Free Web NovelChapter 302: Hoshimi Miyabi Feels Like She Might Have Transmigrated
All the while Andrew carried Hoshimi Miyabi in his arms, he was far from simply walking.
He was marking landmarks as he went, collecting every harvestable item along the route, cataloguing monster traces to avoid any unpleasant surprise encounters around blind corners — and on top of all that, he had methodically stripped every monster carcass he came across of its dragonbone, leaving nothing behind.
The skeletal remains scattered throughout this forest turned out to be an enormous boon for his base material stockpile, and Andrew found himself shaking his head with quiet amazement at the irony of it all.
He was a Hunter. By definition, dragonbone was the kind of material that should be everywhere he went — the one resource a Hunter could count on being able to find without any trouble, no matter where in the world they ended up.
Even the rarer varieties, the ones that weren’t quite so common, were the sort of thing you could pick up off the roadside with a bit of patience.
And yet somehow — somehow — back in New Eridu, dragonbone had become a scarce resource. Of all the absurd things. A material he should have had in endless surplus had become genuinely precious to him there, needed for practically everything but almost impossible to replenish. The Bone Set, which any Hunter worth their salt should be able to slap together in their sleep, had become the kind of dream he hadn’t even dared to reach for.
Specific parts — leg bones especially, those long, dense, structurally ideal bones — had been consumed entirely in weapon crafting long before the shortage had even registered. Cleaned out down to the last fragment.
For a Hunter, that kind of shortage was quietly, persistently miserable.
But at least the road today had done something about it. After all this busy trekking, his resource reserves had clawed their way back from critically depleted to something approaching respectable. A real comeback.
And now, finally, there was a moment to breathe.
Andrew looked at what he’d found ahead of him and allowed himself a slow, satisfied nod.
Three enormous ancient trees had grown into a triangular formation — a natural triangle, each tree positioned at one of the three points. Between them, where their massive root systems and lower branches overlapped, the interlocking limbs had formed an almost perfectly enclosed hollow space, hidden from view on every side.
The interior was dim — the canopy above was so thick that almost no sunlight reached the inner walls of the trunks, and only a sparse scattering of branches occupied the space up top. But that very sparseness worked in their favor: the gaps between those upper branches were wide enough to allow proper ventilation once a campfire was lit, and without the tangle of lower branches that would have eaten into the floor space, the interior turned out to be more spacious than it first appeared.
Most importantly of all — the gaps between the three trunks were just wide enough for a human being to pass through. For any large monster, they were not.
And the ancient trees themselves were built to last. Short of a calamity-class Elder Dragon throwing a tantrum in this exact spot — or something even further up the existential terror scale — nothing was going to be punching through those trunks. The structural integrity of trees this old simply did not permit it.
This place, in short, was a natural fortress. A campsite that practically built itself.
As long as these three great trees hadn’t yet grown together into a single fused mass, this hollow would make for an ideal temporary base for any Hunter team passing through. The space was a touch tight compared to some concealed positions Andrew had used before, but after a brief survey, he was confident: it could comfortably shelter a full hunting party during a rest stop.
The day these trees finally grew close enough to merge completely was still centuries away. Maybe longer. Possibly several thousand years.
By which point, Andrew reflected cheerfully, he’d almost certainly be long dead.
He looked at the hollow one more time, deeply satisfied.
Not bad at all. Not bad at all. Leave it to him — one impromptu expedition and he’d gone and found a brand-new reliable campsite for the New World’s hunters while he was at it. He’d frame it as a gift to the Guild later.
Then he reached into his Item Bag, pulled out his folding camp chair and the fire-starting kit from his camping tools, got the campfire going, unfolded the chair — and immediately ran into a problem he had absolutely not seen coming.
The moment he settled into the folding chair and tried to release the arm he had kept curved around Miyabi’s waist throughout the entire journey, he discovered, with a creeping sense of dawning horror, that the arm around his neck had absolutely no intention of being released.
His arm was free.
Hers was not.
