No one needed to be told to kneel.

  The moment the goddess fully emerged from the Sacred Tree, the village collapsed into reverence as if gravity had doubled. Villagers dropped where they stood, knees striking dirt, stone, and packed earth. Even those too old or too weak lowered themselves while clinging to their neighbors, spines folding in instinctive obedience.

  The priest fell the hardest.

  He hit the ground face-first, scrambling to turn his fall into something that resembled devotion. His hands shook as he pressed his forehead to the soil at the edge of the shrine garden. Whatever authority he had worn moments earlier dissolved like ash in rain.

  We were the only ones still standing, so naturally that drew the goddess’s eyes toward us.

  Raik was the first of us to move.

  He lowered himself into a formal bow, one knee down, head dipped, hand pressed flat to his chest. He held it for exactly one breath, then rose smoothly back to standing, as if he was bowing to a king rather than a god.

  Damada’s gaze slid to him.

  Then, slowly, deliberately, the rest of us followed his lead. Calr, Kan, and I bowed and rose. Shingo did the same, careful and precise, despite his size. Ja’a managed a small sitting curtsy, too dizzy to rise, but even she was too wise to appear disrespectful.

  If only I could have said the same about all our team members.

  Katar… Katar did neither.

  He simply crossed his arms over his chest and stared straight into the goddess’s eyes.

  I don’t think it was hatred, more like defiance. I scooted back a half step from him. I am not getting accidentally smote because of him.

  The vines around Damada shifted, vivid bright green leaves rustling softly. Slowly, they turned darker, deeper green, but her face did not change, not even slightly.

  Then she looked away from him.

  Katar snorted under his breath, but said nothing.

  Damada turned her attention to the priest.

  Her vines stilled. Then her leaves shifted once more, turning yellow, as if autumn had arrived early.

  Dead leaves trembled along the length of her vines and began to fall, exposing more and more of her skin. One by one, dry and brown, they spiraled away from her toward the ground around the kneeling priest. They brushed his shoulders, his back, his bowed head. He flinched at every touch as if struck.

  She spoke.

  “Death is nature.”

  The words were simple, flat… but absolute.

  The falling leaves began to shake faster.

  “Sacrifice is forbidden.”

  The ground around the priest darkened beneath a carpet of dead foliage.

  He sobbed.

  “I didn’t… I never…” His voice cracked as he lifted his head, dirt smeared across his cheek. “I was trying to help! I protected the land! I did what was required!”

  The leaves began to pile against his legs.

  “I served you!” he cried. “I preserved your blessing! I… please, mercy!”

  “I disown you,” announced the goddess; the sentence landed heavier than any shout.

  Vines emerged from the ground, scattering the leaves surrounding the man. They wrapped around him, forming a cocoon of wood and foliage, burying his form beneath a verdant mantle. When they settled, his face was still visible, mouth frozen in horror, gasping, the tips of his feet shaking as they hovered a few centimeters above the ground. The cocoon began glowing green.

  The villagers did not look at him.

  They looked away.

  Unlike them, I couldn’t avert my eyes from the divine punishment. At least not until something distracted me from the scene. Blonde hair moved past the cocoon, completely ignoring it.

  Of course, Katar wouldn’t be the only person defying a goddess today. Why don’t we all take up blasphemy as a hobby? I read in cultivation novels that defying the heavens is the only path to progression. Let’s start dodging lightning tribulation while we’re at it.

  “Is she insane?” muttered Kan next to me, just as dumbfounded at Vena’s actions as I was.

  She walked past the goddess, completely ignoring her, too.

  She knelt beside the woman beneath the Sacred Tree and placed her hands gently over the woman’s chest.

  “Please hold on,” Vena whispered.

  Though she was before the Goddess, her prayers were whispered to a completely different faith.

  Golden light flared from Vena, contrasting sharply with the verdant green light emitted by the Sacred Tree and the cocooned priest.

  Vena grimaced as if she were having trouble accessing her miracles. Sweat beaded at her temples.

  Still, she did not stop.

  The woman stirred.

  A breath shuddered out of her chest.

