He stepped out of the cave a different man. Until now he had lived between hollows and the village—burrows, chambers, roofs of others. A pattern, really: in this world caves and hamlets, in the other apartments and cities. Holes traded for holes. Villages traded for metropolises. It is not astonishing that a man like him - an author - should be a schizoid misanthrope; astonishing would be to expect otherwise.
The season itself was shifting. The woods had begun their slow exhalation, leaves no longer green but burnished into copper and dull flame, falling in hesitant spirals that lined the earth like scales of an old serpent shedding. The undergrowth smelled of bruised fruit, sap gone sour, and the first rot that turns sweetness toward earth again.
The noon had already broken; light spilled sideways, thinner, more slanted, the kind that no longer promised growth but decline. The trees felt it too. Their crowns carried rust and ash, leaves loosening into air as if surrender were contagious. The ground was mottled with their dead—copper scales laid across mud, soft rot under every step.
The wind was sharper than yesterday. It moved with the smell of fruit collapsed in its own skin, of fungus rooting in the husks of summer, of chestnuts split open like wounds. Every color had dulled, as if the world itself had been washed in smoke. Branches groaned like timbers not built to last; starlings tore the sky into crooked lines, restless, rehearsing their flight away.
The road lay open through it, a scar of stone and clay, broad enough to announce itself. He gave it a glance and refused it. Roads belong to maps, and maps belong to anyone with a knife. A line known to all eyes: raiders, vagrants, cultists seeking converts in blood. To walk it was to submit to a script already written. Nameless stayed to the fringe, weaving among roots and thickets, the hidden shoulder of the world where caution breathes freer than boldness.
He followed the dirt road for a stretch, only enough to test its pulse. Its stones had lost their mortar; mud and rut made it half impassable. Every sign of the Interregnum lay plain; devastation absolute. Farmhouses blackened and roofless; walls clawed down to their joints; barns without doors. The silence of work undone. He passed a shrine whose cross had been defaced and toppled into nettles. The road was not dead—it was worse. It looked as though something had fed on it, chewed the planks and the stones, spat out what it could not swallow. Cults and praeters, surely; abominations trailing in the wake of broken order.
That was the lesson he carried: regularity teaches nothing. To endure in order is no merit; anyone can keep time when the clock still runs. What shapes a man is how he conducts himself when the clock is broken—when the world is chaos and the road is no longer a road but a trap. That is where caution is true. That is where strength is measured. He kept walking, the treeline his screen, the silence his guide. "Any fool can march in a time kept by bells," he thought. "Worth begins when the bells are broken."
Nameless kept to the margin. Not on the road itself—never. To walk the highlighted path was to submit to the map: a highway for bandits, adventurer-gangsters, wandering NPCs of mixed allegiance. Good and bad both haunt the obvious. Directness is always insecure; the straight road is the one already claimed. So he slid along the edge, in the treeline, close enough to watch, never exposed enough to be watched. The roadside woods were his true carriage.
Nameless marked the pattern before it was a pattern—dead trunks, hollowed, stripped, their insides blackened into chambers. At first glance: waste. At second: beds. Private mausoleums laid in sequence, poor and unvisited, but serviceable enough for one who never asked the world for luxury. A man who knew how to sleep in a hole would have no trouble calling a dead tree his inn.
He traced them along the road's shoulder, each one an interval in a ledger, a dotted line of concealment waiting to be tallied. Enough, he thought, to walk this margin by day and crawl into any of them by night. The carcass of a tree hides as well as earth, maybe better: beasts scent around, but seldom inside; players look ahead, not into shadows that drink their own shape. He had found his future inns already—vaults without guards, pulpits of silence.
He walked on, muttering the arithmetic of intent. The village's danger had not left with Balin's head; it had only named its recruiter. "Find the source," he told the brush. "The man who netted Mathis and Balin must be near. Justice? Maybe. Relief for the villages? A convenience. What matters is the next secret. The instructor will carry it." And secrets, at this stage, meant survival more than justice.
