Rhea threw her hands forward. A wall of pure telekinetic force materialized between them and the incoming weapon, shimmering like heat off asphalt. David's warlock moved beside her, its gnarled hands tracing a sigil in the air. From the ground, tentacles erupted—thick, slick, covered in textures that slid and shifted, moving with a hunger that had nothing to do with muscle. They rose in the spear's path, writhing, grasping.
For a second, three skills clashed.
The shockwave hit them all. The earth trembled under David's feet. Trees around them swayed under pressure like a strong wind had slammed into the clearing. The ground beneath where the skills met cracked, a web of fissures spreading outward. Dust and debris flew away from the impact point in a visible ring.
Rhea's face was locked in focus. She gave it everything. In David's oracle aspect vision, her mana blazed like a complex beacon, bright and intricate.
Then she was thrown backward. The smoky, dense energy infused spear overpowered her wall. The tentacles burst in a spray of gore, chunks of ichor and flesh scattering across the cracked earth.
The spear veered off course. It slammed into the ground, cracking it with an explosion that sent dirt and rock flying. Then it vanished into black smoke.
A hundred feet away, on the back of the giant buck stagfiend, the rider's arm was outstretched. The spear reformed in its grip.
In the same instant, David made a snap decision. He ordered three things.
He looked at Rhea. "Target its legs. The big one. Everything you got, as powerful as you can."
She didn't nod. Didn't acknowledge. All she did was move.
He reached through the tether to the warlock.
The warlock's head tilted. Understanding.
David spoke the third order internally, to himself, to the energy coiled in his bones. He summoned death energy from where he naturally stored it, deep in his skeleton, and intertwined it with demonic energy in one smooth motion, then poured in demonic heat, twisting to make the energies fuse, shaping it. Three jagged spears of pure fiery Black Death formed in the air before him, humming with something that felt like the end of things.
The tentacles rose. Thick and slick and wrong, they surged from the ground and wrapped around the massive stagfiend's legs, its torso, its neck. The thing roared and thrashed, already breaking free, already tearing through the grasping appendages.
But that split second was enough.
Rhea's javelins punched through the air. They struck its forelegs, piercing the hide, burying in. Barely. The thing's skin was thick, resistant. But they hit.
David's death bolts flew. They struck its flank, charring the skin in small patches, decaying the flesh where they landed. Not deep wounds. Not crippling. But they burned and decayed.
The warlock's frenzy bolt hit it square in the chest. The magic sank in, took hold.
For one second, the thing's eyes went wild. Its mind slipped into mad rage. In that second, the rider on its back felt it too. The rider's arm swung at everything near. The earth where its spear hit went up in a smoky spray. Stagfiends around it—its own kind—were caught in the swing. Bodies flew. The sky was filled with torn stagfiend corpses, ripped apart by the rider's uncontrolled swipe.
Then the frenzy passed. The massive stagfiend shook its head, regained itself. The rider settled, spear reforming in its grip.
David watched. Calculated.
It was insanely strong. It must have mainlined the strength stat.
As bodies rained from the sky, the massive stagfiend regained its senses. Almost immediately. The wild look left its eyes. Focus returned. It knew what had happened. It knew who caused it.
It roared.
The sound was deep, physical. David felt it in his chest. Around them, the ring of stagfiends tightened. They were completely surrounded now. Sixty or seventy of them, slowly closing in. Not charging. Just moving forward. Patient. Confident.
David looked at Rhea. "Level?"
Her eyes went distant, reading. “Forty-seven. A [Lvl 47 Stagfiend — Heretic Variant]"
He processed that. Same as the ogre. Same tier of threat. And sixty plus regular stagfiends backing it up.
They couldn’t win like this, not with these numbers and that formation. He needed to take away the advantage. Turn them into something he could kill.
"We run," he said. “Find dense trees, better terrain to break the herd—which cluster has the lowest levels together?"
Rhea scanned. Pointed. "There. Low twenties. One seventeen."
They charged in that direction, straight at the cluster Rhea had pointed out. Break through the formation. That was the only play.
At his mental order, Fenrir dropped the veil over all five of them. Invisible. Silent. David ran, five jagged spears of blood-colored fire trailing behind him like hunting birds on a string. He sent them forward before the stagfiends could react. The spears punched into the weakest cluster, the ones with low twenties and a single seventeen. Punctured. Burned. They went down.
His hand found his cursed spear. Strength flooded his arms. His muscles swelled with natural reinforcement, a surge that boosted everything he did. Dark veins spread under his skin, crawling up his arms, his neck. His eyes went black as he channeled everything he had—death, heat, demonic energy, all of it pushed into one moment. The spear in his hand whined, vibrating, infused beyond its normal limits.
He swung. Cinder swung beside him. Brutal, cleaving arcs that tore through anything in their path. Stagfiends fell. The formation broke. They were through.
They ran.
