Craters gouged deep into the earth, some still smoking faintly. Trees had been snapped, uprooted, or shattered—remnants of a campfire’s bow and upended impact crater. Jagged ridges of earth jutted where food had once been made.
The shouting started immediately.
“Did—did you see his face? The mask—”
“Who the fuck was that?!”
“Did—did anyone see where it went?”
“Was that… was that a human?”
“Can we fight them? If we all—”
“No.”
“Are there more like him?”
“What happened to Harris—?”
The questions piled on top of each other, overlapping, breaking apart mid-sentence as new ones forced their way out. Voices climbed, cracked, dissolved into noise. Everyone was talking. No one was listening.
David stood among them, cursed weapon finally back in his hand, its power-laden weight doing nothing to steady him.
“Did you see how fast that one moved?” someone whispered, hysteria threading their voice. “The— the one-armed one— I didn’t even see him cross the field.”
Most of them hadn’t. Only Rhea, with her vision-enhancing skill, had even tracked the thing. David had only seen a blur that came too late. To outmaneuver the class, he’d abandoned his mundane sight and relied solely on his Battle Sense.
The outburst didn’t stop.
It wasn’t at anyone specific—just emotionally charged outbursts all around them. Questions hurled into the air like rocks, bouncing off nothing.
“Can we fight that? Can we even hurt it?”
“There were humans with it. Did you see that? Humans.”
That last one stuck. It rippled through the group.
“Humans… what the—”
“With classes. I saw a tag—”
“Do you think there’s more out there? Others?”
“That’s not possible.”
“It is!“
“What do we do now?!”
Someone screamed—sharp, brittle, frustrated, tear-filled and wrong—and immediately clamped a hand over their mouth, to cover their sobs.
David stood where the ogre had left the ground broken, the dirt still warm under his boots, listening to panic find its voice.
“I— I can’t— I can’t even tell what direction—” someone said, words tripping over themselves.
David’s eyes flicked over the clearing. Craters punched into the earth like fists. Trees snapped, sheared, or flash-frozen mid-fall where Jamie’s ice barricade had bloomed and then simply… fractured, the shockwaves turning everything brittle. Chloe’s living barricade—forced-growth trunks braided together in desperation—had been bypassed. Not broken. Ignored. The ogre had simply appeared on the other side of it, teleporting past effort like it wasn’t worth acknowledging.
As expected.
Every defense they’d built lay scattered or irrelevant. As David had always believed, it had only been a matter of time.
“How many more of us?” an older man whispered. The pensioner. His knuckles were white around his cane-like spear. “How many before something else comes back?”
No one answered.
“Like Mark, or Sara. Or Robert,” someone else said.
Robert was the first of them the ogre had ever killed—David had barely known him. The other names were unfamiliar to David, he assumed they were others taken or killed. Perhaps they were the abducted couple. Or one of the other survivors that didn’t make it—David had never tried to learn their names. Nor would he. They had been complete strangers back then.
The words had been quiet. Almost conversational. “Like last time.”
The sound drained out of the clearing after that.
The questions died mid-breath. Mouths opened, then closed again. People looked anywhere but at the churned ground where Harris had been standing. Or the bloodstains.
“And the big one—” another voice cut in, thin and shaking, “it wasn’t even trying. It just… ran.”
That was the worst part.
The level 48 ogre hadn’t raged. Its human enforcers, humans with classes—which until moments ago, had just been a theory by the groups youngest members, one that nobody had really believed was possible. The creature-aligned humans hadn’t snarled or taunted. They hadn’t even spoken. The level 27 Mind Knight had watched them like pieces on a board. The level 25 Swift-Footed Slayer had barely acknowledged them at all.
And the other one.
The masked human with the horned halo. The level 81 Demon Slayer.
To the others, it appeared as though he hadn’t rushed either.
He’d simply existed, eclipsing everything else by proximity alone.
