Chapter 2

  The Leeching Forest

  On instinct alone, Mallox's hand moved on its own. She suddenly stare at her hand, already gripping the dagger. "What?" She did not notice her hand drew her weapon.

  She hadn’t seen or heard a thing, but her body screamed danger. So loud, so visceral, even she was stunned by her own sharpened survival response.

  Her eyes swept the pale, rotting forest. Nothing moved. Only the warped silhouettes of disfigured trees and veins of intestine-like roots spread across the damp earth like a carcass torn inside out.

  Her boots shifted, and something beneath her gave way.

  [Squish]

  A garbled sound followed, “H..wwa.. aaaa…”

  She froze.

  Mallox’s eyes widened in disgust. She had stepped on a face—no, what was left of a face—merged grotesquely into the roots of a tree. A mouth moved, its jaw partially fused into the bark, its expression locked between agony and oblivion.

  “What the hell… are you?” she muttered.

  [WARK!]

  A burst from the left.

  A tree split open violently, its trunk swinging like a door of flesh. Something pale and humanoid launched at her, long and crooked.

  Her body reacted before thought could catch up. Dagger raised, intercepting the creature's outstretched claw. She deflected its arm sideways, pivoting to follow through with a counterattack, but it struck with its spring-loaded legs.

  Mallox blocked and stumbled back from sheer kenetic force.

  What the-

  The pale creature vanished as it dived into another tree like water, slipping through the wood as if it were liquid.

  Before she could catch her breath, nausea surged up her throat. She fell to her knees and vomited, the stench of the creature still clinging to her lungs. It wasn’t just rot. It was something deeper. Wrong. Her body convulsed not just from disgust, but instinctual horror.

  Whatever that thing was—it had done terrible things.

  “I should’ve killed that animal.” Mallox wiped the bile from her lips, the sour taste still clinging to her tongue. Her left hand clutched her stomach and she pressed on through the sickening terrain.

  “He won’t get me a second time,” she muttered. “Next time, I’ll end him.”

  The forest deepened, anything was pale, grotesque, and pulsing with unnatural life. The trees looked diseased, their bark like flayed flesh. Shadows stretched wrong, and the air was thick with decay.

  Then came the sound. Not a single scream, but a chorus—whining, shrieking, distorted like broken instruments screeching in discord. Her eyes found the source.

  Three of the pale creatures stood in a ring, forcing a victim’s head into the trunk of one of the trees. The bark twisted and rippled, greedily absorbing the body like rot claiming a corpse. Two smaller monsters were already half-swallowed, limbs twitching.

  But something strange grabbed her full attention. It was the translucent figure which was human-like.

  The human-like creature writhed and flailed, hands clawing against nothing, trying to break free but the monster held it down with ease.

  Mallox pondered. Her instinct whispered to stay away, to do not meddle.

  Something else stirred, a weight behind her ribs. A voice not in words, but in pressure. That same pull that had guided her since the start.

  She have an almost infinite questions in her head. If she could save the man, maybe, he can enlighten her.

  [WARK!]

  Familiar presence of hostility was detected behind her.

  She moved before she thought. Her body twisted violently on its own accord, just in time to intercept the ambush. The creature’s claw grazed her cheek, barely missing her right eye—but her arm had already struck. The dagger slid into its throat with practiced precision, as if she’d done this a hundred times before.

  She widened the cut, slicing deep, dark fluid spilling from the gash. A jolt of force surged through her legs as she kicked with tremendous thrust.

  The creature vomited a dark pigment before it was sent flying, limbs flailing, until it slammed into a distant tree seven meters away with a dull, crispy cracking thud.

  Mallox stood still, breathing hard. She looked down at her hands. “Damn,” she whispered. “I’m fricken strong.”

  But it wasn’t just strength. It was the reflex, the precision, and the flawless counter. That wasn’t skill learned through training, it was something deeper.

  Her body fully remember the art of combat, even when her mind did not. It was something inside her that had survived.

  Before the clarity of battle faded, she turned back to where the monsters had been. But they were gone.

  “Son of a— Where did those animals go?”

  She rushed forward, heart pounding in her ears. Her boots skidded to a stop, unaware of what she will behold.

  The scenery itself gave a chill through her spine.

  The trees… they remained. But now she saw them—truly saw them.

  Grotesque. Obscene.

  They weren’t just feeding… they were becoming.

  Flesh twisted into bark. Faces stretched across trunks like masks screaming mid-suffocation. Fingers jutted from branches in unnatural angles. Roots pulsed beneath a carpet of soft, meat-like soil.

