The ridge held for almost a full mile before the terrain forced Aryan's hand.
The jagged outcroppings that had shielded him from direct line of sight to the valley floor thinned into a narrow, exposed shelf — barely wide enough for one person, with a sheer drop on one side and the valley itself opening up fully on the other. There was no way around it without descending into the Choir's territory directly, and no way back without retracing two hours of cleared ground through territory that was, by now, certainly aware something had passed through it.
Aryan crouched at the start of the exposed shelf and forced himself to actually look down into the valley for the first time.
What he saw made his stomach turn in a way none of the Stalkers or the corrupted terrain had managed.
The valley floor was carpeted in bodies — not corpses exactly, because corpses implied stillness, and these things still moved, slow and aimless, shuffling in loose circles like sleepwalkers who'd forgotten where they were walking. Dozens of them. Some wore the tattered remains of hunter armor. Aryan recognized A-Rank guild insignia on more than one torn cloak.
[Eye-equivalent threat sense: Predator's Instinct flickering erratically.]
[WARNING: Targets do not register as hostile. Targets do not register as deceased. Classification failure.]
His own skill didn't know what to call them. That, somehow, frightened him more than a clean threat warning would have.
He thought of Sera's account — three of my squad simply stopped, mid-fight, standing still, eyes open, like they'd forgotten what they were doing — and understood, watching the slow, hollow circling below, exactly what she'd meant. They hadn't died. They'd just stopped being anyone in particular, and whatever was left kept walking because walking was the last instruction their bodies had ever been given.
The layered hum rose again, closer now that he was exposed on the open shelf, and this time Aryan caught fragments at the very edge of comprehension — not words, precisely, but something that pulled at the shape where words should be, an itch behind his eyes that wanted very badly to resolve into meaning.
Don't.
He fixed his eyes on the far side of the shelf instead, on the path forward, and made himself count his own footsteps instead of listening — one, two, three, the same trick he'd used years ago counting steps under the weight of a supply pack to keep his mind off how much his shoulders hurt. It was a small, stupid thing. It was also, he found, enough.
He was halfway across the shelf when one of the shuffling figures below stopped moving entirely and turned its head directly toward him.
It shouldn't have been possible. He'd made no sound beyond the soft scrape of boots on stone, nothing that should have carried over the layered hum filling the valley. But the figure's hollow, distant gaze fixed on him with sudden, unsettling precision, and a beat later, every other figure in the valley stopped its aimless circling and did the same.
Dozens of empty eyes, all turned upward, all fixed on him at once.
The hum shifted. Sharpened. For one terrible second, the overlapping voices resolved — not into a sentence exactly, but into something close enough to recognition that Aryan's chest went cold.
...new...
...listen...
...come down and listen...
He didn't run. Running, some instinct insisted, was exactly the kind of attention-drawing motion that finished whatever process had already started. He kept walking, deliberate, unhurried, counting his footsteps louder in his own head, refusing to let the half-formed words settle into anything his mind could chew on further.
[Hunter's Ledger: +15 EXP — Resisted Cognitive Hazard.]
The notification was almost funny, in a grim way. Apparently surviving an encounter with an ancient psychic horror counted as a quantifiable achievement now, alongside killing wolves and dodging claws. He didn't laugh. He didn't have the spare attention to spend on laughing.
The figures below began moving again — not toward him, not exactly, but in his direction, a slow, patient drift up the valley's gentle slope, the kind of pursuit that had clearly never needed to hurry before, because nothing it had ever wanted from prey required catching them quickly.
Aryan reached the far side of the shelf with his pulse hammering and didn't stop moving until the terrain folded back into proper cover, jagged rock rising high enough on both sides to block line of sight to the valley completely. Only then did he let himself stop, back against stone, breathing hard, the layered hum fading slowly behind him into something more like distant weather than an active pursuit.
[Ding! Host has evaded Corrupted Zone Hazard: "The Choir."]
[Status Effect Check: Cognitive Corruption — Not Detected.]
[Hunter's Ledger: +50 EXP — Survived direct exposure without engagement.]
[Level Up! Host has reached Level 13.]
He allowed himself exactly ten seconds to simply breathe before forcing his mind back onto the problem at hand. The valley was clearly the heart of the second tier — the wreckage of both missing A-Rank teams was almost certainly down there somewhere among those slow, hollow figures, and Reyes had been right that going in directly, the way those teams must have, was a death sentence dressed up as a tactical decision.
But the third tier — whatever fed the Gate itself — had to lie beyond the valley. There was no path around it that Aryan could see from his current position, no convenient ridge that circled the entire basin.
He sat with that problem for a long moment, dagger resting across his knees, the distant hum still audible at the edge of hearing, patient as ever.
Sera said the effect was tied to proximity and duration. Four seconds before it took hold completely, and that was at the center of a fight, full attention split a dozen ways.
What happens if I'm not listening? What happens if I never look long enough to start?
It was a thin plan. It was also, as far as Aryan could tell, the only one that didn't end with him joining the slow, hollow circle on the valley floor.
He stood, checked the dagger's edge out of habit, and began looking for the narrowest, fastest route across the valley floor instead of around it — counting, already, exactly how many footsteps it would take to cross before the Choir finished deciding whether new was worth chasing properly.