The night dragged them into sleep, embers sinking into ash. And while they dreamed of crowns, the living tide still pressed at the edges. Many "lucky ones slipped" across a border poorly guarded, at an hour too soft. They entered alive because vigilance was elsewhere.
Destroyer woke to it, snarling, anger still wet in his throat. He kicked the embers, scattering sparks, voice booming:
"Pathetic. You call yourselves fire? We sleep, and lambs slip past the gate! Where's your bite? Where's your steel?"
He brandished the blade in the half-light, red-streaked still, as if his rage alone might catch the runaways.
Nameless woke with bark in his hair and rot in his lungs and counted it profit. The night had given him nothing that glowed—no loot, no levels—but it had given him height. From the hollow trunk, from the crown's old scaffold, he had eaten from the only tree that never runs out: knowledge. Intelligence grants nothing; it reaches everything. He tasted the clearing like a banquet and made himself hungry.
They moved at first light. The "captain" lounged where the ash was still warm, the sword across his knees like a pet. The other three drifted off with the pretense of foraging—sticks, roots, a handful of berries—then bent their path away from the fire for a counsel in the scrub. Nameless followed at the distance of an idea.
He watched them lay the tribute down later—wood and food like offerings at the foot of an idol—and saw what he needed: who served, who thought, who obeyed only the work. Thalmeris stood in the middle of the absence like a hinge, the gray eminence behind the blade's noise. Nightveil kept his hands clean and his answers short. Grinblade wore devotion like a mask that smiled too much.
They spoke before the offering, where the trees kept secrets.
Grinblade, voice bright as a lie: "Not yet. I can mimic the cut, but the Gift itself hasn't bitten."
Nightveil, dry: "How long do we keep the ox fed, then? When you have it, we end him."
Nameless let the thought click into place with the finality of a lock. The suspicion he had been nursing all night came out of its egg, whole and ugly. "There it is. The plot breathes."
Thalmeris lowered his eyes, the words coming like a lesson he had already taught himself. "Transmission is not a festival; it is a gate with a narrow crack. S-rank passes by chance, and chance obeys predisposition. In his case—atributes such as STR and a measure of INT. Low odds, but they accrue with contact. You do not receive the whole; you take a spark. Five percent, no more, and then you must fan it. With a master, faster. Alone, slower. The born-heir wakes at one hundred; the taught-heir begins at five and must walk the ninety-five."
Grinblade whistled a grin. "I'll walk. I'm patient when the prize is loud."
Nightveil: "Good. When he has given you enough, we cut the noise."
Thalmeris inclined his head, as if tipping a cup to an absent author. "I read the minimal kit before entry—the notes 'Nameless' left as scaffolding. The manual was more useful than the world deserves."
Nameless felt a small, incredulous laugh rise and die. "People really read that? I wrote it so I wouldn't forget my own rules."
Thalmeris went on, a little bow to genius folded into his tone: "The inherited Gift is whole cloth. The transmitted Gift is patchwork—begun small, grown by labor."
Nameless watched the three return toward the fire, arms loaded, faces empty. Destroyer received the tribute as if the road itself had learned manners. The others ate beside him with the ease of men measuring a grave.
"Fattening the pig for Christmas," Nameless thought, mouth dry with the sourness of accuracy. "They'll carve him as soon as Grinblade tastes five percent."
He shifted in the dead wood and let the world line up. "Good. Let them teach me everything they have before I teach them anything I am."
Nameless turned the scheme over like a coin. The rot was simple, old as men themselves. A guild, a company, a republic—always the same. Trouble begins when one of the partners stops caring for the money and starts lusting for power. The ledger can share profit; it cannot share crowns. So they plot. With Caesar it was no different.
He let the thought settle into use. "If their hands already itch for betrayal, then mine can itch for profit." He still had to train—one way or another. To walk away now was to waste the banquet he had watched all night. Even the Gospels taught it: learn from the unjust steward, make use of the weapons of iniquity.
His plan took shape. He eyed Destroyer across the camp. "Even from him there's meat on the bone. A miserable teacher, but a teacher still. His blade can be mimicked, his form borrowed. He doesn't need to know he's instructing me. The chalk screams while I write down the line."
Nameless smirked. "This Gift is worth the theft. With my INT and STR as they stand, I can catch it before Grinblade does—take a pearl from a swine."
Nowadays, the internet and AI have killed a lot of myths surrounding education. Thinking about that, he then followed his plan with some clever remarks: "A teacher never teaches anything to anyone. He only delivers the matter. It is the student who decides to learn. Distance makes no difference. A martial hall proves it: the pupil at the far edge of the tatami can mirror the master as well as the one at his side."
