Ruvian had skimmed through the manuscript’s first draft enough times to erode the novelty from its pages, wearing down through repetition until even the marginal creatures had become as familiar to him.

Crestbeak Fowl, in particular, had been an easy memory to keep; harmless in nature, harmless in prose. He knew the pattern of their gait, the habit of clustering in numbers, and the peculiar timbre of their cries.

And so it was not arrogance that convinced him of the wrongness before them, but the inevitable conclusion of someone who had compared what was in front of him to a recollection so deeply ingrained.

The thing in the clearing was no Crestbeak Fowl.

What it was, however, remained beyond even the reach of his memory. He felt no comfort in that thought.

‘Damn it, there is not much clue for me to guess what Voidspawn it was…’

Yerin’s eyes, usually decisive, now carried hesitation. Approaching an unfamiliar Voidspawn was less a gamble and more an invitation to disaster. As a leader, she bore the weight of choosing not merely for herself, but for the lives bound to her command.

Her decision took shape in the smallest exhalation.

“Let’s retreat for now.”

This was the logical response.

But then, the earth itself murmured its disquiet. Arlok’s eyes dropped to the ground. His stance shifted with the smallest fraction of a step. Beneath him, the soil was faintly moving. His face darkened; he did not like what his instincts were trying to tell him. There was a warning in that subtle quiver beneath his boots, in the ground.

Shima’s gaze was also drawn towards the weak disturbance in the earth. She began to trace the tremors of the ground. The soil shivered too lightly, too deliberate to call it natural. Her eyes lifted once more toward the lone Crestbeak Fowl in the clearing. And then she saw its eyes — glassy, depthless, not the dull serenity of docility of what it should, but with the absolute vacancy of a creature long past death.

Her focus sharpened, catching details that at first glance had been hidden by the mess of feathers. There, along the creature’s hindquarters, the plumage parted around a raw, sunken wound — a place where flesh had been ruptured inward. The edges were dark with coagulation.

Recognition began to seep into her thoughts, carried not by fear but by the old, almost superstitious unease of stories she had been told in her village — warnings about predators that never revealed themselves directly, that used other bodies like masks.

Her breath tightened as instinct vaulted over deliberation. She opened her mouth to warn them, but the thing in the clearing moved first.

“Bloodvine Strangler. Move. NOW!!!” Shima pressingly warned everyone.

Rapidly the corpse of Crestbeak Fowl’s head snapped toward them. Its body followed, not with the momentum of life but in a jerking lurch, as though its limbs were being pulled.

Bloodvine Strangler — a Wretched-rank Voidspawn that rooted itself in a living being, hollowing it out from within until it became little more than a puppet. Its organs were replaced by fibrous cords of parasitic growth.

The earth shivered with a low, coiling resonance.

Then the ground tore.

Roots — no, not roots, but cords of sinew-thick vine stained in the deep, arterial red of fresh blood — shot upward through the surface in a frenzy of motion. The vines lunged, each one a whipcrack of violence aimed to seize and hold.

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Shima was the first in their path and nearly the first to be taken. But her instincts fired first, mana burst into her limbs before conscious thought could intervene. A bolt of movement zapped from her stance — a lightning-swift pivot that tore her from the vine’s trajectory by a hair’s breadth.

The air where she had been split with the sound of something heavy cutting through it, the vine’s tip leaving a furrow in the dirt where her legs had stood.

Arlok was not so fortunate with speed, but strength was his best arsenal. The tendril struck him across the chest in a blow, his body shuddered under the force, but the mana surging into his muscles and bones turned what would have been a fatal… piercing into a brutal slap only.

“Warn them sooner, you bratttt!!—” He shouted as he was lifted from his footing and hurled back several paces until his voice dimmed.

As for Ruvian, he calculated it a fraction too long. The warning in his spine arrived a second behind the danger itself.

‘Shit…’

But before it could carry him into motion, Yerin’s hand locked around his forearm.

She didn’t drag him… dragging would have been too slow. Instead, she used the turn of her own momentum, pivoting hard while pulling him in toward her hip, her other hand sweeping down to grab his belt and half-spin both of their bodies clear of the strike.

Her movement brought them both into a narrow roll that bled the impact into the ground instead of their ribs. The vine’s tip sliced through the space they had occupied with a hiss of displaced air.

She came up already low and balanced, one hand still on his shoulder to steady him before letting go.

“You alright?” Yerin asked.

‘...Did I just got—ah, never mind.’

“Yes. Thanks.”

Meanwhile… Horren, further back, had the dubious luxury of seeing the attack for what it was before it reached him. So, he easily avoided it.

Ruvian exhaled, and let his gaze linger on the slithering crimson cords that now infested the clearing.

‘First hunt on the island, and we stumble into a Wretched-rank. What a promising luck!’

Now that the name had been given shape, the rest came easier. Memory, once directionless, began to arrange itself into sharper pieces.

He had read of the Bloodvine Strangler before.

It was never a predator in the simple, honest sense of teeth and claws. It was a parasite in the purest and most insidious form.

It would choose a host — beast, bird, or man — and hollow it from within, threading itself through the veins and muscles like an invasive root system until the original life was nothing but a memory trapped in an empty shell.

‘The husk would be preserved just enough to remain convincing at a distance, and then it would be placed to trick the next prey. We almost got fooled by it…’

Once the trap was sprung, there would be no theatrical violence.

The Strangler would drink its fill through those vine-like tendrils, not consuming flesh but the blood itself, leaving its victims pale and brittle, like fruit drained to skin.

And what made them Wretched-rank was not their strength. It was their intelligence…

That, Ruvain decided, was what made them truly despicable. They killed only through pretense, and nothing in this place was more dangerous than a lie that could bleed you dry.

Shima was already moving, her body folding low, avoiding another vine's strike. Then, arcs of pale lightning began to writhe along the edge of her falchion.

The blade flashed with purple crackle. She stepped into the nearest vine’s path and cut clean through it in a single, whipping arc, the severed length curling away like a wounded serpent before collapsing into lifeless strands.

“The heart!” she called.

“Look for its true body. The gem-like core. These vines are only its reach, not its life. It won’t die until we find the heart!”

‘Shima is right.’

That was the other cruelty of the Bloodvine Strangler. It hid its heart underground, buried beyond casual reach, forcing its prey to fight a battle against empty limbs while the true body waited somewhere else.

Yerin’s voice hastily cut through the clash of motion. “Don’t stay in one place! Keep moving! Ruvian — longer range!” She stepped forward as her blade left its scabbard with a clean, ringing draw.

At once, fire bloomed along its length in a rush, the heat warping the air around her. She turned her head just enough to be heard by all, eyes still on the enemy.

“Training with the simulation array is not the same as this. Stay on guard at all times!”

Ruvian felt the truth of her words in the pit of his mind. The array simulations were no more than rigid constructs — mechanical minds wearing the shapes of Voidspawn. A narrow catalogue of programmed reactions dictated their movements.

‘Yerin has a point. Simulations are incapable of adapting beyond their code. Once you read their pattern, the fight became nothing more than just an exercise.’

But here? The Bloodvine Strangler did not obey the predictability of a machine; it obeyed only its hunger, and instinct… and that was never consistent.

That was why meeting one here, in the first days of their arrival, was the worst scenario imaginable.

PP= 4000

ME= 510