"Uh..."
Holding a beautiful girl in his arms was, objectively speaking, the kind of thing that tended to produce a pleasant warmth somewhere in the chest. Under normal circumstances. With the critical qualifier ’conscious and aware’ attached to the relevant party.
Add the word ’unconscious’ to the front of that sentence, and the pleasant warmth evaporated completely — replaced by the very specific, very uncomfortable feeling of standing at the edge of a crime scene.
Andrew’s instinct fired immediately: he needed to extract himself from this situation. Now, preferably. Before it got worse.
There was no one around to witness it, granted. No passerby to stumble upon the scene and draw the wrong conclusions. His real concern was something else entirely: what happened when Miyabi’s consciousness came back online? Was she going to wake up, register the situation, and immediately decide he was some variety of opportunistic pervert who had taken advantage of her condition?
The problem, however, was a physical one.
She was stuck. And short of applying enough force to actually hurt her, he had no way to unstick her — which was categorically not something he was willing to do.
Her arms were locked around his neck like a weld. There was no give. No slack. No hint of loosening from any angle. And the more he tried to gently pry them apart, the more her arms instinctively tightened in response — the grip strengthening every time he pushed against it, as though the pressure itself was the trigger.
It was like watching someone drowning reach for the shore. No matter how the current pulled and battered, the hands only gripped tighter. There was no talking them out of it.
After a few more attempts, Andrew arrived at his personal limit — not Miyabi’s safety, but his own very immediate concern of not being strangled to death in the Ancient Forest by an unconscious swordswoman.
After agonizing over it for far longer than the situation warranted and arriving at exactly zero useful solutions, Andrew made a decision: give up. Completely. Stop fighting it. Let her stay exactly as she was.
He wasn’t going to force it. If she actually woke up and accused him of something, he had a solid alibi — she was the one who had lost consciousness on a tree branch, leaving him with no viable options. He’d taken the responsible path. Whatever she concluded afterward, he could defend himself with a clear conscience.
Mm. Yes. Absolutely. That was the reasoning. Entirely.
It had nothing — nothing — to do with the fact that the moment he sat down, the shift in position had inadvertently brought Miyabi’s body into much closer contact with his own, and what had previously been a faint, barely-there impression of warmth through armor had resolved, in certain specific unarmored gaps, into something considerably more present.
Andrew noticed, in that same quiet moment, something he hadn’t quite had the bandwidth to register during the trek.
Miyabi trained every single day without exception. No breaks. No slack. And the variety of her cultivation methods was, by any measure, wildly eclectic — an ever-expanding collection of unconventional disciplines stacked on top of each other.
And yet — her body had not responded to all of that the way intense long-term physical training usually produced. She wasn’t hard. She wasn’t dense with the kind of muscle that turns softness into armor plate. She remained, despite all of it, genuinely, surprisingly soft.
Different from Evelyn, who also maintained a daily training regimen. Very different.
If Evelyn’s body gave the impression of softness as the dominant quality — a lush, yielding warmth that carried underneath it, just barely perceptible, the quiet resilience of well-developed muscle — then Miyabi was something else altogether. A different archetype, built differently, feeling different.
Both soft, yes. But where Evelyn’s softness was full and enveloping, the kind that defined the experience — Miyabi’s was a supple, coiled softness. Taut elasticity beneath a surface that yielded. Like a bowstring at rest — yielding to the touch, but with the promise of tremendous tension waiting just beneath.
The elegant, distinctly girlish lines of her figure were pronounced and unmistakable even now — and the body that had clearly been held at some level of unconscious tension throughout the journey had, somewhere along the way, gradually and completely let go. She had relaxed. Fully. Without restraint. As though something deep in her had decided, on its own terms, that this particular place — this particular hold — was safe.
Where before, when she had first lost consciousness, there had been a faint crease in her brow — a shadow of unease, the body bracing against something it couldn’t see — that was gone now. The expression that had replaced it was quiet. Still. Peaceful in the uncomplicated way that sleep rarely managed to be for someone who carried as much as she did.