He look at Thalmeris, who was just in the corner of the fire camp, alone. The shadowed master, the eminence of the trio—Nameless wanted a piece of his art also. Not the whole cloth, but the threads, the principles of his elemental habilities. Enough to pull it apart and reweave it in reverse. Reverse engineering was cleaner than begging.
The strategy widened. He couldn't remain idle, waiting weeks for chance transmission. "Stagnation killed faster than any wound", he thought. He needed XP flowing, but without exposing himself to the risk of being caught without IP or Breath while they should be fully restored. That meant, "The old tricky", baiting mobs into their path, letting the guild do the slaughter while he drank from the ledger's hidden line: assist credit, XP for presence. He would not burn his Image Points on forest mobs alone—exhaustion was a death sentence. Better to let them bleed, to split their breath, while he kept his own pulse calm and fattened quietly in the shade.
So he planned: throw a stone, shift a scent, angle the beast toward their camp, and vanish. The guild would rise, fight, and sweat. He would stay in cover, eating from the spill of their effort. "One man's trap becomes another man's harvest."
Dawn did not soften the road; it only changed the hue of its cruelty. The clearing wore that clean hush that follows noise: ashes cold, breath visible, leaves keeping their secrets. The world felt empty in a way that wasn't lack so much as discipline—space arranged to strip a man down to what he was when no one answered his voice.
He thought of it at once—the desert. Not sand, not waste, but that harsher desert. The wilderness beneath trees, the wilderness inside the chest. He remembered Jacob stepping from the caravan, gaining nothing from men and everything from the solitude. He too walked always a little behind, always apart, finding more in distance than in company.
After some time, Destroyer had made peace with his wrath the way a drunk makes peace with thirst: by indulging it until it looked like calm.
The guild stirred ahead. Destroyer was first to his feet, the tantrum of the night fading into the calm of a man at peace with his rage. He took Grinblade by the collar of attention, barked instruction, and began to show him the blade as if showing himself. Nameless leaned closer through the leaves, more curious now than disgusted.
Destroyer swung, a crude liturgy: "King's Wrath," he called it, voice thick. The blade heaved down, cutting air like it was insult, then slamming into the husk of a dead tree, striking it as though bark should bleed. For a moment it was only violence. For a moment it was craft.
Nameless studied with a scholar's recoil. This was no pure warrior's form; it was the bastard grammar of the berserks, northern stock of Montanum, born from the irascible heart of Altum Petram itself. "Lamé", he thought, the syllables sour in his mouth. The brute had stumbled into technique, but not alone. Someone had taught him.
His eyes flicked to the half-sylvie, robes sagging with dew. Of course. Thalmeris, whispering ironies. He had led Destroyer not leftward, toward patience, but rightward, toward fury. Like a serpent feigning charity, he had pointed the baronial captain to the only school his spirit could drink from. A cruel joke, perhaps. Or a perfect fit. He had only pulled from him what was already fermenting inside. "Lucifer smiles while Satan swings," Nameless thought, half-smirk, half-repulsion. "Good humor, Thalmeris. Caustic. You are using my lore well. The difference is—I don't cast pearls before swine. I slaughter swine."
The day spread its fever—the forest shone black and white at once, spring pressed through branches with the clarions of autumn. Houses gutted by fire peeked through the trees like broken teeth, ruins turned to punctuation. He watched Thalmeris and Destroyer stand across from one another, the irony drawing itself: the teacher feeding the brute with the very appetite that would consume him.
Destroyer's sword heaved again, and Nameless traced its edge with thought. The steel bore its own curse. Every berserk knows this: a weapon takes the habitus of its hand. A blade swung always in fury becomes itself an archive of fury. It remembers. It grows. For the berserks, their weapons evolve by kill-count—especially by the blood of other players. The bronze rusts into something more, into hunger. It becomes famished iron, its edge tasting old blood like a tongue.
Now it made sense. Destroyer demanded the last hit not from vanity alone, but because each final blow fattened his blade. The brute had found himself an economy—brutal, efficient, unsustainable, but real. Nameless watched and filed the thought: "So be it. If Thalmeris instrumentalises my lore, I can instrumentalise the brute's steel." A cursed sword that trained itself would spare him the ledger of resource management. One less thing to balance; one more thing bent toward survival.
"Give the stage to whoever wants it," he told himself, iron dry. His own feint grew sharper in silence. Better not to reveal himself sage—not yet. Ambiguity was the strongest mask. His current build—half-wolf, half-cultist, half-monk—confused the ledger at a glance. Ambiguous armor, reversible robes, a skull-face under a hood. Anyone might see him as anything. And where nothing is expected, nothing arrives. Ignorance fed by falsity, falsity crafted for ends—a cemetery of information.
