David was accompanied by Jamie and Rhea on his latest hunt. They prowled the forest, just past the stream, skirting both familiar and new territory, yet remaining cautious.

  A weak, shrieking squeal and the rattling of chains sounded behind him. David had a level one imp bound in the Heretic's Shackle Fragment. The lanky creature was slumped against a tree, its form sputtering faintly in David’s vision as the shackle constantly drained its energy and bound its soul. It was barely conscious, its low level unable to withstand the drain. It had woken up again.

  Rhea glanced at the shivering creature. "What do you plan to do with it?"

  "Experiment," David said. It was a free soul, readily available, and he had some ideas to test regarding soul manipulation and what he could actually do with one. He’d also found that occasionally messing with a soul like this satisfied the malicious itch of his corrupted Battle Sense, letting it prioritize straightforward killing later in battles without getting distracted. It was a win on multiple levels. Not for the imp, though.

  David had a few specific goals for this hunt.

  Through the group’s tracking, hunts, and exploration, David constantly dissected the fights, and the ecosystem around him, he’d learned much. And he’d come to realize something specific, a thing he’d pieced together while applying Evans’s tracking lessons to the mess of prints and signs, and everything he knew about wolves.

  They had assumed each warg they encountered was solitary, but they had been wrong. This entire section of the forest was warg territory.

  All the wargs in this area belonged to a single, large pack. They’d been hunting the pack’s young and its scattered roaming members. The massive giant adult Corbin and Evans had killed was likely the pack Alpha’s female. David was now looking for the true Alpha. Whatever it was, it would be strong—maybe even skilled. He had plans for its body, and more importantly, for its soul.

  His loyal undead demon was a silent presence just behind his right shoulder. The demoness held her massive bone greatsword low and ready, her horned head moving in slow, scanning arcs that had nothing to do with human curiosity. Jamie, walking a little ahead with Rhea, kept glancing back at the demon.

  Jamie arced a brow, all energy and curiosity in equal parts. “Does it have a name? Like, a real one?”

  “It has a name,” David said, his eyes scanning the tangled canopy.

  Rhea turned at this, mirroring his curiousity.

  “It's Cinder.”

  Jamie looked back, his steps uneven as he tried to watch the forest and the demon at the same time. "I'm just trying to be inclusive. Hey, Cinder—what's your favorite color? Red? Is it red?"

  The newly raised demoness did not respond, the words barely registering. Her completely obsidian-like eyes tracked a distant movement in the canopy—a lean, seven-foot-tall imp scrambling past the distant underbrush with savage glee.

  David watched the tall imp disappear into the high branches, a pinprick in his vision. Too far, and probably still too low-level.

  “So, can it talk?” Jamie asked, not for the first time, jerking a finger at David’s new stoic, stalwart, and bloodthirsty minion. “Like, does it have opinions? On, I dunno, tactical stuff? Or best ways to cook warg?”

  “It doesn’t talk,” David said, his voice flat. “It thinks about killing things and using the remains for construction projects.”

  “Right, but like, silently? In its head? Is it thinking about… me?”

  David stopped and looked at his deathless demon. Then at her greatsword. Then back to Jamie.

  “It’s thinking good things about you,” David said, his voice flat. “Very positive, uplifting stuff. Now look left, past the fallen tree. See anything?”

  Jamie paused and looked, his face settling into a rare mask of concentration. Rhea, who had been silent the whole time, glanced at David and gave a slight shake of her head. She hadn’t seen anything worthwhile either.

  Jamie fell silent for a whole thirty seconds before starting up again, this time about whether demons got bored. David tuned him out. He was scanning the undergrowth and the twisted branches above, his skills subtly active. His own focus was split. He was looking for a useful imp, or some other common, unobtrusive creature, to enthrall. He needed a spy. A perfect set of monstrous eyes that could go places he couldn’t, unnoticed, something that could flit into the Marked Legion’s territory, scout the landscape, gather information on the Marked Legion, or search for the ogre’s lair without drawing a second glance.

  He’d considered trying to use the flesh-golem balls he’d stolen from the abyssal priest, but his Aspect just called them inert constructs of flesh that required a ritual to activate—what ritual, it didn’t say—and his most useful tool, Battle Sense, seemed wholly disinterested in a couple of dense, useless balls of tissue. So, live, hellish creatures were on the menu, and David was shopping.

