Everyone stared at the ogre and the two humans standing beside it. Shock, horror, fear, and confusion twisted every face. The reaction was immediate and paralyzing. The ogre’s arrival had knocked most of them to the ground. Harris, Henderson, the pensioner, Chloe, and Theo were down, pushing themselves up with slow, unsteady movements, dazed with terror.
Chloe was on her knees beside Theo. She was crying, huffing, frantic tears streaking through the dirt on her face as she stared at the twenty-foot-tall monster. Her mace hung forgotten in her limp hand. Theo braced himself on one elbow, his face drained of color. “They have classes,” he whispered, his voice thin with terror and something close to awe.
Only six remained standing. David, Jamie, Rhea, Mia, Corbin, and Evans. They were statues, their earlier defensive stances rigid now, weapons locked in white-knuckled grips, frozen in fear and indecision. Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the ogre’s tag. “What the fuck is a Mind Knight?” he said quietly, his usual bravado gone.
Evans swallowed, his gaze flicking between the ogre and the two humans beside it. “Those levels,” he breathed, his professional calm cracking. Someone was staring at the one-armed man. “A Slayer,” they said, the word flat and hollow.
“What… what the fuck are we supposed to do against that?”
Harris tightened his grip on his weapon. “We can’t handle that,” he whispered, voice strained. “We just can’t.”
Rhea stood completely still, her analytical composure gone. Indecision gripped her.
It gripped David too.
David’s first impulse was to attack. Angles. Vectors. Use his thralls to blind them. Strike them hard. The plan formed in half a second, clean and lethal.
It was a stupid impulse, a twitch in his muscles before his brain caught up. The result of a new life spent on constant hunts.
He hesitated.
Fear hit him, a cold punch that had nothing to do with the ogre in front of him and everything to do with a memory. The Level 50. The Soul-Eater—the one from the temple. He’d killed it through cunning, a technicality, a trick. Consumed its soul. But he remembered the feel of his spear against its skin. It was like trying to cut stone with a wet noodle. He had barely scratched it.
And it had been bound. Drained.
How tough was this ogre? Level 48. Could he harm it? His sword, his skills, his towering deathless demon, his giant wolf—would any of it matter? Or would he just bounce off, a fly smacking a windshield? Unknown variables. Too many unknowns.
His breath started coming too fast. His heart was a trapped bird in his chest. This was no longer his calculation; his body had started screaming:
run
run
RUN
An old reflex from an old David. A panic attack, courtesy of a twenty-foot-tall representation of his own fragility.
Then the Calm Mind skill washed over him. The panic was still there, but it was pushed behind a thick, clear wall. He could see it, but it couldn’t touch him. His breathing evened out. The cold, clinical part of his mind stepped forward and looked at the problem. The question.
Someone more foolish answered it for him.
Son, of all people, attacked.
A bright laser shot from his palm, the same beam that had killed creatures outright, bisected armor, and burned straight through David before. It crossed the distance and struck the ogre in the chest.
Rhea and Mia did not move a muscle. Their weapons snapped up and fired as if on their own, follow-up fire and a telekinetic blade converging on the same point.
The ogre tanked it all.
The laser washed over its grey hide. Burned flesh split, then sealed. Shallow wounds closed as fast as they formed, mottled muscle knitting back into place until the damage vanished. The swords and javelins impacted burned flesh, failing to penetrate, only the cursed one or two managed to remain lodged, if barely.
Then the one-armed human moved.
The level twenty-five, Swift-Footed Slayer, blurred. David saw him reappear with his fist buried in Son’s gut. At the instant of impact, David saw mana burst outward from the blow, a concussive shock that sent Son flying, tumbling across the ground as if hit by a car.
David watched it happen, the way you watch a glass fall off a table in slow motion.
Once again, like the last time a major threat arrived, Mia’s adopted cat was nowhere to be seen.
Son dragged himself up onto his knees, the linebacker-sized kid fighting his own body. He had landed beside Harris, the older man’s position separate from the group, thrown back by the ogre’s arrival. Son staggered upright, blood on his lips, blinking like he was still catching up to the world.
