The ogre was all stretched skin, mottled rage, and a golden cleaver swung so fast the air screamed.

  David’s illusion teleported away from the attack, a sudden blur of motion that placed it further from the Mind Knight’s position. It vanished and reappeared farther from the Mind Knight’s position, careful to remain within the short, unforgiving range of Fenrir’s illusion. Fifteen feet. Not the full twenty. He did not risk it. The boundary mattered too much.

  The Swift-Footed Slayer, seeing his master engage, retreated several paces to observe. David’s illusion landed and lazily raised the massive, dripping greataxe, pointing it toward the ogre’s general location.

  The axe looked real. A swing from it, even a light one, looked like it could bisect a house. David was acutely aware that to the ogre, this was not an image. It could feel the heat radiating from the flaming circlet, smell the sulfur and ozone and phantom blood, hear the creak of armor, see every detail of the polished skulls. It was all very real. And that was the risk. The entire effect was bound to a short sphere around Fenrir. It was limited by the wolf’s energy reserves, which he was actively refilling from his own and his stoic demon, Cinder’s pools. If their energy faltered, it was over. He couldn’t actually attack. If the Mind Knight moved, or if David mistimed a teleport and the ogre’s cursed, blood-sword-boosted strike even grazed the illusion’s intangible space, the construct would shatter, the deception would be over.

  The ogre was too fast, too strong. One mistake could end everything.

  His corrupted Battle Sense thrummed with dark appreciation. It enjoyed this. The high-wire act of projecting an image of being an oppressive, untouchable demon, the psychological torment of a seemingly invincible foe. Shut it, you, David thought, the internal command a flick of mental concentration.

  The ogre came again. This time, it teleported—a blur of distortion and ozone—reappearing with the colossal blood-cleaver already mid-swing.

  What followed wasn’t an exchange of blows—the illusion couldn’t attack. It was the ogre unleashing a world-shattering strike. A blow that missed by a hair’s breadth.

  David’s illusion teleported at the last possible microsecond, the blade carving a trench in the earth where it had stood, spraying soil and rock into the air. The strike was so violent it shook David’s real bones. The ogre teleported a second time mid swing, a horizontal arc that would have leveled a forest. Another last-instant dodge. A third, an overhead smash from a point directly above, cratering the ground, the shockwave flattening grass in a ring. Each impact rattled David’s real teeth inside his skull. The ogre was strong as hell, fast as hell. Even with Battle Sense warning him, the timing was razor-thin. The delay between warning and execution was a vulnerability—a weakness of Battle Sense when pitted against sheer, overwhelming speed.

  David adapted instantly. He masked those near-misses. He made the last-instant evasions look like lazy, almost casual taunts. The illusion reappeared back into existence a few feet away each time, giving the slight, dismissive tilt of a masked head, as if toying with a slow child. It was a nerve-wracking, high-stakes deception. If that exchange continued for more than a few seconds, the cracks would show. Something would give. Speed, timing, or maybe a simple misplaced action. The illusion would crumble.

  The ogre stopped. It didn’t pant. It simply stood amidst the devastation it had made, its blue eyes burning into the laughing demon mask. Then, with a soft whump of air and a scent of ozone, it teleported away, reappearing near its two human enforcers, putting thirty feet between them.

  David’s illusion didn’t pursue—it couldn’t. Instead, it stood its ground, the greataxe resting casually on its shoulder. It repeated the first question, its voice flat and unchanging. "How many?"

  The ogre’s grating voice rolled across the clearing. "I will kill you eventually. You are a weak piece. A piece that does not kill its enemies is a flawed one."

  It shifted its gaze, the burning blue orbs passing over the terrified survivors. "Two. I want two humans. My first batch died. They did not survive their classing." A massive finger, like a stone pillar, pointed. "That one." It aimed at Chloe, who flinched as if struck. Then it pointed downward, at the still form of Harrison at its feet. "And the one already broken."

  Why only two? David thought, the calculation cutting through the tension. Last time it took four. Now it has two, and it only wants two more. Why four? He turned the number over. To a ruthless, pragmatic creature like the ogre, perhaps four wasn’t a symbolic number. It was a logistical one. The maximum it could babysit—manage, transport, or level at once without excessive risk. A batch size.

  David’s illusion tilted its masked head, the flaming circlet casting shifting shadows. “The Marked Legion,” it stated, the words dropping into the tense air like stones. “They are your enemy. They are also mine.” He let that hang for a beat. “You want pieces. So do I. The Legion hoards them.”

  The ogre’s burning blue eyes flashed slightly, but it didn’t interrupt.

  “In twenty days, I’ll move against them,” the illusion continued, its voice a calm, flat line. “I plan to destroy them. Once that is done, the pieces they have collected become mine. We could share them. All of them. You want fragments of the dungeon’s potential. The Legion sits on a stockpile.”

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  The ogre remained silent, a mountain of patient, calculating malice.

  “You can confirm your agreement now,” David’s illusion said. It gestured with the massive axe toward the blood-sword still gripped in the ogre’s hand, and then toward Chloe and the prone Harrison. “Return my sword. Return the two humans you’ve taken. That would be a sign of… collaborative intent.”

  The ogre let out a low, grinding sound that wasn’t a laugh. It slowly bared its teeth as the illusion spoke, as if it wanted nothing more than to eat the elusive human.

  “And if you refuse? Then we negotiate a different price,” the illusion continued, no change in its tone. “I will let you take the humans for a price: for every human you keep, you grant me the right to kill you once. You may take the sword. But I will retrieve it by burning it from your grasp. I will reduce you to ash, leaving only enough of you to regenerate endlessly. So you can feel every second and each flame.”