Behind them, the roar of the massive stagfiend and the thunder of sixty plus sets of hooves chased after them, hot on their heels.
David reached through the tether to Fenrir.
The veil dropped over them once more, having slipped when David broke out of its range earlier. To anyone watching from a distance, they would simply vanish. But the giant stagfiend with smoke trailing from its eyes kept running, kept tracking. Its head moved, following something. David realized what. It wasn't seeing them. It was following their trail. Crushed branches. Broken trees. The path five bodies left in a mad dash through the forest. Fenrir's illusions only worked within a twenty-foot radius. Beyond that, the physical evidence remained.
He looked at Rhea as they ran. "Can you make all of us fly?"
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"Yeah," she said. "But with all four of you, we won't be fast enough to outfly them."
David kept running. Even if they took to the air, the trail would still be there. Fenrir's impacts, the places where a giant wolf's weight slammed into the earth, those wouldn't disappear just because they were airborne. The thing would track them. It was already tracking them.
They ran. They fought as they ran.
David shot flaming spears behind him, bolts of Black Death aimed at stagfiend faces, chests, anything that would drop one permanently. Rhea threw javelins, grabbed sharpened deadly pies from her pack and hurled them with telekinetic force, the deadly metal rocketing in bursts of piercing ammunition. Fenrir kept them invisible, cast illusionary doubles that veered off in other directions, sent fake attacks at the pursuing herd. The illusions bought seconds. Nothing more.
The giant stagfiend, the herd leader, the massive buck with the fused rider on its back, snorted loudly. A deep, rumbling sound. The rider raised its two large smoky spears and clashed them together. The sound that came out was hellish, wrong, rumbling with magic that shifted the entire herd at once.
The herd changed. They stopped chasing directly. Instead, they spread out, staying just outside the twenty-foot radius of Fenrir's illusions. They tried to flank. To cut off. To get ahead.
David yelled. "Watch the flank!"
He, Rhea, and the warlock started targeting the stagfiends trying to get around them. David's flaming spears punched through one trying to cut left. Rhea's javelin took another in the throat on the right. The warlock's curses sent two reeling, buying space. Fenrir's jaws snapped shut over anything that slipped through, crushing them.
He noticed the pattern.
That was an order. The giant stagfiend had noticed their pattern—the invisibility, the range limit—and adjusted the entire fifty-plus herd in response. It was intelligent. And it was leading them.
At his command, Cinder periodically shot off into the herd members that got too close. She attacked both rider and stagfiend, clashing with the fused riders who wielded their spears like hellish cavalry. Each time she returned, she was bloodier. Scales missing. New wounds. A fresh mark left from every exchange.
Rhea was down to one javelin. She used it to boost her speed, moving herself and it with telekinesis, yanking herself forward with each throw and retrieval. For attacks, she resorted to flinging anything nearby she could get her hands on. Sharp branches. Any piece of bone, stone, metal or wood in their path. Rocks. Anything.
David's energy was low. Simmering. Running on fumes. It regenerated constantly, but only death and heat—Demonic Energy regenerated at a slower pace than the two energies generated by Deathborne and his Soul-infused Body, and each bolt came faster than the last. He conserved, picked shots carefully, made each one count, tried to give his energy-churning body time to recover between blows.
Cinder was covered in slashes and cuts that trailed smoke. Scales cracked and hung loose from her hide. Part of her shoulder was just gone, a chunk of flesh and armor missing, revealing something dark and moving beneath.
Fenrir, pridefully enraged by the giant dual-wielding buck stagfiend seeing the weakness in its illusions, adapted. It started duplicating everything within the twenty-foot radius. Every bolt David shot. Every flaming spear. Every curse spirit. Every body movement. Every attack. The illusions multiplied their output, greatly reducing the herd's ability to predict or dodge. What came at them looked like twice as much, moved like twice as many, hit like twice the force.
The warlock shot weakness and frenzy curse sigils in tandem. Where they landed, members of the herd went mad. Frenzied. They turned on each other. Stagfiends tore into stagfiends. Riders slashed at riders. It was their most effective tactic yet, causing major disarray wherever it landed.
But it wasn't enough.
They had killed dozens. David had lost count. Forty? Fifty? But more seemed to join them along the way. From the sides of hills. From behind trees. From gullies and ravines. Like a wildebeest stampede, the herd swelled as it ran.
Now David thought there might be a hundred of these things chasing them. All of them under the influence of the giant buck and its smoky spears. All of them running, flanking, cutting off.
Slowly but surely, they would be surrounded.
Then it’s do or die, David thought.
His steps were quick, despite his energy fading almost as fast as it recovered. It was a deadly cycle. David thought about what he should do.
Stand and fight? Over fifty of them against five. Plus one level thirty-nine boss that was clearly unique and magical in some way. The giant buck with smoke trailing from its eyes, the fused rider with its twin spears that could throw and recall, the way it had adjusted the entire herd's tactics. Numbers and command structure. Bad combination.