The ogre chuckled. Then it teleported.
It reappeared in a blur before Son and Harris, this time without the concussive shockwave. The shockwave is optional, David noted mentally. That tracked. The first time it killed Robert had been stealthy by comparison. The ogre reached out to grab Son. Son scurried back in a daze. The ogre knocked Son aside with a casual backhand and snatched Harris, who was a second too late.
Son hit the ground again and stayed there. Big kid. Tough. Whether he was still alive was anyone’s guess. Brave, David thought. Stupid, but brave. If he lived, that kind of stupidity could be useful. Very useful.
The ogre took Harris. It tore the golden cursed sword Mia had flung into its healing wound. The sword was stuck in its charred and healing skin like a useless toothpick. It studied the sword. Then it looked at the frozen humans.
“My thanks for the gift.”
The ogre sent its energy into the blood sword. It took the cursed weapon. It tore off one of Harris’s legs. Harris screamed.
Gore followed, blood and viscera burst in an spray, and the group reeled from both the sight and the knowledge of who it was happening to. Chloe vomited. Theo turned away and dry-heaved, his whole frame trembling. Jamie stood frozen, pale and empty, all his noise erased. Rhea’s clinical calm shattered; she stared wide-eyed, horror reduced to something raw. Even Corbin and Evans flinched, their professional masks cracking. The screams and the brutal simplicity of the action hit everyone. It was horrific. Brutal. The sound jarred David’s gut into vertigo. Blood burst, ran down the ogre’s arm, and splashed across the dirt.
The ogre poured Harris’s blood over the blade. The golden cursed blade grew. It didn’t stop until the weapon became the size of a motorbike. Then a small vehicle; a crude mass of glowing gold veined with red light.
As the blade grew, the ogre did too. Muscle ballooned across its frame, piling on in dense slabs, its body thickening and swelling into something larger, stronger, and far more dangerous than it had been moments before.
Harris never stopped screaming.
David noted the laser’s effectiveness.
Rhea and Mia’s weapons had lodged in the creature’s thick skin. They were as harmless as toothpicks. But a near-Level 50 shouldn’t have been injured at all. Whatever Son’s lasers had, it was anti-ogre. Determining whether it was the laser’s heat or the lasers themselves without verification was foolish. I need real proof. From what he had seen, it was only enough to give the thing a bad rash. It was useless right now. But it was information.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The Swift-Footed Slayer, the one-armed human, moved. It was a blur of impossible speed, a streak across David’s vision. One moment he was by the ogre. The next, he was back, and Chloe was with him, standing beside the ogre and the bleeding-out Harris. The ogre’s massive hand closed around Chloe’s arm, lifting her off her feet like a doll.
“Wench,” the ogre said, its voice a grating landslide of sound. “Heal him.”
Chloe was shaking, fear-stricken, sobbing. But her hands moved. A golden-green glow sprang from her palms, washing over Harris’s horrific stump. Harris was pale, eyes half-lidded, and should have been long dead—whatever stats he’d invested in Endurance had staved off the inevitable, if barely. The bleeding stopped. The raw flesh began to knit, flesh and sinew crawling back together in a slow, unnatural weave. She healed him through her trembling and tears, her sobs hitching with every pulse of light.
A cold sweat broke out on the back of David’s neck. His jaw clenched. A part of his mind was screaming, a white-noise static of pure, nerve-shredding helplessness. They can just take anyone. Any time. There is no cover. No defense.
The unfairness of it was a hard, bitter stone in his gut. The ogre was bad enough. The humans were another issue entirely. They were a complication that turned a disaster into a sophisticated trap.
He shoved the panic down. He funneled every ounce of his mana, every shred of focus, into the Calm Mind skill. The sharp edges of his terror blurred into a manageable, dull hum. He could think through the numbness.
He turned the trap over, looking for cracks. Through the fear and panic, David saw clues.
