Much later, everyone was either inside the plane sleeping, keeping watch, or gathered around the cooking fire they’d built.

  Rhea and Mia sat on top of the broken fuselage of the plane, keeping watch. Mia seemed to have become Rhea’s protege. Both had the exact same skill; Telekinetic Tug.

  David sometimes wondered if there were other groups of humans out there, stumbling through the same hellscape. The fact that some of the missing or dead from their flight had skills identical to the survivors—a few had Calm Mind, for instance—suggested the System dealt them cards from a finite, or perhaps set, starting deck. It made him wonder if, somewhere, another human had drawn Energy Affinity like he had. And if so, what had they done with it? Had they gone demonic, like him? Or maybe they’d leaned into something else—electric, thermal, pure mana, or some energy type he didn’t even know existed.

  David watched the two.

  Rhea and Mia both had the same skill, but used it differently.

  Where Rhea used it to launch javelins like rockets, Mia used it for animation.

  Below them, a dead suit of possessed armor lay in the dirt. Mia was concentrating, her face tight. The armor’s arm twitched. The hollow shell clattered, pushing itself up on unsteady legs. It bent over, metal fingers scraping through the mud to close around the shaft of its fallen spear.

  David studied the animation. Is she copying me and my minions? he wondered. Trying to fight with a conjured living-puppet like I do? It was a cute idea. It was also redundant. The armor moved like a toddler in a tin can. Even if she mastered it, it wouldn’t be the best application. If he had that skill, he wouldn’t waste the focus animating a whole body. He’d have an army of floating weapons—spearpoints and blades, a storm of sharp things. One body was a target. A hundred independent points of violence was a solution.

  God really gives gold to fools, David thought. Just you wait. When I figure out demonic energy, you’ll all be taking notes.

  David and the group had experienced a minor disagreement in philosophies. They’d all accepted the danger without taking evasive action—which David found vaguely stupid—even the people whose opinions David usually somewhat valued had accepted it. He believed they should never stop hunting. They should never return to the plane. They should spend every second out in the forest, hunting in the immediate area, exploring slowly and with caution.

  But he’d been outvoted.

  They’re dumb, he thought, watching Jamie try to balance a piece of cooked meat on a flat stone. Too used to Earth-culture. To having a home base, a safe zone. This was not a campsite. It’s a bright, smelly marker in the middle of a predator’s territory. We should be moving. Always moving.

  They’d hauled the giant, wolf-like bones of the adult warg to the edge of the forest.

  “That pile is going to draw scavengers,” Evans said. He was sitting on a log, his gaze on the treeline.

  “Let them come,” Corbin replied. He was standing, leaning on his halberd. “We can see them. Better than being ambushed out in the Forest.”

  “It’s drawing something now,” Rhea said from her watch post. She didn’t turn. “Look.”

  A faint, shimmering haze was gathering around the large bone pile. It wasn’t flies. It looked more like heat distortion over asphalt, the way it moved suggested shape and will.

  Jamie craned his neck. “Is that, like, bone ghosts? Spirits? Can we eat it?”

  “Try it,” David said. “Report back.”

  David watched the haze thicken. He could probably scatter it with a concentrated burst of demonic fire. He didn’t. Let them see. Let them connect the cause and effect. The safe zone wasn’t safe. The home base was a target. Maybe next time they’d vote to keep moving.

  He kept his hand on his spear and watched the strange gathering shimmer.

  In the end, Jamie was joined by his young friend, Son, and the adult to oversee them, Corbin. Their approach scared the thing away, whatever it was.

  It left the pile of giant bones, and fled.

  David had considered shaping the gathered warg bones. His power, the demonic energy fused with death, corrupting it, could have reworked those thick femurs and ribs into shields, or breastplates. He’d turned a demon’s limb into a spear that could pierce through supernaturally reinforced hide. Bone shields would be a logical upgrade.

  He decided against it. Each member of the group of survivors was a resource—a tool—they had skills, numbers, and weapons. And Souls. He’d told them he’d gotten the bone weapons from the level 50 and hadn’t elaborated further. Apart from Rhea, none had gotten close to the corpse. They all already thought he was some kind of curse-lifting, necromancer-shaman. Handing out armor made from monsters they’d killed would cement that image—paint him as an asset—but it would inadvertently reveal much more. It was useful to be seen as valuable, but there was a line. Who knew what the future held? Which resource—or person—he would utilise? Displaying that specific ability, the methodical, craftsman-like reshaping of bone into tools—felt like a step too far.

  The group also fortified the plane’s wreckage somewhat. It was something of a team effort, which meant it was mostly inefficient and driven by a desperation David didn’t share, but he observed the process anyway.