Most of the group were barely level 10. A few had just crossed it. Even less were reaching 15. None of them were even close to 20. Standing near that thing had felt like standing next to a cliff edge you hadn’t seen until you were already falling.
David felt it then—that shift. The way fear stopped being loud and became heavy.
They were stood as if their feet felt welded in place. Like if anyone tried to move, the ground would just refuse them.
The air pressed on his lungs all the same. Sickly. Claustrophobic. Every breath tasted like dirt and ozone and old blood.
Rhea gazed at the treeline, head tilted, eyes unfocused—both searching the forest and tracking the absence of motion. She was the only one who’d actually managed to see the swift-footed slayer move. David saw a blur. Everyone else saw nothing. The way the one-armed, leather armored, classed-bearing man had been simply too fast for sight.
Jamie broke the silence by accident.
He spoke too loud, voice cracking halfway through his words. “Level eighty-one? Did anyone else see that? What the… what the fuck was that?”
Mia’s cat hissed from her arms, now returned, fur puffed, claws sunk into her jacket. Mia didn’t seem to notice.
“Where did he go?” Son asked. His voice was thin. “The demon slayer—did anyone see where he went?”
“No,” Evans said. Calm, but strained. “He vanished. Same as the ogre.”
“Same as—” Henderson started, then stopped. Swallowed. “So he could come back. Any time.”
“And the Ogre’s humans,” Theo added, one hand wiping sweat from his brow while the other squeezed his greatsword like an stress-ball. His tone was controlled, but strained. “Two of them. With classes. One was— what did it say? Mind Knight?”
“And the other—” Rhea said, not looking at anyone. She pointed at a gouge in the earth, a clean line cut through stone. “That one made this. The Demon Slayer. I didn’t see him move.”
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Chloe sank to her knees beside a scorch mark, mace slipping from her fingers. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to tuck them under her thighs to stop it.
“We have to save him,” someone said. Theo, maybe. “We can’t just— leave him.” It was Evans.
“Are you insane?” Theo snapped. He’d moved forward without realizing it, jaw tight. “You saw their levels. What that thing did. We’d be walking to our deaths.”
“So what?” Evans shot back, voice too loud. “We just… abandon him?”
“What if it comes back for more?” Someone whispered. “What if it takes another?”
“What if it takes me?” Son said.
No one contradicted him.
David felt it too—the paralysis creeping up his calves, locking his knees.
I couldn’t even do anything.
The thought hit him with humiliating clarity.
He’d thought—honestly thought—that next time would be different. With his skills, his abilities, his aspect and minions, with the demonic energy coiled inside him like a violent engine. He’d killed everything else that stood in his way. Every problem had broken eventually.
He’d believed that meant something.
Standing here, surrounded by craters and broken defenses and people who couldn’t even bring themselves to sit down, it felt laughable.
Pathetic.
David stared at the crater where the ogre had struck. What a joke, he thought. He had been beyond wrong.
Weakness. Helplessness. Fear. He hated that feeling more than anything. Despised it.
He never wanted to feel anything like it ever again.
“Leaving isn’t safe either,” Henderson said. “We don’t know where we are. Every direction is unknown territory.”
“Then what, we just run?”
“To where?”
“We don’t even know where we are!”
“Staying isn’t safe,” Evans replied quietly. “And neither is pretending walls mean anything anymore.”
Someone—David didn’t bother noting who—said, “Maybe we fortify more. Bigger walls. Deeper trenches.”
“This entire place is just… god—” Henderson agreed back. “We should stay put—”
“That’s the dumbest thing you could say,” someone else barked. “They’ll come back.”
No one even argued. The idea just… died on arrival.
David exhaled slowly.
“Listen,” he said.
They all turned.
“Harris is gone,” David continued. His voice was steady. It surprised him. “Either he’s dead, or he’s that thing’s now.”
Chloe flinched.
“We don’t have the levels,” David went on. “Or the time. And waiting just means we’re standing still until something bigger notices us.”
Corbin stared at him. “What are you saying?”