  They were still alive.

  From the trees, voices trembled through the air, high-pitched, broken, as if trapped in eternal moments of death:

  “Mama, the monster is hurting me…”

  “No, please… not like this…”

  “God have mercy… GOD-”

  “Help meee…”

  “Father! I don’t wanna die!”

  “N-nooo! I’m still here! I’m still-”

  Were these their final words before they were absorbed by these monstrous creatures?

  Each voice came from a different tree, from a different face carved into the wood, writhing and distorting as if caught in endless final gasps.

  Mallox stepped back, choking on the horror. The blade in her hand shook, her arms limp, her knees threatening to collapse.

  “What kind of abomination is this...” She couldn’t breathe properly. Her lungs refused rhythm as her vision blurred.

  Crackles of soft scraping, something crawling or even scuttling over bark and bone lingered from the surroundings.

  [WAAAARK!]

  So it was a group of pale monsters leapt toward her, teeth glistening, claws primed.

  She turned to them but not in fear.

  Her eyes burned not from panic, but from an absolute rage she didn’t understand. Her expression twisted into something raw, something feral.

  “What kind of monsters are you… to do this?” Her voice cracked, venom and fury laced through every syllable.

  She snapped.

  A blur of motion. Dagger flashing like a phantom's fang. She didn't dodge. She didn't defend. She attacked.

  The first creature lost its arms in a single blow. The second had its face split open, the skull caved by the blunt hilt of her dagger. The third she impaled with the severed claw of its kin, shoving it so deep the tip burst from its spine.

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  She moved like a storm of knives.

  No technique.

  No restraint, just fury.

  She stood alone among the torn flesh but her rage didn’t stop there.

  She turned on the trees.

  Her dagger sank deep into bark-flesh. She hacked until the face carved into the wood stopped moaning. Another tree fell, its limbs twitching. She cleaved through dozens more, blinded by wrath, deafened by the endless cries.

  One tree fell, then another.

  She kept cutting, kept killing. The black ichor poured like sap. She crushed tentacles beneath her boots, ripped limbs from fused torsos, snapped crying branches with her bare hands.

  Twenty? Thirty? Maybe more.

  But the voices did not stop.

  “Where’s my brother…?”

  “They’re pulling me apart-please-”

  “Don’t let me go…”

  She kept swinging..

  “It hurts…!”

  “Mama… huhuhu-”

  She screamed like a broken and enraged beast as if her soul itself was tearing open.

  She carved her way through the horror, but it never ended. The forest only grew thicker and the cries only grew louder.

  It was like killing shadows, she was just losing herself.

  When her arm finally dropped—numb and trembling—she stood amid a massacre. Black ichor drenched her from hair to boot. Shredded flesh clung to her armor. The trees, gashed and weeping, groaned around her.

  Her chest rose and fell in ragged breaths. Her dagger dripped with thick, dark fluid. Each drop hit the soil with a rippling hiss, painting the ground in ruin.

  Her knees trembled, but she didn’t fall. She just stared. The tremors inside her weren’t from exhaustion… but confusion. Deep, gnawing confusion.

  Yet still, the forest screamed. Still, the weeping poured from unseen mouths. Still, new faces seemed to emerge from the trees she hadn’t touched.

  It was endless.

  All she had done… all that violence… and it hadn’t even scratched the surface.

  How many victims were buried in this place?

  How many people had been absorbed into these trees—devoured alive, piece by piece?

  Her fury collapsed into silence. Not peace, not calm. Just an aching, soul-deep silence.

  This wasn't just a battlefield. It was a mass grave. A monument to agony.

  She looked down at herself—at the gore, the blood, the bits of bone stuck to her sleeves. Her hands began to shake as she gripped her hair, fists trembling at her scalp as she pulled, as if trying to tear the confusion out by force. "Why am I here? Why do I need to see these?"

  No answer. Only the sound of the forest, eternal and weeping. Her cry vanished into the endless groan of the forest, swallowed like every other soul it had consumed.

  I need to leave this place no matter what.

  With no clear direction and a stomach that growled like a caged beast, Mallox mustered what strength remained in her battered limbs and pressed onward. Each step deeper into the forest led her into a realm more unsettling than the last.

  The air grew colder.

  She could feel the monsters watching—pale, shapeless things lurking just behind the trunks or within them—yet they did not dare draw near. Something about her scent, her aura, made even the warped denizens of this cursed wood shrink back in fear.

