A mischievous spark made her want to place the Tablet atop the blonde’s head and use it to measure just how much taller she was, but the mental image was sufficient. For a while the four of them walked down the trail in silence, the Swordsman giving the occasional backwards glances, whilst Spliteye downright stared when she thought Zelsys wasn’t looking. An hour, perhaps two - it wasn’t easy to tell in the monotonous quagmire of this place. The only measure of how far from the living forest’s edge they were was the size, shape, and density of the trees - the closer they got, the more the forest around them turned from a maze of dead wood to something actually reminiscent of a dead forest, though the treeline was still all too dense to see more than a few paces off the footpath.

At some point, Spliteye finally piped up.

“We’re not war criminals, if... That’s what you were thinking,” she said, audibly weighing each word as she spoke it. The foreign inner voice flashed in Zelsys’s head again in response. “Probably the survivors of some lost company,” it said.

“I don’t care,” she lied. “I just need to get out of here.”

Spliteye fell silent at that, seemingly content with such an answer. Once more, the four walked in cautious silence, with only the howling of the winds and the creaking of dead wood to keep them company. They eventually reached the living portion of the forest, the sound of rustling leaves overwhelming the creaking of dead wood. The living forest’s border was outlined by rune-etched marble stones half as tall as her spaced some twenty paces apart. Much like the forest, even the stones themselves were split down the middle - visibly decayed on the dead side of the forest, with the runes nearly worn away on those she could see, while the halves on the living side were overgrown with moss.

They walked alongside the border until the path led them to a gap in it, a stone that had seemingly been shattered into pieces, or perhaps chipped away. The plants around the gap were either completely dead or visibly dying, as if the death of the other side was actively spilling through. They passed over the broken barrier-stone, following the footpath for a few more minutes into the forest as it began to get noticeably dark.

The smell of Viriditas and the sound of bubbling liquid echoed through the trees as the Swordsman disappeared past a sharp left turn, Spliteye walking ahead to join him. Zelsys emerged into a clearing amidst the trees, its centerpiece a large vehicle with two deflated front wheels and broken, rusted tracks, small shrubs growing through the gaps. The transport’s back door had been repurposed as a table stood atop some lumber next to the vehicle, a tarp stretched from between three trees to cover it. There was also a deep firepit with three rounds of lumber placed around it as seating, a makeshift metal grill placed atop the pit itself, on which there sat a large copper pot with some sort of soup bubbling within. However, something else drew Zelsys’ attention.