And in that moment Nameless felt surer of the path that leaned on instructors rather than invention. To wrest a skill from nothing—raw, unsanctioned, hammered out of private will—was always dearer than to learn it from a hand already marked. The ledger charged more when you wrote your own lines; the world took a premium for arrogance. To learn from an instructor was cheaper in points, narrower, and safer of sucess. To create alone was wilder, costlier, and slower. With resources thinned to famine in these first days, austerity was not a choice but a rule. Metrics mattered. Policy mattered. He would not scatter points like grain on a barren field.
He checked his tally: 1 skill point, no more. He would need many corpses to season the climb, each mob a rung on the next level's ladder. The village thought him guardian, but he was only debtor to mathematics. He whispered: "Domine went straight to Culum, head of the Penumbra. I won't need to. If Balin and Mathis fell this fast, the distance between spawn and cult can't be long. A hamlet, a wood, and a recruiter. That's all it takes."
He caught himself measuring the ledger. "I need mobs," he said inwardly, flat as an oath. "A duty of conscience. If I don't keep cutting, I rot."
Balin's death—he weighed it without ceremony—had been nothing more than theft from a child. Too easy, too loud. "That wasn't a climb," he muttered. "That was dessert." His bar was still fat with IP, his lungs still whole with Breath, and now his body wore iron and blood stitched into silk. Obligation doubled when armor did.
He touched the staff as if to remind it of its price. "This set isn't charity. I owe the mobs their blood. I owe the ground my sweat. Level waits to be paid for. So—pay it."
The forest answered with silence, as though granting him the bill.
Shortly after that, as he rehearsed which creature might be first, the forest answered with steps on the road. Slow, measured, much less heavier than fox or boar. He froze to margin's depth, then slid into the rib of a dead trunk, pulling bark over breath. The hollow smelled of dust and fungus; saplings grew from its wound like veins escaped. He pressed his cheek to the wood and let one eye catch the cut of the road through a crack.
Waiting is a skill too.
He heard them first — men tearing at each other. The impression was that the fight had started further up the road, but two shapes had stumbled back: one because he willed it, the other because he had no choice. A pursuit.
Nameless stayed silent in the treeline. Perfect Sight rose like a second lid over his eyes:
Human — Level 4
Human — Level 2
A warrior against another warrior. Both still half-dressed in the scraps of beginners, cloth hanging, leather barely tied.
Time stretched; the higher pressed, the lower bent. The Level 4 struck with wide arcs, heavy, explosive, each cut meant to announce itself as law.
"Now it's your turn!" he shouted, voice thick with performance.
"We are the ones who rule this road!"
He laughed as he swung, sword describing the air like thunder.
The other tried to parry — once, twice — but each block spent him, and every second blow landed. He was selling lunch to buy dinner.
"Mercy!" the Level 2 cried out, gasping, body folding under the weight. "I just started—please—"
Destroyer answered with another swing, wider than need demanded:
"Then learn it and spread it! Tell them all — Destroyer killed you!"
The blade came level, waist-high, and cut across like an oath broken. The torso split from the hips in one stroke, a horizontal verdict, blood meridian drawn into mud.
The scream ended before the echo did.
The corpse still steamed on the dirt when Destroyer turned, blood clinging to him as though it had chosen him. His bulk was pale under the splatter, wide-shouldered, a brute cut from fat timber and armed with the same. The face wore no veil: teeth bared in a smile too large, gums shining, forehead heavy and childlike in its confidence. He looked less like a man than like flesh's first experiment in movement—carnal, coarse, drenched. His sword dripped a seam that could have been marrow itself, and the air smelled of copper turned to pasture. Bucolic, but terrible.
Nameless watched, half in disbelief. He thought for a moment the man was parody, theatre painted in gore. Then a voice behind the brute confirmed the scene for what it was.
"Master!" the smaller one cried, laughing bright and vicious. "So quick you cut him before he could even finish begging. You'll make me lazy at this rate!"
