The trail through the forest is no less meandering than it had been inside the wards, wending between bits of cover along the ward-line for a short distance before turning and heading deeper into the forest.

It’s a long, tense, silent trek through the night-dark woods, following a trail of blood back-back-back, through the darkest bits of cover, around every patch of moonlight, every little clearing, until it feels like they’ve covered most of the woods, until it feels like they should soon be finding the other side—!

Ria suddenly stills and gestures sharply for the rest of them to stop. “I think this is it,” Ria murmurs as she slowly kneels and leans forward a bit. “Tobias?”

Alexis sweeps her gaze across the woods even as Tobias slips closer to Ria to help her look; there really isn’t anything special about this spot that Alexis can see or sense, which is worrying. Is the whole forest trapped without their knowledge, or was this some sort of… of targeted attack on that specific Shinigami? Or was it just coincidence that that Shinigami fell into it?

“Whoever set this up was a bastard,” Tobias snarls low-harsh-infuriated as he and Ria start carefully dismantling whatever they’ve found. When Alexis makes a soft noise of curiosity, he spits out, “It’s multi-part, starting with a simple ‘capture’ trap to hold the victim in place, then proceeds to drain their spiritual powers dry—”

“Likely to fuel this bit,” Ria interrupts, nudging something with a stick as she does. “Which is… I’m not really sure, actually,” she muses as she leans closer. “I’ve never seen this combination of sigils before.”

“Separate it from the rest and bring it back with us, if you can,” Alexis orders without hesitation. “We need every bit of information we can figure out.”

Ria hums in agreement as she examines the area a second time, then pulls some tools out of her pouch and sets to work, delicately moving things around that Alexis can barely spot between the distance and the darkness.

“I think… the damage was done in his escape?” Tobias says as he moves a bit further from Ria. “This… hm…” he trails off as he circles the area, head tilting as he examines things. “No. Whoever set this up didn’t want to kill whoever they trapped,” Tobias decides with finality, as he rises up on his toes and runs a hand over the trunk of a tree. “Except our guest fought back before the trap fully triggered and ended up hurt.”

Alexis watches Ria and Tobias work, the two of them slowly dismantling the trap and erasing signs of its — and their — presence as they go. She sees more than one bit get wrapped in cloth and carefully tucked away, and with everything the two scouts pack up, her sense of unease grows; this trap is exponentially more complex than any other trap she’s seen or set in her life, which means they have no idea what it’s true intended effect was. Their new guest could be even more dangerous than just the danger a Shinigami posed, and, worse, he might not even realize it.

“I don’t like how close to our clan home this trap was set,” Alexis murmurs with a wary glance at Briar. “Either the trapper was aiming for one of us, or they knew there would be Shinigami lurking around.”

“I know,” Briar replies just as quietly, voice heavy with his own unease. “And here we stand, in the dark, at the site of the trap itself.”

Alexis pauses, eyes Briar’s shadowed form and then the forest around them, and asks, “You think the trapper will return?”

“I think it’s likely,” Briar agrees grimly. “Boil it all down, and there’s only two goals to trapping: kill—”

“Or capture,” Alexis finishes with a grimace. She’d known that as soon as Tobias had said the trap wasn’t meant to kill, but to hear Briar say it aloud…

Well. It makes the dark, dark forest with its quiet and its shadows and its stillness into a threat. More of a threat. Every rustle of wind through leaves, every creak of branches, every crack and sigh and whisper feels like death looming over her shoulder. There is a malevolence in the darkness around them, not active, but still present. Lingering. An echo of an echo, just at the border of sensing.

(Traps are not set without purpose.)

(Traps that can capture an adult, that can do something to them, that — in failure — can nearly kill their prey…)

(She does not want to meet their mysterious trap-maker unexpectedly.)

“How much longer?” Alexis can’t help but ask, even as she rolls her shoulders to loosen them up and forces her limbs to relax.

(If their trap-maker appears, she cannot afford to be stiff or slow.)

If they are lucky, they will not meet the other now. If they are lucky, this trap was set to capture one specific Shinigami, for a specific reason, and the other Shinigami will suspect nothing.

(If they are unlucky, they are about to be accused of breaking the peace, and war is about to descend once more upon their heads.)

(Please, please let them not be unlucky…)

“We’re about done,” Ria finally answers as she rises from her crouch and casts a look over the area. “There’s… not much more we can learn, here. We’ve collected what we can and erased the rest, and hopefully whoever set this up did it without orders. And hopefully there aren’t any other traps out here.”

Tobias makes a soft noise of agreement, already walking another circuit around the area, then pauses, sucks in a sharp breath, and kneels. His hands sweep out, brushing aside some leaf litter, and then emerge holding a blade that shines as it catches the moonlight. A very distinctive, very infuriated blade.

Infuriated enough that Tobias hisses and immediately drops it again, shaking his hands as if shocked. “Well, be that way,” he snaps at it as he rubs his hands together. “I suppose you don’t want to be returned to your wielder, then? I’ll just leave you there for whoever did this to find, I’m sure they’ll be fascinated.”

Alexis covers her mouth, biting back amusement as the blade’s anger wavers and turns suspicious.