  He needed something durable. A level one or two imp would die if a stronger demon so much as sneezed on it. His spy needed to not die easily. Something that had survived long enough to reach level four or five. Level ten would be best. That implied a certain cunning, a knack for avoidance. But the forest creatures were growing in number and type. The imps in this immediate area—the lanky, seven-foot-tall ones that moved like jerky rabid hyenas—were mostly runts, skittish and low-level. They rarely made it that high; something bigger usually culled them. It was like shopping for the toughest prey in a world full of predators.

  Rhea moved ahead, her gaze distant in the way that meant she was using her sight elsewhere. Jamie pretended to examine a weird fungus. Cinder stood perfectly still, a statue of lethal potential. David watched a smaller, rust-colored imp scuttle past a trunk before vanishing into the distant underbrush. Level two. Maybe.

  Not good enough, he thought. I need a premium spy. That’s the hell-beast equivalent of a disposable camera. He made a mental note of the location. He’d come back alone.

  The ground started to rumble. It was a deep, localized tremor that vibrated up through their boots. The group shifted instantly into defensive positions. Jamie raised his hands, and the air around him turned so cold that David could see his own breath fog. Javelins wrenched themselves from Rhea’s back to float in a slow orbit around her. David dropped the chain tethering the drained, squeaking imp. He picked up his primary training weapon, a wooden staff he’d carved from a dense, root, infusing it with demonic energy until it could probably stop a truck axle. Beside him, his demon Cinder remained perfectly still, her greatsword point dug into the earth, unmoved.

  A herd of twenty to thirty Stagfiends pushed through the treeline in a stampede. Each moose-sized creature was a dense mass of muscle and reinforced joints under scorched hide, built for powerful charges. A rider-form fused to its spine held a long spear of bone and jagged chitin. The herd advanced as a single, coordinated block, the riders leaning forward in unison to lower a line of spearpoints at the group. David settled his grip on his reinforced staff.

  David watched the tree line. "How many?"

  "Thirty," Rhea said. "Between level three and sixteen. One’s at twenty-two."

  "Stay close," David said, setting his stance. "Jamie, don't let them close in." He expanded his magic field to its full ten-foot radius. The air within the boundary began heating up as he channeled energy directly into the field. Throughout the spherical space, balls of dark, blood-like flame started to slowly manifest, condensing from the charged atmosphere, drawing more energy from the field, slowly swelling into fist-sized orbs of volatile flame, hanging in the air around him like fruit from a malevolent tree.

  "Behind them," Rhea said, her gaze distant. "There are dead imps. A lot of them. I think the herd was hunting."

  David couldn't see as far as she could, but he didn't need to. Among the charging Stagfiends, he saw the evidence. Gore was smeared across their tough hides. Skewered on the jagged chitin of their spears were unmistakable, lanky, wiry limbs and tattered flesh. Some of the rider-mouths still had imp parts dangling from their half-opened, bladed jaws. It looked like the Stagfiends were natural imp predators, and the group had interrupted a meal. His bound, squealing imp had probably sounded like a dinner bell.

  He watched the predator-prey relationship click into place—food chains—a concrete piece of how this hellscape operated. Interesting, David thought. Too bad I called dibs.

  Cinder spoke.

  It was the second time since David had created her. The sound was a deep, smooth, sultry note. David felt the surprise like a small electric jolt. Jamie flinched. Rhea’s head whipped around.

  “MY LORD?”

  David looked at his demon. “Er… yes?”

  She pointed at the charging herd. Through the thrall link, David felt the powerful, focused desire. It was a violent image paired with a crystal-clear conditional impulse: IF YOU WANT ME TO KILL THE FOREST CREATURES IN YOUR HONOR... SAY NOTHING.

  David smiled, a quick, tight pull of his lips, and gave a single nod.

  Cinder was now nearly as strong as he was. The excess demonic energy he’d poured into her creation, combined with her race’s natural, wild circulation, had seen to that. Hunting with her constantly for days, training by fighting her and the hobgoblin, it had all pushed her level up, expanded her energy reserves. Today alone, with Rhea and Jamie, they’d hunted imps, wargs, werebeasts, and a pair of giant level 17 colossal hobgoblins without anyone taking more than light scuffs or bruises. Her savagery was a constant. Now, it felt like the combat power David could bring to a fight had doubled.

  The horned deathless demon walked forward, placing herself between the group and the charging Stagfiends. In the last instant before impact, David saw his creation do it—something he’d been attempting to mimic for hours on end—she pulled every shred of the wild, rampant demonic energy swirling inside her, from her entire form and focused it all into a single, reinforced point: the bones and dense flesh of her leading shoulder and leg. The silent demoness became a bolted steel wall.

