I stepped outside the palace.
The three heroes were already there, waiting.
The Sword Hero started in on me — a long string of noise dressed up as conviction. I lit a cigarette and walked past him without giving him the satisfaction of a reply.
Then the Hammer Hero's hand landed on my shoulder.
"We're talking to you."
I looked at the hand. Then something came off me — pressure, heat, a force with no name I'd bother giving it — and the whole palace shuddered. All three of them flinched.
"Move your hand," I said. Quietly.
He lifted it. Slowly. Like a man backing away from a dog that hasn't decided yet.
I checked the wound on my shoulder. Manageable. I kept walking and stopped pretending they mattered.
Paper.
It came from every direction at once, folding the air itself into walls.
I found a gap in the ceiling. Loaded my legs to jump — the gap sealed itself a half-second before I left the ground, so I redirected everything I had into a forward charge instead. I hit the paper wall hard enough to feel it in my teeth. It held a moment, then split. Paper always splits, eventually — that's the whole problem with paper.
Its weakness is water.
I was already moving toward finding some when the Sword Hero tore through the wall himself, blade already swinging for my neck.
I caught the flat of it with my bare palm.
He actually staggered — the shock of it written plainly across his face, the particular shock of a man discovering his weapon isn't as decisive as he thought.
"Get away from me," I said. "A child playing dress-up has no idea what he's standing this close to."
The third one — the one they kept calling a hero, the title sitting on him like a costume two sizes too large — screamed: "You insulted the king. You die for that."
I looked at him without much investment in the outcome. I was bleeding. I'd fought through worse with less reason to keep going.
Something moved fast toward my skull. I got the shield up — the Hammer Hero, his weapon connecting hard enough to numb my whole arm to the shoulder.
So now I was boxed between two of them, paper closing back in around all three of us like the room itself wanted me dead too.
I smiled.
Then I laughed — really laughed, the kind that comes from somewhere that finds this whole arrangement absurd rather than threatening.
Their faces changed. Confidence draining into something closer to the truth.
"Surrender," the Hammer Hero said, "or die."
I let the silence breathe for a second before answering.
"Your own sentence contradicts itself. If I surrender, they execute me anyway. You're offering me a choice between two ways of dying and calling it mercy."
"We won't allow that," the Sword Hero said.
He was several steps off. I closed the gap in one motion, fast enough that my face was suddenly an inch from his before he understood I'd moved at all.
He tried to step back. I had his throat before he managed it.
"If you meant that," I said, "let go of me right now."
He raised his sword anyway. Black clouds rolled in above us — lightning splitting the sky, thunder following a half-beat behind it like it was trying to catch up. When his blade caught the next flash, I saw myself reflected in the steel for exactly one second — saw what I'd become from the outside, just long enough to register it and move past it.
I took the swing's own momentum, twisted, and threw the Hammer Hero backward into it — let his friend's blade do work his friend never intended. I screamed with everything in my chest, and the shield grew under my hands, doubling, tripling in size.
I drove it into the ground.
The detonation tore the paper walls apart on every side, wind howling through the gap. The barrier was weak now. I had room.
I turned to leave. Both of them came at me at once.
One arm. I need to give up one arm. Which one do I not need.
I smiled at the question, raised the shield over my head — and let it go.
They both struck it in the same instant. The force that came off the impact was enormous, wind and pressure detonating outward in a single wave.
I dropped low. Drove my hand straight into the dirt. Fed the wire through it, into the ground, into everything still standing in that room.
I took one last pull on the cigarette. Exhaled slow, watched the smoke catch the wind that was still tearing through the wreckage.
"Goodbye," I said.
The wire shot outward and wrapped the entire paper barrier in a single sweep.
Their faces in that last second — pure, uncut terror — were genuinely funny to me. I won't pretend otherwise. There's something almost generous about watching two men finally understand exactly how much trouble they're in, all at once, with no time left to do anything about it.
I shouted it at them, happy in a way I hadn't let myself be in longer than I could remember:
"Now we're actually fighting."
The wire came down like rain made of razors and cut through everything it touched — paper, wood, the air itself, both of them. The barrier dissolved. Both heroes took damage they'd be feeling for a long time, assuming they lived long enough to feel anything.
I picked the shield back up and was gone before either of them found their footing.
Distance, finally. Enough of it to breathe.
Now what.
