The woods were still in that early-Sunday way where even birds seemed hesitant to start anything. Ethan shifted in his stand, bow resting across his lap, regretting the thin gloves he insisted were “fine.”
His phone screen lit up silently.
Abby: See anything yet, Mighty Provider?
Ethan: Cold.
Abby: I hit my buck last week. You’ve got no excuses today.
She attached the photo—her with her eight-pointer, looking like she’d been waiting her whole life to brag.
Ethan typed back, Congrats on your deer. Again.
They both knew what he was really after: “Chairman,” the heavy ten-pointer they’d caught on their trail cams. Big frame, thick beams, that unmistakable old-buck swagger. Abigail named him because “he runs this forest like he owns stock.”
Ethan: If Chairman steps out, he’s mine.
Abby: Bold of you to assume he didn’t relocate after watching me flex last week.
Ethan rolled his eyes.
Movement below cut through the stillness. Broad shoulders easing through the brush. Antlers catching the first thin strip of morning sun.
Chairman.
He didn’t text this time. He rose slowly, drew, steadied, and let the arrow fly.
The hit landed deep in the buck’s shoulder. Chairman bounded, crashed through brush, and vanished into the ravine.
Ethan: Hit was solid. Tracking.
Abby: On my way. Don’t mess this up.
They met at the ridge and descended the narrow trail into the gully—damp leaves, steep drop-offs, the smell of wet earth.
Abigail pointed. “There.”
The buck lay still—but a translucent brown mound clung to its shoulder. It pulsed slowly, like breathing gelatin. The hide beneath it was softening as if being dissolved.
“What is that?” Ethan muttered.
Abigail’s jaw dropped. “It’s a slime!”
“My buck!?”
She was already recording, moving for a better angle. “This is insane. This video is absolutely going viral.”
Ethan grabbed a fallen branch and poked the thing. The tip hissed and came back with a scorched groove.
“Oh, come on.”
“Yeah, like that cute blue one in the cooking anime we watched!” she said.
“This thing is not blue or cute.”
“It still counts. You’re getting menaced by pudding.”
He tried dragging the deer. The slime stretched like taffy but didn’t detach. They tried rocks, sticks, and an ill-advised boot nudge. Nothing.
“Knife?” she suggested.
Ethan grimaced, drew his hunting knife, and drove the blade straight into the slime. The knife sank in cleanly, but the creature didn’t react—no recoil, no change in texture, nothing to suggest the strike mattered. He pulled the blade free and stabbed again with more force, but the result was exactly the same: the slime absorbed the hit like wet clay.
Abigail winced. “Wow. Zero feedback.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” he muttered, adjusting his stance. He angled the next thrust toward what looked like a firmer spot, hoping for any kind of response, but the slime simply quivered in place. Without warning it whipped a pseudopod at him, forcing him to jump back with an undignified noise.
“Oh my god it fights!” Abigail half-laughed, half-squealed.
“Stop enjoying this.”
“Find the core,” she said, scanning with her camera. “There’s always a core.”
She pointed. “Right there—darker spot.”
He lunged and missed. Tried again while the pseudopod thrashed uselessly.
The third strike hit home.
The slime burst into drifting blue motes and vanished, leaving behind a tiny, glittering blue shard on the buck’s hide. Neither moved to touch it.
Abigail finally lowered her phone. “So… monsters?”
Ethan exhaled. “I have no idea. But—”
He cut off when something upstream caught his eye.
Between two leaning sycamores stood a crystalline frame, five meters wide and three tall. Angular, faceted, glowing softly along its edges in the early morning sunlight. The center of the frame was solid black—an opaque void, matte as charcoal, the light around it seemingly being pulled into void.
Abigail stared, her voice dropping into a whisper. “That… definitely wasn’t here before.”
Ethan swallowed hard, unable to look away from the black interior. “No. It wasn’t.”
She edged forward by a half-step, eyes locked on the frame. “That’s a dungeon entrance.”
Abigail didn’t even blink as she said it, which did nothing for Ethan’s nerves.
They stayed where they were, balanced between instinctive caution and the pull of something impossibly new.
Their world felt different now, and neither of them pretended otherwise.