Destroyer roared again, the sword biting dead bark, and Nameless imitated from afar. Movements that were not yet skills still carried the contagion of the school: the bastard berserk style, bloody, sentimental, visceral. Cuts with no economy, thrusts with no restraint—every strike a scream rather than a sentence.
Nameless felt the bile rise. He could not stomach this style, but the lesson demanded it. "When something is free, you are the product." And now he was paying in disgust to feed on swine grass, consoling himself with thoughts of Olympian skills yet to come. The higher gifts, the late harvest—that would be his wine.
The training dragged on. Destroyer swung until his breath sagged and his rage dulled to a hoarse voice. He dropped the blade to his side, sweat black with dirt, and barked: "Enough. My gift of teaching is spent. Breath's half gone."
[Breath: 24/74]
Nameless weighed it with arithmetic. The brute must hold near 100 Breath; he himself had burned 50 out of 74 to match the rhythm. The ledger announced itself soon after:
[Short Sword Proficiency +15]
[Short Sword Proficiency +15→ 37/10,000]
And later, another note, quieter, less final:
[Skill Warming — Initiated]
He closed the window of thought with a faint smile. "Still the antechamber, not the stage itself—but near enough to hear the lines, near enough to guess the tragedy's end."
They tarried on the roadside until breath returned to their warriors. Destroyer sprawled with arms crossed, boasting even in fatigue, while the others murmured that more human spawns would appear west. All they had to do was wait: sooner or later, fledglings would come stumbling here to orient themselves—and be cut down as the last ones had been.
Nameless heard it all from the margin. A repeat of the ritual. The same butchery dressed as inevitability. He let the thought stir bitterly: "Perhaps the new lambs could use a shepherd of a different kind."
He crouched in the brush, tracing the topography in silence, mapping ruin and grove in his mind. He remembered fragments—beasts seeded in these woods—but nothing immediately worth the ledger. Until he saw it: a feral boar rooting alone, tusks wet, shoulders broad. Its solitude mirrored his own: more misanthrope than man.
Perfect Sight slid over it:
Wild Boar — Level 5
Nameless measured quickly. "Yes. Let them bleed before they hunt again."
He picked a stone, nestled low, and waited. When Destroyer's voice grew loud enough to tear at the branches, he flicked the rock into the open and ducked into shadow. The boar's eyes flared, red and furious, snapping toward the sound. No thought, no hesitation—only retribution.
The brute charged through the trees, the forest splitting around him. Destroyer hardly had time to curse before the mass struck him square, slamming him into the dirt. Hooves hammered down, tusks flashing, rage heavier than iron.
"Grinblade, you idiot—get it off me!" Destroyer bellowed, thrashing under the weight.
Grinblade rushed in with theatrical panic, slashing at the boar's flank, but the beast pressed harder, tusks grinding. Nameless noted the truth with a cold eye: "He must have spent everything in Constitution and Strength. No DEX, no escape. A walking anvil."
Thalmeris finally moved. Breath drawn, hands cutting low—"Impetuous Wind." The gale struck, peeling the beast sideways, long enough for Destroyer to stagger to his feet.
"Sinister Cut!" Grinblade cried, voice cracking with play-acted courage, slicing a horizontal gash along the boar's ribs.
Nightveil did not hurry. He only smirked once, coldly, then loosed an arrow clean into the beast's face. The animal shrieked, the shaft quivering from its skull.
That was enough to unchain Destroyer. He roared, blade raised, and dropped it with violence on the boar's hind leg. "King's Wrath!" he bellowed, shearing the limb clean. The scene collapsed into butchery. The boar flailed, screeching, blood spattering the road in sheets, its cries like a slaughterhouse echo, raw and pitiful. Destroyer advanced, eyes alight, sword rising again to sever the head.
But the beast screamed, crippled, refusing silence. It moaned and bellowed, dragging itself with three legs, screaming in a pitch that did not belong in forest or farm.
Nameless stiffened. From the same dark margin where the boar had come, other sounds cracked through—shrill, quick, almost mirthful. Not hoofbeats. Not claws. Something slyer, sharper.
He slid deeper into the hollow of his tree, breath caught, Perfect Sight ready if needed.
The brush opened.
A figure came forth, grinning as if the blood had been his comedy. Goat legs, hooves black with mud; torso knotted with corded muscle, fur matted, stinking of old wine and slaughter. Horns curled cruelly back from a brow split wide, and from that mask came a face half-human, half-beast, lips split in permanent laughter that carried no joy. His eyes shone yellow, bright with malice, old with cunning. The mouth opened in a laugh that was also a snarl, tongue black, teeth pointed like a carnivore's. His gait was skipping, almost playful, but every line of his body spoke of ambush and ruin.
The stench of musk and copper came with him. His laugh rose, thin, obscene, then cut into silence like a knife through gut.
Nameless whispered aloud, throat dry.
