They entered the forest leaving Karlos behind.
There was clear irritation on everyone's faces — irritation that Karlos got to lie in a comfortable root hollow while the rest of them worked, and a separate, quieter confusion about why Arjun had permitted it. Sophia was walking with the particular energy of someone who has an opinion and has decided to keep it to themselves for the time being. Javier was watching Arjun from two steps behind with the careful, assessing attention of someone formulating a question.
After about fifty metres, he asked it.
"Mr. Arjun, may I ask you something?"
Arjun glanced back and nodded without slowing.
"Why did you let him stay? I understand he can use his astra while sleeping — but that means he gets to rest while contributing nothing to the actual fighting."
Arjun looked at him without particular expression.
"Think about it," he said. "I've been watching how he talks, how he moves, how he approaches things generally. What I've concluded is that Karlos has a very stubborn and very specific personality. Forcing him into a fight he doesn't want to be in produces a worse outcome than letting him do the one thing he'll actually do well." A pause. "Dragging him along by force wouldn't help us. This arrangement does."
He looked away after that, which communicated clearly that the explanation was finished.
Javier didn't look entirely satisfied, but he didn't push further either. He filed it away and walked on.
Rudra, a few steps ahead and apparently not listening, had heard every word.
'I'm sure that wasn't the only reason,' he thought.
---
Sophia stopped in front of a tree.
She pulled her fist back and knocked firmly on the bark — not a gentle tap, a solid impact, the way Karlos had apparently instructed them to signal. Almost immediately an eye appeared on the trunk, blinking once in the filtered green light. A moment later a mouth formed below it.
"Ouch!! Could you not do it so hard? That actually hurts!"
Sophia looked at the eye with the expression she had apparently decided was appropriate for this communication method.
"Shut up and tell us where the nearest monster is."
The eye closed. A pause of several seconds. Then the mouth opened again.
"Aha! Found one!"
A hand grew out of the bark and pointed — directly, without hesitation, in the direction they needed to go.
"That way, about twenty metres. Looks like an orange gem situation."
They moved.
---
It was sleeping when they found it.
The monster occupied the shadow beneath a cluster of the forest's enormous trees with the complete, boneless relaxation of something that has no natural predators and knows it. At rest it looked like a rhinoceros — but a rhinoceros scaled up by something that had no particular interest in proportion. The body was easily the size of a small bus, the skin a dark, mottled grey-brown with a texture like cracked stone, thick enough that it caught the light differently from the surrounding air. Three horns rather than one, arranged in a forward-facing cluster on the snout, each one dark and ridged and longer than Rudra's arm. Legs like pillars, ending in feet with three blunt claws per side. Its breathing was a slow, periodic sound — deep enough to feel in the ground underfoot, rhythmic, unhurried.
The orange gem was visible on its flank. A faceted stone, roughly the size of a fist, embedded just beneath the surface of the skin partway down the ribcage — glinting faintly with its own light, the colour of heated metal. Getting to it meant getting past everything else.
Arjun looked at the creature with a crooked smile. He reached into his side bag without taking his eyes off the target.
"Let's do it," he said quietly.
Rudra pressed two fingers against his temple. The soul hands arrived — two of them, blue and faintly luminous, larger than ordinary hands and crackling slightly at the edges with the restless energy that his soul had always carried. He positioned them carefully, extending his awareness through them to triangulate distance and angle. The plan was simple: wake it up from range, keep it occupied, find the opening.
He threw the first soul hand at the creature's flank.
The impact was significant — not enough to injure something with that mass and that skin, but more than enough to wake it up. The monster came out of sleep with the speed that large things sometimes had that was deeply wrong relative to their size — from completely still to on its feet in a single convulsive movement, the three horns swinging toward the source of the impact, a sound emerging from somewhere in its chest that was less a roar and more a sustained vibration in a register that Rudra felt before he heard it.
It charged.