David’s gaze slid—measuring. Counting. The injured. The slow. The ones who couldn’t run if they had to.
“We move,” he said finally. “We level. Aggressively. No more bunkering. No more pretending defense will save us. If something like that comes again, we either kill it—or we make sure it doesn’t want us.”
“And Harris?” Someone asked—Henderson. His voice broke on the name.
“What exactly do you want me to say to that? That we’ll save him? Because I won’t lie to you.” David didn’t soften it. Harris bought us time—bought ‘me’ time, he thought.
The silence that followed wasn’t shock.
It was recognition.
Evans looked sick. “That’s— that’s not how this works.”
“Then suggest something better,” David said. He didn’t look away.
Mia hugged her cat tighter. The animal’s heart hammered against her chest.
Somewhere in the back of the group, someone started to cry. Low, and stifled. Like they were ashamed of it.
Someone yanked a bag closer and started shoving things into it without folding.
“We need to go,” a man said. “Now.”
“Go where?” Henderson snapped back. “You want to sleep in the trees?”
“At least the trees didn’t eat Robert,” the Pensioner said.
That shut a few people up.
“And Harris,” someone else added.
“This place keeps getting people killed,” Evans said. “We’ve seen it happen.”
Henderson pointed at the wreckage. “And this is the only thing that’s stopped it from being worse. Metal walls. Cover. A perimeter. You leave that, you’re on the ground.”
“The ogre walked straight through everything,” Jamie said. His voice cracked. “It didn’t care.”
“We can build more,” Henderson said. “We’ve got ice. We’ve got trees. We can make it stronger.”
“It didn’t matter,” Son said. “Nothing slowed it.”
People talked over each other.
“We move west.”
“We can’t stay here.”
“This place is bad.”
“So is the forest.”
“We don’t know what’s out there.”
“We know what’s here.”
David listened. He didn’t step in right away. Not again. He watched who was already packed and who was still staring at the plane like it might argue back.
“Like I said before,” David said.
That got attention.
Corbin frowned. “what’s the plan?”
“We stop pretending shelter fixes it,” David said. “We level. We hunt.”
“That means people die,” Henderson said.
“People are already dying,” David replied. “The difference is whether it gets us something.”
Silence stretched.
Someone started crying. Quiet. Embarrassed.
David bent down and picked up the spear.
He didn’t say anything while he did it. He just put his hand on it and pushed.
[You have bound First Tier Weapon: Devotional Wraith Spear — cursed — to your body and pathways.
All attributes increased by +20%
Wraiths will hunt you until death or the weapon is unbound.]
David felt a surge of strength and deathly energy surge in his veins, slamming into his bones like weighted platinum.
The energy flowed. Thick and heavy. The metal darkened, then brightened, slipping out of focus like it wasn’t fully here anymore.
People stepped back.
“I’m leaving,” David said. “I’ll be back when I’ve made this place safer. Or I won’t.”
He picked up the axe. Then the sword. No one else reached for them.
This world rewards momentum. If they freeze here—they stayed welded to the ground.
And something would come back. Next time, it wouldn’t bother negotiating.
David wouldn’t be here when it did.
David turned away from the group and started toward the treeline.
Someone said his name. Then someone else. Then several at once.
“David—”
“You can’t just leave—”
“We need you here.”
Corbin stepped in front of him again, closer this time. Not aggressive. Blocking the path like a man standing in a doorway during a fire.
“This isn’t you walking off from a bad meeting,” Corbin said. “This is life and death.”
David stopped. Looked at him. Really looked.
“It already is,” he said. “It’s been life and death from the first moment we landed here.”
Evans moved up beside Corbin. “You go, you take power with you. That’s what you are now. You walk out, this place gets thinner.”
“I know,” David said. “Im still leaving. It won’t be permanent.”
He needed the bodies—weapons to throw at the many problems he now faced. That was what he’d come back for.
That answer landed badly. A few people reacted like they’d been slapped.
Chloe’s eyes were red with tears. Son shook his head, eyes wet, furious and scared and unable to put words to it.