"The faun."
It stood at the road's edge, head cocked, the broken boar still writhing between the men.
Not mere beast. Not mere mob. Level far above theirs—twelve, perhaps eighteen. Its strength was not in bulk, but in mind. Almost human. More cunning than the men it watched. Trickster. Treacherous. Waiting.
And all the while, the forest held its breath.
Nameless let Perfect Sight slide over the thing.
Faun — Level 18
The apex of its breed. Too strong for this stage, monstrously above them. He stayed still, breath small, knowing better than to tempt notice.
The faun moved as if the air itself amused him. Then, in a leap, he was on Destroyer. A clawed hand slashed upward, from groin to rib. Flesh tore like parchment. Destroyer shrieked. His left leg came off at the joint, sheared in one swipe, and the ground drank it whole.
Grinblade froze, then bolted several paces back, cowardice plain as daylight. Thalmeris and Nightveil stiffened, their silence weighing seconds until the half-sylvie cut it:
"Attack now. Then flee."
Nightveil's bow sang, the Rose of Death blossoming in thorns across the faun's chest. Thalmeris's Impetuous Wind howled, shoving dust and branches against it. The monster barely flinched. It seemed entertained, not wounded.
With a flick, the faun tossed the bleeding boar back into the trees, ignoring the men. He bent, touched it. Green light crawled from his hands; the severed leg knitted back; the beast staggered up and fled yelping into the dark.
Nameless felt a ripple of unease. "So this one heals. Defensive cast. That means three more in reserve. The ledger hides worse yet."
By then Grinblade had dragged Destroyer half-upright, the brute clutching his own leg in one fist, face white with shock. He howled, spittle flying:
"To the spawn! Use the newbies as shields! They'll cover us!"
Nameless hissed dryly under his breath. "Prudence of the flesh. Human shields. Idiot—but not wholly."
The Children of Fire scrambled, Thalmeris and Nightveil firing in cadence as they backed westward. Rose after Rose, Wind after Wind, lashing the faun, forcing its advance to slow. And in that moment, Nameless bent his staff and whispered:
"With jurisdiction comes reach. Now with the staff I can finally launch attacks from a distance. One can never be too cautious, because getting too close is fatal for an intellectual."
Doubt lanced from the shadows, masked by the gale. It struck the same leg Thalmeris had targeted—critical.
[Critical Hit — 120 Damage]
[Status: Left Leg — Crippled]
(IP − 169→ 145)
The knee buckled, crippled. The monster roared, fury boiling, and lurched after them with doubled malice.
Thalmeris's eyes flashed—surprise, calculation—yet he said nothing, only seized the fortune and pressed faster into flight.
The faun lunged at Grinblade. A rake across his back split leather, split skin, split the very length of him. He screamed, staggered, Destroyer hanging from him like a parasite. The brute braced against his disciple, lifted his sword, and screamed "King's Wrath!" The stroke hammered the faun's head, driving it back an inch, stunning it if not harming.
Rose and Wind sang again, arrows biting, gale shoving, the beast's other leg now stung. Grinblade, trembling, forced one last swing—Sinister Cut—against the crippled limb. The foot split nearly off, dangling.
The faun shrieked, rage unbounded. Grinblade and Destroyer clung like Siamese twins in a parody of embrace—one dragging, the other dragging him—and bolted. Nightveil's arrows fell like rain at the creature's feet, buying seconds.
Nameless noted the precision." They've learned. Hit the legs. Region targeting. PvP teaches faster than wolves ever could."
He stepped again into the ledger. Another Doubt flew—this time at the right leg. It bit shallow, only a little, but it slowed.
[Normal Hit — 76 Damage]
(IP − 145→ 121)
The faun stopped. Then, with calm malice, it placed its hands on its ruined leg. Light crawled again, fusing bone, sealing flesh, reattaching what had been cut. It stood whole.
In that pause, the Children of Fire reached a clearing off the road. A ring of firelight, ten figures seated, their laughter dying as Destroyer roared:
"Careful! A beast! Enormous!"
The warning was mockery. For the faun broke in behind them like a tide.
Nameless scanned the camp.
Human — Level 1
Human — Level 2
Human — Level 2
Human — Level 2
[…]
Human - Level 3
Ten in all. The strongest, Level 3.
They rose in panic, archers loosing arrows, warriors charging with naked courage. Six blades fell against the beast at once, a crude phalanx, an improvised legion.
Weak strikes, desperate flailing. No skills imbued, nothing but will and terror. "Attacks without art—attacks of despair", said Nameless.
And behind them, the Children of Fire had already vanished into the trees, leaving the spawnlings to meet a fate that even they themselves could not endure.
