The graves still smoked faintly, a thin breath of yellow fire curling upward before dissolving into the branches. Behind them, the earth lay smooth, oval mouths sealed shut—warnings carved in soil. Birth and burial in the same glade, a single cradle for both. Whoever spawned here next would wake beneath the shadow of tombs. Lesson enough: prudence must be learned early, or not at all.
Nameless stood among them, mask tilted downward, as if measuring the ledger of silence. The shards lay everywhere—broken guild, broken vows, broken bodies. Shards are not only ruins; they are mirrors. Each fragment reflects the fall, but also points the way forward, like glass catching the sun to show the road. He thought of them that way: his enemies and their deaths not merely detritus, but signposts. "The shard is both the victim and the map," he mused. "By looking into what breaks, you see where to step."
He turned his thought inward, where the numbers settled.
Emperor — Level 10.
The screen listed his growth. The Sword Gift 5% gleamed there now, marked as "Master." Yet under it lingered the scrawl of the ledger—autodidact, the name crossed over Destroyer's. His master erased, but remembered as ink rubbed faint on parchment. "So it is written: I am my own master now."
It had been a leap. A clean severing of the Children of Fire, their noise extinguished. "A good leap," he thought. "Level 10."
Yet no climb is without competition. The screen flickered again, announcing the new order:
[World Ranking Updated]
#1 — Dark Warriors
Entropy (L6)
Nameless let the name linger a moment, dry amusement tracing him. Entropy—lord of decay—at level 6. "So the powers are consolidating already. One guild dead, another grown in its ash."
His thought cut sharp: "I cannot idle in the interregnum. The space between rulers is the most dangerous span. To halt is to be outpaced. I must move. To the recruiter of the Penumbra Order, near the village. The sooner this errand ends, the sooner the reward is mine."
The mask turned, glancing back once at the sealed graves. Warning for children, tomb for men, shard for him.
And in the middle of it, as if nothing had passed, the women argued. It was almost comic: a forest still trembling with carnage, and they bickered as though at a market stall.
Nameless glanced sideways. Mila was still quarreling, words spilling bright and needling against the bluntness of the half-Petrosi girl. The thought slid through him: perhaps the races mirrored what the players had been before entering the world. At least here it held true. Petrosi carried temper quick as fire, quarrelsome, chiselled for anger. Sylvies bent the other way, to melancholic extremes—saint or fiend, depending on the passion of the hour.
He considered himself then, dryly. "Ratiols. The eldest of the old blood. Inertia made flesh. Pure phlegm, pure apathy." He almost smiled. "I could not have chosen better."
Below, the clash of temperaments played out like a petty skirmish:
Mila's voice rose, warm and insistent, her tone like honey forced through clenched teeth:
"You can't keep stomping like that. Look at you—cloak torn, boots caked, not even trying. People will think you crawled out of a quarry."
The half-Petrosi crossed her arms, words hard as gravel:
"Better quarry than doll. Cloth frays, stone endures."
Mila smiled thin, sighing as if magnanimous:
"Always the same tune—stone, stone, stone. But when it cracks, who binds it? You bleed, I mend. At least admit you'd rather be patched than buried."
The Petrosi leaned closer, eyes sharp as struck flint:
"I'd rather bleed standing than live as someone's burden."
Mila's shoulders lifted in a shrug, her voice sweetened just enough to sting:
"Fine. Be the boulder. I'll carry herbs for when you roll downhill."
Their words struck and rebounded, gift against command, honey against rock. The air thickened, not a quarrel so much as two natures refusing to yield—fire sparking, water hissing, steam rising between them.
Nameless turned away, dry as ash: "So this is how they inherit the world. Carnage behind them, yet already quarreling over scraps."
Then he moved, noiseless, out of the clearing, into the road that would not wait.
Nameless walked the road alone, the soil still carrying the echo of graves behind him. His thought bent forward, toward what waited ahead: the Order of Penumbra. Their grades, their hidden sequence. Whoever stood as recruiter in the nearest village would not be a novice. No—at least a Listener. Second rung, the one permitted to take others into shadow, to mark them for the climb.
He spoke no word to Mila, nor to the Petrosi. Better so. Ties are ballast, and ballast drowns. She might die and pay to respawn on another shore, another continent. Nothing binds what the system itself scatters. And he was not made for sociability; the solitude fit him like marrow.
His hand brushed the staff at his back, where the imprint of Impetuous Wind pulsed dormant. He smirked dry, almost amused. "Elemental tricks," he thought. "Air, water, stone—the old school of Thales. Gross knowledge dressed as spellcraft. So this is where we are. Finally the anime isekai begins. Only a harem missing, and the tale is complete."