  Eventually, her feet led her to the edge of a wide, greenish pond, its surface stagnant and eerily still. The water was infested with bloated cadavers or like monstrous carcasses of creatures she could not name, their forms twisted, some missing limbs, others with faces frozen in horror. A foul, sour stench clung to the air like rot left under a sunless sky.

  Water? No... this is some kind of acid.

  Then she saw it—something stirring. A translucent figure, thrashing at the center of the water. A man, or what remained of one. His form glowed faintly, like heat haze under moonlight. Middle-aged, in his fifties perhaps. Half bald, with a tangled beard and a round belly. But his right cheek and eye were melting into a disfigured mess of flesh and dripping spirit matter. He flailed in vain, arms churning the liquid but the pond never rippled. Not a even single splash.

  Is it the liquid that trapped the man or the man cannot interact with the liquid?

  “Help me! Somebody help me! I didn’t deserve this!” he cried, over and over, his voice warped with anguish. "Anyone!!"

  Mallox’s breath caught in her throat. She’d seen and heard him before. That same man who had been almost devoured earlier by one of the screaming trees. Was this what became of those who were absorbed? Is this what awaited every victim?

  She stepped cautiously to the water’s edge. “What happened to you?” she asked, her voice quiet but firm.

  The man snapped his gaze toward her, eyes wide in disbelief. “Are... are you human too?” he gasped. “Please, help me! They're everywhere! They're inside the trees!” His panic surged as if her presence confirmed hope. “Please, I don't want to stay here—I don’t want to be like them!”

  His words trembled with terror, but Mallox could only stare.

  “Human?” Mallox echoed. The word rang with strange familiarity—something from a past she couldn’t reach. “Answer me. What happened to you?”

  “I don’t know!” the man cried. “I just—just woke up in this nightmare! In a swamp full of monsters!” His translucent form twisted in place, hands clawing at the unmoving water. “Please, just get me out! I’m begging you!”

  Mallox’s expression stayed flat, but her eyes narrowed. “Swamp? Where is that?” From her account, she just found herself in middle of vast wasteland near a gate portal-like rock formation. Their way of entering this place was different.

  Swamp? So there's a real water in this place?

  The man’s voice cracked. “One moment I was falling from a cliff—some mountain, I think—and then I was spat out by this huge, rotting plant into a swamp. It’s hot and awful and—I swear it’s alive! Then I was snatched by those white monsters out of nowhere! Please, can you just—help me out already?!”

  Mallox didn’t move. Her gaze locked on him, analyzing every twitch, every tremble. In this kind of hostile place, she cannot just trust anyone or anything.

  “You fell from a cliff... then a plant vomited you into a swamp?” She asked in a flat voice.

  “I-I know how that sounds! But it happened!” he said quickly. “This place... this isn’t Inferonia. It’s a different world!”

  Inferonia?

  The word itself felt also very familiar to her, but no memories came out.

  "What is this Inferonia you are mentioning?"

  "Inferonia—Our own world! There's no way we came from different world... Right?" The man responded.

  He made sense, if they didn't come from the same planet or world, how can they understand each other's language?

  I came from a world named Inferonia? I am not certain but probably...

  Mallox’s voice remained eerily calm. “That’s all you remember?”

  “Yes! Why does it matter? Can you just—please, I’m stuck! I don’t know why, but I can’t swim, I can’t touch anything—” His translucent limbs flailed again, causing not even the slightest ripple. “I’m trapped like I’m not even real anymore!”

  She crouched slowly, resting one knee on the ground, eyes cold. “Maybe you’re already dead. Maybe this is the afterlife, a place where dead souls are dumped.”

  He stared at her, baffled. Then let out a broken, miserable laugh. “What? No—no, that’s insane.”

  Her silence unnerved him more than her words.

  “This can’t be Grimrell,” the man muttered, searching Mallox’s eyes as if pleading for her to correct him. “I’ve heard stories, but—why me?! I don’t belong here!”

  “Grimrell?” Mallox echoed, her head tilting slightly. The name stirred nothing in her memory.

  The man swallowed, his voice unsteady. “It’s the hell of the damned. The place they send souls that no god would claim. Eternal punishment for those beyond redemption.” He began to shake. “But I’m not one of them. I built orphanages. I gave back. I lived a good life... There has to be a mistake!”

  Mallox said nothing for a moment, eyes locked on him with something skepticism.

  If he’s telling the truth… then is it possible Grimrell condemns not only the wicked, but also the innocent?

  Could the realm itself be flawed?

  Or he was not telling the whole truth? Or maybe this was not Grimrell after all.