The ogre wants him healed. It has human enforcers. This isn’t a feast. It’s a recruitment drive. The thought was ice-cold. Or more accurately, it’s picking seeds. We’re not ripe yet. We’re potential livestock. Our numbers have swung too low to kill us.
It wants to use us. Like it’s using them.
He turned the deduction over, looking for cracks. His eyes flicked to the two humans. Swift-Footed Slayer. The name tracks. Moves almost too fast to see. A literal blur. The other one.
The other one hadn’t moved. The human in scavenged, blood-stained plate armor. Its class name was a problem. Mind Knight.
The class name 'Mind Knight' suggested mental abilities. His own Calm Mind skill’s description proved mental attacks were real. That led to a logical, chilling deduction: it was very possible that, like David could sense souls, the Mind Knight in scavenged plate could sense minds. It might be sensing his right now. Seeing through his wolf’s illusions. It hadn’t reacted, hadn’t looked his way, or even glanced toward his veiled, invisible cohort. That meant one of two things. It had already noticed him and didn’t care. Or he was out of its range.
Hope for the latter. Assume the former.
The Mind Knight was the priority threat. If he moved, David would have to retreat.
David focused inward, on the thrall bond with Cinder. The devout, knight-like demon burned with a singular, fervent desire: to slay the ogre. He could feel it, a furnace of zealotry seeing the massive teleporting creature as the ultimate trophy to lay at his feet. Maybe its undead, deathless nature makes it immune to fear, David thought, mildly surprised by the intensity. Or maybe it’s just that crazy. A religious nut… And why do I like that? It was beyond useful.
The response was immediate and eager. The massive, scaled demon placed a clawed hand over his chest, a gesture of devout submission. A torrent of corrosive, potent power flooded into him. His Energy Affinity skill seized it greedily, a parched channel drinking a river of acid. He didn’t hold it. He could use it raw like this, but that would be a waste. Instead, he turned and funneled the entire raging stream into Fenrir through their own bond. The giant wolf, already sustaining a complex veil, shuddered as the influx supercharged its reserves.
A sense of understanding and readiness washed back. The response was; Yes.
David designed the illusion in his mind, feeding the details down the link. He pictured a human manifesting into appearance not from stealth, but as if by a unique skill. The air would distort. Dirt and earth would be displaced outward in a minor shockwave, accompanied by a soft thump of displaced air.
The man himself was tall, nearly seven feet. He wore sturdy, unadorned armor. No helmet. His face was covered by a mask—a demon’s face, frozen in silent, mocking laughter. Above the mask, crowning his head, burned a circlet of pure fire, an idea stolen from the memory of the corrupted elemental naiad he’d consumed, giving him the aura of a natural disaster. Hanging from his waist was a gruesome belt: shrunken, polished skulls—temple demons, ogres, priests, strange creatures—all strung together as trophies. In his grip, held with casual, playful ease, was a large jagged greataxe that glowed with violent power, demonic energy dripping like sap from its edge. The man stood calm, overconfident, the heavy, imposing axe moving like a toy in his hands.
Above this fabricated figure, Fenrir, with its enhanced power, wove the final, crucial tag:
[Human, Lvl 81 — Demon Slayer]
David had chosen the class specifically to tell the ogre and its enforcers exactly what they were looking at. It said ‘Try me and die’ to everyone and everything in this dimension. He’d almost used something else. ‘Knight of ???│??_??—??╱??.’ The memory of his aspects description had called it ‘Second of the Forsaken Pantheon.’ Whatever the hell that was. Using it seemed like a spectacularly bad idea. Tying his deception to some possibly real, demonic god-like entity, especially one that might be an enemy of the devoured and very dead god-like being he was now linked to, was asking for a different kind of problem.
He settled on 81. He doubted this place had a strict level cap, but he didn’t know. A false level 100 or 200 would have been more intimidating, but it would have created a bigger problem. It would give them—the ogre and its cadre—a target. A goal. An obstacle to catch up to. I can’t kill them right now, he reasoned coldly. I need them to leave, not to go rally their friends or dedicate their lives to hunting down a myth I just invented. An 81 was terrifying—a near-insurmountable threat for a level 48 and its mid-twenty lackeys. It was a reason to disengage, not a reason to level up. David was trying to keep his problems scared and weak. At a level his spear could pierce, should the time ever come.