To Andrew’s eyes, looking at her now, she looked less like someone who had been knocked unconscious against her will — and more like someone whose mind and body, after an unrelenting stretch of high-tension operation pushed relentlessly toward its limits, had simply reached its threshold and chosen, instinctively, to protect itself by shutting down into proper rest.
He thought about what she was like — always pushing, always searching for the next increment of strength, never allowing herself to ease up — and something in his chest gave a quiet, involuntary exhale.
He gave up completely on the idea of moving her.
And so Andrew simply stayed where he was, settled in the folding chair, completely still.
The campfire burned steadily. Its warm, orange-gold light washed across both of them, chasing out the last of the forest’s damp chill and dispersing the lingering cold that had settled into the lightless hollow — the kind of cold that lived in places where sunlight never reached.
In the silence, a gentle warmth flowed between them.
Andrew looked at the peaceful face of Hoshimi Miyabi, right there in front of him, and thought — with the detached bemusement of a man surprising himself mid-thought — that staying like this for a while might actually be... not entirely unpleasant?
He shook his head and scattered the thought before it could settle.
No telling how long it would take for Miyabi to come back around. So in the meantime, Andrew turned to the task that should have been his very first order of business the moment they’d landed — the task he’d been putting off.
The map.
He pulled it out and got to work.
The Ancient Forest was enormous. Genuinely, absurdly enormous. The spatial Rift from Hollow Zero had deposited them somewhere inside it — but where inside it was the entire question, and ’somewhere in the Ancient Forest’ was about as useful as ’somewhere on a continent.’
The only reason Andrew had been able to confirm it was the Ancient Forest at all was because he had spent the better part of his rookie days as a Hunter here. The local ecosystem was burned into his memory. Without that familiarity, even narrowing it down to ’forest’ wouldn’t have helped — the Monster Hunter world had no shortage of forests.
Still. The Ancient Forest was vast, but Andrew was no longer a rookie.
He dug out his New World atlas — dusty from months of disuse — and began cross-referencing the surrounding terrain. Within a reasonable amount of time, he had triangulated his approximate position. Whatever margin of error remained would shrink naturally as they moved.
The first thing he did once his location was confirmed was mark the new campsite on the map. It deserved to be recorded.
He’d done more than that, too.
While he’d been searching for a campsite earlier, he had already been tracking the sun’s movement and reading the surrounding environment to estimate the current time of day. He’d gone further than that — cross-referencing the local ecosystem’s behavioral state against his memory to narrow down the approximate month within the Monster Hunter world’s calendar.
All of that fed directly into one calculation: which monsters were currently active in this region of the Ancient Forest.
With that information in hand — and barring any genuine surprises — Andrew could plot a route through the forest that avoided virtually every hostile encounter along the way.
After getting all of it organized and noted down, Andrew sat back and studied the distance between his marked position and Astera, running the numbers.
"My current position to Astera..." he muttered, one hand rubbing the underside of his chin thoughtfully. "Moving overland — even accounting for the terrain — that’s less than a week of travel?!"
He had, frankly, been bracing himself for something more like ten days to a month of hard travel. And that had been his optimistic estimate, made after he’d already confirmed they were in the Ancient Forest rather than somewhere worse.
The Ancient Forest covered roughly two-thirds of the New World’s outer landmass. That wasn’t metaphor — the forest was its own continent-scale ecosystem. Even its outermost edges were vast in a way that defied casual description.
Without the Guild’s flying transport infrastructure, moving through that kind of terrain on foot — and through dense forest at that — could easily eat ten days to two weeks without being unreasonable. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com
Wingdrakes could cut that travel time by roughly two-thirds, thanks to their speed and ability to bypass ground-level terrain entirely. But Wingdrakes were a Guild perk. And Guild perks required being registered as an active, reporting Hunter — which Andrew was decidedly not, until he walked back into Astera and formally logged his return.
So. Overland it was. Which made less than a week genuinely surprising good news.