Destroyer grinned wider, the bloody smile now full declaration. He raised the sword as if to brandish not the steel but himself.
"Grinblade," he barked, booming, "if you grow lazy, it means you've learned well. Let the dogs crawl; we walk over them."
The laughter of the disciple trailed the clangor, and together they looked like mockery given flesh—one roaring in conquest, the other feeding on the echo.
The blood still lay fresh when the undergrowth shifted again. Out of the trees came a man holding a bow, lean as a shadow given weight, two bodies slung over his back like sacks of grain. Both should be players—faces young, half-covered in starter cloth, their deaths still wearing the clumsy surprise of beginners.
He dropped them at the roadside with the neatness of a craftsman setting down tools. His voice was flat, pared to function:
"Two more. Both should be Level 1. Arrows broke their runs before they touched steel."
Destroyer roared approval, chest heaving, gore-slick sword lifted like a torch. "The road is ours! Do you hear it? Ours!"
Grinblade clapped, mock-cheerful, bowing toward the corpses. "A guild of shepherds—we drive the lambs to slaughter before they know they're even sheep. What mercy! What service!" His laugh was crooked, as if the joke had already betrayed itself.
Last came another figure, slower, robes drinking leaf and mud. Not fully human—his ears cut longer, his bearing tinctured by something older. Half-sylvie, it showed plain. The Sylvans, touched faintly by green, half-shadow and half-echo, bore in their gaze the mystery of groves. And mankind—frailest in body, yet most obstinate in will—remained the least defined, yet most unpredictable of all. This one carried both. His eyes were hollows where thought had gathered too long, and his words, when they came, were low enough to make even Destroyer pause.
He spoke toward the archer, but the words were aimed through him.
"Tonight, Nightveil—your arrows draw the line before anything crosses it. We open with distance, and we spend steel only after silence has done its work. A road patrol is not a festival."
Destroyer, still breathing hard, hand slick on the hilt, shifted his weight. The half-sylvie did not look at him; his voice merely thinned, like a knife passing under skin.
"Let thunder wait for the second act. Eagerness bleeds a man faster than any wound. We'll keep our captain's life for when it buys more than applause."
Destroyer grinned, showing his teeth, but the pause was long enough to betray the sting. The expression on the half-sylvie's face did not speak, but it wrote clearly: idiot.
"Grinblade! Nightveil! Thalmeris! Let them write our names on the board. This road is now a covenant in blood", spoke Destroyer without any previous thought.
Nameless, watching from the hollow of a dead tree, understood. Not a duel, not chance—it had been an ambush from the first step. And not just brute force: theatre, calculation, liturgy.
He breathed once, slow, the mask damp against his cheek. "So this is how the west teaches," he thought. "By fire, by mockery, by night."
He did not move. From the hollow of the dead trunk he kept his eye fixed on them. All of them—Destroyer, Grinblade, Thalmeris, with the exception of Nightveil—stood at Level 4. Nightveil was at Level 6. It shocked him a little, that Nightveil, the secundary, was more powerfull than the guild-leader. He let the number write itself across his mind, and the irony forced a breath through his teeth.
"So here he is," he muttered inwardly. "The legendary. Destroyer."
For a moment he weighed the odds. What were the chances—the top name on the public list, the strongest player by rank—standing here, on this road, in front of his hollow eye? Absurd on the surface. But then, not absurd at all. Most players, given choice, always picked the human race. Default flesh. Numbers win the lottery by sheer mass. More humans meant more spawns in human countries; more spawns meant more probability that the first crown would sit on a human brow.
He watched them scrape the bodies, not sparing a glance for the faces that had been. They were scalping the field in their own way—tearing rings, boots, daggers, cloth, whatever dropped, throwing it all into a sack the half-sylvie bore like a treasurer of the damned. Children of Fire—their name burned into the ranking, their work blackening the road.
