The manor corridors were huge, all thick stone and old echoes.Most days Leo liked that.
Most days it felt safe.
Today it felt like the walls were crowding him.
Each step made the dagger's crossguard knock his thigh. Clink. Clink. Clink. A steady reminder of what came next.
He avoided the main doors.
Too many eyes.
He took the servants' route instead: narrow passage, bad light, air that smelled like old grease and damp dirt.
At the exit he paused in the dark, still as stone, forcing his breathing down.
Void State wasn't some flashy spell.
No fireball.
No bright circle.
Just your own head turned against you.
Break down the person. Stop being Leo the grandson. Stop thinking about warm food and clean sheets. Convince your body you are background. A wall. A shadow.
He pushed the door open.
City noise slammed into him.
Albion was screaming like always.
Upper District air came thick with cinnamon wine, burnt sweets, and enough cheap perfume to sting his nose.
Festival day.
Day of the First Spark.
Rich houses parading tier levels through the streets, pretending power came from merit instead of blood and money.
Leo yanked his hood lower.
Eyes hidden.
Shoulders down.
He folded into street traffic and made himself forgettable.
Near an alley, a pack of Level 1 Squires clogged the way. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Polished armor. Loud mouths. Glowing blue practice blades waved around for attention. Mana leaking off them in bright, sloppy bursts.
To them, Leonardo was invisible.
Not because he was stealthy.
Because he looked worthless.
"Look at that pathetic one," one of them laughed, pointing his blade at a merchant's son who was crying after failing a tier check. "Another Inept wasting space on the pavement. Throw trash like that into the sewers."
Leonardo didn't turn his head.
A month ago those words would've gotten under his skin.
Now they were static.
His hand brushed the dagger on his belt and one cold thought crossed his mind: put any of those boys in the woods for five minutes and they'd die screaming.
He kept walking.
As he approached the Western Gate, the city got uglier block by block.
White stone and gold trim gave way to dirty gray walls. Alleys narrowed. Temperature dropped. Sugar smell faded into wet dirt, bad firewood, and forest air waiting at the edges.
Then he saw the Gate.
Huge.
Black metal and dead wood, maybe fifty feet high. Level 8 runes carved into it flashed yellow and buzzed loud enough to hurt his ears.
The guards were older men. Scratched armor. Dark circles under their eyes. The kind of faces that had seen too many people not come back.
Leo walked to the small side-door.
A guard stepped in front of him immediately.
Big frame. Level 2 Warrior. Scar through the eyebrow. Hand already on the hilt of a broad sword.
"What do you want?" the guard spat. "Woods are closed to civilians. You need a guild token. Or a death wish. Go home, kid."
Leo said nothing.
No eye contact.
No argument.
He reached into his shirt and pulled out a black coin.
His grandfather's mark.
He held it flat in his palm.
The guard's expression shifted fast. Bored to alert. Alert to uneasy.
He looked at the coin, then Leo's hooded face, then back to the coin. Swallowed.
No name asked.
No destination asked.
He knew better than to question that seal.
"Open the wicket!" he shouted over his shoulder, voice cracking. "Let him through. Now!"
The side mechanism groaned.
The small gate opened just enough for one person.
Leonardo crossed the threshold, leaving Albion's artificial warmth and noise behind. Cobblestone ended abruptly, replaced by a narrow muddy track that disappeared into the dark emerald mouth of the Elinor Woods.
The moment he stepped out from the Gate's shadow, the world tilted.
Albion's central mana-hum, that constant rhythm he'd heard all his life without noticing, vanished.
Cut clean.
In its place came a silence so deep it felt heavy, like the air itself had thickened and wanted to shove him face-first into the dirt.
He ignored the main road.
That path was for armed caravans and mercenaries with short futures.
He veered left instead. Boots sank into tall, damp grass at once. He adjusted the Sting's leather strap, fingers brushing cold material for reassurance.
Ecatrice's voice surfaced in his memory without warning.
The woods don't care about your choices.
He looked up.
The Elinor canopy was a tangled ceiling of emerald leaves and obsidian branches. So thick that the dying sun above came through only in broken shards, like stained glass smashed over mud. The trees were ancient and wrong-looking. Bark peeled in long strips of dead skin, exposing inner wood as gray and hard as iron.
Leonardo took a deep breath to test the air.
His lungs burned instantly.
No city filters out here.
No purification arrays.
Just raw rot, sharp pine resin, and something metallic underneath it all.
Corrupted mana.
Wild. Unrefined.
He didn't activate Void State yet.
Too early.
He'd need the stamina when the sun dropped for real.
But he let his awareness drift anyway, sinking into that cold hollow in the center of his chest.
His heartbeat slowed.
Thump... thump... thump.
Vision sharpened. Tiny tremors in leaves. Deep shadows pooling around twisted oak roots.
Crack.
A tiny sound, almost nothing.
Maybe a hundred yards away, in thick brush to his right.
Leonardo went perfectly still.
He didn't turn his head. That would wreck peripheral focus.
He listened with his whole body, reading vibration through skin and air.
Not wind.
Wind in Elinor moaned low and continuous.
This was sharp. Distinct.
A dry branch snapping under something heavy trying hard to stay quiet.
No manor now.
No wooden dummies.
No Ecatrice to save him.
Only the forest, the pressure-silence, and whatever was moving through the underbrush toward him.
Leonardo lowered his hand to the Sting.
Fingers found the safety strap.
He unclipped it without a sound.
He didn't draw yet, but the hilt touched his palm and the Earth Tier metal answered with its cold, hungry resonance.
He stared into the dark, impenetrable tree line.
Inside the hood, his mutated violet eye pulsed once in the gloom.
"I'm here," he whispered to the shadows, voice barely more than vapor.
Then he stepped under the first arching branch of Elinor, and the darkness swallowed him whole.