Under his direction, Fenrir poured the pooled demonic energy into the construct.
Fifteen feet to the left of the group, the air shimmered. False dirt spat outward. A soft whump of displaced air marked the arrival of the Demon Slayer. He stood there, his flaming circlet casting light over the laughing demon mask and the trophies at his hip, his immense greataxe dripping phantom power, dangled between fingers as if weightless. He looked at the ogre, his head tilting slightly, a predator considering new prey.
"What do you think you’re doing, cretin?" The masked, high-level human illusion spoke under David’s order. The sound that came through the mask was distorted, steady, and amused; like molten metal poured through a human throat.
The reaction from David’s group was a collective, stifled gasp. Jamie’s mouth hung open. Corbin and Evans stiffened, their weapons shifting minutely toward the new, overwhelmingly powerful threat. Rhea’s eyes widened, darting between the ogre and the impossible newcomer. For a moment, the terror of the ogre was eclipsed by the sheer, staggering presence of a level 81 human, a Demon Slayer who had just walked out of a nightmare.
The two hostile humans, the Mind Knight, and the Swift-Footed Slayer, who had been approaching, suddenly froze, hesitating.
Then the slayer speedster attacked. David saw it coming, his Battle Sense mapping the single attack to the second. His illusion teleported. He made sure the movement created more distance between himself and the Mind Knight. He reappeared holding the greataxe’s horned tip to the slaying speedster’s eye.
David’s illusion held up a shimmering dungeon fragment, and turned. "You want to be the new sovereign. Like the rest of the fools." It was a guess. A logical one. A safe one.
The ogre did not flinch. Its blue eyes, like trapped gas flames, regarded the fragment with detached interest. "My aspirations," it grated, the sound like stone tearing, "are not so low."
"Everyone wants a fragment," the illusion countered, the flaming circlet flickering. "The floor sovereign is the highest power on this floor. What could be higher to a mere level 48 ogre?"
The ogre’s massive head tilted slowly. It did not smile. It raised a hand, not in threat, but in indication, and pointed a single, trunk-like finger toward the churning, bruised expanse of the hellish sky. "The Defiled Gate is not a myth."
More mysteries. More annoyances. What the fuck is the defiled gate? David would have to find some abyssal priests to torment and interrogate.
David’s Demon Slayer illusion went very still. "How many?" it asked, its voice dropping to a flat, dangerous pitch. "How many pieces do you want?"
The ogre paused. The silence was heavy, filled with the low growl building in its chest. Its gaze swept over its frozen, terrified audience, then back to the illusion, it bared its teeth, all hunger and stray viscera. "All of them," it stated, the words final and absolute.
David’s illusion laughed, a sound devoid of warmth, sharp as a splintering bone.
"Give me the sword. Now. Or die."
The ogre fell silent. Its immense chest rose and fell once, a slow bellows motion. The two human enforcers did not look at the illusion; their attention was fixed on their master, waiting for a sign. The Mind Knight’s armored head was tilted, as if listening to something faint. The Swift-Footed Slayer was a statue of coiled potential.
"Your level," the ogre said, each word measured and heavy, "will not guarantee your victory." It seemed to be weighing, not the threat, but the opportunity.
“A promising piece," it conceded, a note of genuine, predatory appreciation in its stone-grind voice. "To rise so quickly." Like a butcher judging a prize bull, its burning eyes scanned the illusion from head to toe, assessing the trophy skulls, the dripping axe, the crown of fire. The appreciation vanished, replaced by absolute, tyrannical will.
“Here, take your sword. Die for me."
This time, the ogre attacked. There was no teleport. It simply moved, a continent of muscle and malice shifting into motion, its new, massive golden, cursed blood-cleaver rising.