He let the thought settle as the last item was ripped from the last corpse, blood still dripping down the scalper's palm into the sack. The conclusion was sharp, almost kind:
"This is certainly the hardest starting zone in the world."
He thought then of older names. "Cain and Abel: there was no government that day. Government comes after blood, never before it." This guild was nothing more than caricature—civilization stillborn, strength devouring weakness.
The memory of Jorge flashed—a boy blocking Balin at the village gate, only to be broken into the dirt. No XP was given to him then, even if he was close to the target, because no damage had been done; the system did not reward being beaten like a drum. But here, it was different. They were party-bound, guild-bound. XP shared, distributed. Both the Level 1s Nightveil carried like spoils had fed them equally. A slow drip, a communal rise.
He measured it in silence. "Predictable. Inevitable. Realistic." Destroyer had already grasped the cheap arithmetic: mobs took time, risk, planning. Players—equal in fragility at the spawn line—were easier prey. And the system, with its bitter calculus, paid more for man than beast. PvP was keystone. Kill your equal, rise faster than butchering wolves. It was the first law discovered, and Destroyer wore it like a crown.
So the Children of Fire had taken to the road, hunting fresh spawn, prowling the arteries where new life bled in. First example of man enslaving man. First guild, first crime, first parody of kingship.
Nameless trailed them from the margin, one step behind, silent as bark. He saw the pattern already: this method would not last. Newbies at Level 1 yield little, and XP divided four ways bleeds faster than it feeds. Destroyer did not see it, not yet. He thought he was founding dominion. In truth, he was only burning through the ash of easy prey.
Nameless's thought closed on them with the quiet of a judge signing a writ: "the first men have chosen to make slaves of each other."
He let the arithmetic walk itself across his head. Two Level 1 corpses cut into four men—scraps divided until the meat was gone. Each kill worth, at best, a fraction of a level. Shared again, it was little more than garnish.
"Short ideas. Short term. Animals." he told the hollow, his voice flat. "A sprint against stone. They burn lives for a trickle of XP, and the sack fills with scraps that can't even be sold well."
He watched their fake victory thin into silence and let the thought move through him like a cold ledger.
"They think the road is theirs. But this game isn't fooled. When a man is 6 levels above his prey, the kill begins to be almost nothing—XP starts to be gradually reduced to a token, a symbol more than a payment. At first the method fattens; later it starves. Hunt noobs long enough and you only buy yourself a limbo—stuck between numbers that won't rise and levels that won't break. A trap disguised as triumph."
He let the sentence harden. "That is the mediocrity—the fate of those who think themselves something, when they are only a little more than nothing and less than everything."
It is truth that he system pays more for the kill of an equal than for slaughtering beasts. But even that law bends; the board does not honour children killed at Level 1. Their method was already doomed to die from birth.
He kept following them, one pace behind, the treeline still his cloak.
"Players eating players." It was the first instinct, and the first mistake.
He thought: "Better a mob farmed clean than a man farmed empty."
He waited and watched.
They left no decency behind. The bodies were heaped like kindling, and Destroyer, grinning with the leisure of a child at play, scrawled a message across torn paper, dipped in blood, and set it atop the pile.
CHILDREN OF FIRE. DESTROYER.
Nameless read it from the treeline, silent. "This is the nature of such a leader," he thought. "Noise for prestige, not strength. A beast with numbers but no patience. He mistakes proclamation for dominion."
He shadowed them at distance, threading between dead trees, watching the night rise. They made camp as if they owned the ground, a circle around flame. Nameless crouched farther back, wanting to see what Thalmeris had promised—strategy by darkness, not brute clangor. Even at Level 8, diving alone into four Level 4s was rash. Better to study the dance before he cut it short.
Grinblade leaned closer to the fire, his grin bright as the sparks. "Master, tomorrow we train again, yes? I can't wait to learn the next cut from you. Every swing feels sharper when you're the one showing it." He said it with that crooked smile of his, half-jest and half-hunger, the eagerness of a disciple who wanted more than tutelage.
