The last memory he had, going to bed right after finishing his routine of mindless scrolling on the phone. He expected waking up on the same warm comfy bed but unexpectedly a hard dirt ground and the smell of grass greeted him instead when his eyes opened.
No sign of traffic. No voices coming through walls. No hum of a city doing what cities did whether you wanted it to or not.
It felt foreign. He rubbed his eyes to make sure he wasn't still in the land of dream.
Green. Everywhere. Tall trees pressing in from every direction, their canopy so thick the sky existed only in suggestions — pale light filtered down in uneven patches, cold and thin. The air tasted different. Heavier. Like breathing somewhere his lungs hadn't been before.
He pushed himself up slowly.
"…Where am I?"
His voice came out dry. Like he'd been breathing sand.
Then he heard it.
A scream. Close enough to feel in his teeth. Human and desperate and cutting off too fast.
His body moved before his mind caught up — one step forward, then stopped. Because beneath the scream, underneath it, something else. Low. Rhythmic.
Breathing.
Not his.
He lowered himself without deciding to. Moved sideways instead of forward, putting a trunk between him and whatever was ahead. One step. Another. Each one placed like the ground might give him away.
He saw it through the gap between trees.
A man on the ground, scrambling backward on his palms, face completely white. In front of him — something standing. Too tall. Wrong in the way it held itself, limbs bent at angles that suggested the bones inside had a different arrangement than they should. Its head tilted slightly as it watched the man try to get away.
Like it was curious.
"P-please—!"
It moved.
A blur. A sound Kai would spend a long time trying to stop hearing.
Then the forest went quiet again.
Like nothing had interrupted it.
He didn't move. Didn't breathe. Pressed his back against the bark and waited for his pulse to stop sounding so loud.
It didn't.
But eventually, the thing moved away. He heard it — the shift of something heavy through undergrowth — and then nothing.
He exhaled.
Looked at the body. The state it had been left in made his stomach turn. He looked away, his mind still trying to think. Telling him to run as far away as possible, his body didn't obey. His stomach churned again. This time he couldn't hold.
That's when he noticed it. Something that shouldn't be there, something that wasn't common sense.
A floating orb.
It had been there the whole time. Hovering near him, since the moment he opened his eyes, glowing faintly, like waiting, calling to him. The urge overwhelmed every sense. Curiosity even, perhaps.
His hands were shaking.
He reached out anyway.
The silver light hit him all at once — it wasn't painful nor was it warm, just immediate. Like a force trying to assimilate with him gently. Words arrived in his mind without being spoken. Not heard. Just — known.
[Zodiac Orb Detected]
[Initializing…]
[Zodiac: Virgo]
[Ability: ———]
[Status Panel Unlocked]
Then it was gone. The light, the weight of it, the sensation. His emotion steadied, his breathing calmed, what's more, even his vision somehow felt different.
The body still there. The blood still there. Whatever had killed that man still somewhere in these towering trees.
Nothing had changed.
Except him. Something in him had settled — didn't feel like he was full of strength, just focused. The shaking in his hands didn't stop but it moved to the background. His eyes moved differently across the treeline. Looking for angles instead of exits.
"I need to think first,"he said quietly.
Not to anyone.
Just to himself.
Because in a place like this, thinking first might be the only thing that kept him from ending up like the man.