Though, speaking of Wingdrakes...
Andrew’s thoughts drifted, almost involuntarily, to his own Wingdrake. The old partner he’d left behind when he departed for the Forbidden Lands.
He could picture the little creature clearly — that perpetually hungry look it wore, the way it always had one eye on whatever food was nearby. During his absence, with no active hunts to run and nothing to do but wait on standby in the Guild’s stables... it had probably been eating, sleeping, sleeping, eating, on an endless loop.
He’d been gone a long time.
It hasn’t gotten so fat it can’t fly, has it?
The mental image ambushed him before he could stop it — his Wingdrake’s usually lean, sleek body, built for long-range high-speed flight, having expanded under months of guild-provided meals and zero exercise into something spherical. A ball with wings. A pair of wings attached to a small, round, extremely well-fed disaster.
The worry he’d started to feel dissolved entirely, replaced by the specific kind of helpless amusement that only an owner could feel about their animal.
Time passed quietly.
The sun moved in its slow arc from east toward west, unhurried and indifferent. The forest held its breath around them, the campfire crackling softly in the stillness. The hours slid by without announcement.
And then, several hours later, well into midday — Hoshimi Miyabi finally came back.
When a person surfaces from unconsciousness, the senses return in a specific order. Hearing comes first — always first. Then touch. Smell. Taste. Vision tends to be last.
Miyabi was no different.
The first real sensation her returning awareness registered was warmth.
The campfire’s light was washing over her steadily, pouring heat into her skin in a continuous, gentle tide. Beneath the soft crackling of the flames, she became aware of something else: she was lying in the cradle of something broad and warm. Something solid.
An embrace.
And her arms — she realized, one beat after the warmth — were wrapped around someone’s neck. Not placed there by some external hand.
She had put them there herself.
Whether it had happened consciously or not — whether someone had lifted her arms into position, or whether her own body had sought out that anchor on its own — was a question that, as a warrior with absolute knowledge of her own physical state, Miyabi did not need to deliberate over for even a fraction of a second.
She knew.
Her eyes opened on instinct. Unfocused at first — the world a soft, indistinct blur of light and dark — and then, through a slow, careful sequence of blinks, the image in front of her gradually sharpened.
The campfire. The hollow. The warm orange light that filled this strange, enclosed space and painted everything in the color of embers.
And the face right in front of her — close enough that she could see every detail — lit by that same warm, flickering glow. A face wearing a look of quiet, absorbed focus.
Andrew’s face.
—?!
Andrew?!
Her thoughts lurched. She scrambled to reconstruct the sequence of events.
She had come through the Rift. She had landed on the branch. She had been about to drop down to help — and then—
The memory cut out. Completely. Like a candle snuffed mid-flicker.
The only thing she could retrieve from that moment was a fragment: she had released her senses into battle-ready state, and then—
Nothing. A clean break.
Why had it ended up like this?
She remembered being with Andrew before she lost consciousness. She remembered that much. But waking up to find his face right there — that had not been something she had in any way prepared herself for.
She could feel the warmth of his breath. That close.
How it had come to this, she had no memory of at all. Not a single frame.
This had happened to her before, granted — the sudden loss of consciousness, the gap in awareness. Zhu Yuan had been the one to notice it first, back then, and say something with quiet worry in her voice. Yanagi had done the same, more recently.
But it had never — not once, in any previous occurrence — produced a scene that looked anything like this.
In all her years, this was the first time she had ever been this close to someone her own age. To a male her own age.
And yet — unexpectedly — the closeness didn’t produce the discomfort she might have anticipated. No alarm. No instinctive pull away.
If anything, being this close to Andrew had the opposite effect.
She felt herself relax. Involuntarily. Like something that had been held taut for too long had finally, quietly, been allowed to release. Her mind stilled. Her heart quieted. The inner landscape — so rarely tranquil — settled into something that could only be described as genuinely calm.
This feeling...
...was, unexpectedly, not bad at all?
____
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