  Mallox replied nonchalantly, “Then take it up with whatever monster dragged you here.”

  He stared, speechless.

  “I don’t even know my own name,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. “But if this is Grimrell... then I want to know why I’m still breathing.”

  The man’s mouth opened, but no words came. Just disbelief. Unlike him, Mallox was not translucent, she possessed real bone and flesh.

  “Wh–what?”

  Mallox exhaled slowly through her nose, “I’ll find a stick to reach you.”

  She stepped along the brittle edge of the pond, boots cracking on dead moss. Her eyes swept the area with sharp observation. Nothing moved. But the silence wasn’t natural. It pressed in on her ears, tight and expectant.

  She found a thick branch, snapped and stripped, wedged beneath a jagged stone. As she grabbed it, her eyes flicked to the surrounding woods.

  The trees were still. But the stillness itself felt wrong.

  A faint rustling broke through the hush-slow, deliberate, as if something was crawling through the forest floor just out of sight.

  She turned her head slightly then paused.

  The rustling stopped.

  [Snap]

  A dry twig broke somewhere behind the pale woods. The sound echoed, it felt distant but also near.

  She narrowed her eyes. No creature in Grimrell was subtle without reason.

  Her body was not signaling any kind of danger. Maybe it was just critters or something.

  "Hey, Madam! I'm here!" The man shouted that made Mallox snapped back to what she supposed to do.

  She walked slowly towards the pond of acid, and a sudden questions came in her mind. Her eyes shifted back to the man.

  Why leave him in the pond?

  Her grip on the branch tightened.

  Why would something spare prey this easy?

  Why not kill him? Eat him? Or feed him into the trees?

  Is this some kind of trap? But I can't feel any danger from the man nor from the surroundings.

  She returned and approached the pond’s edge, and held the branch out toward the man.

  “If I pull you out and you turn on me, I’ll kill you.”

  “I–I won’t! I swear!” he shouted, his voice cracking with fear.

  Mallox stared at him with cold gaze. “Grab it.”

  The man’s hands trembled, reaching for the other end. “You came back... thank you—”

  “–I didn’t leave.”

  His translucent fingers touched the wood. To her surprise, the contact held. He was able to grip it.

  She dug her heels into the ground and pulled.

  The man stumbled free from the water, rolling onto the bank with a wet grunt, coughing and heaving.

  Mallox stepped back, keeping a cold stare on him.

  He looked up, grateful. “I don’t know who you are, but—”

  “–Quiet,” she cut him off.

  Because she heard it again.

  The trees weren’t still anymore. They were... shifting, not swaying. They are leaning or like bending as if someone was watching them.

  Then came another crackles.

  Faint at first, like ice shattering under pressure. After a while,a louder and sharper like bones splitting.

  The man’s breath hitched. “W-what’s that sound?”

  Mallox didn’t respond. She patiently observe the surroundings, blade now half-drawn from its sheath.

  Something was off, something shifted in her senses.

  That pressure again—an almost psychic weight pressing from behind the trees.

  She stepped back, gaze scanning the warped forest. The wind had died. Leaves stopped rustling. The world had gone silent in a way that was wrong.

  Too wrong.

  Then—[crkck]

  It was a faint crack. Somewhere deeper in the woods. Not a branch snapping. Something heavier, a sound of something wet.

  The man stiffened beside her. “What... was that?”

  Mallox’s eyes narrowed. “I said quite.”

  She waited.

  Nothing.

  No murderous intent. No presence. Not even a flicker through her danger sense. That was the first red flag.

  She couldn’t feel it.

  Yet something was coming.

  Another subtle noise followed, a slow, deliberate rustle, like something massive brushing past brittle trees without breaking them. Then silence again.

  She turned slightly, listening harder.

  Still nothing.

  I cannot feel any danger, but what the hell is that? I heard it's step, it's huge.

  "Wai-wai-wait... What is that?"

  Mallox got detached from concentration, giving the man a pissed off face. "Can you just shut up for a moment?"

  "Im sorr—" The man froze, eyes widened and its pupil shaking.

  Without a warning, there was a faint shift in the air. Not a sound, but a breeze that hadn’t been there before.

  It was silent, cold. As if something had manifested—not stepped—into existence behind her.

  "Wha–" Mallox paused, and for a flicker of a moment, she noticed a reflection of disfigured silhouette from the man's translucent eye.

  Huh?

  “Behind you—!”

  [BFRAAGCk!]

  A thunderous crack snapped the silence.