Nameless scratched the side of his head, the irony almost comic. "Training, at this level?" The brute had looked unnervingly quick with the sword—no denying that. A déjà vu fell over him, clear as a page he'd already read. "Of course. S-Rank Sword Gift." This particular gift, like its cousins for sage, archer, assassin, and priest, allowed its bearer to train others—passing on what he was, not just what he knew. Each session carried the faint chance of transmitting a sliver of that same gift. And even before Maturation—before Level 15—such training still granted proficiency, because it drew from the Gift and the master, not the system. "That's the trick. They're not just playing at friends; they're waiting to drink from him."
The family of S stood in contrast to Z. Some things cannot be lent, no matter the discipline. The inner endowments are sealed. Rank Z stands apart. His Perfect Sight could never be taught at a sparring ring or shared in repetition; it was not a practice but a birthmark, a wound of vision. Such Gifts come only by genesis or by the lightning of rare events, never by instruction. It is, in the system's cruel balance, an inner virtue.
Nameless let the thought coil inward. "Good. They are blind to what burns without smoke, deaf to what does not announce itself. An inner virtue cannot be stolen; it doesn't even exist for their eyes. They'll spend their lives fighting over firewood, and never notice the flame already lodged in my marrow."
The S-ranks, by comparison, were like external fires. They could be passed like torches, master to disciple, because they belonged as much to the gesture as to the hand. A teacher does not merely teach the lesson—he teaches teaching itself; and the student, if hungry enough, learns not only the matter but the very way of being a teacher. So it is with the flame: inherited, yet also cultivated, transmissible by presence. A fire lights another fire without losing itself.
Nameless let the thought ripen in image. "It is like fire. Its dominion spreads everywhere, never captive in one place. It needs no one, and yet multiplies insensibly, it expands without being restrained by anyone and does not diminish as it expands,manifesting its grandeur in every matter that receives it."
But when he turned his eyes back to Destroyer, the grotesque form hunched in self-importance, the poetry shriveled. Here was no fire. He burned nothing into greatness, wasted as he swung. He strutted as if sovereign flame, needing no other to spread. Yet he did not see—could not see—that even his own disciple, "This disciple, greedy for the cup—thirsty at the pot, as they say", already imagined him otherwise: not a fire at all, but chalk. Chalk consumed line by line on a blackboard, destroyed in the very act of leaving its trace. A fool who thinks himself flame while others already measure his dust.
Nameless let the thought linger on the disciple. "Grinblade, with his clumsy flattery—forced, artificial, grotesquely loud—only exposing the coarseness of the fool who received it with a stupid smile on his face." The image amused him darkly. "He was like the jester of Caesar, but inverted. Men once gathered around Caesar, called him divine, treated him as if he were a god. And the fool's duty, the court clown, was to remind him he was only a man—fire only so long as it was bound to earth, not a star with its own light, but a torch thrust in soil, burning only as high as the ground would let it rise. The clown was his antidote against flatterers."
Grinblade, by contrast, worked poison. He was convincing his master not of his mortality but of the opposite. The malice of it was plain enough: he wanted to see the brute in "anotherplane." Nameless smirked at the irony, whispering inwardly, "not heaven, but the grave."
From the other side of the fire, a quieter current moved. Nightveil's voice, clipped and spare:
"Your counsel served. The shot held truer. I'll test it again when it counts."
Thalmeris inclined his head, voice low as leaves brushing stone.
"Wind must first unmake itself before it strikes. The Impetuous Wind breaks path for the arrow; you carved the Rose of Death from the same branch. It will bite deeper next time. Save your points for its refinement in the future."
Nightveil gave the barest nod, no more.
"…Gratitude. We'll see it done."
"Not just a pack of idiots," Nameless admitted inwardly, jaw tight. "They've already learned the mechanic of creating skills. Impressive."