I treated my own wound. Wrapped it properly — I've had worse practice at this than any healer in this castle.
After threatening the king the way I had, I sat with one question for a while:
Why not actually explore this? See what this world looks like when I'm not being dragged through it by people who think they own me.
Ten minutes of turning it over. One conclusion:
Fine. I'll go find out what this place actually is.
First stop: a weapons shop. Time to upgrade, and time to understand what I'd eventually be killing.
A sword caught my eye. I reached for it.
The shield stopped me cold — shocked my hand badly enough that I lost feeling in three fingers for a full minute.
I tried to pull the shield off. It wouldn't move. A notification floated up in front of my eyes, calm and unhelpful: Do not disturb the shield.
I put the sword back and kept looking.
A scythe, next. I reached for it carefully, already bracing for the shock.
Nothing.
A dagger. Same — nothing.
A hammer. It detonated in my hand the second my fingers closed around it.
I looked at the shopkeeper like he owed me an explanation. He didn't have one. What he had was: "One gold piece."
"I don't have that kind of money."
He got irritated fast. "Then why'd you even walk in here?"
I gave him the look that usually ends conversations like this one. "I'm a customer in your shop. Don't raise your voice at me again unless you'd like to find out what happens next."
He read whatever was in my eyes and backed off immediately. "My apologies. But the item still needs to be paid for."
A small girl came out from behind the counter.
"Is there a problem?"
"No—" I started.
He cut over me. "Go back to your mother. Don't bother the customer."
I looked at her properly. Sweet kid. His daughter, probably, judging by the resemblance and the exasperation in her voice.
Why not, for once, be the kind of person who doesn't make a kid's day worse.
She turned to him and said, "Dad, you're mean," and walked off before he could answer.
I told him: "I'll clean the shop. Consider it the apology you're owed. And I'll throw in two silver on top."
He agreed. I cleaned the place.
On the way out, one more sword pulled my attention. The moment I looked at it, the same kind of notification surfaced in front of my eyes:
Decay Blade. Increases damage dealt. Weakens the force of enemy strikes.
I told the shopkeeper I'd take it, sheathed, untested. I didn't want to find out what it did to me before I understood what it did to anyone else. I never touched the blade itself.
I wandered into a building I hadn't meant to enter — the kind of mistake you only make when you're not really paying attention to where your feet are going.
An old woman sat inside. Fifty-three, maybe, by the look of her — though something about her eyes made the number feel beside the point.
She looked at me and said the one thing in this entire world I doubt I'll ever stop hearing in my head:
"Who are you. A broken hero? Did you come here looking for revenge? You're empty. Did you already get it?"
"Who are you," I said, "and what was that supposed to mean?"
"You're not subtle," she said. "My eyes stopped lying to me years ago. I've outlived enough liars to recognize the real thing on sight."
I asked again. Same non-answer, delivered with the same patience.
She turned without quite finishing the thought. "I'm a witch. Whatever you came here to learn, you'll find it in this room."
I didn't ask about the world directly — too obvious a question for someone trying not to be noticed. Instead: "I've felt something strange since yesterday."
"The three heroes arrived yesterday."
"Who are they."
"The Sword Hero. The Spear Hero. The Hammer Hero."
"I heard there were four."
"No." Too fast. An edge under it now. "I haven't forgotten anyone. There are three heroes."
Something in me went cold and then hot in the same breath. How dare you erase him like he never existed.
I asked again. Same answer, same edge, sharper this time.
"Why does everyone hate the Shield Hero?"
She looked at me like I'd said something dangerous.
"Where did you hear that name?"
"Why does it matter where I heard it?"
"Just tell me."
"You first," I said. "Then I'll tell you."
She weighed that for a long moment.
"Fine. I'll tell you everything about the Shield Hero. And exactly why his name doesn't get spoken in this kingdom anymore."
"Go on, then."
"The Shield Hero," she said, "was the only one of the four who actually understood what the word hero was supposed to mean. He didn't care about his name, his reputation, any of it. The other three were vain. Arrogant. They took the best rooms in the palace, kept company with as many women as the court could supply, treated the whole summoning like something they were owed for showing up.
He was the only one who looked at that life and walked away from it. Left the kingdom entirely to live as the Shield Hero on terms that were actually his own.
The king took that as defiance — which it was — and sent an entire fleet after him. Heroes included.