He weighed it all in a blink—follow the fleeing pack or stand with the doomed. No time for philosophy. The Level 3 with a staff—hooded, slight—had yet to cast a single thing. A sage, by the tool. Perhaps half-sylvie by the fact it was made of wild wood, perhaps not; at this range it was guesswork. No offensive art on show. Maybe a healer.
He stole the healer's mask. While the faun threw men like kindling, Nameless slid to a line behind the hooded one and loosed from the treeline, the staff humming low, the mind a knife aimed at skull.
[Critical Hit — 100 Damage]
[Status: Confused]
(IP − 121 → 97)
The faun blinked as if the world had changed hands. It swung its head toward what it thought had struck it—straight at the hooded human with the staff.
The warriors felt the shift and stepped with it, raw courage doing the calculus speech never could. "Keep firing! We'll hold him!" they shouted. "Don't let it reach him!" They threw their bodies against the charge, shield and bone to make a wall around their ally of occasion. Archers flanked the hooded figure like fullbacks of last resort, loosing into a chest that did not care.
The healer hesitated, throat dry—he had not cast. But when one of the front men cartwheeled into the dark and did not rise, the staff finally lit: "Natural Cure," she breathed. Light bridged the distance; flesh knit across a shredded back. The man lurched upright, half-reborn, and the line found its voice again. Their ally of occasion was a healer indeed. A miracle, and reasons to defend him multiplied.
The faun tired of the courage of insects. It lowered its head and drove forward, horns first. The chosen man—the one who had been shouting the rhythm—froze a fraction, then braced. The horns entered him the way a pen enters parchment. Out the back in a clean, cruel geometry; the body lifted on the prongs like meat discovering it had been a flag all along. Blood sheeted down the beast's face, and when it jerked its neck, the man slid free and thudded to the earth boneless, the ground taking him like a name erased.
Panic wobbled every shield. The faun did not waste the lesson; it threw itself into the rest, turning the line into a scatter of red intentions. Nameless cut the moment from behind:
[Critical Hit — 110 Damage]
[Status: Right Leg — Crippled]
(IP − 97 → 73)
The archers whooped and hailed the hooded healer for a second killing stroke she had not made. The lie held because it had to. Two more swordsmen went down in pieces.
What remained: two blades against the tide, five archers, one healer dry-mouthed with a near-empty well. He cast again, hands shaking, the light a thin ribbon to the last standing front man. It bought seconds, no more.
The faun dipped for the same impalement. The soldier, out of options, set his sword point at his own chest height, turning himself into a trap—let the monster's charge meet iron. It worked, for a breath: steel bit brow and split skin, but horns broke the blade like a twig and the man behind it died on schedule, lifted and discarded in a single lyric of pain. The line understood that steel was a rumor.
Nameless took the ledger's offer—another angle, another tree—and sank a third Doubt into the creature's back.
[Normal Hit — 60 Damage]
(IP − 73 → 49)
It turned, wrath seeking the staff, and the archers called to the healer to run. She obeyed—hood turning, slipping into the trees—straight toward Nameless's silence, neither of them seeing the other for what he was.
In the clearing, the last sword held his ground with a pitiful dignity—a valiant Don Quixote with the body of Sancho Panza. He struck once at the crippled leg, repeating a lesson he did not know he'd learned. The faun answered without theory: a rake that snapped his weapon and threw him across the circle like kindling.
Running proved his most effective strike. He fled—at least, running was his most effective blow—and the faun, converting blame by instinct, ignored the hood and chose a scapegoat it could understand. It chased the man who had humiliated it, and settled the account personally. One deep rake across the back, then again and again, the body hammering the ground until the shape of man gave way; the head tried to speak and offered only one last syllable—"ATTACK!"—before leaving the argument entirely.
Nameless used the fury the way a mill uses floodwater. One more cast, from a new hole in the wood, a line at the base of the skull where the crown could not guard:
[Critical Hit — 150 Damage]
(IP − 49 → 25)
[Status: Stunned — Confused]
IP was a purse nearly empty.
The archers spent the opening in full—shafts drumming the beast, one after another. "Good! Keep it!" they yelled toward the hood, still crediting the wrong pair of hands.
The faun recovered in rage, and the strategy of many became a sadistic domino. Stalk left—tear, fall. Stalk right—tear, fall. The healer stared, useless, because the beast killed in single blows that left no time for stitches.
Nameless climbed, bark cold under his palms, while the penultimate archer was torn. Only the extreme-right bowman remained, and in the breath when the creature bent over his friend, he dove into the pocket, dropped the bow, and drew a knife. He hacked at the worst leg with a butcher's rhythm, shouting and sobbing together. The faun staggered despite itself; when it swiped to end him, the archer sprang up, planted both feet on the creature's hand, and drove the knife through palm into earth, pinning flesh to soil.