  Her child cried out in relief, clutching his mother’s arm, laughing and sobbing at once.

  The vines around Damada shifted again.

  Leaves turned green once more.

  Then white roses bloomed among them.

  Damada approached.

  Her steps made no sound.

  She stopped beside Vena, looking down at the kneeling cleric whose shoulders shook with effort. The roses trembled softly, petals pristine against bark and vine.

  “Daughter of Sofia,” Damada said.

  Her tone did not change.

  Vena blinked and turned toward the goddess when she heard her mother’s name.

  “Thank you,” said the goddess.

  Vena’s breath hitched. She gave a small nod but kept healing.

  The goddess turned to the woman.

  She reached out and placed a hand gently on her forehead, petting her like a mother pets her child.

  “Daughter of Miradette,” she said.

  “Be whole.”

  Green light surged, completely drowning out Vena’s golden one.

  It was more than just healing: renewal. Old scars faded, and lingering weakness burned away. The woman inhaled deeply, color flooding her skin, strength returning beyond what Vena’s miracles alone could have restored. Even the people watching near the shrine were touched by residual healing, complexions brightening, and shoulders relaxing.

  My weary muscles and minor bruises from sparring with Katar were completely gone.

  The child clung to his mother, laughing through tears.

  Damada crouched.

  She brushed the child’s hair once.

  “Son of Marianne,” she said.

  “Well done.”

  Yellow flowers bloomed briefly.

  Then she stood.

  The vines withdrew from the cocooned priest as he fell unconscious to the ground.

  She turned toward the Sacred Tree and began disappearing into the bark.

  For a brief moment before she vanished completely, she turned back and looked at me. Not through me… at me. Directly into my eyes. Why me?

  Her face was still expressionless.

  Then she was gone.

  The tree sealed, and the garden looked as if she had never been there, if you ignored the face-down priest.

  And the world remembered how to breathe.

  It took a while for things to return to even a vague semblance of normalcy. Having your quaint little village personally visited by a goddess tended to do that to people.

  For a long time, no one spoke above a whisper. Villagers lingered in small knots, eyes darting toward the Sacred Tree as if half-expecting it to open again at any second. Some cried quietly, while others laughed; the giddy, hysterical kind that came from witnessing something impossible. A few simply sat on the ground, staring at their hands, as if they were seeing them for the first time.

  Then reality, slowly and stubbornly, began to reassert itself.

  Vena helped the healed woman to her feet. She walked unsteadily at first, then with growing confidence. Her skin still carried a faint flush, like she’d spent a day in the sun, and when she took a deep breath, it sounded deep and easy.

  Word spread quickly that a festival was being planned.

  Apparently, this was not unusual after major religious events, though “major” usually meant a good harvest or a particularly successful blessing, not a direct divine manifestation. Even so, people needed to celebrate, to anchor the impossible with food, music, and shared labor before it floated away and left them wondering if they had imagined it all.

  Several villagers had ascended to their next class on the spot. Ja’a would have loved that data point if she hadn’t been busy recovering from near-total sensory overload. From what I could see, one woman’s hair had turned completely into thick green vines, while one of the temple guards’ skin had shifted into a shade of tree bark. Their paths had probably diverged from the standard Acolyte progression into something more suited to their roles within the community.

  The rescued woman was formally placed in charge of the shrine before the sun even reached its peak. No ceremony was needed; the villagers simply promoted her on the spot, as if the decision had already been made.

  As for the former priest…

  He was… diminished.

  They carried him indoors. Losing his position, his authority, and by all appearances his class was considered punishment enough. Watching him stumble, hollow-eyed and trembling, it was hard not to agree. Whatever Damada had done to him hadn’t just stripped his power; it felt like layers of his soul had been carved away. I heard people murmuring about exiling him to Hano once he had recovered.

  I briefly considered asking Ja’a how much soul power he had left.

  Then I remembered she had collapsed trying to comprehend a goddess soul and decided that maybe now was not the time for quantitative curiosity.

  We decided to leave her resting at the village inn, bundled in blankets, dizzy but stable. She promised to recover quickly. Knowing her, she’d probably be causing trouble again in no time.

