Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 236: Ch234. The long climb

Chapter 236: Ch234. The long climb

The mist didn’t lift, but it changed.

It grew thinner, less choking, more like breath than shroud.

Where before the air had stilled around them, now it moved. Not with wind, but with purpose.

They felt it more than saw it. A pulse like memory guiding them upward, away from the hollow and toward the waiting ridge.

Sarissa leaned on her broken spear like a crutch. Her leg bled sluggishly beneath bandages fashioned from Miles’ shirt. Dee limped ahead, refusing to be carried. Its scales were scuffed and dulled, but its eyes remained sharp.

Miles walked behind them, silent, one hand trailing along the roots that curled up the slope like stairways half-swallowed by time, his other hand flexing rhythmically, as if feeling for something he couldn’t quite name.

The silence between them was choked with reverence. The forest was quiet now, but not empty. It watched, and not all the watching felt hostile this time.

At times, Miles thought he saw things. Shapes in the mist, half-formed figures just beyond the curve of a branch or the bend of a root. Some were animalistic, while others were too familiar.

His own shadow once split in two and walked beside him for three paces before fading.

They were not illusions. Not tricks of the darkness around them.

It felt more like they were... Echoes.

The path narrowed ahead of them. Moss-covered bark and knotted stone formed crude steps, worn smooth by no feet they could name. The climb steepened, and with it, something inside them seemed to shift, too. To Stretch, to uncurl within them.

Sarissa was the first to notice.

She paused, leaning against the stone, and closed her eyes. Her breath hitched, and then steadied.

It didn’t feel a memory. Didn’t eve feel like a vision.

Just a truth, surfacing.

A glimpse of the girl she had been before The Glitch, before Wonderland... Before Shinji and Miles and the Union and all the names she carried.

A moment when she had stood on a rooftop in the winter, staring up at the stars and wondering if she would ever change.

The Sarissa of that night had no [Classpect], no power.

But she had wanted to become something. And now, that yearning took shape, not as recollection, but as a strange pattern.

She opened her eyes and said nothing, but her gait changed.

It became a little steadier, a little taller.

Miles felt it too, moments later. As they passed through an arch made of twisted branches and fossilized root, a tremor ran through his chest. Not pain, not fear.

It felt like... Something aligning within him.

He remembered standing in his parents’ room, the [Tutorial Spawns]’ bodies scattered around him. This time, though, he remembered not the loss, but the choice he made days after.

To keep going, to rise, to name that moment not an end, but a beginning.

That choice had become him.

He had worn it like armor, unknowing, ever since. And now, it wore him back.

His eyes drifted shut for a second, and when he opened them, the path had changed again. Narrower still.

The trees here were vast and ancient, their roots fused with stone, their trunks etched in veins of green-gold light.

The sacred plateau waited above.

And Cheshire waited with it.

He crouched on a broken bough that jutted like a balcony from the upper slope, his grin noticeably absent. His tail flicked once, and when he spoke, his voice lacked its usual melodic humor.

"You’re late, or early. Depends on how you count beginnings."

"You knew where this led?" Miles frowned.

"’To know’ is a strong word. I only suspected." Cheshire leapt down lightly, landing between them. "Tir’Serene does not offer this climb to many, and you’ve survived what it sent first."

"The beast?" Sarissa narrowed her eyes.

"No." Cheshire said, and turned to walk beside them. "That was not from Thalan’dor, or how you call it, the forest. That thing was part of the rot that festers in stories left untold. The kind that tries to wear flesh not because it needs to... But because it hates what it’s lost."

"It wanted to become something it couldn’t." Miles rubbed his temple.

"And so it tried to become you." Cheshire gave a slow nod. "But you had already chosen yourselves. That is... Very rare."

They reached a landing. However, the plateau was not quite a summit. It was more like a stage carved out of mountain and root, lined in old stone and dotted with shallow pools.

Mist drifted through it like curtains pulled aside by invisible hands, and in the center, there was a tree.

It was small, if they compared it to the giants around it.

No taller than Miles, its trunk gnarled and curled like a question mark. Its leaves were silvered green, and they shimmered faintly, even in the gloom.

A soft hum came from it, as if it were inviting them.

"This is where the forest ends." Cheshire stopped a few paces from the edge and sat cross-legged.

"What’s beyond it?" Miles looked up the path.

"Whatever begins." Cheshire’s smile returned. Tired, this time, earnest. "The forest is dying. Or sleeping. It’s hard to tell, but either way, it brought you here to witness its last truth."

"And what truth is that?" Sarissa stepped toward the tree.

"That you are not just Survivors, or Fighters, or Godslayers." Cheshire looked at her, then at Miles. "You are Witnesses to the death of one world, and the choosing of another."

The tree pulsed once. And then they heard the voices.

Their own, and others’. Future-selves, or maybe alternate ones. The voices didn’t speak in words, just resonance.

The way a Story might feel before it’s told.

Sarissa touched the bark, and it was warm. Miles stood beside her, and for a second, the two of them could feel it.

A thread running backward and forward through themselves, but it didn’t feel like Fate.

It felt like possibility.

"What do we do now?" Miles exhaled.

"You rest, you recover, you learn to listen again. Not to the System, though... To yourselves." Cheshire stood, brushing off imaginary dust. "This place marks the end of the rules you knew, and the start of something, older. Truer."

"And you?" Sarissa turned.

"I was born in this world, long ago. But where I come from... It doesn’t allow me to have a place within these heartbeats. However... I think I’m beginning again, too." Cheshire’s eyes shimmered, two vertical slits in the dark. "I might disappear, but you might meet me once again."

Cheshire made a brief pause, and then added, its impossibly wide grin returning one last time.

"This time, though, you’ll meet the original me."

And disappeared like smoke dissipating in the air, leaving the three of them, standing in silence for a while, with a little bit more questions than answers in their hearts.

Then Dee padded forward and curled beneath the tree, letting out a soft trill.

Sarissa sat beside it, her hand still on the bark. Miles sat across from her, watching the silver leaves tremble in a wind that didn’t quite exist.

Above them, the mist parted for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.

For a single heartbeat, they saw stars.

And for the first time in their entire existence, the questions didn’t matter so much.