The spear was a lie in his hands. Julian held it the way he’d seen the others, but the balance was wrong, the weight a dead thing. It was a tool for a life he had only ever watched, a prop for a role he was failing to play. Ahead, Torvin moved through the dense undergrowth of the Wild. He did not walk through the forest; he was a part of it that had decided to move, his steps making no more sound than falling leaves. Julian tried to mimic the motion, a clumsy parody of a predator’s grace.
He was so focused on his feet, on placing Garran’s calloused soles silently on the damp earth, that he didn’t see the root. It was a dark, gnarled loop of wood, half-buried in moss. His foot caught. He pitched forward, windmilling his arms, and the spear clattered against a rock. The sound was a crime. A dry snap that echoed through the immense green silence. Fifty meters ahead, the broad-backed herbivore they’d been stalking for an hour went rigid, its head snapping up. Then it was gone, a brown blur dissolving into the trees.
Torvin stopped. He did not turn immediately. He stood perfectly still, a statue of contempt. When he finally looked back, his face was a mask of profound disappointment. It was not anger. It was a diagnosis. The look a man gives a tool that has just proven itself useless. He said nothing. The silence was a judgment, heavier than any shout. Another hunter, a younger man with scars striping his arms, just shook his head and spat on the ground.
They moved again, faster now, the easy pace of the stalk abandoned for a punishing trot. Julian’s lungs, accustomed to the sterile, recycled air of the Grid, began to burn. His body, this borrowed machine of muscle and bone, was a foreign country. It ached in places he didn’t know he had. Every breath was a gasp. His senses, dulled by a lifetime of augmented reality overlays, were a muddy, useless slurry. The hunters saw a dozen shades of green, read stories in broken twigs, tasted the direction of the wind. Julian saw a wall of green. He smelled only dirt.
He was a ghost, a passenger in a body far more capable than its driver. The world was a torrent of raw data he couldn't process. A flash of light at the edge of his vision, a shimmering grid of pixels overlaid on a fern for a split second. A STATIC_GLITCH. A ghost of the world he’d fled, haunting him here. He blinked, and it was gone. He was falling behind. The effort to keep up consumed all his focus.
He was watching his feet again. A fatal error. The ground simply ended. One moment, there was damp earth under his boot; the next, nothing. Just a dizzying drop into a ravine, its bottom a mess of jagged, moss-slicked rocks. His stomach lurched. He flailed, a man falling in a dream, his arms finding no purchase on the empty air. This was it. This was how his stupid, romantic escape ended. A broken neck in a ditch, a feast for whatever scavengers lived in this green hell.
A hand shot out, grabbing a fistful of his leather tunic. The grip was iron. He was yanked backward, stumbling, his heart hammering against his ribs. He fell to his knees, gasping, the smell of crushed ferns rising from the ground where he landed. Torvin stood over him, his face unreadable, his chest not even heaving. He had closed the ten-meter gap in an instant.
Torvin looked down at him, not with pity, but with a final, weary certainty.
— You are a songbird in a wolf hunt, — he said. The words were quiet, a low rumble, but they landed with the force of a physical blow. He didn't wait for a reply. He just turned and continued the hunt, leaving Julian kneeling in the dirt.
The price of the rescue was the last shred of his dignity. The insult was not just an insult. It was the truth. A simple, observable, and brutal fact. He had spent years in his sterile pod on the Grid, dreaming of this. The Wild. The real. A place where a man’s worth was measured by his own two hands. He had imagined himself thriving here, shedding the skin of his useless digital life and becoming something primal and true.
The fantasy died. It did not fade gracefully. It was murdered by a simple, observable fact: he was not good at this. He was a liability. A piece of faulty equipment. The freedom he had craved was not a gentle meadow; it was a finely tuned machine of muscle and instinct, and he was a broken cog. The silence of the forest settled around him, and for the first time, it didn't feel like peace. It felt like indifference. In the quiet, he heard a faint, high-frequency hum in his ears, the ghost of a data stream. A STATIC_GLITCH. The sound of the cage he’d left behind, reminding him he didn’t belong here, either.
The wind moved through the canopy, a slow, indifferent breath. The scent of crushed ferns and damp earth rose from where he had almost fallen.
He had failed in the world he chose. In the world he hated, his other self was about to become a god.
