Chapter Text
Tommy hit the ground hard.
The ground rushed up to meet him before he could even register what was happening, a tangle of roots and fallen leaves scraping at his skin and tearing through his hoodie. The impact knocked the air from his lungs in a harsh, strangled sound, leaving his body rolling through undergrowth and roots as if the world itself was trying to catch him. His shoulder slammed into the earth, head clipping something solid, and his ankle twisting beneath him with a sharp, sickening snap that sent white-hot pain shooting up his leg.
He lay there, stunned, staring up at a canopy of green he didn’t recognise.
The ground beneath him is soft. Too soft. Damp with leaf litter and moss, the smell of rot and rain pressed into the air around him. Roots dig into his side instead of breaking his back. Branches loom overhead instead of open sky. The forest is alive in a way the place he left never was, birds shifting, leaves whispering, something small skittering away nearby, and that alone is enough to make his pulse spike with sudden, animal fear.
Stone was supposed to be cold.
Stone was supposed to be jagged and final and unforgiving. It didn’t make sense. None of it did.
He had aimed for stone, for cliffs and sharp edges and a quick end—the sharpest drop he could find, the kind where even if you panicked halfway down, there wouldn’t be time to regret it. Stone doesn’t bend. Stone doesn’t cushion. Stone ends things.
This… this is wrong.
At first, he thinks he might be dead after all.
His chest heaved as he dragged in air, each breath coming in short, sharp pulls that felt like they scraped on the way down, ribs flaring in protest. Panic crawled up his spine, colder than the forest air, because this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to still be here.
Everything hurts—and not in that distant, muffled way injuries sometimes do after a fight. This was loud and immediate, pain stacked on pain until his body can’t decide which part to scream about first. His ankle is on fire, twisted at an angle that makes his stomach churn. His ribs protest every inhale. His arm burns, hot and wet, his fingers slipping when he tries to curl them into the dirt.
His eyes won’t focus. The world swims in greens and browns, the canopy above him smearing into light and shadow. For a moment he can’t tell if it’s shock, or the way his head rang when he hit, or if it’s the blood dripping down from the cut on his forehead and into his eyes. He blinks hard, swiping at his face with the back of his good hand, only to make it worse.
Tommy tried to sit up.
The moment he shifted his weight, pain exploded in his ankle. He cried out before he could stop himself, the sound tearing out of his throat and echoing too loudly in the quiet forest. He collapsed forward, palms hitting the ground, breath hitching as he fought not to scream again. His ankle throbbed viciously, already swelling.
“Fucken Stupid,” he muttered under his breath, more reflex than thought.
He stayed there, hands shaking, blood dripping slowly from his arm onto the dirt. His heart wouldn’t slow down. His thoughts spiraled, messy and loud, skipping from Dream to exile to Techno and Phil and back to Dream again. For a terrifying moment, he half-expected to hear his footsteps or a mocking voice drifting through the trees. He scanned the forest wildly, eyes darting between trunks and shadows, waiting for Dream to step out and finish what he’d started.
No one came.
The silence pressed in around him, thick and unfamiliar. No distant explosions. No screaming. No constant threat humming in the air. Just birdsong and wind through leaves and the sound of his own ragged breathing. It made his skin crawl.
He didn’t trust this place.
He tried to move.
Pain tore through his body the second he shifted, sharp enough to knock the breath from him. His hands slipped in the dirt and he fell back with a small, broken sound, staring up at the leaves above him. His chest hurt. His ankle ached. His arm burned. Everything screamed at once, and he knew he wasn’t getting anywhere like this.
So he stopped trying.
He stayed where he was, flat on the ground in the damp leaves, one arm pulled weakly across his chest while the other bled into the earth. His breathing slowly eased, not because he made it, but because his body decided for him. Tommy watched the canopy blur overhead until his eyes finally slid shut, and he didn’t fight it.
After a while—he doesn’t know how long, because time feels weird and stretchy and wrong—he forces his eyes open again.
The forest was still there.
That, more than anything, is what finally convinces him this isn’t a dream. Dreams blur at the edges. They don’t stay still like this. The trees stand straight and evenly spaced, their leaves thick and green instead of ragged and half-burnt. The ground beneath him isn’t cratered or torn apart. No creeper holes yawn open nearby. No scorch marks. No random bits of obsidian jammed into the dirt where someone once thought it’d be funny.
The grass is… trimmed.
That’s the part that really gets him. It’s stupid, but it is. The grass around him isn’t tall and wild and uneven like it is everywhere around L’Manberg. It’s cut back, neat, like someone actually cared enough to go through and keep it that way. Paths wind between the trees, worn smooth instead of gouged out by explosions and boots and running for their lives. Even the undergrowth looks intentional.
It’s pristine.