  Under Evans and Corbin’s guidance, Jamie had been making walls of ice to obstruct and funnel entry to the clearing. The ice melted pretty quickly in the muggy, wrong-feeling air, so the kid had to make them massive and thick. At least once an hour, Jamie would walk a slow circuit around the clearing, with David’s hobgoblin trailing him as a silent, green-skinned bodyguard, patching holes and thickening weak spots. His breath puffed out in a cloud as he worked, and he provided a running commentary the entire time.

  “This section’s actually pretty dope,” Jamie said, slapping a smooth, blue-streaked section of the wall. “I packed it super dense. It’s like an ice cube the size of a car.”

  “It’s a very cold, very temporary puddle,” David said, watching a steady stream of meltwater run from its base. “Keep going.”

  David finally chimed in on the strategy, suggested utilizing Chloe’s healing. The idea was to break and grow a thick wall of trees. Cinder hacked into the line of trees at the clearing’s edge with her massive bone greatsword and demonic strength, each blow a concussive thwack that sent wood chips flying. Mia and Rhea would then carve the partially severed trunks, creating deep notches and grooves. Then Chloe would step in. She’d lay her hands on the wounded wood, and under her healing, the trees didn’t just scar over. They grew. New bark and sinewy wood swelled violently, twisting the trees into each other, grafting them into a solid, living wall about ten feet tall.

  The whole time, David felt his demon, Cinder, simmer with a desire to kill everything and everyone in sight and use their bones to build a throne for him, as usual. It was a constant, low-grade pressure in the back of his thoughts, like a song stuck in his head if the song was just the sound of tearing and breaking. He kept her focused on cutting trees. Each swing of her sword was a substitute for splitting a skull, and the growing pile of splintered wood was a half-decent alternative to a pile of corpses he couldn’t use.

  Now, the clearing was ringed by a ten-foot wall of fused, living trees and reinforced by thick, sweating slabs of ice, with only two narrow entrances left open. In theory, they should be able to see any attack or raid coming.

  Unless, of course, something is strong enough to just smash through it, David thought, studying the wooden palisade. Or flies. Or ignores physical barriers entirely and just teleports past the whole thing.

  He watched Jamie start another lap, spraying a fresh layer of ice over a sunken section. The kid was getting faster, his shapes more controlled. Harris was on the other side, directing the placement of sharpened stakes in the dirt. It was busywork. It was old-Earth logic. It was the deep-seated instinct to build a fence instead of becoming the thing that the fence was meant to keep out.

  What we need is strength and levels, David thought. A lot of levels. Non stop. But after the raids and the ogre, people were desperate for some sense of safety, even if the sense was manufactured. They wanted walls. So they built walls.

  It was, in his professional opinion as a guy currently stuck in hell, stupid. But he let them build. He even helped, a little. Because they were his resources. His tools. He figured watching those walls fail would teach them more than any argument he could make.

  David was sitting on the ground, playing with the cat. "Playing," in this situation, meant he was idly rolling a condensed ball of dark maroon demonic energy between his fingers like a coin. The sentient Scottish Fold was draped over his legs, a purring, warm weight. Every time the energy flickered, the cat's head would snap up, its wide eyes tracking the movement with unnerving focus.

  It was fast as hell. When David suddenly pinched the energy out, the cat's paw shot out in a gray blur, swiping through the empty air where the ball had been. It looked at its own paw, then up at David, and let out a small, chirping meow of protest.

  "Hold on little guy," David said. He summoned the energy again, this time letting it roll along the back of his knuckles. The cat immediately shoved its head under his hand, rubbing its face vigorously against the shimmering haze. The purring intensified into a ragged, motor-like rumble. It wasn't just seeking pets; it was marinating in the energy.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  David scratched behind its folded ears and took a paw in his hand. He swore its claws were longer than they should be. They peeked out from the gray fur, sharp and with a dull metallic sheen, like old steel. Not a cat's claws. A thing's claws.

  Surprisingly, the gremlin-voice in the back of his head—the corrupted, chattering instinct of his Battle Sense skill that usually dissected every movement into a vector of violence—was quiet. It wasn't gone. It was a watchful, recognizing disinterest. Like looking at another predator and deciding, for now, not to start anything. like the skill had analyzed the small, purring creature on his lap, categorized it, and filed it under 'fellow malicious being.'

  David felt at the two bundled dungeon fragments in his pocket, resting against his thigh. He needed more information. An inspection with his Aspect had just called them "fragments of potential," which was about as useful as a menu without prices. He looked down at the cat, now enthusiastically kneading his thigh with those metallic claws.

  He wondered if the cat was a dungeon piece, too. Chosen—or more accurately, doomed—as a seed to be grown and consumed, just like the rest of them. Was it a dungeon piece, or just an accident that got swept up? It could be either. Maybe the little thing was leveling up. It was definitely getting smarter. It knew when he was about to start circulating energy for practice and would materialize beside him like clockwork, as if he was a walking heated blanket made of evil. It did the same when food was being prepared, appearing instantly to sit just outside the firelight with big, sad doe eyes until someone caved and gave it a piece of warg.