The irony burned sharper for him than any flame. For a man who would rather recoil from even the scent of men, the shadow of a woman already carried weight enough. Companionship was danger, threat. For the solitary, even kindness was edged.
He laughed once, low and without mirth, then pressed on, noiseless, into the road.
"Listener… no less than Level 15. At least an experienced perversor—someone who can bleed more secrets from shadow." The thought ran clean, ledger-like.
Nameless's pace was steady, eyes moving over the lay of the land. A cavern, perhaps. A hollow sunk in stone. Or a burrow in the ground, a throat of earth where novices could vanish unseen. It could not be far. Balin and others like him had been marked already; the recruiters should be planted themselves near the spawn, close enough to catch the raw and green before they learned too much.
He kept walking. The path thinned, scattered with roots. The canopy above pressed low, green darkness bending toward him. His mind was occupied, charting probabilities, running the lines of where the Penumbra would nest.
Then came the sound of feet, hurried, light. Mila. She broke from the underbrush, breath short, hair loose from her hood. Her voice was sharp, pitched more with hurt than anger:
"You're just leaving? Walking off without even a word?"
He stopped, turned half his head. His eyes narrowed behind the mask. "No."
She blinked, startled, lips parting.
He let the silence hang, then added flatly, "There. I said something. Satisfied?" His tone curved dry, iron in its irony. "Now goodbye. Try living a little longer, and stop clinging to me."
Mila's jaw tightened. Her eyes shone, half indignation, half laughter at the cruelty of it. "You're impossible."
He turned back, already moving, his cloak brushing the undergrowth. "And you're still alive. Don't waste it."
Mila's voice broke the silence, sharp but hesitant, as if afraid her own words might be overheard by the trees.
"You don't care, do you? Killing players like that. Making enemies for nothing."
Nameless did not even turn. His steps fell steady, as though the path itself belonged to him.
"Killing is not always wrong. That is what most never understand. Killing innocents is always wrong. These were not innocents."
She flinched, more at the precision of the answer than its cruelty. Her thoughts tumbled, veiled in suspicion. Not innocents… said like a man who has judged this before. Said like someone who lives by rules colder than the game itself.
For a moment she let the distance grow, then hurried to close it again, breathless, curiosity gnawing.
"You fight like someone who's been here for years. Double class—sword and staff—already. You know the items. The mechanics. The lore. But this game isn't even a day old."
Nameless said nothing, eyes fixed ahead.
Her thoughts spiraled. Could it be? Could he be the one? The neighbour everyone whispers about—the recluse who leaves his apartment once a month for groceries, who's lived a decade in silence without so much as a nod to the porter? They say that he is the so-called Nameless Nobody Guy. What if… it's him?
She forced a laugh, too light, too deliberate.
"Strange, isn't it? I only joined early to get ahead of someone. My boyfriend. He has work this week, so he said he'd start on the weekend. I thought—I'll learn the mechanics first, stay a step ahead, keep him… under my eye."
Nameless finally glanced at her, the mask tilted, voice flat as iron.
"Then you came not to play, but to bind. To watch. To control. That is the oldest game of all."
Her smile faltered. She hadn't said it aloud, not like that. But he had caught it anyway, stripped her words to their bone.
She looked away, cheeks hot, thoughts racing. Is it him? The one who writes, who hides, who never speaks? If it is… then I've walked into something far deeper than I ever guessed.
Mila kept pace beside him, though the silence pressed like a wall. Her eyes flicked sideways, catching the hollow mask, the way he walked as though he had always known the road.
"He moves like someone rehearsed. Like someone who didn't need the tutorial the rest of us fumbled through."
Her words came out light, almost teasing, though the note beneath was sharpened:
"You know more than you should. It's like you've lived here longer than the rest of us."
Nameless did not answer. His stride did not falter.
She tried again, lips curved but eyes searching.
"Strange, though. You remind me of someone. Someone who barely ever leaves his place. Someone people whisper about, say he's… odd."
A pause. Still no answer.
"He doesn't deny it," she thought, pulse quickening. "What if it really is him? The one they say writes strange books, the one who never speaks to anyone, who lives behind the door nobody dares knock? Nameless Nobody Guy…
Her voice grew softer, probing now, a question wrapped in jest.
"Tell me—have you played games like this before? Maybe… lived too close to one?"
That was when he stopped. Slowly, he turned, the bone mask gleaming pale. The staff lifted, its point set not quite at her chest, but close enough that the air trembled between them. His voice was flat, stripped of tone:
"Another question, and you will pass from innocent to guilty. And you already know what happens to the guilty."
The words froze her. For a moment her grin clung stubbornly, but the chill beneath it cracked her composure. She forced a laugh, thin, brittle, backing a step.