“How could you,” the Pensioner said. All accusation and broken fear. “After everything.”
David didn’t answer him. They weren’t close. He owed him nothing.
Rhea watched him from a few steps away. She hadn’t spoken during the argument. She’d been watching the same things David had. Who could move. Who couldn’t. How many people there were. How fast things had escalated.
She took a breath and walked to his side.
Evans noticed immediately. “Rhea—”
“I’m going with him,” she said.
The words weren’t loud. But they hit like a brick.
Several people reacted at once.
“What?”
“No—”
“We can’t lose both of you.”
Rhea didn’t look at them. She looked at Jamie.
Jamie had gone very still. His hands were clenched at his sides. His jaw worked like he was trying to chew through something invisible.
“I can’t,” Jamie said, swallowing. “If I leave, they don’t have walls. They don’t have—” He gestured, helpless. “They need me.”
Rhea nodded once.
David didn’t react. He just looked. He had expected that. Jamie was useful, but abandoning the group just wasn’t in his nature. At least not yet. He would have to work on that in the future.
David turned, Rhea followed.
Corbin swore under his breath.
“Wait.”
Corbin hesitated. Then he stepped forward, and reached for the cursed sword David held. David let it happen, curious to see if his thrall had the nerve, if he’d learned anything from the encounter, or was just posturing. If Corbin bound the blade, it would simply be a reallocation of resources. What he did next would determine how David would use him until he found a suitable demon soul to replace him with.
Corbin immediately shoved his energy into the blood-cursed weapon. The blade reacted immediately.
Everyone stared.
Energy surged from him into the blade immediately. The sword reacted hard, vibrating, biting back. Corbin hissed through his teeth but didn’t let go.
“Corbin,” Evans said sharply. “You don’t know what that does—“
“I know exactly what it does.”
Corbin drew his knife and cut his palm deep. Blood welled up fast. He pressed it against the blade and smeared it down the length of the metal. Blood gushed way more than should have been possible. His face drained of color as the sword drank it in. His muscles swelled, veins bulging, and David saw his every pathway light up with power, like live circuitry.
“Chloe,” he said. “Fix it.”
She stared at him for a second, then moved. Hands shaking. Focus snapping into place as she grabbed his wrist and poured healing into the wound. Color crept back into his face slowly.
Well would you look at that, David thought, pleasantly surprised. He hadn’t expected that at all. I guess Corbin isn’t totally useless after all.
Seeing that, he decided to leave him some orders.
Only the first two were orders, Corbin would feel unnaturally compelled to stay alive and level hard. But who wouldn’t after what they’d just been through? David suspected the orders would only increase the intensity and volume, but every level counted. The rest of his words were just that; simple non-compulsive words, mixed among them as cover.
Corbin’s face reddened as he began to yell, but David held up a palm.
That was not an order, but with what had happened, it would function like one. Without him and Rhea, Corbin wouldn’t have a choice.
A high level Corbin and Evans package deal would be useful against the ogre, even if was just to distract its high level, hostile humans long enough for David’s group to kill the thing.
Nobody looked happy.
David didn’t care either way.
He didn’t need sleep.
Or food.
He needed levels.
Power.
He never wanted to feel that helpless again.
David turned to Rhea. She was already facing the trees.
Behind them, people were crying quietly. Packing faster now. Panic turned into motion. The entire group preparing to leave.
Jamie stayed where he was, ice forming unconsciously around him as he watched them disappear, responsibility rooting him harder than fear ever could.
David stepped into the forest.
His demon stirred. His wolf moved at his side. The hob followed without question.
Rhea went with him.
They disappeared into the forest.
Without him the group would feel raw, vulnerable. They would have to level out of sheer principle fear.
He’d need as many high level bodies as he could get to kill the ogre and its humans. Corbin would lead the rest of them in hunting that thing.
If they lived, he’d have a small, higher level army. If some of them didn’t?
Well, that was on them.