Chapter 227: Ch225. First hunt
The underbrush pulled at their legs as they moved deeper into the forest.
Each step was deliberate, slow, and as silent as possible. The soft ground muffled their footfalls, but it also gave too easily, and every misplaced step threatened to sink them knee-deep in twisted roots or strange, sponge-like moss.
The deeper they went, the more the forest seemed to watch them.
Miles kept his eyes ahead, sweeping the strange terrain for any signs of movement. Sarissa flanked him, eyes flicking from tree to tree, her mind working through half-remembered tutorials about tracking, back from a time before she ever had her Perception stat higher than twenty.
There were no tools here. No Skills, no perks, only hunger and instinct.
"Something’s been through here." Sarissa whispered, pointing to a faint line in the soil, a place where the moss had been crushed in a curving arc.
Miles knelt, frowning as he ran his hand over the disturbed earth. The indent wasn’t deep. No claws, no hooves, but something large had definitely passed by.
"Not crawling, though. Bipedal, perhaps?" He asked, and Dee raised its head, looking at the trail curiously, almost intently, with them.
"Maybe. But... Look." She pointed farther down, where the trail bent around the base of a tree. "It circled."
They followed the marks in silence. The trail led them into a thinner section of the forest, where the canopy opened just enough to let a pale, colorless sky bleed through.
The light here felt wrong, as if it didn’t belong to the sun at all.