  The group collected more thick trees for the wall and hunted more animals. Theo, Harris, Jamie, and Evans found a herd of a new type of the forests larger predators.

  The system called them Stagfiends.

  The Stagfiends were moose-sized demonic deer, but they were a deer in the way a T-rex resembled chicken. They were built on a deer’s structure but heavier and denser, a mass of thick muscle and reinforced joints covered in dark, heat-scarred hide. They moved in grouped bursts of charging and repositioning rather than any kind of finesse.

  On their backs stood an inhuman rider with an upper body grown directly from the spine, holding a long spear formed from fused bone and jagged chitin-like metal. The riders used the spear to thrust, hook, and skewer, adjusting its angle and timing in perfect coordination with the stag’s movement. They fought continuously, pressing attacks to impale and pull prey inward as the deer closed distance.

  When Evans’s group finally separated and downed one after a brutal fight, they saw the final mechanism: as the creature died, the rider unfolded along its torso, splitting open into blade-edged structures that exposed a molten, interior mouth. The rider wasn’t a separate being. It was a built-in feeding mechanism.

  It had been trying to eat them the whole time. Instead, the group ate the creature; the deer-like parts, after separating the rider from the body, a part nobody—including David, was willing to touch.

  The Stagfiend meat was dark, stringy, and carried a faint, peppery aftertaste that burned the back of the throat. It wasn’t as good as warg meat, but it was edible. David stood over the butchered carcass, a piece of the strange flesh in his hand. I’m debating the culinary merits of different types of hell-meat, he thought. How times have changed.

  Evans had been key. His hunting knowledge—stalking, understanding how to drive such a creature into a pincer between Theo’s hastily dug pit and Harris’s flanking position—was put to use. His forestry and skinning skills were precise. David watched him, asking short questions about tracking and terrain. He tried to learn as much as possible. All the ways Evans knew to navigate and survive were valuable, just in case David ever had cause to abandon everyone. Or, at the very least, in case he ever found himself stranded and alone.

  Evans mentioned tanning the warg hides for bedding, which seemed like a good idea. Even though the weather was permanently, swampishly tropical—which made the wargs’ thick fur seem like overkill—there was no bad way to be comfortable, or to sleep well.

  Although David’s skills made it so he didn’t actually need food, water, or even sleep. His body fed on demonic energy. If he didn’t eat or sleep, a slow, tiny, yet constant trickle from his circulation would substitute. He could probably sleep if he really tried. And he still ate and drank because… well, why the hell not? It could probably save the others hunting, but they all needed the levels. More plentiful food would lead to complacency, and complacency was death. They fortified while expecting, even anticipating, another attack.

  Under Evans’s guidance, a few more people learned how to skin the kills without damaging the pelts, so the group kept them in case another region turned colder. They hunted as much as they could and smoked the meat.

  But the forest was changing. The ecosystem was growing more different each hour than last. And each day.

  There were more animals. That was the clear, unsettling pattern.

  There were more imps, chittering in the foliage. There were more packs of werebeasts. There were even more warlocks, and more Stagfiends, their riders prowling through the forest, searching for creatures to skewer and consume. The forest wasn’t getting emptier. It was getting fuller.

  Much fuller.

  The creatures levels were rising, too.

  David had been hunting, then. Sometimes he went with other members of the group, sometimes he didn’t. But he was always with Cinder. He wanted to get the both of them to level one hundred as soon as possible, and maybe—no, definitely—find out what the System would reward him with for hitting that milestone. It was difficult with the lower-level creatures in the immediate area, but that was slowly changing. The things wandering into their territory were getting stronger.

  He didn’t bring the elite hobgoblin. He had future plans for it that didn’t involve its level. He sent it out to hunt alone, when he was at the camp. When he wasn’t? He left it at the camp, posted near the wreckage. It was extra security, but not for the others. Its orders were to watch the people, to watch the cursed weapons, and to snatch the cursed weapons, and Jamie or Rhea if things went catastrophically bad and there was no clear way for them to survive. A blunt instrument for a specific, ugly contingency.

  Item retrieval.

  On hunts, David stopped using the demonbone spear. He kept the heavy, vicious thing strapped to his back unless his life was truly in danger. Using it felt like a waste of good energy and a skipped lesson. Instead, he fought with his magic field and a very thick, sturdy stick—a long, carved piece of iron-hard wood he’d infused with demonic energy until it was nearly as durable as steel. He used it to bludgeon, to parry, to thrust.

  It let him practice everything at once: the predictive flow of his Battle Sense, the new, raw surge of targeted limb circulation he was copying from Cinder, the constant management of his ten-foot sphere of influence, and the refined, efficient combat principles he was learning from the hobgoblin. It was hard and awkward at the start. Now, it was productive. He’d broken the stick four times. He just made a new one.