Then the thought twisted sharper. Of all their names, only one carried the weight of lore. Thalmeris. It had the sound of a true Sylvie—native, ancient, plausible. He almost laughed in silence. "A fan. Of course. Some lunatic who read the saga before it breathed here. What do they call it in criticism? Ah yes—the Borgesian effect: the book containing the one who had read it before it existed. My work has already grown its own cultist. That truly consecrates a work! Wonderful."
The Sylvie, touched faintly by green, learned the elemental arts with uncanny ease. Their bloodline spent fewer points to master fire, wind, water and root. A simple economy of nature.
Nameless, however, bore another lineage. His sub-race, the Ratiols—the elder cousins of the Sylvie—had no such cheap gifts. Their strength slept in abstraction, in systems not drawn from river or flame but from higher orders: structures, symbols, ideas that presupposed all the others. Not the crude elementals of earth, but the unseen frameworks only a matured world could even recognise. Late-game benefits. Costly in the mud, priceless in the firmament.
He leaned back into the dark, thought cutting lean. "The Sylvies are an mostlyearly game race—cheap costs on elemental skills, fire and wind for pocket change. They shine fast, but only in the shallow end. The Ratiols, by contrast, are late game stock. We pay full price now, and get almost nothing in return. No shortcuts, no cheap tricks. Our ledger only tilts late—when the world grows complex enough for abstractions to rule, when elementals are child's toys and systems devour them whole. That is when the cousins fade, and we remain."
A thin smile cut his face. "Let them enjoy their early game fireworks. I'll be the one harvesting the board when the world goes late. Patience isn't virtue—it's inevitability."
He let the thought deepen, almost amused. "That is the difference between reader and author. The reader clings to the passages he likes best, fragments lit by taste. The author holds the whole—surface and depth, beginning and end. The root that feeds the flower, and the grave that waits beneath it. They play their favorite scenes. I write the outcome."
After some time in silence,Grinblade leaned forward first, smile bent. "Master, today was glorious. I swear, you struck like thunder itself." The word master always on his lips, always laced with mockery disguised as praise.
Nightveil gave his false assent, voice pared to bone. "Too glorious. Steel bleeds louder than it should."
Thalmeris lowered his eyes, letting the quiet bend. "Tonight, the feint begins with Nightveil. His eyes are roots in shadow; let distance cut before steel. The night is ours when silence leads it."
Nameless, in the hollow, turned the thought over. "Night vision. Rank B. Obvious enough for an archer here. Predictable. Be careful with bias."
Destroyer cut across the counsel, puffed with his own heat. "No. We begin with my name. It must be spoken at every kill. Destroyer. Children of Fire. Let it ring. The board must know who took the first night."
He jabbed the air with the sword, voice booming, "When the weaklings of the other list enter tomorrow and the day after, I read it in the news before coming here—four million more, flooding in. Three million would log-in today already, and across the next three days another four million will spill through, piece by piece, until the count is seven million. Tonight we must take the lead. Three million already here, four million soon to come. Who else but Destroyer? Some nameless freak? That Nobody's just fattening his pockets like a merchant, writing his little saga as if it mattered. That guy… The so-called Nameless Nobody Guy! He must be swimming in millions already. That freak bastard. Let the world hear our name."
He said ours as if the word meant anyone but himself. In his mouth it was camouflage—we for the sake of loyalty, but what he meant was I. Prestige was the only crown he could imagine, and every other voice around the fire was there only to echo it back.
Nameless swallowed dry, irony burning his throat. "An animal sees only numbers, never the sweat it takes to build the stall."
Destroyer stood, blade catching firelight. "Tonight we burn three fires. Whoever they are, they fall. This road is ours."
Grinblade tilted his head, smiling thin as a blade. "Of course, master. I've even rehearsed the look of terror they'll wear. Maybe I'll scream louder than you, just to help with the theatre."
Nightveil's tone was cold as a stone. "Lighting fires only draws arrows. I need no speeches. Give me targets."
Destroyer slammed the hilt on the ground. "Arrows don't make names, Nightveil. Steel does. It's the clangor that writes memory."