The first soul hand intercepted it — not a block, which would have been pointless, but a redirect, catching the momentum at an angle and throwing it sideways just enough that the charge missed the group entirely and took the monster into a tree instead. The tree lost. The monster turned, more careful now, and found that there were five small things arranged around it at various distances and angles, which was a more complicated situation than one thing directly ahead.
Arjun moved.
He was already circling to the left, staying low, the daggers in his hand coated with a thin layer of soul energy that made them look slightly wrong — too bright at the edges, too defined. He threw the first one at the creature's left eye. Not a killing throw, not even an injuring throw — a redirect, forcing the head to swing away from Rudra's position. The second dagger followed the first, aimed at the joint above the foreleg, probing for the place where the stone skin had a natural seam.
The third one found it.
The monster flinched — a small, sharp flinch that was entirely different from its reaction to the soul hand impact. Something in the joint had registered.
Sophia came in from the right.
She moved with the settled, unhurried speed of someone who has trained with a spear long enough that thinking about it was the wrong approach — the body knew where to be and the mind followed. The spear found the same joint Arjun had identified and drove into it, the A-tier weapon cutting through the seam in the stone skin with a clean resistance that her ordinary arm strength alone wouldn't have managed. She pulled back before the creature could turn, already repositioning.
The wound was small but it bled.
Beside her the Leviathan, which had been floating at chest height with its usual indifference, noticed. Its head turned toward the blood with a slowness that was somehow more alarming than if it had snapped toward it. It grew — not dramatically, not all at once, but visibly, a few centimetres in every direction, its tail lengthening slightly, its teeth becoming fractionally more present than they had been.
Javier engaged on the creature's blind side. He was working with precision rather than force — short, careful sword strikes aimed not at damage but at keeping the monster's attention split. He couldn't do much to the stone skin, and he knew it and wasn't trying to. What he could do was be another point of pressure that the creature had to track, making the whole engagement more chaotic than the monster wanted it to be.
He was good at it. The positioning was intelligent.
The monster was managing four points of engagement simultaneously and losing ground on all of them, which produced the particular dangerous response of a large creature that has realised it's in a fight rather than a nuisance situation. It stopped trying to charge and started trying to make the area around itself as hostile as possible — sweeping movements, unpredictable direction changes, using its bulk as a weapon rather than its speed.
Rudra brought the second soul hand in and threw it at the creature's head with full force.
The impact snapped the head sideways. The three horns swung wide and hit nothing. The creature staggered left.
Sophia was already there.
The spear found the orange gem on the flank — she drove it into the spot she had been waiting for, past the stone skin through the seam already opened, and the gem came loose with a sound like something unlocking. She caught it in her free hand and stepped back fast, the Leviathan following her retreat and now noticeably larger than it had been at the start of the fight.
The monster rounded on her.
One of Arjun's soul-coated daggers struck it across the snout. It turned. Rudra drove both soul hands into its side simultaneously. It staggered again, turned back, found five people it couldn't locate cleanly and a floating creature with teeth that had gotten significantly larger since the blood hit the ground, and appeared to arrive at a conclusion about the situation.
It retreated into the trees.
The sound of its movement faded. Then the forest went back to its usual indifferent noise, as though nothing had happened in this clearing and nothing would again.
Sophia held up the gem.
Orange light. Faceted, fist-sized, catching the filtered canopy light in small warm fragments.
"One hundred points," Arjun said.
Rudra looked at the clearing — the torn ground where the charge had gone wrong, the tree that had lost to a rhinoceros-sized impact, the small amount of blood on the soil that the Leviathan was now pointedly looking away from with the deliberate effort of something exercising restraint.
He looked at his team.
"That went well," he said.
Sophia examined the gem with the calm expression of someone checking a completed task.
Javier said nothing, but the sword was back at his hip and his posture had the ease of someone who has done something they were prepared to do.
Arjun was already looking at the trees in the direction the monster had retreated, recalculating.
"Three more red gems today," he said. "Then we camp."
Nobody argued.
They formed up and moved deeper into the Hungry Forest.