I woke up to the smell of mud and rain.

Cold.

Damp.

Heavy.

Something wet was dripping down my face and sliding along my neck, soaking into my shirt. For a second, I thought it was blood. It would've been a very normal start to my day, honestly. But when I wiped it with the back of my hand, it was just water mixed with dirt.

Comforting.

I opened my eyes and stared upward.

The sky was… gone.

Completely swallowed by a canopy of twisted, writhing branches, if you could even call these limb-like tree appendages that. The trees above me weren't normal. They looked like something pulled from the nightmares I used to have before Bastard took them.

Their bark was spotted, white, gray, black, like they'd been bleached, charred, and rotted all at the same time. Their leaves shimmered with the color of the night sky, a deep cosmic black that seemed to swallow the light around them.

And the trunks…

The trunks had mouths.

Mouths with crooked smiles carved directly into the wood.

Static.

Unmoving and somehow still brimming with hunger.

Their roots pulsed with patches of brown, slimy algae that bloomed and popped like diseased blisters.

Over and over.

A wet cycle of rot.

It was disgusting.

It was wrong.

It was exactly what I'd expect the damn academy to drop me into.

I took it all in within a heartbeat, scanning left, then right. My instincts were already screaming at me to get moving, get fighting, get alive. But first, I had to look at my team.

They weren't here.

No shapes.

No footsteps.

No familiar annoyed breathing from Nora.

Just me.

Alone.

Perfect.

I exhaled slowly and glanced down at my wrist, and blinked.

A device was clamped to it.

Thin, metallic, glowing faintly along its edges. I definitely hadn't put this on myself, which meant it had been attached after the teleport.

A map shimmered on its surface.

Four red dots.

All moving slowly, pulsing like faint heartbeats.

My team's positions.

Spread out in the forest.

Separated.

Fantastic.

I was about to take a step, just one, when a sound tore through the quiet.

A growl.

Low and deep.

Thick enough to vibrate the ground.

Close enough that I felt it in my ribs.

And just like that, whatever peace I had evaporated instantly.

My hell officially began.

---

I snapped my head toward the source of the growl.

Branches shifted.

Leaves trembled.

Something wet slapped against bark.

And then, through two twisted trunks, I saw it.

A beast.

About my size.

Monkey-shaped… if someone had taken the idea of a monkey, fed it through six years nightmares, then glued it back together with sewage.

Long, elongated limbs dangled from its hunched frame. Its hair was patchy in places, matted in others, and caked with something brown and chunky that I refused to identify any further because my brain was already screaming that's shit, Sebastian, that's literal shit.

Its chest and half its face were exposed raw flesh, slick and red, like someone had peeled it open and forgotten to sew it back.

And the smell...

Gods.

The smell hit me like a slap.

I squinted at it, took one cautious step back, and muttered out loud, because apparently my survival instincts had clocked out for the morning:

"They say there isn't a face a mother couldn't love…"

The creature jerked its head toward me, revealing jagged teeth sticking out at wrong angles, dripping with more brown gunk.

I pointed at it.

"Well, you'd think otherwise after seeing this thing. No mother could love you. Not even on her best day."

It screeched.

A sound so ugly and shrill it rattled the leaves above me.

And I sighed.

"...Great. I hurt its feelings."

Then the monkey bastard charged towards me like I owed it rent.

And my mind switched on.

Cool.

Cold.

Detached.

I tracked its gait, how its weight shifted with each loping step.

The arc of its leap.

The twitch of its overlong arms.

Its mana flow was weak, unstable; most of it leaked through its exposed flesh.

Its vitals lined up clearly from the way its ribs expanded. All its patterns blooming open in front of me in a single heartbeat.

D-rank.

Too high to kill with a single word drenched in my very welcoming Death Will.

Too low to be a real threat.

And far too disgusting to touch with a sword.

I didn't want to go anywhere near it.

So I didn't.

In the space of that single instant, just as the mutated beast kicked off the ground, just as its shadow crossed mine, a black tendril tore out of my body. It blurred forward, aiming straight for the bastard's heart.

It dodged.

Fast, but not fast enough.

A second tendril speared through its ribs, right under the arm it tried to lift.

I summoned Sacha in her sword form and raised a thin sheet of ice in front of me. A barrier between me and the mess I knew was coming.

The corruption spread fast.

Crawling.

Eating.

Hollowing the mutated monkey bastard out from the inside.

It screamed in a garbled, wet way.

And then it blew apart in a spray of blood and organs, spattering across the trees like rotten paint.