  As for us, well… we weren’t here to meet a goddess, and we weren’t here to depose priests.

  We were here because a troll had been reported nearby.

  So once the immediate crisis settled into something resembling order, Raik gently but firmly pulled us back to task. We took the report, confirmed the location, and set out before the village could rope us into preparations for the upcoming festival.

  Some of the villagers tried anyway.

  They mostly wanted to celebrate Vena. Word had spread fast about the young Holy cleric who had stood up to the priest and defied him in front of his own shrine. People brought gifts of bread, dried fruit, and even a crown of flowers.

  Vena panicked.

  Still unused to that level of praise, she deflected as much as she could, deeply uncomfortable with the attention, mumbling something about “just doing what was right.”

  She made her escape with us as quickly as possible. By the time the villagers realized she was gone, we were already on the road.

  The forest felt different afterward, quieter. It was probably just the contrast with the festive energy we left behind, but the silence pressed in all the same.

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  I walked with a heaviness in my chest, my mind looping uselessly around the same thought: I had looked a goddess in the eyes, and she had looked back. It felt, somehow, like she had singled me out with that last look. Did she know something about me? Was it because I was an outsider to the Seven Realms, or was it something else entirely?

  The feeling left me unsettled in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. Anthropology has taught me to observe belief systems, to contextualize divinity as social structure, metaphor, and shared narrative.

  That framework felt very small now.

  Divinity was undeniably real in this world. And when a goddess was involved, the impact became more than belief, more than tradition, more than just a social contract.

  A couple of hours of climbing later, the mountain finally gave us something concrete.

  Footprints.

  They were wrong in a way I couldn’t immediately describe, too wide, too deep, and pressed into the soil with a weight that displaced stone as easily as mud. Each print was roughly bear-shaped, but elongated at the heel, with distinct toes that looked almost fingerlike. They were uncomfortably close to what every cryptid-obsessed person back on Earth described when talking about Bigfoot.

  I crouched beside one, fingers hovering just above the dirt.

  “Whatever this is,” I muttered, “it’s heavy.”

  Without Ja’a to directly pinpoint its location the way she had with every other beast we’d dealt with, we had to do things the old-fashioned way: scouting, tracking, and mostly guesswork. It felt strangely like we were real adventurers for once, instead of a highly efficient pest-control team.

  Luckily, Calr was half-decent at pattern recognition.

  “These are fresh,” he said, tapping one print with his fingertip. “Less than a day. Maybe hours. See how the edges haven’t crumbled yet?”

  He pointed farther up-slope, where the trail crossed exposed rock before reappearing in damp soil. “Those are older. Probably the same creature. It comes back this way often.”

  “It’s not hiding its presence,” Kan added. “Either it doesn’t know how, or it doesn’t care.”

  We followed the tracks upward until the terrain softened near a narrow creek. It wasn’t a real river, mostly snowmelt trickling down from higher elevations, but it carved a shallow channel through the stone, pooling just enough to attract wildlife.

  And monsters too, apparently.

  The troll stood in the water when we spotted it.

  Ugly didn’t quite cover it. The creature was vaguely humanoid: tall, broad, and heavy. But its proportions were wrong in subtle, unsettling ways. Its torso was too thick, its limbs swollen and asymmetrical, as if different parts had grown at different rates and never reconciled. Its skin looked like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, caught halfway between scales and something tougher, like thick hippo hide layered over blubber.

  It was completely hairless and wore nothing. Thankfully, it didn’t have anything dangling. Whatever reproductive system it had wasn’t external, which was a small mercy for my sanity.

  The worst part, though, was its hands.

  It had opposable thumbs.

  Looking at it made me hesitate. It was human enough to trigger that deep, uncomfortable, uncanny reflex; the one that whispered this might be a person, or something that could have been one. It hunched forward as it drank, mouth pressed directly into the water, as if it had never learned to scoop with its hands.

  “Are you sure…” I whispered, “...that’s a monster and not a person? Couldn’t we just… talk to it?”

  Raik shook his head without taking his eyes off the creature. “It shouldn’t be smart enough to understand speech.”

