A blade forged of pure flame shrieked through the air before Li Ke even began his charge. The moment it impacted the rushing horde, it shattered the monsters' bone masks, sending the Lovecraftian horrors dissolving into the wind with a final, guttural wail.
Powerful as they were, these beasts possessed no intellect; their weaknesses were glaring, rendering them utterly pathetic before Li Ke's calculated precision.
The instant the behemoths fell, Li Ke's silhouette blurred into a phantom, plunging headlong into the surrounding sea of zombies. His blade was a rhythmic flash, severing necks with surgical ease. To his heightened senses, the zombies' lunges and reactions were as agonizingly slow as a snail's crawl.
The once-heavy one-handed sword felt weightless in his grip. His muscles, forged beyond human limits through grueling, near-suicidal training, allowed him to manifest the impossible feats of legend into a bloody reality.
He moved like a vengeful wraith through the thick of the horde—weaving, baiting, and striking. Heads tumbled like fallen fruit as one zombie after another collapsed into the dirt.
Still, several hundred zombies were a daunting number to clear by hand. Sensing the need for efficiency, Li Ke sprinted to an optimal distance, whipped two grenades from his belt, and flicked the pins in a single fluid motion.
The twin explosions tore through the center of the mob, sending dozens of undead skyward in a plume of fire and dust. The blast shattered their dense formation, leaving the survivors scattered and ripe for the slaughter.
And Li Ke had plenty of grenades to spare.
Within ten minutes, punctuated by the rhythmic roar of high explosives, the horde of hundreds had withered to a mere few dozen. With one final, explosive burst of speed, Li Ke swept through the remnants, putting the mindless creatures out of their misery for good.
As the last zombie slumped to the earth, Li Ke finally allowed himself a heavy exhale, his chest heaving despite his inhuman stamina. He reached up to give his tattered cloak a sharp shake.
The garment had served him well in the world of Seven Days to Die, acting as a shield against the biting sandstorms and keeping his inner clothes clean—occasionally even doubling as a makeshift bedroll.
Now, after the intensity of the skirmish, it looked like a true relic of the wasteland. Shrapnel from his own grenades had no eyes; though he had been fast enough to track their trajectories and avoid injury, his clothing hadn't been so lucky. It was shredded and scorched, and where a few zombies had managed to snag the fabric, it hung in jagged, ruined strips—a silent testament to the raw power he had used to tear himself free.
"My stamina is more than half-spent, my mana is bone-dry, and I've pushed my Blood Energy right to the absolute limit..."
Li Ke sucked in a few heavy breaths, trying to steady himself. He was just about to turn around and see exactly who these two girls were—and how they'd even gotten here—when something changed.
The scorched black ash and rotting zombie corpses across the field began to dissolve into shimmering motes of golden light. The glow converged in front of him, swirling into a distinct triangular shard that pulsed with a strange, inviting warmth.
The moment he saw that fragment and felt its resonance, it clicked.
He didn't need a manual or a system prompt to tell him what he was looking at. This was a World Fragment from 7 Days to Die. These two girls were supposed to be the "newcomers" the original world was meant to summon. But since that world had been pulverized in an instant, they'd been caught in the same crossfire he had—flung into the void like shrapnel.
He had only beaten them here because he was already in the middle of a world-jump when the collapse happened. He knew there were probably a thousand laws of physics and interdimensional mechanics he didn't understand that explained why they arrived only minutes after him, but the "why" didn't matter right now.
He reached out and silently grasped the fragment. Immediately, a flickering holographic display manifested before his eyes, offering two choices:
Refine World Fragment Particle:Obtain 10 points of World Power. Store in Flame Keeper Space:Temporarily deposit the fragment; can be retrieved or stored at any time.
Li Ke took a moment to think. He wasn't desperate enough to burn the shard for power yet—not when he had two mystery girls to look after.
When he'd first dropped into this blocky world, it had tried to reject him like a foreign virus. He find it hard to believe these two weren't feeling that same crushing alienation.
