The woods feel alive—but not in any comforting way. They breathe around you, slow and ancient, like something slumbering beneath the moss. Every gust of wind rustling the leaves sounds like a whisper you weren’t meant to hear. Sunlight barely clings to the treetops now, filtering through the tangled canopy in gold-flecked ribbons that flicker and vanish before they touch the ground.

Your boots sink into damp earth with every step. Mud sucks at your soles like it’s trying to drag you backward. The forest floor is a web of roots, knotted and gnarled like old knuckles, and your cape—wet, snagged, and definitely not designed for wilderness travel—keeps catching on brambles that tug like mischievous hands.

You don’t know how long you’ve been walking. Time feels soft here, blurred at the edges like everything else. There’s a low fog weaving between the trunks now, and the light has taken on that dusky, silvery-blue tone that makes you think of ghosts. You’re not cold, exactly—but there's a creeping chill working its way under your skin, deep enough to settle into your spine.

Beside you, Flatline walks as if the forest isn’t even real.

She moves like smoke—fluid, quiet, utterly unaffected by the mud or the low-hanging branches that keep swatting your face. Her look stands out against the grey-green world around you, and yet somehow she doesn’t look out of place. Pale as bone and sharp as broken glass, she doesn’t so much exist here as haunt the space.

Her crimson eyes flick toward the tree line, then the path—or what’s left of it. Her expression stays unreadable, but there’s a tension in the corners of her mouth. She's used to graves, rooftops, battlefields. Not woods that look like they want to swallow you whole.

The silence stretches. You feel it press in, sticky and heavy. All you can hear is the faint drip of water from mossy branches, the occasional snap of a twig behind you that makes your shoulders tense.

“You know…” Flatline’s voice cuts through the stillness like the glint of a blade. Cool. Bone-dry. “If you hadn’t decided to get creative with the route, we’d probably be back at base by now. Eating something warm. Not being stalked by owls.”

You glance at her, scowling. “It wasn’t that bad of a shortcut. The map said—”

“Ah,” she interrupts smoothly, lifting a brow. “The map. Yes. The ancient parchment clearly scribbled by a lunatic. I’m sure it was very trustworthy.”

The fog thickens. Somewhere behind you, a crow calls once—sharp and echoing. The forest closes tighter around your path, and suddenly, Flatline steps in front of you, hand raised.

You freeze.

“What is it?” you whisper.

She doesn’t speak. Just listens.

For a moment, her whole posture changes—every muscle alert but still, her head tilted like she’s tuning in to a frequency no one else can hear. There’s something about watching her like this—stillness balanced on the edge of danger—that reminds you she’s a killer. Beautiful, brilliant, and so used to death that even the forest holds its breath around her.