“No, we didn’t do this,” Tobias tells it as he leans back in and pokes the hilt with a finger. “Why the fuck would we do this? We’re not stupid, no matter what you Shinigami think of us,” he grumbles, poking the hilt a second time. “We’re only here because your wielder stumbled his way through our wards and ended up at our Clan Head’s house, so if you want to be reunited with him, maybe consider letting me pick you up.”

The suspicion wavers. Banks. Settles into a sense of annoyance-wariness-impatience that slowly fades from Alexis’ senses as the blade stops projecting as much.

“If you bite me again, I’m dropping you and leaving you to your fate,” Tobias warns the blade as he carefully reaches out and scoops it up a second time. He pauses a moment, as if waiting to see what will happen, then heaves a sigh and climbs back to his feet, tucking the blade through his belt as he does. “Right, one temperamental blade acquired. We’re definitely done here.”

“Right. Tobias, lead the way back. Ria, make sure our track’s erased,” Alexis orders as she takes a step back and half-turns back the way they came.

“Understood,” Ria and Tobias chorus as they start moving, Tobias moving past Alexis and Briar in order to take the lead while Ria starts erasing what she can.

The way back to safety is no less tense than the way out; in fact, now that they know the trap was supposed to capture their Shinigami guest, they’re definitely more tense than they started. The specter of their unknown trapper looms over their shoulders as they wend their way back through the woods, ducking from shelter to shelter much like the Shinigami did on his way in.

But they make it back to the wards without any sign of the trapper and slip back through over the toppled tree.

“Briar, help me deal with this,” Alexis hisses once they’re on the other side. “Ria, Tobias, get the rest of the trail cleaned up, we’ll meet you back at Erich’s house once we’re done.”

She turns back to glower at the fallen tree as her two scouts do as ordered, considering the size of the trunk and its position; they’re still going to need the wardmasters to walk the full border, but with a hostile unknown beyond their borders she can’t justify leaving it like this.

“I hope we’re not moving the whole thing by ourselves,” Briar says as he steps up to her side, arms crossing over his chest. “I’m strong, but I’m not that strong.”

Alexis snorts in amusement and shakes her head. “No, let’s just chop a section out where the wards should cross it and roll that out of the way. I can patch the wards once we do, so no one else can get through as easily.”

Briar makes a noise of agreement and moves to a part of the trunk just past the little creek. Power flickers around his left hand, gathers, and then flares to life as he brings it down upon the wood, slicing a great gouge into the trunk with little effort.

Before Briar can get too far ahead of her, Alexis takes her place on the other side of the wards and begins slicing through the trunk on that side. They fall into a rhythm together, cutting through the trunk and slowly adding hardened reishi beneath the section they’re carving free in order to incrementally lift it up, easing their progress by preventing the trunk from shifting too much.

It doesn’t take too long to cut the section free, and even less time to roll it aside, but at the same time it feels like an eternity. By the time they’re done, the sky is already lightening with hints of false dawn and the first birds are beginning to chirp, and even as Alexis carefully smooths away the weakness in the wards she feels… drained. Empty in a way that aches because it’s a new day. It’s a new day, and their problems are only going to grow. She’s handled the immediate concerns, but there’s so much more yet to come, so much that she can’t yet anticipate—

“Come on,” Briar says gruffly, gently nudging her away from the wards and towards the clan homes. “It’s— well, it’s early now, and we’ve been up half the night. To Erich’s place we go, where you are going to crash until he finally wakes up. Everything else can wait for now.”

“Stop making sense,” Alexis grumbles, running a hand over her face and then squaring her shoulders as they cross the gardens in a more direct route than the weaving path the Shinigami took the night before. “I just hope we get a few days before other Shinigami start sniffing around.”

Briar grimaces and casts a glance back over his shoulder at the wards. “One can hope. But in the meantime, I am going to order extra patrols around our borders, on top of having all the wards checked. We can’t upgrade to the war wards without being obvious, but…”

“But we can take steps,” Alexis agrees with a nod. “Make sure the patrols stay inside our borders,” she reminds him. “We don’t know if there are any other traps out there, and until we know what this one did…”

“Yeah.” Briar breathes a soft sigh and shakes his head, adding, “One step at a time, Alexis. We’ll find a way through this.”

“I sure hope so,” she can’t help but murmur as they finally come out onto the path to Erich’s home. She pauses there, lips pursed and gaze focused on the little house that Erich’s made his own over the years, and can’t help but add, “If it comes to it, I’m not letting him on the battlefield again.”

“He’ll fight you on that,” Briar reminds her softly, though his voice shades with steel-warmth-determination in the process.

Alexis clicks her tongue and slants a look at Briar that he meets with a steady gaze. “He can argue it all he wants,” she settles on after a moment, “but I won’t give in. And if I have to figure out how to either eliminate an entire military organization from the world, or how to permanently hide us from the world, I will.”

Briar watches her for a long, breathless moment, then nods sharply and says, “Then lets hope that it doesn’t come to that.”

“Let’s hope,” Alexis agrees with a faint, lopsided smile. “And in the meantime…”

“We’ll do what we can,” Briar says firmly. “Get some sleep, Alexis, I’ll see you whenever I manage to wake back up.”

She laughs softly and waves him off, not bothering to watch him leave as she continues down the path towards Erich’s home; she knows he’ll get everything done like promised, and he’s right, it is more than past time for her to get some sleep. She’ll be better able to make decisions once she has.

She’s going to need it.