Neo came down from the building with his hands in his pockets and found Alice already waiting below.

She stood near the entrance in her usual quiet way, straight-backed, calm, with the morning air moving lightly through her hair. The city had not fully woken yet. A few cars passed. Somewhere down the street, metal shutters were being dragged upward. The day still felt half-open.

"You’ve been here long?" Neo asked.

Alice shook her head once. "I got here a minute ago."

Neo stopped beside her and glanced down the road, checking for the vehicle they had arranged the night before. "Good."

Alice studied him briefly. "Did you sleep?"

"Enough."

That answer satisfied her. It would have satisfied almost anyone, really. With Neo, most things ended there unless they deserved another sentence.

The transport truck turned the corner a short while later, large, dusty, and ugly in the practical way vehicles got when they spent more time outside the city than in it. It rolled to a stop in front of them with a low cough from the engine and a slow hiss from the brakes. The paint had once been dark green. Now it looked burned out by sun and road grit, with old scratches along the side and a crust of dust gathered around the wheels.

The driver’s window rolled down.

The man behind it had to be in his sixties, maybe older, with a lined face, a rough white beard, and a cap that looked as though it had survived more weather than some people survived years. His skin carried the deep-browned color of someone who lived on roads and under hard skies. He took one measure of Neo, another of Alice, and clicked his tongue.

"You’re the pair going to the Dry Scar Grounds?"

Neo nodded. "That’s us."

The old man glanced between them again. "You are pretty young. I imagine you just awakened."

Neo’s expression did not move. "That’s right. And we are paying."

That earned the faintest twitch from the driver’s mouth.

"Fair enough. Get in."

Alice climbed into the back first, moving without hurry, and Neo followed after her. The inside of the truck smelled of old leather, dust, engine heat, and stale smoke that had seeped into the seats years ago and never left. There were two narrow benches in the back and a dented metal divider between them and the driver’s cabin.

The old man pulled away from the curb once both doors shut, steering into the waking traffic with the ease of someone who had repeated the same motion more times than he could count.

For the first few minutes, nobody said much.

The city drifted around them in layers. Apartment blocks. Glass fronts still dim. Cafés lifting their lights one by one. Delivery vans. Early joggers with clean shoes and expensive water bottles. Arandom still carried that strange order Neo had not quite made peace with. Even now, part of him expected the surface to peel away if he stared at it long enough.

The driver checked the mirror once.

Both young. Both armed, probably, though nothing showed. Both quiet enough to make the truck feel colder than it already was.

’Damn. These two are ice.’

He let the thought pass and cleared his throat.

"First time going out there?"

"Yeah," Neo answered.

Alice gave a small nod beside him. "First time."

The old man grunted. "Good. Better to know that before I waste words."

Neo leaned lightly against the window behind him. "We’re listening."

That seemed to please the driver a little.

"Dry Scar isn’t a Breach," he said. "That fools people. They hear hunting grounds and think easy money, fresh air, a few beasts, then dinner." He spat the last word out with a trace of contempt. "Plenty of graves started with that sort of thinking."

The truck left the broader roads and moved onto a longer strip of highway cutting away from the city. Buildings thinned. Concrete gave way to industrial edges, then storage yards, then wider ground where Arandom no longer pressed in from every side.

The old man kept talking while the road unrolled ahead.

"It’s wide country. Dry. Mean. The land tricks you by showing you everything at once. You think you can read it because it’s open, but the dunes fold wrong, the wind changes old tracks, and distance lies to you." One weathered hand shifted on the wheel. "Years back, people said it used to be forest. Some old one. Nobody agrees on what killed it. What’s left now are those giant trunks sticking up through the sand like spears left in a corpse."

Alice turned slightly toward the front. "There are ruins too?"

"Plenty." He nodded once. "Half-buried stone. Broken stairs going nowhere. Old walls swallowed down to the teeth. Maybe shrines. Maybe markers. People with books can argue over that part. You’ll see them soon enough. Just don’t get clever and start poking everything that looks ancient."

Neo almost smiled at that.

The driver caught it in the mirror and continued.

"The ground changes under you. Hard crust one stretch, soft sink the next. Some beasts bury themselves and wait. Others lurk near ruins. A few use the dead trees the way city rats use gutters." His voice roughened slightly. "Dry Scar doesn’t kill with noise. Mostly it waits until someone relaxes."