  The first level 5 Stagfiend hit her and shattered. The second and third met the same impact. The fourth died to a horizontal sweep of her greatsword that cut its legs out from under it and carved deep into its torso. When a higher-level 12 beast deflected her next swing with its own chitin spear, she didn't struggle. She launched herself up and forward, crashing down feet-first onto its back. Her free hand snatched the false rider sprouting from the creature's spine. She yanked it back, reinforced her own skull with a sudden surge of almost the entirety of her body’s energy, and drove her horns forward in a vicious headbutt that pierced the stag's real skull with a wet crack—like cracked in yolks. With her sword recovered, she skewered corpses and flung the mess into the heart of the recovering horde.

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  It was pure savagery married to an innate, predatory mastery of raw energy. Every movement was savage, untrained, and brutally efficient. Every ounce of her power focused into a single point of contact—a limb, a joint, her horns—at the exact microsecond it was needed, then abandoned completely for the next. It was all-or-nothing reinforcement, hyper-precise and as automatic as breathing.

  David watched for a half-second, then got to work. He stood with his magic field active, five dark maroon orbs of flame orbiting him like malevolent stars—the maximum number he could control at once. He walked forward as Cinder, Jamie, and Rhea engaged the herd.

  [Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 7 → Demonic Energy Mastery Lvl 8]

  David fired his flaming bolts indiscriminately, practicing. They shot out, scorching hides and striking at the vulnerable joints and eyes his Battle Sense highlighted. A stag broke past Cinder's rampage and charged him. David tried to dump all his circulating energy into his legs for a burst of speed. He copied his demon’s actions perfectly, and somehow, he still did it wrong. The energy could be controlled, but letting it run free felt like trusting a wild bull not to rampage. His demon’s blows wasn't just muscle. It was her entire body's potential force focused into a single action. It cut through legs and torsos. David imagined himself utilizing selective reinforcement with the elite hobs martial arts.

  Battle Sense caused it to run wilder when he tried, more savage and raw; and David could do savage, but he wanted finesse—he needed to merge it with his weapons. So David tried to master a demons true circulation without the skill’s help.

  He intended to blur forward faster than the others could follow and stab it in the chest or head.

  Instead, he shot forward too fast as he swung, an explosion of blurred motion that ended with his reinforced staff exploding against the creature's neck in a shower of wood chips and severed bone. The thing's head came off. David rolled, recovered, pulled a spare wooden stick from his waist, and struck at the creature’s weak point he sensed clearly, an organ deep in its chest—the brain. The stag dropped, headless, its body slashing wildly. The rider on its back split open into writhing, bladed tentacles, the molten maw within foaming and seizing pain. The nearest Stagfiends saw it. Beheaded. Lobotomized. Foaming at the mouth. A few began to veer away from him instinctively.

  The group eviscerated the herd. The battle took longer than David would have liked. But they killed most of the pack—the rest fled.

  [Lvl 14 → Lvl 15]

  [Your body is in the nascent stages of developing two conflicting bloodlines. Due to the changes to your body, a system granted bloodline is no longer available to you.]

  No class? No special reward? No bloodline? David wasn’t even surprised. The System’s idea of a prize was letting him wake up each morning. And two bloodlines? He had no idea how, why, or when either would fully develop. He guessed it was probably the Touch of the ?Unknown? skill, that mark of that strange, dead, god-like being who’d been consumed by the Abyss, and the Demon-stuff, most likely. Either way, he’d done it without the systems blessing.

  Maybe it’ll throw me a class-shaped bone at level twenty, he figured—but he wouldn’t count on this hellhole being generous, or even kind. Instead, he’d take everything this place had and build a class himself. He was already developing two bloodlines—he’d steal from it far more than it had ever stolen from him. It could keep its dangled carrots. It could keep its class. David would build his own class from scratch, and this hunt was the very first step.

  He put every stat into Demonic Energy.

  An exhausted Jamie slumped, hands on his knees. Rhea stood stoically, breathing deeply as her energy slowly replenished. David and Cinder were fine, unmarked and still full of energy.

  Jamie sucked in a ragged breath, hands on his knees. Then he straightened up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and fake-yelled after the creatures disappearing into the foliage. “Yeah, you better run! Tell your friends about the iceman!”

  His voice, however, didn’t project. By now, Jamie knew better than to yell in the forest. He knew much better than to do it anywhere near David.

  David stared at the torn-up ground littered with twitching stag parts. He turned to Rhea and met her gaze. "Did you level?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "Where are you putting your points?"

  "Intelligence. For the range on my sight. And Javelins."

  "Put the next ones into Constitution, a one-four ratio," David said. "Seeing further doesn't matter if you're dead before you can tell anyone.”