  “They get smarter the more people they eat,” Calr added quietly. “Ten people for tool use. Twenty for rudimentary speech. But by then, they understand the benefit of eating more people, so peace is rarely an option.”

  “That’s fucked up,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  Raik exhaled slowly. “Alright. Let’s stick to the plan.”

  He glanced at each of us in turn.

  “Since Ja’a isn’t here to estimate its soul strength, we can’t go for a quick kill,” he explained, even though we’d gone over this while walking. “We will assume it can regenerate through anything we throw at it. We will exhaust its healing factor. Shingo, you front line, I’ll take the left, and Katar the right. Keep distance from me when I activate my flame aura.”

  We nodded.

  Shingo stepped forward first, shield raised, boots grinding loudly against stone. He struck his hammer against his shield, the sharp clang echoing across the creek.

  The troll’s head snapped up. It let out a hoarse, wet roar that vibrated through my chest.

  Then it charged.

  For a creature that large, it had no business being that fast.

  Shingo planted his feet just before impact. The troll slammed into him like a falling log, fists hammering down on his shield. Metal rang, armor screeched, but Shingo didn’t budge. He absorbed the blow and shoved back, shield driving hard into the creature’s chest.

  Raik moved immediately, circling left and hurling a fireball. Katar mirrored him on the right, low and fast, blades already flashing.

  Kan had taken a different approach. She’d added barbed wire to her chains.

  They snapped out, wrapping around the troll’s legs, barbs biting deep and anchoring it just long enough to disrupt its balance.

  That was the opening.

  I stepped back, leveled my spear, and sent lightning down its length. Using my electromagnetic vision, I aimed for where it would do the most damage to the nerves. Electricity rippled across the troll’s body, muscles locking… for half a second.

  Then it shook it off.

  “It’s regeneration’s too strong!” I called. “My lightning’s barely affecting it!”

  “No surprise!” Calr shouted back, loosing a crossbow bolt that punched into the troll’s shoulder and tore out a chunk of meat.

  The creature roared and swung wildly, tearing free of Kan’s chains through sheer force. Blood sprayed from its legs, already knitting together as fast as it spilled.

  Raik activated his flame aura.

  Heat washed over the battlefield, distorting the air. I instinctively retreated another step, sweat breaking out instantly. The troll staggered as flames licked across its skin, blackening and cracking it.

  Katar darted in under its reach and slashed behind the knee. Blood poured out in a thick stream. He was gone before the troll could react.

  It turned back on Shingo, hammering fists against plate armor, trying to crush rather than cut. Each blow would have pulped a normal person. Shingo took them all like a champ, shield up, stance solid, doing exactly what he was built to do.

  Vena focused on healing him. Even if the damage looked manageable, it was better not to let it accumulate. She also used her Sevenfold Radiance Soulbook, alternating between colorful rays at opportune times.

  “Keep it on him!” Raik barked.

  Kan obliged. Her chains whipped forward again, snagging an arm this time. She yanked hard, pulling the troll off-center.

  I advanced, bident spear stabbing at maximum reach. Taser mode flared, lightning jumping between the prongs, but instead of spreading across the surface, I forced it inward: deep, focusing my intent at hitting localized bursts aimed at organs rather than nerves.

  The smell was awful: burnt flesh and wet iron.

  The troll screamed and lashed out blindly. One massive arm slammed into the ground where my head had been a moment earlier. I stumbled back, heart pounding, nearly colliding with Calr.

  “Careful!” he snapped, already firing again.

  It wasn’t targeting me deliberately. The motion felt reflexive, born from pain rather than strategy. The troll stayed focused on Shingo, as if his size alone marked him as the primary threat, even though his attacks were mostly ineffective.

  It was like watching a high school bully fighting a medieval knight.

  Shingo held aggro, shield, and armor, absorbing punishment. Raik’s flames cooked the troll steadily, forcing it to regenerate faster and faster. Katar carved arteries with terrifying precision, reopening wounds before they could close. Kan kept it bleeding, moving, off-balance.

