Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 203: Ch201. [Dark Forest] (5) - Son of The Crawling Chaos

Chapter 203: Ch201. [Dark Forest] (5) - Son of The Crawling Chaos

The forest swallowed all sound except the rhythm of Miles’ footsteps. Each step deeper into the [Dark Forest] peeled back another layer of unreality. Stories didn’t just echo here. They bled, dripping from leaves like dew, seeping from the trees as ink.

Miles walked with his katana in hand, but it felt like holding a pen more than a weapon.

The air around him shimmered faintly, a distortion he had come to associate with the pressure related to a Story. [The Crawling Chaos] wasn’t present, but it was active. Watching. Listening.

It wanted something.

It wanted freedom.

He paused beside a fallen tree, its bark hollowed out by runes that rearranged themselves when he looked too closely. Pressing a hand against the wood, Miles felt it breathe.

"It’s not a dungeon anymore." He muttered. "It’s more like a page made manifest."

He moved on, his breath fogging in the air that should’ve been warm. The further he pushed, the more the forest stopped being a forest in and of itself.

Roots stretched like veins, humming with faint pulses. Every vine, every tendril, seemed to move just slightly when he wasn’t watching.

He passed a clearing filled with armor. Dozens of sets, but no bodies filling them.

The sets were still standing, though, still locked in the final postures of battle. But Miles didn’t stop to examine them.

Whatever had fought here didn’t win, and Miles was not going to be there to become one of them.

After another mile, the terrain shifted again. The trees thinned, and the ground dropped away into a shallow basin choked in fog. The air buzzed with something unrecognizable.

Below, in the center of a circle of silver-threaded trees, lay a mass.

At first, he thought it was stone. Or perhaps another fallen dungeon boss, but as he approached, it moved.

It pulsed.

It was a cocoon, twice the size of a siege engine. Not smooth, laced in veins of parchment and flesh, coiled with ink tendrils and twitching vines. Stories clung to it, unfinished and recursive, too grotesque to be called Stories at all.

And through it, Miles could feel the resonance.

This was it.

The core of the Dungeon.

Miles knew that, if he still had the system, he would see the name tag above the cocoon. But still, now that he had the [Story’s Eye], he was able to know the thing’s name without the aid of the system – even Alice’s version.

[Nameless Son of The Crawling Chaos — Cocoon Stage]

Miles exhaled slowly, a faint smirk curling his lips up. Cheshire wasn’t with him, and he had no backup.

That had been intentional, but for the first time, Miles was not so sure.

If this were part of a Story, he needed it to unfold untainted, though. But now that he looked closer with the help of the [Story’s Eye], he felt a pulse of hope in his heart.

’You’ll have dinner soon, Dee.’

He sheathed the katana, lowering himself in a striking posture, with one hand on the hilt and the other on the sheath, but before he could move, the forest spoke.

"You should not be here."

Miles turned, fast.

They stepped out from the trees like ghosts through curtains.

Cultists, looking like the ones that summoned the anomalous [Card Soldier] into the fight before.

A dozen, maybe more. Cloaked in dark-purple robes that flickered with unseen light. Their faces were obscured, but their mouths had been stitched shut, and their eyes glowed faintly with a black iridescence.

The one who spoke had no visible mouth.

"Mouthless, and yet I hear you..." Miles said, keeping the blade raised. "Curious. Have we met?"

"You hear what you need to hear." The leader said. "As all who stand on the border of Stories and truth do."

He took another step forward, tilting his head.

"You came seeking the answer, but you arrived at one of the questions."

"Cute." Miles flexed his grip on the hilt, lowering his stance even more. "But you’re standing between me and something that doesn’t belong in this world."

"He belongs where the ink flows." Said a third cultist. "And you are not allowed to interrupt his ascension."

"His?" Miles cocked his head.

"The Son." The leader said. "Born from chaos, cradled in conflict, fed with death. The System wrote itself to protect itself from this day. But the System is old, and the ink runs beneath it."

"You really like hearing yourselves talk." Miles sighed.

"We are not talking." The cultist said. "We are narrating."

"If he hatches, what happens?" Miles narrowed his eyes.

The cultists didn’t answer. The cocoon pulsed again, and this time, a ripple passed through the ground.

Something underneath the basin cracked.

"You’re not going to step aside, are you?" Miles’ fingers twitched on the hilt of his katana.

"No."

"Then I guess we’re writing this Chapter together." He nodded once and whispered. "Lonely Cherry Blossom of The Mountain, first form... Solitary Autumn."

He moved first, dashing in a straight line, and at the same time, Miles unsheathed the katana in a forward slicing motion.

It happened too fast for the eye to see, a simple slice of red against the fog, and it caught the lead cultist square in the neck.

But there was no blood.

Only ink spilled from the cultist, falling lifeless on his knees.

Another one surged forward, his hands raised with quill-like claws forming glyphs in the air. Miles ducked, twisted, and slashed the runes in mid-air.

They bled light and vanished.

Three more came at once, but Miles leaped back, landing near the edge of the cocoon.

It pulsed again, louder this time.

The cultists began to chant. No mouths, no sound, but the words still pressed into the space between Miles’ thoughts. They weren’t spells, though.

It felt more like they were trying to... To rewrite something.

Miles bit his tongue until it bled, grounding himself in the now.

"You want a rewrite?" He spat. "Fine. Here’s mine, it’s called [The End]!"

He planted his foot and surged forward again. His blade moved like a sentence cutting through a paragraph, deliberate and brutal, glowing with the energy of his own Story fragment. Still incomplete, but effective.

Another cultist dissolved, but there were more.

Way too many for him to deal with all of them by himself.

He was outnumbered, but not outmatched. However, this wasn’t a fight meant to be fair. It was a ceremony, a ritual.

And Miles had interrupted it.

One cultist extended both arms, and the ink from the others flowed into him.

He grew and shifted, expanding into something massive and skeletal, with parchment wings and claws like calligraphy pens. A mockery of a guardian beast, half-formed, half-imagined.

Miles grimaced.

"Right..." He said. "You’re all just Chapters of the same damn book, and it’s a bad one, at that!"

The beast charged, fast despite its size, almost making Miles recall the Revenant King, back in the Horizon.

Miles sidestepped, slashing up along its ribs. Ink sprayed again, but this time it stuck, clinging to his coat like glue.

The forest howled, the cocoon pulsed, the cultists screamed through their silence, and somewhere, behind it all, something opened its eyes.

Miles froze, just for a moment. He didn’t know why, but something in him looked back.

And it smiled.

He staggered, shook it off, still unsure if he wanted to know what it was, and slashed again. The Keeper shattered into ribbons, but even as it fell, its pieces began crawling back toward the cocoon.

Miles turned toward it.

He reached out with his senses, letting the ink on the cocoon touch his awareness, and what he felt nearly dropped him to his knees.

It felt like the draft of something barely cohesive to be called a though, but too vast and... Dark, to be called anything.

It was a becoming.

It didn’t know what it wanted to be. It had no alignment other than absolute chaos, no form.

It wasn’t evil, but it wasn’t kind, either. It was pure possibility.

Too much possibility.

And that was what made it so dangerous.

Too much possibility eats purpose, devours cohesion.

Eats stories.

And that’s what it had been doing, dungeon by dungeon, Story by Story.

Miles staggered to his feet, panting.

"I need to kill it now..." He whispered. "Before it’s born."

"It will be. Soon." Another cultist stepped forward.

Miles lifted his sword again.

"No." He said. "Not if I have a say."

And then he ran forward, straight into the inky heart of it.