  Then he turned to Jamie. “Did you?”

  “Yeah,” Jamie said, still breathing hard. A grin broke through his fatigue. “You see that ice-spike combo I did?”

  “What’d you put the points into?”

  “All Intelligence. More mana, bigger ice.”

  Both had gone all in on offense, and used their skills to supplement the other stats, like defense, or in Rhea’s case, strength and speed. That was the quickest path to growth. The most efficient. Both chose it with barely any oversight. This was why they were prime assets.

  David looked at him. “Good. Very good. Put your next ones into Constitution. And figure out how to use the ice to move quicker, or you’ll have to start wasting points on dexterity—and wasting points is for the dead. Your magic is your strength, so is staying alive. Don’t be stupid with it.” Who knows, he thought, maybe there’s a mana equivalent of circulation. They’d both need skills to even find it, though. For now, this strategy would keep them alive and make them lethal.

  Jamie’s grin twisted into a full-on smirk. “Says the guy who literally just stood there on fire—like an evil disco ball, aura-farming and blowing stuff up from the inside.” Jamie snorted and started mock-throwing fireballs, fingers pressed to his temples for absolutely no reason.

  “Major Overlord energy. You looked like a Wish-version dark lord. And dude—you’ve even got the big, silent knight.” He jerked his head at Cinder.

  David picked up a small, loose chunk of muddy stag-hoof from the ground and flicked it at Jamie’s leg. It hit a conjured ice shield with a soft thwap. Jamie didn’t even look as he blocked it—the little twirp was improving. “If I wanted to hear from an asshole, I’d ask Corbin for the time.”

  “Hey! Use your words!” Jamie protested, brushing harmless flecks of ice from his legs.

  Rhea brushed flecks of gore from her arm. “He’s not wrong. The staff through the chest was efficient, I’ll admit. But the hovering fire orbs… they do make an impression.”

  She nodded once, her tone unchanged. “Very efficient, very evil.”

  Jamie barked a laugh. “See? Even the robot agrees.”

  “I’m not a robot,” Rhea said, without heat.

  David looked at her. Et tu, Rhea? “Noted. Your feedback’s been downgraded from ‘helpful’ to ‘barely audible.’ I’ll remember this betrayal at bonus time.”

  Jamie’s head turned. “There’s a bonus?”

  “See? You’re already missing out.”

  Rhea turned from the back-and-forth and nodded toward the forest where the herd had fled.

  “Guys…” She looked thoughtful. And concerned. “They were higher level than the last ones. More of them, too.”

  Rhea looked toward the tree line, her eyes distant. "They’re stronger, too. It's not stopping. More of them keep coming."

  She was right. David looked past them at the torn-up ground, the stagfiend carcasses, and the imp parts still skewered on broken chitin spears. He nudged a severed imp leg with his boot. "Forget the combat review. Look at the menu. Every time we turn around, something else is hunting harder and in bigger packs.”

  “The ecology’s changing,” David said. He looked at the imp parts still skewered on a nearby stag’s spear. The food chain was in motion. Things were getting hungrier, and stronger.

  Jamie’s smile faltered slightly as he agreed. “The whole forest is leveling up." He muttered.

  David collected the chained, barely-alive level 1 imp. It was still breathing, which was a small miracle considering the amount of oversized demonic wildlife that had just tried to trample everything. The patient lives, he noted. He could level it directly, but that would be a waste of time that could be spent getting stronger—inefficient. The group headed further into the woods, continuing their hunt.

  The forest had truly changed. The whole ecosystem of creatures along with it.

  Movement in the region had increased dramatically. David suspected killing the chained, level fifty Soul Eater had flipped a switch. Maybe the monster’s presence had been keeping other things away. Even chained, it could still consume and corrupt souls. Now, with it gone, the neighborhood had gotten lively. And rowdy. Now, even coordinated groups of wargs, imps, and werebeasts led by corpse-wielding warlocks had started attacking the clearing.

  In the woods around their fortified wreckage, they’d also found signs of something else. Something hunting high-level creatures. They’d found corpses of the Marked Legion. They’d even found the brutalized corpse of an Abyssal Priest. It looked like some kind of three-way conflict was occurring right on their doorstep.

  Evans tracked it to a particularly gruesome section of forest. It was a patch of woods riddled with bodies, like the aftermath of a small, very violent war. The ground was covered in corpses of werebeasts, the giant, colossal hobgoblins and expert elites of the Marked Legion, wargs, warlocks, and that single Abyssal Priest. They were all piled together, facing similar directions, as if every faction had momentarily put aside their differences to try and survive a single enemy.

