Outside of Delta City, in the parking structure of what used to be a shopping mall, Callum Drake was meeting with someone new.
The man who sat across from him was thin, pale-skinned and wore glasses too small for his face. He had the air of someone who spent most of his life in laboratories.
His name was Dr. Evret Sohn.
Before Orlong, he had been a weapons engineer for a private defense contractor. After Orlong, he had done something very clever.
He had started studying the beasts.
"The core samples we recovered from the Grin Frog leaders confirm what I suspected." Dr. Sohn said, sliding a tablet across the table. "The beasts aren't random creatures. They have a hierarchy. A biological chain of command."
Drake looked at the tablet.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning if you remove the right node in the chain, the lower beasts destabilize." Sohn said. "We've been fighting them as individuals. But they're not individuals. They're a system."
Drake was quiet.
"And someone else figured this out before us." He said.
It wasn't a question.
Sohn blinked.
"....the Heaven Destroyer Party's kill pattern." He said slowly.
"Every pack leader. Every horde center. Every legacy class beast in the region." Drake tapped the tablet. "Killed in sequence. Not randomly."
The two men looked at each other.
"They're dismantling the network." Sohn said.
"Yes." Drake leaned forward. "And they're doing it faster than any team we have. Which means whoever is leading them knows this system from the inside out."
He stood up and moved to the window.
Below, his people were running drills in the parking lot. Disciplined. Practiced. But slow.
"Double our resources to finding them." Drake said. "I want to meet this Arthur Naldir."
Sohn froze.
"You already know who it is?"
"I had an idea." Drake said. "It took some digging. The bank robbery. The getaway. Delta City."
He almost smiled.
"Impressive man. Criminal background and all."
"...should I be concerned?"
"No." Drake turned back to the window. "I just want to make sure I get to him before someone else does."
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Two weeks and four days after Orlong's arrival.
The world leaderboard updated again.
[World Team Leaderboard
1. Heaven Destroyer Party — 139 kills
2. Iron Vanguard — 97 kills
3. Eclipse Squad — 74 kills
4. Divine Spear — 61 kills
...]
The gap had widened.
Not just on the leaderboard. In reality.
The farmhouse had changed. It wasn't just a farmhouse anymore. Arthur had expanded it, with the Carlos brothers drafting the construction and Jack doing most of the heavy lifting. Three additional rooms. A proper forge. A storage unit for materials extracted from hunts.
It was a base.
Small. Functional. Invisible to anyone who didn't already know it was there.
Outside the base, Leon sat cleaning his twin blades with a rag. The venom coating had been reapplied that morning, they had a faint dark sheen now that hadn't been there at the start.
Jack was asleep inside. The man could sleep anywhere at any time.
Arthur stood at the edge of the treeline holding the Goremaw Marrow Core.
He had been looking at it for three days.
[Legacy Beast Core: Goremaw Marrow Core
Effect: Fusion or Consumption.]
He had made his decision.
Not fusion.
Not for the breaker. Not yet.
The breaker still had more potential to grow through natural use. Fusing the core now would cap that growth.
But there was another reason he had been waiting.
"Carlos." He called out.
The elder Carlos emerged from the forge wiping his hands on a cloth.
"The hollow in the breaker." Arthur said. "Can you expand it enough to hold this?"
He held up the core.
Carlos studied it.
"The core is what, three centimeters across?"
"About that."
"The current hollow is one." He chewed on that for a moment. "If we expand it, we weaken the structural integrity of the rod."
"By how much?"
"....ten percent. Maybe fifteen."
Arthur was quiet.
"Acceptable." He said.
Carlos gave him a look.
"You want to put a live core inside your weapon." He said flatly.
"Yes."
"Why."
"Because the core pulses." Arthur said. "Right now it's dormant. But when it's stimulated by kinetic impact during combat, it will discharge the stored energy."
Carlos stared at him.
"You want to turn your weapon into a detonator."
"A controlled one."
Carlos looked at the core. Looked at the breaker. Looked back at Arthur.
"...give me until morning." He said.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
That night.
Arthur sat alone and pulled up something he had been putting off.
The world wasn't just outside Delta City anymore. Leaderboards meant competition. Competition meant people were watching.
And not just Drake.
On Orlong's side.
In his past life, Arthur had learned late that the heaven race monitored earth's leaderboard from the start. They used it to identify candidates for observation. Some they recruited. Some they marked as threats to eliminate.
His past self had been marked as a threat.
He would be marked again.
The difference this time was that he knew it was coming.
(I have to reach the gates of Orlong before they decide what to do with me.) He thought in his mind.
Orlong's gate was not a physical place on earth. It was a threshold. A strength threshold.
In the system, it was listed as something that most people never discovered.
Arthur pulled up the system menu and navigated three layers deep.
[Orlong Gate Threshold
To qualify for the first ascent to Orlong, a user must:
— Reach Level 30
— Possess a class with Tier 2 or above rating
— Complete at least one Dungeon of trial classification
Current Status:
Level: 10 / 30
Class Tier: 1 / 2
Dungeons Completed: 0 / 1]
Level 30.
He was at 10.
Two weeks in.
(Twenty more levels.) He thought. (And dungeons haven't even appeared yet.)
He closed the menu.
Then he looked up at the sky where Orlong sat, enormous and quiet, its surface catching the light of a setting sun.
He had died on that planet once.
He was going back.
And this time, the heaven race would be the ones on their knees.
"Oi." Leon's voice came from behind him.
Arthur turned.
Leon stood in the doorway holding two mugs.
"Coffee's ready." He said.
Arthur looked at him for a moment.
Then he stood up and walked over.
"Thanks." He took the mug.
They stood side by side looking up at Orlong.
"You're going to war with that planet, aren't you." Leon said.
"Yes."
"And you expect me and Jack to go with you."
"Yes."
Leon drank his coffee.
"....alright." He said. "But I want a bigger blade when we get there."
Arthur almost smiled.
"Deal."
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