Alice’s voice came low from the bench. "What hunts there?"

"Dune hounds. Needlebacks. Burrow eels farther south if you wander where you shouldn’t. Stone-scaled lizards near the older ruins. Sometimes bigger things if the season’s turned ugly." He shrugged one shoulder. "The place is broad enough that one side can feel empty while the other is chewing through people."

Neo listened without interrupting.

That mattered. A wide hunting ground meant space, routes, room to move. It also meant easy angles for something human to disappear into.

As if the driver had followed the same line of thought, he gave another glance through the mirror and lowered his voice a little.

"There’s something else."

Neither Neo nor Alice spoke.

The old man went on.

"Heard rumors lately. Government’s sniffing around too, so it’s probably got some truth in it. There’s been an awakened killing other awakeneds outside the city routes."

Alice answered first this time. "In the hunting grounds?"

"In and around them. Not always Dry Scar. A couple of spots. Far routes. Areas where people go in pairs or small groups because they think they’re safer outside a Breach." He rubbed one thumb across the steering wheel. "Bodies found light. Some missing cores. Others just cut down and left."

The truck filled with a different kind of quiet after that.

By then the city had shrunk behind them. The land outside had gone flat and harsher, the colors pared down to pale grass, dust, cracked soil, and long stretches where nothing wanted to grow.

Neo asked, "The government knows who it is?"

The old man gave a short grunt. "If they did, I’d sleep better. What they know and what they say are different matters. Could be one man. Could be more. Could be hired work. Could be some bastard who found hunting people easier than hunting beasts." He shook his head once. "Makes little difference when you’re the one bleeding."

Alice rested both hands loosely on her knees. "So we stay together."

The driver nodded. "Exactly. Don’t split because one beast runs the wrong way. Don’t chase something into broken ground without checking what else is around you. And if either of you feels that old twist in the gut telling you the place has gone wrong, listen to it."

Neo’s face stayed dry as ever, but his voice lost a little of its usual edge when he answered.

"Understood. Thanks for the warning." 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

The old man glanced at him in the mirror again.

Respect without softness. He appreciated that. Most young awakened either acted immortal or talked too much trying to hide nerves.

"You’re welcome," he said. "Useful habit, listening when someone older bothers to speak."

The road worsened after that.

Smooth pavement gave way to patched ground that looked repaired more often than rebuilt. The truck jolted harder. Dust rose behind them in long pale tails. The sky opened wider above, bleached almost white where the sun had started climbing in earnest.

Dry Scar revealed itself slowly.

First came the trees.

They rose on the horizon as thin black marks, too tall to be scrub, too bare to pass for anything living in the ordinary sense. As the truck drew closer, their shape sharpened. Massive trunks, some dark as charred bone, others bleached pale, all stripped clean of leaves and branches until they looked less like trees than pillars driven into the earth by something old and merciless. They stood scattered across the sand in loose ranks, each one casting a narrow shadow.

Then came the dunes.

Ash-gold, faded brown, pale where the wind had scraped the top layer away and exposed harsher ground beneath. Between them, half-buried stone lines appeared and vanished, as if an older country kept trying to rise through the sand and failed every time.

The truck rolled to a stop on a rise overlooking the outer edge of the grounds.

Alice watched through the windshield without speaking.

Neo did the same.

The place had the silence of something ancient enough not to need spectacle. No welcoming air. No grand threat. Just distance, wind, dead trunks, and old stone drowning slowly beneath the sand.

The old man killed the engine and turned halfway in his seat.

"I’ll be back near sundown," he said. "If you’ve got sense, you’ll be here before me. If you don’t..." His shoulders lifted. "I’m not driving into that wasteland to search for two young fools who ignored good advice."

Neo reached for the handle.

"Fair."

Alice gave a small nod. "We’ll be back."

The old man watched them climb down into the dry wind and the empty width of the place ahead.

’Ice. Both of them.’

He only hoped that would be enough.

Neo shut the truck door behind him and faced the hunting grounds properly for the first time.

The air tasted dry enough to crack the tongue.

Alice stepped up beside him.

For a few seconds, neither spoke.

Then Neo said, "Let’s go."

Alice nodded once, and the two of them started walking toward the sand.