But the second he tucked the shard into his Flame Keeper Space, the atmosphere shifted. Everything felt... clearer. The heavy, sickening sensation of being an outsider vanished in a heartbeat. It was as if, suddenly, the world decided he finally belonged there.
"What is this…?"
Li Ke stared at his hands in disbelief. He turned toward a nearby, cubical tree and, without overthinking it, delivered a sharp, practiced slash with his sword.
This time, the result was different. A square wooden block popped off and dropped to the ground. Instead of remaining an untouchable "glitch" like before, the block drifted toward him the moment he moved close, seamlessly merging into his body.
The instant the wood entered his form, a new sensation washed over him. Drawing on his long-term experience from the 7 Days to Die world, he mentally called out for his inventory.
Suddenly, a familiar interface—the exact layout he'd used back in the wasteland—manifested before his eyes. There it was: a single, lonely block of wood sitting in one of the slots.
With a simple thought, his quick-access action bar flickered into his vision, just as it had in the previous world. When he tried to pull up a map, the grid-based interface he knew by heart appeared as well.
"Interesting… Is it because I recovered the World Power that was invading this realm? Did that make the world recognize me as 'friendly'? Or is it something else entirely?"
Li Ke rubbed his chin, deep in thought. Based on the sequence of events, the former seemed the most likely, but until he had hard proof, he wasn't willing to bet his life on it. He kept his theories as mere guesses for now.
While he was lost in thought, Elsa—who had been rooted to the spot, paralyzed by the sheer violence of his combat—and Toph, who had been forced to rely entirely on her ears, finally began to approach him.
Before Elsa could find her voice, the sightless Toph spoke up first.
"The noise has stopped. I take it you've finished off those monsters?"
Even though she couldn't use her seismic sense to track enemies through the earth here, her hearing was still razor-sharp. She had navigated the earlier chaos purely by sound, though she'd had to keep her ears covered during the deafening roar of Li Ke's grenades.
Now that the frantic, messy energy of the battlefield had settled, she knew the threat was gone.
"I have," Li Ke replied. He turned to face them, his posture shifting back into a wary, guarded stance. "But more importantly—who are you, and what are you doing here?"
Even though he had stepped in to save them, Li Ke knew better than to drop his guard. He shifted his gaze between the girl with the "dangerously" styled hair (Elsa) and the one with the East Asian features wearing the strange headband (Toph) before speaking plainly.
"My name is Li Ke. I'm a traveler," he said, his eyes scanning them. "If you don't mind telling me... what exactly happened to you? Why did you drop out of the sky, and why did you bring those monsters with you?"
He was genuinely curious. While the World Fragment had already clued him in that these two were just more poor souls snatched up by 7 Days to Die, he didn't know the specifics of their experience. The fragment gave him the "what," but he wanted the "how" from their perspective.
"Oh? Um... that is..." Elsa stammered. She was still reeling from the chaos, and a part of her was subconsciously terrified that her own out-of-control magic was responsible for the nightmare.
Toph, by contrast, remained perfectly composed—perhaps even too calm for someone in her situation.
"Beats me," Toph said bluntly. "One second I'm leaving home, the next I'm falling from the sky. As for those monsters, Elsa says they were born from the light that was wrapped around us. I couldn't tell you the details."
Toph held back a few things, though—specifically the fact that they weren't from this world. She could feel it every time she tried to bend; the earth itself seemed to recoil from her, flatly rejecting her presence. It was a strange sensation to put into words, but she simply knew they didn't belong here.
"I see," Li Ke murmured.
As he watched them, a familiar resonance stirred within him. It was the exact same sensation he'd felt when he touched the World Fragment. To be more precise... it was the presence of World Power.
Looking at the two girls, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place in his mind.
Looking at the two girls, the pieces of the puzzle finally began to fall into place in Li Ke's mind. They must have been "contaminated" by World Power during the collapse. If even the mindless monsters were infused with it, it was only natural that two girls dragged through the rift by the 7 Days to Die world would be drenched in that same primordial energy.
As he watched the golden resonance surrounding them, Li Ke let out a long, weary breath. It wasn't just a coincidence that they were here; their very presence was tied to the power of the world he had just lost.