Selen stared into Rolin's eyes, instinctively taking a step back from the sheer shock of what she saw. Those golden eyes, which had always burned with a sharp, lethal intelligence and cold, calculating self-interest, were completely hollow. They were glassy, lifeless, as if the soul inhabiting that body had abruptly vacated the premises. There was nothing left inside them but an absolute void—a profound, deep-seated terror frozen forever in his pupils.
'What is wrong with him? What did he see in those few split seconds?' Selen wondered silently, feeling a rare prickle of anxiety pierce her normally frozen heart.
Approaching with absolute caution, she extended her uninjured hand and shook his shoulder hard. "Rolin... are you alright?"
There was no reaction. He remained entirely motionless, a standing corpse kept upright by muscle memory alone. Even his breathing had slowed to an agonized, erratic crawl.
Nearby, Likath retreated from the vanguard, padding forward slowly as his crimson eyes scrutinized his master. With a sudden, whip-like motion, his fiery tail lashed around Rolin's ankle, delivering a sharp, searing burst of heat to snap him out of it. Rolين didn't even blink.
The fire-wolf let out a low growl, a rare mixture of mockery and genuine gravity bleeding into his tone. "Hmm... has this meat-sack truly turned into a plastic doll? His mind isn't home, silver-eyes. It's spinning somewhere in a bespoke corner of hell."
Selen completely ignored the wolf's arrogant, provocative banter. She knew that remaining out in the open while Rolin was effectively braindead was a death sentence. She turned to the fiery beast, her voice turning sharp and authoritative. "Carry him. We can't stay here."
Likath grumbled, his crimson form expanding outward until he reached the density and size of a full-grown alpha wolf. With effortless flexibility, he hoisted Rolin's limp form onto his back, where the fur was humming with pure elemental energy. The three of them moved out slowly, swallowed by the crushing darkness that blanketed the endless canopy.
Selen marched alongside the wolf, her mind churning with dark theories. 'This place... it's entirely unnatural. What is lurking in the shadows of this canopy that could cause someone as pragmatic and hardened as Rolin to shatter so completely?'
She tried to push the grim thoughts away until Rolin recovered. Feeling the sudden weight of survival resting entirely on her shoulders, she decided to assess her current combat readiness. With a brief flick of mental focus, she summoned her residual magical energy. Instantly, a shimmering, semi-transparent screen manifested in the air before her: The Status Window.
Selen stared coldly at the glowing magical scripts and runes floating in the dark:
[ Status Window ]
Name: Selen
Magic: Fabric of Imagination
Level:1
Rank: Human
Core Progression: 196 / 500 (Beasts Slain)
She stared at the number for a long time. 196 out of 500 kills required to trigger her next core evolution. Her eyes drifted lower, scanning the descriptions of her armor—the crimson breastplate and armguards were scuffed and chipped—and the medium-length sword she had taken from Rolin, ensuring its blade was still sharp and true.
With a swift flick of her wrist, she dismissed the window, letting out a silent, weary sigh into the freezing air. 'Five hundred beasts just to transcend the first rank... In a lunatic asylum like this, the sheer exhaustion of it is going to be brutal.'
With every step they took, the foul squelch of the ink-like fluid beneath their boots grew louder. Rolin remained draped over Likath's back—his body present, but his mind still chained to the enigmatic, cloaked figure ruling over that sacred domain of monsters.
Eventually, the three of them settled into a makeshift sanctuary, tucked within the hollow intersection of four colossal tree trunks that met to form a small, natural alcove high above the forest floor. Selen carefully slid Rolin off Likath's back. She grabbed him by the collar, shaking him violently before bringing her hand down across his face in a sharp, resounding slap that echoed off the ancient wood.
Nothing.
Not a single spark of awareness returned to his face. She stared at his pale features with an eerie calm, though her inside was a storm of unease. His golden eyes were vast pools of nothingness, like a dark, shoreless ocean teeming with unspeakable horrors. Staring too long into that void made her own chest tighten; it dragged up old, buried memories and foul whispers from a past she had tried desperately to cremate.
She averted her gaze sharply, turning to Likath. Her voice was a low whisper. "Leave him for now. His body is here, but his mind is miles away."