The half-sylvie's voice slid between them, calm yet weighted: "Respect does not live in clangor—it lives in remembrance. A sword kills one; a name kills a hundred. But names burn out, too. Captain, let the archer open the dance, and then come with thunder. Better remembered for the end than the risk."
Destroyer straightened, appeased, the grin returning. "Yes… yes, you're right. First the shadow, then the blade. They'll see who is thunder on this road."
Grinblade whispered, just loud enough to sting: "Borrowed thunder always sounds bigger."
Nameless, listening, let the diagnosis close on them: "A child with a rare toy, and all of them pretending friendship to keep touching it. Nightveil despises him, but hides it. Grinblade laughs, feeding on his vanity. Thalmeris guides them like puppets, never showing the strings. A kingdom divided will fall—but one born divided survives only on the lie. The toy exacts its toll: they must all pretend to love the boy, when all they want is the toy."
Night pressed close, and three shapes huddled near a small fire, beginners who had already learned to fear their own light. They tried to smother the flames, covering smoke with dirt, whispering like men in a trench. It didn't matter. The guild was already on them.
The feint was precise. The torchlight flared only when needed—just enough for Destroyer and the others to see. Otherwise, it was Nightveil who began the harvest. He saw through dark as if it were glass, and the first arrow went clean. The victims cried to the bow itself, as if their enemy were not a man but the instrument.
Another arrow followed, and this one burned. The shaft struck the chest and bloomed. Roots, roses, thorns. Nightveil named it in loud voice —Rose of Death. The vine coiled around the body, pressing the shaft deeper, the petals of pain folding toward the heart. The man screamed like a bird caught mid-song, the sound warping until it snapped into silence. Nameless felt the thought cross his mind unbidden—"a song that kills itself to give a flower". He shut it down as quickly as it came. The scene was too fine for its own honesty, too violent to deserve the name of beauty. beauty turned executioner, art written in blood. A violent blossom, and terrible to see.
The other two players were cut down in turn. One ran, but the light flared again, and an arrow split him from behind before steel ever touched. The last tried to parry, and the laughter of Grinblade filled the dark. It was quick, not clean—mockery taking the shape of slaughter.
Nameless stayed hidden. "I won't be any white knight," he told himself. "They'll respawn elsewhere. Better to sell today to buy tomorrow." The thought was cold, and he would regret it later.
When it was done, the Children of Fire stood over three more bodies. The XP moved through them, shared in equal measure. All four flared together, the message hanging in the air:
[Level Up — 5]
Destroyer roared, sword lifted high. "The road is ours! Hear it! Ours!"
Grinblade clapped, bowing, laughter spilling sideways. "Master, I'll need a second sack at this pace. You're making me rich."
Thalmeris murmured, calm and low, "Every fire feeds the greater flame. Tonight was not waste."
Only one face stayed still.
Nightveil was already Level 6. No step lifted him further.
He only forced a smile—quick, thin, false. The mask of celebration slipped almost as fast as it came. Nightveil—if not the head, then the arm. Destroyer was loud, but this one was exact.
Nameless read the charade at once. "As I thought. The loudmouth sits on thepublic board because Nightveil leaves him the last hits. Equal XP either way, but only one gets the glory. Astute. The archer lets the brute believe in his crown, waiting for a better hour to claim what's his. Chief in name only. There's a plan in that silence."
The rite repeated: Destroyer scrawled again in blood, carving his name and the guild's on the stripped bodies, left in the dirt without a second thought. A signature written in ruin.
They lay down after, untroubled, as if slaughter were lullaby enough. The fire sank to embers; the grove held its breath.
Nameless turned from the glow, in his own refuge—the old hollow trunk, dead wood emptied by time. Forgotten by the living, it received him without judgment. He already had a plan in place, and if today belonged to them, tomorrow would be his. There he rested, cradled in rot and shadow, while the road dreamed on beneath the stars.
Every crown is borrowed; every toy, broken.