SSS-Ranked Awakening: I Can Only Summon Mythical Beasts

The forest at night was a different thing entirely.

The canopy during the day already blocked enough light that the difference between day and night beneath it was more a matter of degree than kind. What changed was the quality of the silence.

During the day, even at its quietest, there was movement in the layers above—wind finding gaps in the leaves, creatures shifting weight on distant branches, the faint settling sounds of a living ecosystem going about its business.

At night, those sounds stopped.

And what replaced them was something heavier. More deliberate. The Forest of Twin Disasters did not sleep the way normal forests did. It simply changed shift. The things that moved through it after dark were different from the ones that moved through it at noon, and they moved differently—with more patience, more intent, more awareness that the darkness was a resource to be used rather than a condition to be endured.

Damien moved through it without concern.

Not carelessly. He was not the kind of person who confused familiarity with safety, and this forest had shown him enough in the time he had spent inside it to know that complacency here had a short lifespan. But concern required a certain ratio of threat to capability, and the ratio had shifted since he first entered.

He knew what was here now.

Or most of it.

Fenrir moved ahead of him, threading between trunks and over roots with a silence that continued to be remarkable for something of its size. The wolf did not need to be told to stay quiet. It had calibrated itself to the forest hours ago—adjusting its footfalls, angling its body through gaps rather than around them, keeping its aura compressed to the point of near-invisibility.

Luton kept pace at Damien’s side, rolling silently across the forest floor in its flattened travel form. It had learned, over time, to match his pace instinctively. Not too close to be in the way. Not far enough to require attention.

The three of them made almost no sound.

For a while, that was enough.

Damien tracked time through the forest’s changes rather than any external measure. The density of the demonic essence in the air had dropped slightly since leaving the second base—not because the source was farther away, but because they were moving along a corridor of the forest that the demons had not heavily occupied. A natural gap in their positioning, probably intentional on the demons’ part—a route left clear to prevent drawing attention to what was being guarded.

It was the same route the trackers had used.

He followed the thread of it without rushing.

There was a version of this approach that would have been faster—Fenrir at full speed, direct line, no stops. He had considered it and set it aside. Speed mattered less than arriving functional. The fight at the second base had been real. He had not been pushed to his actual limits, but he had been pushed, and the difference between ninety percent and full capacity was something he had learned to take seriously.

Not from weakness but from experience.

A fight entered at ninety percent against an opponent calibrated to one hundred was a different fight entirely. And the third stronghold, by his estimate, would be larger than the second. Better positioned. More aware, probably, that something had gone wrong—even without direct knowledge of what, the silence where the second base’s presence should have been would register as absence to anyone sensitive enough.

He intended to arrive ready.

Which meant, at some point, he needed to stop.

He found the place by feel more than sight.

A natural depression in the terrain—not dramatic, just a subtle lowering of the ground surrounded on three sides by the exposed root systems of trees large enough that their trunks were wider than Damien was tall. The roots formed something close to walls on those sides, and the fourth side opened onto a section of forest floor that was clear enough to see across.

Good sightlines.

Natural cover.

Defensible if something found them, which it probably would eventually—this was still the Forest of Twin Disasters—but manageable.

He stopped there.

“Here,” he said quietly.

Fenrir circled the depression once, nose low, then returned and settled near the entrance. Not sleeping. Not resting in any way that would compromise its awareness. Just lowering its body to the ground and becoming still, the way large predators did when they were conserving energy without abandoning vigilance.

Luton drifted to a corner and went quiet.

Damien sat down against one of the root walls.

He exhaled slowly.

The physical cost of the last several hours was more evident now that he had stopped moving. Not pain—he had taken less damage in this forest than the fights might suggest. But the sustained output of essence, the constant low-level attention, the mental work of tracking, planning, and executing without pause—that accumulated differently. It settled in the body as a kind of heaviness that sleep would fix but rest could partially address.

He closed his eyes.

Not to sleep.

Just to stop processing externally for a while.

His system remained active—it always did, running quietly in the background, monitoring the state of his summons, flagging changes in the environment that crossed certain thresholds. He trusted it to surface anything that needed his attention.

He let his essence settle.

It was a deliberate process—not passive, not simply waiting for the reserves to refill on their own, but a light, focused management of the flow. Cycling slowly through his system, clearing the residual costs of the fight, allowing the deeper reserves to surface. He had more than most people understood, and the deeper reserves refilled at a rate that was, in his experience, not normal.

But he did not push it.

Pushing it would have defeated the point.

He let it move at its own pace and simply maintained the conditions for it to do so.

Time passed.

The forest sounds shifted around him—the particular calls and movements of things that had noticed the three of them stopping. Most stayed distant. A few came closer, then thought better of it.

One thing—he could not identify it precisely by presence alone—circled the depression twice at a distance of perhaps forty meters before concluding that whatever was resting inside it was not worth the risk and moving on.

He did not open his eyes.

An hour.

Then most of another hour.

He was not fully recovered—a few hours of rest in the middle of an active combat zone was not a substitute for actual sleep, and he was not naive about the difference. But the heaviness had eased considerably. His essence had refilled to a level he was comfortable with. The fog that had been sitting at the edges of his thinking had cleared.

Good enough.

He was about to open his eyes and signal that it was time to move when the forest changed.

The calls stopped.

Not gradually, the way sounds tapered off when something large moved through an area. All at once. A collective silence that spread across the surrounding terrain in a wave, as if every creature within a certain radius had made the same decision at exactly the same moment.

Damien’s eyes opened.

Fenrir was already on its feet.

Luton had shifted from its resting position to something denser, more compact.

Damien did not move immediately. He listened first.

The silence was directional—heavier from the northeast. Whatever had cleared the local fauna was coming from that way and had not yet arrived, which meant it was either moving slowly or was still far enough away that the creatures here were reacting to its approach rather than its presence.

He waited.

Thirty seconds.

A minute.

Then he felt it.

Multiple presences.

Not one or two, not a patrol—a group. Moving without particular subtlety, which meant either they didn’t know he was here or they didn’t care. The weight of the presences was significant.

Individually, each one registered at the lower end of Grade Three. Collectively, they were the kind of thing that would have caused serious problems for most people resting in the middle of a forest they hadn’t fully mapped.

Mana beasts.

He recognized the quality of it—not demonic, not corrupted by external influence. Wild. Territorial. The forest’s own residents, the ones that had survived and thrived inside the Twin Disasters long enough to reach a grade that made them legitimate threats.

He counted.

Twenty.

No—twenty-three.

Two more, hanging back slightly.

Twenty-five, total.

A pack.

Grade Three, all of them.