that was the answer.
— The sound of approaching footsteps.
Unfamiliar. The weight and cadence of something alien, something she couldn’t place —
And then, beneath it: one set of footsteps she recognized. One rhythm she knew.
Andrew.
The moment Miyabi’s ears confirmed it was him, she let herself exhale — and the remaining tension holding her suspended released all at once. Under the dual pressure of sensory overload and the energy pouring through her body, Miyabi’s consciousness finally let go and slipped fully into the blank, inward-focused state Andrew had witnessed from below.
More precisely: she had retreated entirely into the work of processing what was happening inside her body. All external awareness suspended. Internal focus maximized.
She had released. Andrew had not.
From below, with absolutely no knowledge of what was happening to her, Andrew was doing his level best to make sense of the motionless Miyabi standing on her branch above him — and the process was not going well.
He had tried calling up to her. Multiple times. And every attempt yielded the exact same result: she simply echoed back the last few words of whatever he had said, verbatim, with the flat and earnest delivery of someone who had no idea they were doing it.
Andrew scratched the back of his head with an increasingly helpless expression.
He muttered under his breath, mostly to himself:
"What... what do I even do with this?"
The words had barely left his mouth before Miyabi, completely unconscious, echoed back without missing a beat:
"...Do with this."
Andrew blinked. He hadn’t been speaking at any significant volume. The fact that she had caught that at all —
"Hold on — she’s echoing that too?! Has she turned into an actual parrot?!"
"...Actual parrot."
"..."
Andrew’s hand drifted up and covered his face.
The sheer speed of those echoes was starting to make him genuinely suspicious. Was she — was she actually pulling his leg? Had she just decided to mess with him by pretending to be out of it?
But then he thought about every interaction he’d had with her. The way she existed in conversations. The very specific, very particular flavor of her social cadence — that almost-robotic sincerity that was one hundred percent impossible to fake and one hundred percent authentically her.
No. That thought didn’t survive contact with reality. Miyabi, of all people, was not the type to think of pretending to lose consciousness as a viable prank. The idea almost certainly would not occur to her. And even if it did, her personality was simply not built for that brand of mischief.
After a few more experimental attempts that confirmed nothing new, Andrew gave up trying to convince himself otherwise and turned his attention back to the problem at hand — gazing at the motionless, eerily serene Miyabi hovering on her branch, and starting to work through the options.
His eyes drifted to the spatial Rift still hanging in the air behind him — faint and barely perceptible, but present. Unmistakably real.
Should he send her back?
The thought lasted about three seconds before he dismissed it.
Sending an unconscious Miyabi back through the Rift alone — into Hollow Zero, with no Proxy on the other side to guide her, no one waiting, no way of knowing what she would walk into on arrival — was not a plan. That was barely a suggestion dressed up as a plan. There was no meaningful difference between ’send her back alone while she’s out cold’ and ’leave her to die with extra steps.’
The kind of move that only someone with no conscience whatsoever — the sort of gutter-dwelling tunnel rat or gang enforcer who had sold whatever decency they’d started with for a fast payday — would even consider making.
So. Not that.
But if he went back with her —
Belle had been very clear about this before they set out. A spatial Rift, however stable it appeared, was still a spatial Rift. One crossing in each direction — the single trip here — was manageable. The Rift’s stability could hold that.
But asking it to support a return crossing for two people, immediately after? Its stability would degrade substantially. Even if post-testing indicated it was technically survivable, the risk profile jumped dramatically. This was not a margin either of them had agreed to play in.
Belle’s instruction had been explicit: if an unexpected situation forced them to consider returning early, they were absolutely not to use this Rift again. They were to go back to the video store, find her, and locate a new Rift before attempting any further transit.
Which meant that if Andrew turned around now —
Setting aside the fact that all of Belle’s grueling, sleepless, two-day effort to pinpoint and calculate this Rift would be completely wasted —
The timeline for finding a scholar with the knowledge to recreate the vaccine would be pushed back. By how much, he had no way to predict. Days? Longer? He had no way to know.
There were no warning signs yet — no immediate outbreak, nothing signaling a crisis already in motion. But time was not something to be squandered carelessly. Even if he returned with the vaccine eventually, replicating and mass-producing it was going to take time on top of that.
And furthermore — who could guarantee that the next Rift Belle found would be better positioned than this one? It might be worse. It very well might be significantly worse.
Andrew shook his head and let the idea go.
Turning around immediately was off the table.
He walked a slow circle around Miyabi, studying her carefully. And despite everything — despite the utterly vacant expression she was wearing and the fact that she had apparently become a low-quality voice-echo machine capable of repeating only the last few words of any given sentence — he could find nothing physically wrong with her. No injury. No visible distress. No signs of acute danger.
She looked, if anything, like someone who had simply vacated the premises.
A soul gone for a walk, leaving the body behind to manage things in its absence.
After a brief, conflicted debate with himself, Andrew made a decision: wait. See what this actually was. Give her time to come back on her own before escalating to anything drastic.
With that settled, he tried calling to her a few more times — purely out of a stubborn sense of thoroughness — failed each time — and then turned his attention to the more immediate logistical question of what to do with her in the meantime.
One thing was immediately obvious: the open edge of a tree branch was not a suitable place to leave a person who was not currently in possession of their full faculties. No cover. No concealment. No protection of any kind. Letting her stand there like a statue in the open air was simply not going to work.
And beyond practicality — Miyabi was someone Andrew genuinely considered a friend. That alone was enough. Beyond that, there was the not-insignificant concern that some sharp-eyed wyvern passing overhead might clock the motionless figure on the branch and decide to investigate whether it was a free meal.
On top of everything else, there was no telling when she’d come around. Andrew couldn’t reasonably commit to standing guard over her indefinitely.
No — the move was clear. Get her somewhere hidden, set up a temporary camp, and wait there.
He turned back to the dazed, glassy-eyed Miyabi and spoke in a straightforward, slightly tentative tone:
"Miyabi? I’m going to pick you up and carry you out of here. If you can hear me at all — if you’re still in there somewhere — consider your silence consent. Understood?"
The moment his words landed, Miyabi’s instincts answered on autopilot, immediate and unhesitating:
"...Understood."
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