The free hand came—he rolled, kept weight on the blade with a stamping kick, then sprang back, snatching a second dagger from the mud where his comrade had dropped it. He formed a guard, breath sawing. The beast looked at him with a hatred that wanted to live forever.
It charged for the pretty impalement again. The archer didn't leap aside—he went down, letting horns bite empty air, and from under the beast he rammed the second blade up into an eye, angling toward brain.
The scream that followed had the taste of iron in it. The archer scrambled to his bow by reflex, found only two arrows left, and sent them both at the face. They struck home—not in eye, but in the hands that clawed at the embedded knife. The beast howled at this new blinding.
Nameless felt something like respect lean through him. "That one is a fighter. Maybe a police, maybe a ring IRL. Almost dead twice, still alive."
The faun chose to end the irritation by hand. It seized the man against a trunk. The archer smeared something from a small vial between his palms like oil and waited for pain. The beast began to work him, claws opening the rib-meat like letters. He screamed—but not only with pain. "Take this!" He palmed both eyes with the gel. The hooded healer, for the last time, to give a few more minutes of suffering to the sacrificial victim, sent him one thin wash of cure—the last drop in an empty well.
The man, half-mended and still breaking, shoved both hands into the faun's mouth. It bit, blindly, tasting the gift it had been given. Confusion flickered. Then the truth: a burn, a sharpness, a crawling acid. Poison.
The swan's last cry.
"Finish it," the archer rasped, arms ruined, to the hooded healer who had nothing left to spend. "Come on—GO! ATTACK!" he begged, as the beast chewed through what was left of him. The healer did not move. She couldn't do nothing. No IP; no art; only fear and wood.The miracle does not seem to be happening again.
The faun solved the question by throwing the man's body to ground, then falling on him like a verdict—tearing and stamping until the voice was gone and the head, trying one last command, said "ATTACK!" and came off in the beast's hands.
Staggering under poison, it dragged itself forward with the inevitability of a nightmare. Its gait was crooked, but its hunger was straight; branches splintered, undergrowth ripped as it moved like a drunkard embalmed in wrath. The hooded girl ran tree to tree, her breath quick and brittle, while behind her came the sound of something that could not be hurried—every step a verdict.
He followed her like a shadow clothed in ruin. Half-blind, one eye drowned in blood, the other burning red, he did not need sight; hatred alone was compass enough. He closed the distance.
The strike came suddenly—an upward rake, faster than a body so poisoned should have managed. By chance, or providence, she slipped aside at the last gasp. The blow sank instead into bark, and the beast's right hand stayed trapped, claws buried, wood refusing to let go.
She could hear it then: the ragged panting, the death lust clinging to its breath. Death's desire made audible. She closed her eyes, knowing the left hand was already coiling for the coup de grâce, a final stroke of vengeance.
The air changed.
Nameless stepped from the dark side of the tree, staff level, the line of it pressed directly to the faun's bare crown where no horn gave shield. His voice did not rise; only the weapon did.
"Touch the head, end the fever of the forest."
The staff discharged.
[Fatal Hit — 284 Damage]
(IP − 25 → 1)
The body froze, then folded—limbs slack, venom and wrath cut short together. No spectacle, no gore: only the sudden stillness of a fire stamped clean. The faun fell as though sleep had claimed it, face emptied of malice, the rage extinguished without ceremony. Cold, quick, final.
[Kill: Faun — Level 18]
[XP +1929.6]
[Intellectual Attack Proficiency + 40]
[Intellectual Attack Proficiency 115/10,000]
[Level Up]
Emperor — Level 9.
The silence after the fall was cavernous and dark. The woman still knelt, eyes closed, waiting for the pain that did not come. All she heard was the thud of a giant laid low, the stillness after violence—and her own heart hammering at the absence of death.
Nameless stood over the corpse, breath measured, the system's echo still written across his sight.
Level 9.
A thin current of satisfaction curled in him, dry and private.
"Another rung. Numbers that mean nothing—until they mean everything. Worth the risk, worth the silence. Even monsters have their use. Some teach, some feed."
He looked once at the woman, still trembling, still blind in fear. He had no words for her, no time. She was noise in the ledger, nothing more.
He passed her without pause, steps steady, eyes fixed on the prize that lay cooling before him. The faun's bulk sprawled in ruin, but its parts were greater than the whole.
Nameless drew steel. The shortsword gleamed briefly in the half-light, then bit. He severed the first horn clean from the skull, then the second, each thud on the dirt a coin of future value.