Leaning down toward Rolin's waist, she reached for the **Infinite Bag** hitched to his belt. She needed something—anything—to keep them warm against the biting chill of the canopy. She thrust her arm into the opening, but her limb sank all the way to the shoulder without encountering a bottom or a single lining. It was completely empty to her touch.
'This is strange... How does one manipulate an ancient relic like this?' Selen thought, her brows furrowing. She channeled a small pulse of her own mana into the fabric, hoping to force it open, but the bag remained stubbornly inert, a dead pocket of space.
Suddenly, Rolin's arrogant words flashed through her mind—how he had casually mentioned that the bag's capacity was entirely tethered to the user's mental cognitive capacity. A realization sparked in her thoughts: 'If its volume expands based on mental visualization, does retrieving an item require one to explicitly imagine it and call it by name?'
With no time to waste, she took a steady breath, plunged her hand back into the pitch-black void of the bag, and closed her eyes. She focused entirely, painting a vivid picture of a "thick blanket" in her mind's eye. She visualized its coarse texture, its heavy weight, its dull gray color. Within a second, a solid object brushed against her fingertips. She gripped it firmly and pulled.
A heavy, standard-issue survival blanket slipped out into the light. She examined it, then glanced back at the silent bag with a hint of dread. 'Whhat a bizarre, terrifying item. It doesn't just hold things... it reads intent.'
She shook out the blanket, draping it gently over Rolin's rigid, wax-like frame, before retreating to sit beside Likath. Her silver eyes settled back onto the repulsive, ink-slicked floorboards.
In that quiet moment, the crimson wolf turned his head toward her. For the first time since they had met, his wild, chaotic flames receded, settling into a soft, ambient glow. He stared at her with embers of deep, unsettling intelligence burning in his eyes. His voice dropped to a low, rough rumble.
"You... are a strange piece of work, silver-eyes."
Selen treated him to a stare as cold as polar ice, offering no reply.
The truth was, Selen calculated every single step she took with a precision far beyond her seventeen years. She was cautious of Rolin and feared his erratic nature, but she was absolutely certain of two fundamental truths: First, Rolin was no fool; he didn't act on mad whims, he was profoundly rational and practical. Second, he was a mercenary utilitarnian to his core—he would drop her and leave her to rot the very second she became a net negative to his survival.
That was precisely why she had revealed the secret of her legendary magic, the Fabric of Imagination, to him so early in their journey. It wasn't an act of naive trust; it was a carefully forged psychological shield. She had made herself an asset of supreme importance in his eyes, a utility so valuable he couldn't afford to let her die.
But while Rolin was an open ledger she could read and balance, the flaming beast sitting next to her was an entirely different equation.
She did not trust Likat for a single second. The reason was glaringly obvious, and deeply unsettling—the creature was smart. Far too smart for a mere fire-beast. His cynical, mocking intelligence made his true motives entirely unpredictable.
"Why?"
The single word cut through the heavy silence like a honed blade. Selen didn't take her eyes off the dark horizon, but every muscle in her body coiled, preparing for violence.
Likath looked at her sideways, tilting his head in a disturbingly human gesture. He raised a forepaw, its claws flickering with quiet crimson fire, and began to scratch behind his ear with practiced, casual indifference. Then, a dry chuckle rattled in his throat, sounding like cracking timber on an open hearth.
"Because you didn't just stumble into that spider's ambush back there by pure coincidence... did you?"
The air inside the alcove instantly turned to ice. Likath's tone carried its usual layer of mockery, but the burning embers of his eyes held her gaze with terrifying clarity. He wasn't a beast guided by blind, predatory instinct; he was a hunter who saw the invisible strings moving the puppets.
Likath lowered his paw back to the wood, leaning his massive head a fraction closer to her. "That pale meat-sack sleeping over there... you can read him like a book because his arithmetic is simple. A stray dog looking for a bone to survive. But I'm a wolf, silver-eyes. And I know exactly when a prey animal is playing weak just to lure in a bigger catch."
Selen didn't look back at him, but her hand, resting quietly on the hilt of the sword Rolin had given her, tightened until her knuckles turned deathly white. She realized then that her greatest threat wasn't the magic she had disclosed to Rolin—it was the terrifying depth of the creature reading her from the shadows.