  I added more and more melee attacks; lightning alone wasn’t enough. So I stabbed, twisted, zapped internally, and withdrew. Over and over. Each strike was timed between regeneration cycles, hitting fresh tissue before it could fully recover.

  The troll didn’t adapt. It kept going for Shingo, only occasionally lashing out at Katar when the pain spiked too high.

  Twenty minutes in, its movements slowed. Regeneration lagged behind the damage.

  Raik rammed into its side, flames flaring brighter. Katar was there a heartbeat later, blades flashing red.

  It was the beginning of the end.

  Burns stayed burned. Cuts stayed open.

  Finally, Shingo drove his shield into the troll’s chest one last time, knocking it flat onto its back.

  “Now!” Raik shouted.

  Everything hit at once.

  Flames surged. Chains locked down its limbs. Katar opened its throat. I drove my spear straight down through its chest and discharged half my mana.

  The troll convulsed. Then went still.

  Silence fell, hard and sudden, broken only by the crackle of dying flames and our own breathing.

  Shingo was panting heavily, shoulders rising and falling beneath his armor. Sweat streamed down his face, and his grip on the shield loosened just enough to show how close he was to his limit.

  Kan noticed.

  She tilted her head slightly, eyes flicking over the battlefield. The monster's blood covered everything: pooled in the dirt, soaked into grass and stone, and there was a lot of it.

  Her chains loosened.

  The spilled blood began to move.

  At first, it looked like heat distortion, a shimmer in the air. Then droplets lifted from the ground, thin red strands rising as if pulled by invisible threads. They floated toward Shingo, converging around his body, wrapping him in slow spirals of crimson light, or maybe red mist.

  Then it sank into him.

  The effect was immediate. Shingo gasped sharply, back straightening, color returned to his face, his breathing evened out as exhaustion drained away, bruises faded further, and the deep fatigue that came from sustained impact simply… vanished.

  Kan exhaled softly, satisfied.

  She redirected the flow without breaking concentration.

  Smaller streams of blood peeled off and drifted toward Raik and Katar. The effect on them was subtler, a warmth rather than a surge. They weren’t as exhausted as Shingo, but I could see it all the same.

  Life-steal. Kan’s newest Soulbook.

  I swallowed. It was my first time seeing it in action after the initial testing. I’d known she could do that in theory. But, seeing it was something else entirely.

  The blood dispersed, evaporating into light once its purpose was fulfilled, leaving the battlefield strangely clean despite what had happened there.

  Shingo let out a long breath and straightened fully. The mute boy gave Kan a grateful nod.

  Kan shrugged, chains retracting. “Waste not, it's not like I use much mana when fighting anyway.”

  After that was over, the adrenaline crash finally set in. I stood there shaking, staring at the corpse.

  Now, it was obvious… There was nothing human in this creature: no fear, no recognition, and barely even instinct beyond hunger and aggression. It had never tried to flee or change tactics. A monster through and through.

  It couldn’t be sapient.

  It was barely sentient.

  That realization brought a small, unexpected relief.

  Not during the fight, I’d barely thought about it then in the heat of the moment, but afterward, when the adrenaline faded, and my hands stopped shaking.

  It was just another monster cleared.

  The discussion about loot started the way these things usually did: tired, practical, and faintly morbid.

  Raik was the first to speak. “The liver and heart might be worth harvesting,” he said, already eyeing the corpse with professional detachment. “Good for you, Kindred people.”

  I grimaced. Shingo nodded, entirely unbothered. Kan sighed, looking resigned. She knew this was exactly what needed to be done for growth.

  Calr crouched near the body, examining the wounds. “It was strong enough that it might have a monster core,” he said. “Maybe a life core.”

  They kept talking, weighing effort against reward.

  I let them.

  Because something else had caught my attention.

  The footprints didn’t stop at the creek.

  They veered off toward the mountainside, faint but consistent, leading to a narrow dark opening in the rock. A small cave, easily missed if you weren’t looking for it.

  I pointed briefly. “I’m going to check that,” I said, already moving. “Just in case it hoarded something.”