  Some corpses were smashed to pulp. Others were half-eaten and partially crushed by something with giant hands and teeth. Strangely, others were killed with surgical precision—a single sword cut, or a fist-sized hole punched clean through them.

  Evans showed the group the tracks. The ground was mostly trashed, but he’d spotted two blood-soaked trails. One was a massive, three-toed print that appeared here and there in random bursts, like the thing had been leaping or teleporting. The other was a smaller, boot-like print. The massive one appeared and disappeared. The smaller one sometimes appeared following it, as if walking from place to place in its wake. Both sets of tracks led away from the clearing, far past the stream.

  David had gorged on the death energy. The air was so thick with it he could practically chew it. His body converted the lingering energy into a heavier, more demonic flavor, packing it into his bones until he felt solid, unnervingly dense, like he was slowly turning into a statue made of dark matter.

  They didn’t know for sure what monster was in the lead, or what was hunting all the factions. But David suspected a singular culprit.

  The Ogre.

  This place was truly a death trap.

  David’s thoughts circled back to the giant landscape-like corpse they’d encountered south of the plane wreckage. The thing had been massive, its head the size of a large house. Its level couldn’t have been low. The way it died had crushed ancient redwoods—trees nothing else, not even the ogre, had managed to so much as scratch. The more he thought about it, the more he felt the plane’s wreckage had landed in the only patch of hell that wouldn’t instantly vaporize them. With his intervention, and two trained gunmen in the Marshals, they’d barely survived the first hour. If they’d come down an hour south, or in any other direction, they wouldn’t have made it past the first sixty minutes.

  Hell, if the Soul Eater had been free to roam somewhere else, and the region’s regular creatures had been home, they’d have been dead in the first ten. Chewed up and digested before anyone even finished screaming.

  He wondered, not for the first time, why they couldn’t have gotten a less difficult option. A nice, starter dungeon. A tutorial zone. Why them? Why Impossible?

  The dungeon clearly had the power to pluck people from across dimensions. It probably didn’t do it at random. Maybe it chose people for their potential. Just so it could watch them grow before it devoured them—like selecting the ripest, most promising fruit.

  A shadow launched over them, dark and swift against the gray sky. David’s thoughts about building his own class evaporated.

  Strangely, nobody else reacted. Rhea, their eagle-eyed lookout, didn’t turn. Cinder didn’t budge. Jamie was playing football with a twisted stag head, laughing as it skidded through gore. David considered ignoring it, not looking. His Battle Sense told him that would be significantly bad for his health, supplying a crisp, vivid image of his own intestines being unraveled by something with very large teeth.

  “Six o’clock,” David said, and hurled his reinforced wooden staff like a javelin in the direction his eyes caught the haze.

  Rhea instantly adjusted her position, debris lifting around her. David turned in one swift movement, pulling and holding the immensely sharp demonbone spear shaped from the Soul Eater’s spine. Jamie raised a wall of ice.

  The wall didn’t do much. Standing over it was a giant demonic wolf—a warg that had manifested from the air, forcing itself into the world like it had no patience for reality. It dwarfed the car-sized wolves; this one was the size of a small building, a house-sized mass built for nothing but killing. Its fur was matted and foul, threaded through with jagged dark crystalline spikes that looked grown from its flesh. Heat and rot rolled off it. Its jaws were stretched too wide, packed with yellowed, stone-hard teeth like broken pillars, each one as tall as a man. When it looked down, its eyes burned bright like cruel torches, it stung slightly to meet its gaze, the orbs digging into anything they touched. This thing was a horror wearing a wolf’s body, held together by hellish magic, hungry and vicious, already leaning toward the group like it wanted to tear them apart.

  [Level 28 Adult Warg — Alpha Variant.]

  Beside it, a smaller Level 20 flanked them, trying to reach a blind spot. David said one word. “Rhea.”

  Javelins shot out like rockets. The javelins twisted in midair like homing beacons, and the level twenty was struck in the foreleg as it moved, crashing to the ground. The level 28, however, didn’t budge.

  Rhea’s Javelins completely missed.

  The level 28’s eyes glowed violet, like miniature stars, and the air beside it wavered. Two identically large wargs had manifested beside it, each appearing equally as deadly. David’s eyes hurt as he looked at them. When the pain subsided, he saw that the energy in the other giant wargs was strange, hollow, incorporeal. The creatures barely had energy and it was flimsy like a shell. Of the four, only two were real. The two others weren’t real at all. They were illusions. The alpha could create illusions, and only David could see them.

  “Well, shit.”