The change was immediate when I stepped past the tree line.
The meadow birdsong cut off like someone had thrown a switch. The temperature dropped several degrees. The light shifted to something greener and more diffuse, filtered down through a canopy that my own art team had spent three weeks getting right, and now I was standing underneath it with my heart rate doing something my END stat of ten was not equipped to manage gracefully.
Every footstep sounded too loud on the packed dirt. Every shadow in my peripheral vision convinced my nervous system to fire before my brain could countermand it. I kept reminding myself that I was still inside the safe buffer zone, still two hundred yards from the chokepoint, still technically in the part of the forest I had designated as non-threatening.