Should he expose Fenrir? Ride his proud magic wolf with the rest of them, using illusions to try to escape? He really didn't want to. That was a card he'd kept hidden, a capability no one else knew about. But the situation was dire. And even if he did, there was no guarantee it would allow them to escape. The thing had already shown it could track their trail, adjust to their tactics.
He clenched his fist.
He found himself getting enraged. At being hunted. At being chased. At something else. A part of him wanted to kill them all. Wipe them out entirely. A deep simmering part wanted to burn each and every one of their souls, build a tower of souls from them like the soul eater, and drain them forever. Carve into them and build a monument from their bones like Cinder did.
But those thoughts were creeping. Insistent. Like the urge to jump off a bridge, intrusive. A voice whispered to fight, and it wasn't battle sense. Battle sense just said Keep running, which was concerning in its own way. No, this voice was creeping, many voices, urging him to stay, to fight, to drink their blood and bathe in their souls as they watched, alive enough to suffer.
As he ran and fired the last flaming bolt of death, something shifted. The mad twisting demonic delirious rage that had been creeping up on him finally took hold. He used his dredges of death energy, the last scraps he had left, and did something he hadn't tried before. He manipulated his own bones. Grew something. A spike that shot out of his palm, covered in black flame.
The sensation was like tearing a part of himself loose. Worse than anything he'd felt, except for one moment. When he was burning down the soul eater's fortress, standing in the midst of a realm on fire, being eaten away. That pain would've been excruciating, but back then, standing in a realm on fire, David hadn’t been in his right mind. Same as now.
He shot the bone spear of death, a long jet of black flame with an ivory center.
The bone was a part of his body. His body was boosted, infused with the energy of his cursed spear. And it was a literal part of his soul leaving him. His body was excess soul—tempered with every soul he’d consumed. The attack was devastating. It pierced more than just flesh.
[DeathBorn Lvl 3 → DeathBorn Lvl 4]
The cursed-spear empowered soul attack tore through three stagfiends and grazed two more. Wherever it touched, the creatures dropped and tumbled. The ones behind them had to jump over their already dead bodies. Even a graze was enough to end them. He was attacking their souls.
If he'd checked his status then, he would've seen his constitution drop by a full twenty points. A grave cost.
The bone spear careened toward the leader. The giant dual-wielding buck with smoke trailing from its eyes.
For the first time, the creature dodged.
David knew something was wrong. He felt vertigo, like he was in a dream where the rules didn't apply and nothing touched the ground right. But the rage, the indignation, the need for revenge was all consuming. The voice told him to fight, to make them suffer, that he was the one who had been wronged, that they deserved everything he could do to them and more. The voice told him he was a demon.
He looked at the direction of the sun. Something about it didn't make sense. It was in the wrong place. Or he was. He couldn't tell. His mind grabbed for landmarks, the ones he never lost track of even in the worst fights. The ridgeline. The split tree. The stream. They were there. They were real.
His Calm Mind skill worked in overdrive, fighting against something he couldn't see but could feel pressing in from all sides. The pressure eased. Far from gone. But barely enough. Slowly, he half-came back to himself, struggling against the waves of bloodthirst and delirium.
[Calm Mind Lvl 1 → Calm Mind Lvl 2]
David came to a decision.
"Follow me," he said.
They turned course and ran, further north, heading for that spire to the north, the tall, mysteriously erected structure with high level creatures patrolling its grounds.
He kept running.
The trees still formed their wide ring around the basin of fractured grey stone. The black spire rose from the center, cracks in its surface bleeding that steady light onto the ground. The fine, glowing fissures still webbed the earth.
The creatures were gone. No silver flash of scales. No spined limbs jerking across stone. Nothing floating overhead. The things with layered metallic feathers, the shapes of condensed shadow—the ones Rhea had spotted, the ones with levels beyond anything they could handle—gone. Only dark stains marked the stone where they had moved. Scattered remains and signs of battle littered the basin floor. Whatever had happened here, they had missed it.
Everyone pushed forward, exhausted, too tired to even speak. For a second, David's heart dipped. He thought his plan failed. Worst case, he'd have to use one of his irreversible contingencies.
Then he saw one figure standing before the spire's doorway. Guarding it.
A large knight in full gothic dark plate armor. Its helm had two thick horns that reached for the sky. It wielded two long swords, one in each arm, each as large as Rhea. The swords glowed a sickly green, dense energy rolling off them in waves. It was seated on some kind of twisted demonic steed, a seven-foot knight in full black plate. Just there, in front of the spire's entrance.
[Demon — Sentinel Variant, Alastiel The Eternal Harvest Lvl 50]
Rhea gasped, almost stumbling, the rest were in various states of alarm and battle readiness.
But David? David sighed a breath he hadn’t even realised he’d been holding the entire time.
Like a ray of light in a dark knight, David headed for the demon, his people at his heel and a hundred monsters at his back.