  Following a cold, prompting impulse from Battle Sense, David directed Fenrir. The illusion’s left hand rose. In its palm, a sphere of fire manifested. It was not normal flame, but a bonfire. It burned black at its core and white at its edges, warped the air into screaming spirals as it consumed light itself, and left reality blistered and hollow where it passed. It looked like a mass of fire so dense it stopped being flame and became a roiling, light-devouring shape, its surface folded in on itself like molten glass while colors died at its edges and the space around it visibly buckled.

  David didn’t know what kind of fire that was, but his Battle Sense directed the imagery.

  In the illusion’s other hand, it held up the dungeon fragment. A thumb-sized, perfect sphere, its heart a bright, swirling nexus of multicolored light trapped within the crystal.

  “Help me break the Legion,” the illusion said, the hellfire in one hand, the glittering fragment in the other. “And I will share the pieces. My humans, and theirs. A partnership. Or we can measure our wills by how much of your flesh I can burn away before you stop screaming.”

  A beat of silence.

  Then the ogre moved. It didn’t hand over the sword. It threw it. Hurled it. It moved at a blinding speed, a projectile that would have crushed a real target. It wasn’t a return. It was a contemptuous, violent attack. The sword slammed into the earth where the illusion stood, embedding itself with a thunderous spray of soil and rock. The massive, car-sized cleaver shrank as it flew, transforming back into the normal, human-sized golden cursed blade mid-air.

  Then, without looking, the ogre’s other hand flung Chloe. It was a violent discard, not a release. She would have been badly injured if Rhea and Mia, reacting on pure instinct, hadn’t thrown their hands out. A telekinetic wave from Rhea and a cushioning force from Mia snatched the healer from the air, arresting her momentum just before she cracked into the ground. They lowered her, trembling, to the dirt.

  The ogre paused.

  It looked down at the healed, unconscious Harrison at its feet as if reconsidering its actions. Its burning blue eyes studied the broken human, then lifted to stare at David’s illusion. The silence was heavy, filled with the sound of its low, grinding breath.

  “No,”

  It grated, the word final and absolute. “A thing like you has no right to make demands of me. Your level has uses.”

  It took a single, earth-trembling step forward, its presence pressing down on the clearing. “Ten days,” it declared, its voice a landslide of will. “In ten days, you will kill the Legion’s champions. You will throw yourself against their false king. I will slaughter their marked soldiers. Then…” The ogre’s lips peeled back from stone-like teeth. “I will kill you both and take your strength. Then I will take your pieces.”

  It laid a massive, possessive hand on Harrison’s chest. Then, with a final, dismissive glance at the illusion, it simply… left. It vanished between one blink and the next, taking Harrison and its two classed human enforcers with it. A massive shockwave followed, earth trembling, wind howling.

  Then the clearing was suddenly, horrifically lighter, the crushing pressure of its presence gone, leaving only devastation and a ringing void behind.

  David didn’t hesitate. His moved, appearing beside the cursed golden sword where it was buried in the torn earth, now the size of a regular weapon. He wrapped his hand around its hilt and wrenched it free. It was a pragmatic move, if only to prevent the ogre from reclaiming it.

  David felt it then, helplessness hitting him all at once, cold and heavy. It settled in his gut and stayed there. His breathing sped up. His chest felt tight. His thoughts crowded in and wouldn’t line up, each one louder than the last. He couldn’t get a grip on any of them.

  Fuck.

  His hands shook. His heart wouldn’t slow down. Panic kept pushing, squeezing, making everything feel urgent and out of control. The feeling spread through him until it filled his body completely, leaving him weak and exposed, stuck in it, knowing he couldn’t do anything and feeling useless because of it.

  A sense of helplessness he hadn't let himself feel before. It sat in his gut like a stone.

  It invalidated everything. All his efforts. He’d been using earth logic. Holding onto morality. Refusing to consume human souls, sentient human souls. He’d been handholding. Eating. Sleeping. Taking breaks. Like the others, he had—perhaps without even realizing it—been treating this place lightly in his own way.

  The ogre’s humans represented a far lesser version of what he could become. Powerful, but subservient. They had given in to this place in a way he despised. The illusion he’d created, the Demon Slayer, represented who he needed to become.

  The ogre itself, that powerful, cruel bastard? It represented something he hadn’t let go of, something still tangled in him no matter how hard he tried to rip it out. He would have to get past it if he wanted to survive. Dependence on others, maybe. Morality? Ethics? Hesitation? Grief? No—not grief. There were things he wouldn’t abandon. Couldn’t. Not for anyone here. He had prioritised the sword over the humans, but his heart wouldn’t slow, Harrison’s gore stuck behind his eyes no matter how hard he tried to look away. His stomach rolled, sharp and sick, bile crawling up his throat. He swallowed it back and felt worse for it. He needed to overcome it. That thing. That creature. This entire place. Leave his former self behind even though it felt like tearing off skin. It showed him everything he hated about here. About himself. The unfairness. The horror. His weakness. His need for others. His hesitation.

  It represented a simple, brutal truth: survival here needed more from him. A reversing of the predator-prey hierarchy. It was about building a new self. One where survival, control, and what worked replaced purpose, morality, and old rules.

  Panicked cries and screams engulfed the clearing. David hardly heard them. The first number he’d thrown out had been a gamble. A bluff.

  Until the last second, he was almost certain something would go terribly wrong. Only when the moment passed and the clearing stilled did he let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. His plan had worked.

  Ten days.

  He had ten days to figure out how to kill that thing.