Tommy lets out a weak, breathless laugh that turns into a hiss when his ribs object. Of course it is. Of course the one time he actually commits to dying, he lands somewhere stupidly perfect. Somewhere that looks like a spawn area someone spent hours decorating instead of a warzone people abandoned once it got ugly.
There is no place like this around L’Manberg.
There never has been.
His gaze drifts, slow and unfocused, taking it in without really meaning to. No towering walls. No watchtowers. No looming structures meant to remind you who was in charge. The forest doesn’t feel empty, exactly—more like… quiet. Lived in, but gently. Like whoever owns this place doesn’t need to prove it.
That should scare him more than it does.
Slowly, carefully, he shifted back, dragging himself against the base of a tree. His rubs screamed again, but he clenched his teeth and swallowed the sound, forcing it down until it hurt his jaw. He pressed his back to the trunk, trying to make himself smaller, less visible, his injured arm still curled protectively over his face as if expecting another blow.
The weight in his limbs grows heavier, dragging him down into the ground. The adrenaline that kept him moving, kept him alive, finally starts to bleed out of him along with everything else. His arm throbs, sticky with drying blood. His ankle has gone numb in a way he knows is bad, but he can’t bring himself to care enough to panic about it. Even his thoughts feel sluggish now, sliding past instead of crashing into each other.
He should get up.
He should hide.
He should be ready.
But he’s so tired.
Tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. Tired in his bones, in his head, in the part of him that’s been running for so long he forgot what it felt like to stop. The forest doesn’t shout at him. It doesn’t threaten. It doesn’t chase. For the first time in what feels like forever, nothing is demanding anything from him.
His eyelids droop despite himself.
“If this is a trap,” he mutters hoarsely to no one, voice barely louder than the rustle of leaves, “it’s a really bad one.”
The tree's trunk is cool against his cheek. The air smells clean. His breathing slowly, painfully evens out, each rise and fall of his chest a reminder that he is still here, still alive, whether he wanted to be or not.
Tommy’s eyes slip shut.
And despite everything—the blood, the pain, the fear curling tight in his chest—exhaustion finally drags him under once again, and the forest keeps his secret.
Xisuma is halfway through a routine scan when the server stutters.
It’s subtle. The kind of thing most people wouldn’t notice at all. A half-beat hitch in the flow of data, a microscopic delay as lines of code cascade down the screen embedded into the multiple screens in front of him. Normally, Hermitcraft runs smooth. Clean and predictable. Every system where it should be, every permission accounted for, every barrier doing its job.
Xisuma prides himself on that.
The code continues to scroll, luminous and orderly, when a line flashes out of sequence. Then another. Then a sharp, corrective snap as the system attempts to reconcile something that should not exist.
Xisuma straightens.
His hands still on instinct, fingers hovering just above the controls as his eyes narrow behind his mask. The disturbance is already gone — swallowed back into the stream like it never happened—but the afterimage lingers in his mind. He rewinds the feed, isolating the moment, slowing it down frame by frame.
There.
A spike.
Not a breach. Not exactly. The firewall never tripped its alarms. The void protocols didn’t activate. No forced deletion, no consumption, no automatic rejection. Which in itself is… wrong. Anything that tries to enter from outside the whitelist, anything that even brushes against the edges of the server through the void, is meant to be erased before it can resolve.
Hermitcraft does not allow accidents.
Xisuma runs a deeper diagnostic, pulling the relevant layers apart. Permissions. World state. Entity tracking. Player list.
Nothing.
No new name appears. No join message echoes through the system. No ping, no handshake, no acknowledgement that the server accepted anything at all. And yet the code insists something happened. A momentary fluctuation in the world data, localized, precise, and unmistakably physical.
This shouldn’t be possible.
The protective systems around Hermitcraft are layered for a reason. Even if something managed to bypass one—which in itself would be impressive, if not impossible—the others would compensate. The void eats intrusions. The firewall shreds malformed data. Anything not explicitly permitted doesn’t get to exist long enough to cause a ripple like that.
And yet.
He checks again. Then again, just to be sure. The logs are clean. Impossibly clean. No corruption flags, no error cascades, no signs of hostile interference. It’s as if the server itself hesitated… and then chose to continue.
Xisuma doesn’t like that.
He leans back slightly, folding his arms as the code continues to flow past. Whatever caused the disturbance isn’t active now. Whatever slipped through isn’t trying to leave. For the moment, the system is stable.
That doesn’t mean it’s safe.
After a brief pause, Xisuma brings up the server channel.
[Xisumavoid]: Server check. There was a minor anomaly detected. If anyone notices unusual behaviour or terrain changes, let me know.
There was no need to alarm anyone over something he doesn’t yet understand. Still, his attention doesn’t return fully to his original task. Part of it stays locked on that hiccup in the script, on the quiet patch of world data that looks exactly as it should.
Xisuma watches the code a moment longer, thoughtful.
Somewhere out there, the server is holding onto something it was never designed to receive.
And he intends to find out what.