I barely had time to wipe the gore off my metaphorical boots before a tiny voice piped up in the back of my mind.

"Papa… did you just use Sacha as a glorified shield?"

I almost tripped over a root.

"No," I said instantly, clutching her blue-glass blade form as I sprinted through the forest, branches clawing at my face. "Absolutely not. I would never do that."

"You put Sacha in front of the boom," she insisted, sounding deeply offended. "You held Sacha like… like a pot lid, Papa."

"That was not a pot-lid situation," I said, ducking under a hanging vine that looked suspiciously like an intestine. "That was strategic ability deployment."

"That's bullcrap, Papa, and you know it."

"It isn't bullcrap," I argued. "It was… protective positioning. And why in the world do you know that word?"

"That's still a pot-lid."

I groaned. This girl just completely ignored me. Is this how parents feel when their children become edgy teenagers?

"Sacha, sweetheart, I love you, but we're not doing this while mutated monkey guts are still raining."

"You could've just moved."

"I am moving. Very gracefully, I might add." I hopped over a puddle that hissed like acid. "You just missed it because you were too busy being a blade."

"Sacha is always a blade when Papa summons her in demon forests."

"Well, yes."

"Then maybe… maybe Papa thinks Sacha is only good as a wall."

I skidded to a stop. "Sacha. No." My voice slipped into automatic father tone, the one even I wasn't aware I'd mastered. "You are not a wall. You are my daughter. My partner. My beautiful murder implement."

"Murder… implement?"

"In a loving, affectionate sense."

She sniffled telepathically. Somehow I recognized it.

"Sacha didn't feel very loved when Papa put her in front of exploding monkeys."

"I didn't put you anywhere," I protested, resuming my run because something behind me growled and I absolutely didn't want a repeat fight. "I simply placed you between me and the rapidly decompressing biological hazard."

"Papa… that's shield. Again."

"Okay, fine. Fine. But listen, if something explodes in my general direction, I trust you more than anything else in the world to protect me."

"So Sacha is your shield."

I winced. "Metaphorically."

"But a metaphorical shield still sounds like a shield."

I scrubbed a hand down my face. "Sacha, you're missing the point. I trust you because you're strong. Smart. Reliable. And—"

A branch tried to stab me. I sliced it without thinking.

"—and because I love you."

There was a long pause.

Then—

"…Sorry, Papa. Sacha didn't mean to be annoying."

"You weren't annoying," I lied. "You were expressing concerns like a responsible sentient tiger-weapon-child."

"But… Papa?"

"Yes?"

"Next time… can Sacha be the boom instead of the shield?"

I snorted. "You want to explode something?"

"Uh-huh!"

"You're supposed to help me kill things without blowing yourself up."

"Then make Sacha the thing that makes the thing go boom!"

"You want to be...what...the bomb?"

"The ultimate bomb!"

I felt my eye twitch. "Sacha, you are not becoming a bomb."

"Papa, please? Sacha wants to go pew pew kaboom."

"No."

"Just once?"

"No."

"Just a little boom?"

"Sacha."

"Papa."

"Sacha."

"Boom?"

I groaned. "Absolutely not."

She went quiet.

Quiet enough that I got suspicious.

"…Sacha?"

"Hehe…"

"What did you just do?"

"Nothing."

"Sacha—"

"Papa, run faster."

"I am running."

"Run faster-er."

"That is not a word."

"Papa… there's a big thing behind you."

I didn't look. I learned from the previous encounters that looking back only brings more headaches.

"Sacha."

"Yes."

"Is it bigger than the monkey?"

"Uh-huh."

"Is it uglier?"

"Papa… it has two faces. And one of them is upside-down."

I sighed.

Of course it did.

"Fine," I said, gripping her tight as I bolted through the demon forest. "But if we survive this, we're having a very long talk about metaphorical shields."

"And bombs?" she chirped hopefully.

"No."

"Boom?"

"SACHA."

A/N:To everyone who's stuck with me up to this chapter...thank you. You might've noticed my writing style bouncing around: sometimes long paragraphs, sometimes single-word lines.

If you caught that, don't worry, you weren't imagining things. I've been experimenting to find what fits me best, and I think I've finally settled on a particular way. The style used in this chapter (111) is the one I'll be sticking with moving forward.

Thank you for reading, and as always, enjoy.

P.S. If you've got some spare Power Stones or Golden Tickets, I'd really appreciate them. I'm this close to breaking my milestone, and every bit of support helps. Thank you!

P.S. I edited this author's note after uploading the chapter, so it shouldn't affect the chapter price.

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