But the half-races stood between him and that fleet. Elves. Dwarves. Werewolves. Beastfolk. They shielded him with their own bodies. History calls that war 'The Rebound,' if it bothers to call it anything at all.
The king's hatred for him didn't end there. It just went quiet.
Some time later, the king found himself threatened by the Demon King's right hand — an actual existential threat, the kind that makes old grudges feel briefly unaffordable. A message reached the Shield Hero anyway, somehow, telling him what was happening to the kingdom that had tried to have him killed.
He came back.
Fought beside the same people who'd hunted him. Helped bring down the Demon King's right hand with his own hands.
They summoned him to the palace to honor him for it.
At the ceremony — the one where they were supposed to be thanking him — they killed him instead. Closed the case afterward as 'protecting the king from an unstable threat.'
They didn't even bury him properly. Burned what was left and threw the ashes into the sea, like he was something to be disposed of rather than mourned."
I sat with that for longer than I meant to. Genuinely shaken, in a way I hadn't expected this place to manage.
"How old is this story?"
"The half-races carried it forward. The elves, especially. They don't forget what gets done to people who protect them."
"How do you know it?"
"Are you buying something, or are you done wasting my afternoon? Because that's all you're getting from me either way."
"Fine," I said, and moved on to asking what I'd actually come in for — magic.
She told me about something called dark magic, branching the same way the rest did: fire, wind, earth, light, each with its own dark variant.
"Some people," she added, almost as an afterthought, "can use every type that exists. Fewer still master all of them and start building entirely new kinds. Those people are rare enough that most of them die before anyone hears their name."
I'd seen someone earlier with a tail he clearly hadn't been born without noticing, so I asked: "Is it only humans here? No other races — no slaves?"
"There's a category called half-races," she said. "Elves, dwarves, lycanthropes. Others, depending on which corner of the map you're standing in."
I'd gotten everything I'd come for. I left.
As I started toward whatever came next, the king came after me again — not with soldiers this time, with paperwork. He wanted me processed as a slave.
I almost laughed out loud at the audacity of it.
Instead I let it happen. Let him think the trick was working.
Because being processed as a slave meant ending up exactly where the actual slaves were being kept — and I had every intention of taking that place apart from the inside out, piece by piece, the moment I got there.
I understood the angle fast: they wanted me dead specifically as property, with no paper trail leading back to a crown. Clean hands, on paper. Convenient.
I let them induct me anyway. Let them think the game was theirs.
Their facility was underground, and the smell announced itself before the door had finished opening. Rot. Waste. The particular stench of a place that had given up pretending to be anything other than what it actually was. Flies thick enough to function as their own weather system.
They shoved me into a cell and locked it behind me.
I looked around.
Children. Starving past the point starving usually stops at — some of them reduced to outlines, to the architecture of a body with nothing left covering it.
I broke my own restraints without much effort.
I went to a boy who was coughing blood into the dirt. By the time I reached him, whatever part of me kept anger contained had simply stopped doing its job.
He died in my arms before I could do anything that mattered.
I couldn't save him. There was nothing left in him to save by the time I got there.
I broke the cell door off its frame. The slavers came running at the noise.
The first one reached me first. I took his skull in both hands and put it through the floor.
I lifted him again. Did it a second time, in case the first hadn't been clear enough. He stopped being something that moved.
The rest of them froze for exactly one second. Then broke formation and came at me together, which was the wrong call but the only one fear left them.
I threw their dead friend's body into the middle of them.
It hit like ordnance — scattered their entire front line, bodies and weapons going down together in a heap that hadn't existed a second earlier.
I didn't stay to watch it land. I was already moving through the gap it had made.
One second of total silence followed — broken only by my own breathing and the sound of my own teeth grinding against each other.
Their footing faltered. Blades shook in hands that had stopped being steady. What I found in their eyes wasn't rage. It was the older kind of fear — the kind with no thought left in it, just the animal underneath finally showing through.
The tallest one — also, predictably, the most frightened — raised a sword that had seen better decades and screamed, voice cracking down the middle: "Kill him! He's just one man!"
I reached him before the sentence finished leaving his mouth.
I wasn't walking by that point. I was something closer to falling toward him, gravity doing half the work.
His swing went wide, panicked, nothing behind it. I tilted my shoulder out of its path without breaking stride, and my fist found his throat in the same motion that had carried me the rest of the way.