  No one objected. The cave was barely a hundred meters from the fight site, still well within sight of the team. I climbed toward it carefully, boots scraping stone, spear back in my hand.

  The smell hit me first.

  Rotting meat, old blood, and the thick, cloying scent of decay that clung to the back of the throat.

  Bones littered the entrance.

  Most were animals: deer, goats, something with horns, but one skull made my stomach drop: human, or close enough that the distinction didn’t matter. The bones weren’t clean. They’d been cracked open, split to reach the marrow.

  I swallowed and activated a gem-light in my hand.

  The cavern opened just enough for something large to lie inside.

  That’s when I saw it.

  Another troll.

  Smaller than the first, but unmistakably the same species. Curled in on itself. Breathing slowly and heavily.

  Sleeping.

  My first instinct was to retreat quietly.

  My second was the realization that sound hadn’t woken it during a full-scale battle barely a hundred meters away.

  Sound wasn’t the problem.

  Light was.

  Its eyes snapped open.

  The troll lunged.

  It hit me square in the chest before I could even think, the impact driving the air out of my lungs. I was thrown bodily from the cave, tumbling down the slope in a painful, breathless sprawl. My spear went flying.

  I hit the ground hard, ribs screaming in protest, coughing violently as I sucked in air that wouldn’t quite come fast enough.

  I didn’t linger.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran in a panic.

  The ground tilted under me as I sprinted downhill, boots slipping on loose gravel. Behind me, something heavy crashed through stone and brush.

  Fast. Too fast. Gravity was on its side.

  I heard my teammates shout. Saw Shingo break formation and charge uphill to intercept.

  I made the mistake of looking back.

  The troll was gaining on me.

  Panic surged, hot and immediate.

  Should I teleport? No, not without my spear.

  Can I recall the spear? I could, but I hadn’t tested Star Mana draw with the recall option since the upgrade. If it drained fully, I would be a sitting duck.

  I kept running and thinking.

  “Use your dash!” Calr shouted.

  Right.

  Dash.

  The Perfect State Soulbook spell responded instantly.

  Time stuttered.

  The world stretched and blurred as I was hurled forward in a straight, uncontrolled line. It was impossible to steer. But at least I was gaining ground.

  I shot downslope like a projectile.

  A heartbeat later, I snapped back into normal time, on a direct collision course with Shingo.

  I dropped into a slide as he raised his shield, lifting it just enough to let me pass.

  A thunderous clang sounded behind me as the troll slammed into him instead.

  I rolled to a stop, gasping.

  Vena was on me immediately.

  Her hands glowed golden as she knelt, praying rapidly. She used far too many invocations involving saints for my comfort, especially since half of them seemed very specifically directed at me.

  After a minute, she sighed.

  “You have four cracked ribs,” she said, voice steady. “No punctured lung, thank the Holy. They’ll heal fine, but they’ll be tender for a while. Don’t overdo it.”

  I nodded, heart beating, and in shock, still reeling at the near-death experience. Why was I here fighting trolls again?

  Then I looked up.

  The team was already engaged again. They were tired, fighting a second troll immediately after the first.

  And all I could think about was how easily it had hit me. How slowly I’d reacted… how I’d caused trouble.

  Anger burned through my fear.

  I recalled my spear, using the innate power Nina had bestowed on it, through a nightmare soul.

  It appeared back in my hand, solid and reassuring. I checked the star mana inside it. It was full, stable, and intact.

  Good.

  I closed my eyes for half a second and wished.

  “I wish I were in the troll’s blind spot.”

  In the blink of an eye, I appeared directly behind the monster as Shingo shield-bashed it in the face.

  I drove the spear forward, straight into where the heart had to be, and dumped all my remaining mana into the strike. Lightning surged inward, burning the monster from the inside.

  The damage outpaced its regeneration.

  The troll spasmed once.

  Then collapsed.

  Dead before it could even begin to heal.

  Silence followed.

  Katar glanced over at me, blood on his blades, eyes sharp.

  “That,” he said, giving me an evil grin, “was the killing instinct I was talking about.”

  After that, I got to eat a grilled troll's heart all by myself, and it tasted as vile as you would imagine.