[Stored: Faun Horn ×2]
In the pooling red at his feet, Nameless set the butt of his staff, letting it stand like a root drinking from the ruin. While it drank, he kept cutting, prying deeper, hands blackened. Flesh parted under his cuts, and from within he pulled what was not quite flesh at all—a heart shaped in wood, veined and knotted, half-organ, half-relic. It came free with a wet tear, dripping blood and resin together. The automaton heart slid loose in his grip—strange, heavy, pulsing faintly as if remembering the body it had left.
The woman opened her eyes then and saw him there: not savior, not companion, but butcher, scholar, thief—indifferent to her survival, intent only on the spoils of conquest.
The man before her crouched over the corpse like a predator feeding, hands black with gore, chest spattered as if baptized in it. He looked up. Slowly. The mask turned toward her—a human skull cast in porcelain veined like marble, luminous and cold, a madman's crown.
She did not know whether to thank heaven or curse it. Relief, grief, awe, dread—all came at once and canceled each other. He gave her nothing to cling to. No name, no word, no gesture of human solidarity. Only silence.
Then something else happened. Her eyes widened. A glow swam in them, sudden, undeniable.
Nameless froze. "Perfect Sight."
The revelation hit her late, like lightning delayed. The glow sharpened, and her breath broke into a scream—thin, stifled at first, then swelling as though her body had only now caught up to terror.
In two steps he was on her. One bloody hand clamped her mouth, the other smeared crimson across the mask's jaw, marking it like lipstick over bone. He leaned close, the red hand painting silence over her lips.
His voice was low, cold as steel quenched:
"If I wanted you dead, you'd be a memory already. Shut your mouth, stupid girl. You'll call another beast."
She blinked, stunned, her muffled cry dying into her throat. The words struck both ways—an insult and a kind of twisted courtesy, a warning dressed as disdain.
And in that warped instant she felt the full irony: wounded, offended, humiliated—and yet, in the harshness, consoled. For only a gentleman could sneer so cruelly and still make survival sound like a gift.
Nameless ignored her again. He returned to the carcass with the indifference of a butcher at work. A hunter does not abandon his kill, least of all a prize that had cost so much blood to fell, just to pour into his hands at last.
[Stored: Heartwood Core ×1]
He flayed the beast in silence, peeling hide from muscle. The pelt was coarse, harder than boar, more resilient, a hide fit for armor. When he was finished with the skin, he severed the head entire, horns already claimed, and laid it aside - a trophy for the future. Last he drew from its waist a red flute made of bone—simple, proportioned, natural in its beauty, as if grown rather than carved. He tucked it into his satchel without comment.
[Stored: Faun Hide (Medium)2x]
[Stored: Faun Head (Misc) ×1]
[Stored: Pan's Reed Flute (Misc) ×1]
The girl still watched, horrified, as though witnessing not rescue but slaughter continued. He turned, blood clinging to his hands, mask veined like marble and now streaked in crimson. To her eyes, it looked like a man devouring his prey. She faltered, then whispered, almost ashamed:
"…your name?"
He paused only to smear the blood from his fingers against the mask's lip, a grotesque parody of rouge. His voice came quiet, cold, like a verdict already given:
"I know why you panicked. Use your sight with more prudence, or you'll hand someone else the excuse to kill you. Don't step into occasions made for death."
She flinched at the rebuke, wounded and yet, in some twisted way, steadied by it.
He crouched by the faun's body, eyes narrowing. The creature's aura still clung like a widow to her husband's corpse, a posthumous companion bound to what no longer breathed. A mind without a head, stubborn in the ruin of flesh.
Aura—here the word meant Image Points, the currency of intellect and presence. Every being carried its own current, but never in the same register. The Perversors carried Miasma, the fog of corruption. The sages bore Aura, the radiance of thought. Those marked by justice showed their Spirit—Justice Points flickering like a second pulse beneath the skin. Warriors, and the common breeds of men, betrayed themselves in their Impulse—raw drive, fury embodied, a pressure that bent outward. All were powers. All could be seen, but each dressed itself in a different garment.
The faun had shown tricks of the same order, healing from wounds that should have ended it, but its essence remained bound to the body, to brute and blood. It was no sage. Its aura was not like his. It was the mark of a beast that had learned to ape intellect without living in it - from the same school as she, the gross of elements.
Nameless remained apathetic to what Perfect Sight showed, even as the girl's frightened gaze had mistaken him for greater than he was. He also had no intention of dispelling her illusion. Especially since, contrary to custom, her first impression of him was not one of contempt, but fear. She had read the magnitude of his aura, and thought him stronger than the beast. A false impression. He did not care.
Since the faun had intellectual capacity only as a secondary trait and not as a primary one, remaining a brute in the broadest sense, for this reason alone, despite having this capacity, he appeared to have an aura inferior to that of Nameless who, especially with his level up and new equipment, already had something capable, perhaps, of catching the eye of some. But he himself was not fooled; at this stage of the game, he was only rich because he was slightly less miserable than everyone else. If the monster's focus were to be predominantly intellectual, like his older brother, a satyr, then he would have reason to be frightened.