I caught the scream before it cleared his chest, dragged him backward by the collar, and turned him into a shield against the arrow his friend had already loosed in blind panic.
The arrow took his back instead of mine. Small mercy, and not for him.
While he finished dying, I threw him aside and went for the archer.
I cleared a pile of debris in one jump and landed directly in front of him before he'd reloaded. The bow fell out of his hands on its own. His pupils did something I've only seen in people about to understand, all at once, exactly how their evening is going to end.
"Your turn," I said. Barely above a whisper.
It wasn't a threat by the time it left my mouth. It was already a sentence being carried out.
I caught the hand reaching for his dagger and twisted until I heard the joint give. Then I drove him backward into the cell wall I'd torn through minutes earlier.
Stone came down on top of him in a slow collapse, dust mixing with the blood already pooling across the floor.
I turned to what was left.
Three of them. Frozen completely, staring at their dead the way you stare at something you can't yet process as real. None of them advanced.
I wiped the blood off my face with the back of my hand and took exactly one step forward.
That was enough. They dropped everything they were holding and ran for the dark corridor behind them — forgetting, in their hurry, the one detail that actually mattered:
I had no intention of leaving a single one of them alive to describe what they'd just watched.
Their footsteps echoed away down the tunnel. Eventually they stopped to catch their breath, the way people do when they've convinced themselves the worst is behind them.
One of the three simply vanished from where he'd been standing — no sound, no warning.
The remaining two felt it before they understood it. The panic arrived first, the comprehension a half-second behind it.
Fast footsteps, closing.
They turned.
I was already in front of them.
They tried to run anyway, because the body does that even when the mind already knows better. The wire caught both of them mid-stride and lifted them clean off the ground, suspended, twitching.
An arrow found my ear as I closed the last of the distance.
Both of them screamed, in unison, the same word:
"Boss!"
I turned slowly to see who'd earned that title.
A man. Carrying himself with the particular confidence of someone who hasn't yet been informed that the situation has already been decided without him.
"Don't you know," he said, "that anyone who walks in here alive doesn't walk back out?"
I pulled the arrow out of my ear and threw it back the way it came. It found his bow and shattered it on contact.
"I know," I said. "I watched a child die in my arms about ten minutes ago. So forgive me if your rule doesn't move me the way you'd hoped."
I raised my hand. Closed my fist.
The wire finished both men hanging in the air before either of them found the breath to scream again.
I walked toward the boss. He came at me, and we traded blows — once, then a second time, both of us giving as good as we got.
My third landed clean. He went down and stopped getting back up.
I took his head in both hands and introduced it to the wall. Pulled him back. Did it again, in case the wall hadn't made itself clear. Then I threw what remained of him into the sewage runoff, because that felt like the only fitting place for him to finish.
With the gang gone, I freed every slave still breathing in that facility.
But something I found in the process opened a hole in me that I don't think closed back up.
A girl, maybe ten, with her whole body curled around her younger brother — the specific posture of someone who has done this exact thing many times before and knows precisely how to make herself the wall between him and whatever's coming.
My eyes went wet before I could stop them. I smiled at her — the genuine kind, not the kind I usually have available.
"You're the best sister anyone's ever had."
She started crying, purely out of fear of what my smile might mean.
"I'm taking both of you somewhere safe," I said. "But first — tell me your race."
"Elf," she said, barely audible.
I looked at her ears. The right one whole. The left one cut away entirely, the scar tissue old enough that whoever did it had taken their time.
I treated what I could and brought them both to the inn. Fed them properly — actual food, not the scraps they'd clearly been surviving on. Got the girl settled into bed with her brother curled against her.
I stood out on the balcony afterward.
It reminded me of something I hadn't thought about in years — every time I needed distance from my mother before a beating started, the balcony had been where I went. Some habits apparently cross worlds with you.
I lit a cigarette and let it burn most of the way down without rushing it.
A sound from inside pulled me back. The girl and her brother, both still awake, both staring at nothing in particular.
I went back in.
"Why aren't you two asleep?"
She said, quiet: "We see it again when we close our eyes. The whip. All of it. Every time."
I held both of them. They cried harder than before, the kind of crying that's been waiting a long time for permission. I wiped their faces and said the only thing I had:
"It's alright now. I'm here."
I stayed until they finally went under.
The next morning I went out for breakfast.
The guards were already standing there, waiting to take me in.
End of Chapter 40