  On one particularly unfortunate hunt, David grabbed Henderson's collar and slammed him on the ground, pretty hard. The impulse from his Battle Sense had been a clean, unambiguous signal. David’s interpretation was straightforward: the skill warned of an attack, so he moved to save Henderson's life. It was a logical conclusion. The fact that the skill was evil, and that its true, grinning purpose had been to make him hurt someone for the fun of it, was the part he’d missed.

  He could’ve sworn he felt his Battle Sense practically cackle with glee in the back of his skull at the misdeed. David apologized to Henderson as Henderson lost his cool, yelling, face flushed with outrage. David explained it was a new skill, that it had misfired. Henderson, after a solid minute of furious sputtering, finally wiped the dirt from his hair and accepted the apology with a tense, sharp nod.

  David had begun learning the difference between his corrupted Battle Sense's attack guidance and its defensive impulses. The defensive ones were quieter, almost shy. The attack guidance was loud, enthusiastic, and currently very pleased with itself. It hadn’t been trying to save anyone. It just wanted to see Henderson hit the dirt, and make David appear evil in the process.

  He continuously tried to familiarize himself with the new, corrupted Battle Sense. Before, he’d learned to keep the skill running permanently—a constant, hum of situational awareness. Now, the skill was mean. It prioritized offense. If David also prioritized offense, if he matched its violent intent, they harmonized. He could move preternaturally, his actions a fluid sequence of inflictions. Damage was dealt. Pain was grievous.

  But the skill had been corrupted, and it came with drawbacks. His actions were now guided by a foreknowledge of immediate outcomes. Among all possible actions in the next two seconds, only the ones that maximized harm were selected. Actions that would be safer, cleaner, or faster but caused less suffering were simply ignored. In those moments, Battle Sense went quiet, and David would be fighting alone. It still warned him of incoming danger, but as an afterthought. Where before it would scream, now it would just mutter dodge. On the plus side, it instantly showed him the weak points of inhuman creatures. Where others had to guess where a creature’s heart was, or if it even had one, David knew precisely how to hurt it in the worst possible way.

  This gave him two options: prioritize offense and sync with the skill to inflict maximum damage, or play a more active, attuned role in his own fighting. Why not both? he mused. In battle, he began engaging Calm Mind—his only mana-based skill—pouring energy into it. The result was a focused, calculating cruelty. He consistently chose the most damaging option available in any given moment. Thankfully, because the evil gremlin in the skill seemed to enjoy tormenting souls, it wanted him to kill. If it had preferred keeping enemies alive to prolong suffering, it would have been a tremendous drawback. Instead, it just wanted him to consume more souls and torment foes beyond death. A nasty critter.

  His combat behavior changed. Instead of dodging to avoid a hit, he might shift into a position where his opponent overextended and suffered a worse injury. Instead of disabling an opponent, he’d strike in a way that increased pain, bleeding, or lasting damage. It didn’t require more speed or strength—just better, more malicious timing and positioning. With two seconds of foresight, he could launch preemptive counters, exploit micro-mistakes, and attack before an opponent’s intent became visible. To a normal human, it would look like impossible anticipation, a constant punishment for actions before they even happened.

  The skill didn’t care if he got hurt, only that he wasn’t killed. Minor injuries were ignored; life-threatening threats were avoided. This was unacceptable to David. After a lot of practice, he had to essentially convince the skill that him remaining unharmed was its own form of psychological torture—that an untouchable enemy was oppressive in a uniquely evil way. The logic was sound: if he died, the skill died. Being harmed wasn’t conducive to inflicting pain on others. Therefore, preventing harm to the host wasn’t kindness; it was a strategy to maximize long-term suffering. Others would experience their own violence as useless, their resistance as costless. That fact alone was torment.

  Days passed. David’s level finally reached 14. Cinder reached level 9.

  Through his corrupted Battle Sense, he trained his magic field, too.

  David would summon walls of fire or set bolts of dark energy to orbit him like ugly, maroon satellites before lashing out at multiple targets. They were slow, obvious, and about as elegant as a hammer to the face, but under the skill’s insistent guidance, he was practicing. He wished there was a manual—Demon Magic for the Beginner Tyrant or something—but the corrupted Battle Sense was the only reference he had. It was like learning an instrument from a teacher who only communicated by screaming "LOUDER" and "MAKE IT HURT."

  It would take a lot of training to get used to, but essentially, the skill was forcing him to fight like the worst kind of demon. Theo, after watching one of these practice sessions, had described it as like watching a "dark lord," whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. David didn’t feel lordly. He felt like a very efficient, very mean factory press. But he couldn’t argue with the results. The skill made him oppressive, cruel, and brutally efficient.

  It was turning him into a Fiend.