For him, her fear was only a warning—an alarm ringing too soon. For he knew this would not remain a rare gift. In time, players would learn skills that let them see as he saw: names, levels, hidden powers. What now seemed miracle would become common mechanics. And when that day came, defenses would be needed. Counter-arts. Ways to occlude, to smother the very truth of about himself.
The great advantage of Perfect Sight is not only the fact that you can see such capabilities, but the fact that you are never mistaken and can overcome any restriction or concealment.
Then, he returned to the beast while making reckless comments about her in his head. The healer's trick it had used proved it—an intellect-user, not merely brute. And intellect-users always had a twin: attack. His guess was right. The thought pressed into him with the quiet bite of a banker's audit. The kind of subtle economy that only an intellect-user could trade in. Not mere claws, but claws sharpened by thought. He had glimpsed it when it lived; now, in its death, he confirmed it. Perfect Sight traced the aura still moored to its carcass, the faint light of its last spell etched into the air as if the body had tried to rise in defiance of its own ruin.
The staff drank proof. From the blood-soaked pool the last threads of the faun's IP bled into it, leaving the wood darker, heavier, wrapped in a sheen of roots unseen.
[Staff Enhanced]
Increased Nature Blood
+10% Elemental Affinity
+10% to all Elemental Attacks → +25%
Nature Connection: Secret.
It was no accident. He had timed it, replicated Balin's death exactly. Not chance this time, but intent. He let his gaze drift across the broken archer who had died clawing at the beast's leg, remembered his fury, his knife, his last defiance. "It isn't bravery that wins," Nameless thought, cold. "It is patience."
His gaze lingered on her. Half-Sylvie, unmistakable now—the silence, the staff, the dim cast of her eyes. She had slipped her own soil. The thought cut bitter: the beast was the forest itself, its hunger and its seed, and she… she carried the same vein, only turned inward, hushed. Kin, mirrored and unspoken. A Sylvie, was kin to that same earth, shadowed and melancholic. Their likeness was brutal, and she had survived only by chance.
He lifted a finger, almost idly, though the gesture cut like a verdict.
"Take something of the blood," he said while looking at the horizon.
The words fell flat, iron and cold, the kind that carried two meanings at once without naming either. A ledger left open, an ambiguity that did not need explaining.
The girl froze at first. Her lips trembled as if to form refusal, but no sound came. She lingered on the edge of motion, caught between instinct to flee and the strange gravity of his command. Slowly—hesitant, suspicious, as though obeying a second predator—she edged closer. Her steps were deliberate, heavy, as if distrust itself weighed her limbs. She bent, lowering the staff to the congealing pool.
She moved like one under spell, unwilling but compelled. He, seeing her reluctance, gave no comfort. Instead, he turned away—deliberately stepping back from the blood, carrying his own staff with him, as though her gesture no longer concerned him. If she wished to take, let her. If not, the blood would sink into soil and vanish. His gift was neither offer nor kindness; it was instruction.
He turned his back to her, wordless, and began to walk toward the field of corpses strewn nearby. His silence was itself an answer.
The woman remained, dipping the staff into the pool with a stiffness that betrayed her suspicion. She glanced up once—toward the masked figure now moving away, the porcelain-white skull with its crimson smear across the lips, a crown of madness etched in stillness. The monster who had saved her—or perhaps merely delayed her death. She did not know which.
Nameless crossed into the line of the dead. The meridian had already climbed to its zenith; noon's gold poured over the clearing, but what it lit was ruin, not triumph. Bodies, bent and broken, lay without rite. The brightness above served as nothing more than a funeral pall—an indifferent shroud cast by heaven over men left unburied.
He stopped among them, staff dragging a faint line in the dirt. His eyes narrowed, not in grief but in calculation. This was noon: the hour when shadows vanish. And yet here, in this meadow of death, the shadows were deepest.
Behind him, her voice broke at last, thin but insistent.
"Was it you…? Those attacks…"
He did not turn. The question hung, unanswered. Only the hush of flies and the rustle of smoke replied.
She tried again, softer.
"…Thank you."
Still he did not answer. Silence was his law, and he observed it like prayer.
Instead he knelt among the fallen, reaching for the dirt with bare hands. The earth was shallow, soft from blood. He pressed his palms into it and began to claw the outline of graves. One after another, pits for the nameless.
No words, no ceremony. Just a man digging while the sun wrapped corpses in its false gold, a mortal shroud for the unburied. The girl watched from behind, staff still wet with stolen blood, while the masked figure labored in silence—predator, savior, butcher, and now gravedigger.
Nameless continued in deep silence and set himself to the work of graves.