"Fine. Keep your secrets. See if I care."
Then she turned sharply, cloak snapping, and walked off into the undergrowth, leaving him to the silence he seemed to prefer.
Nameless watched her go, lowered the staff, and resumed his path without a word.
She didn't stop until the branches hid him from view. Only then did she breathe out, sharp, her chest tight with something she could not name.
"Threaten me all you want. Pretend you don't care. But if you truly didn't, you wouldn't bother warning me at all."
Her hands clenched at her sides, nails biting into skin. She wanted to scream at him, curse him, laugh in his face—anything but walk away like some scolded child. Yet beneath the sting of his words, another thought whispered: "He knows. He always knows. And that frightens me more than his staff ever could."
Mila's mouth twisted into a crooked smile, half-defiant, half-aching.
"Go on then, Meles. Stay hidden in your skull and shadows."
She drew her hood tighter, set her jaw, and walked back toward the clearing, every step a vow she would never voice aloud.
Nameless walked on, boots breaking the silence in measured rhythm. Her questions lingered behind him like smoke that would not lift. Strange questions. Too pointed, too local. Not the chatter of a girl testing the game's edges, but of someone probing him.
"Why dig at a man's mask? What profit in it?"
He turned the thought over as one turns a coin between fingers. Fleeting suspicion crossed him, then he discarded it with the same motion. "Even if she guessed, what then? A neighbour? A face she thinks she half-remembers? Irrelevant. The map is not the ground, and speculation buys her nothing."
The staff weighed steady in his grip, the sword at his hip still raw with other men's blood. He drew breath, slow, as if settling the dust inside himself. "Distractions multiply. Curiosity is a contagion. Better to cut it before it roots. Questions are blades; let her swing them at the air, not at me."
He let the silence reclaim its ground, and with it his clarity. "I am what the ledger shows: Emperor, Level 10. Nothing more. Nothing less. The rest is conjecture, and conjecture has no damage stat."
His pace never quickened, never slackened. The forest closed around him like a vault, and he entered it as though it had been built for him alone.
Nameless entered the forest's depth along the road, each step cutting forward into the hush. He traced possibilities—immediate, distant. The afternoon was still far; autumn insisted on surfacing in the midst of summer that refused to die. The air carried that tension: heat fading, chill advancing, both clawing at the same hour.
"Perhaps not all will be 'Listeners' like Mathis—docile, eager to be instructed. Some may be like Balin: cautious, sharp. A tale, a cloak of lore, will not fool every eye. Yet the disguise holds better now than before."
He reached into his inventory, drew the brooch of Penumbra, and fastened it openly upon his cloak.
[Equipped: Initiate's Brooch of the Penumbra]
A low rise stood beside the road. He ascended, not hurried, until he stood above, the line of the path cleaner now than before, emptier. From the height he scanned the vale, eyes narrowing.
"Perception—still lacking. I was too slow to sense Mila. That delay could kill me later. Double class does not mean triple. I am no archer, no warrior proper. In truth I remain a sage—only a sage who learns to move when necessity strikes, when the pan breaks and the egg sizzles."
He glanced at the sword. Its steel caught little light, still shadowed by the blood dried on it. He considered the shards of those he had cut down—each a fragment, each a path. "Strategy must pull from all angles to stand valid, else it is only vanity."
A swordsman by birthright would refine his blade. A sage by calling should deepen his intellect. But famine ruled the early game, and he had no luxury for such cultivation. Not yet. Even intellect itself must wait. Combat—true combat—was not yet his to refine. Falsity remained the sharper edge.
The blade in his hand carried the proof. Both sacred and arcane, its core drank from blood and from aura alike. Perfect for a mask. A perfect swordsman—but perfectly false.
"No need to build the art when illusion does it better. A flare of intellect through the edge, an unseen augmentation, even speed drawn from the head to trick the eyes into believing the hands move faster. That will be the leap."
His gaze slid from the weapon to the valley stretched below. Shadows in pockets, light cresting the folds.
"Vales and hills," he muttered aloud. Once. Twice. Again. Then silence—deep, absolute.
And in that silence, the faint sound rose. Movement below. Not climbing, not stalking. A clash. Voices breaking. Steel against steel. Shards flying. People fighting in the hollow beneath.
From the ridge Nameless let Perfect Sight sweep across the fray. Three figures, clumsy, their auras thin and stuttering—two Level 2s, one Level 3. Around them burned a darker flame, steadier, sharper. Level 4. The difference showed in every swing.
The cultist's blade cut arcs too clean for beginners, yet he did not bellow, did not boast. His voice came spare, carried on the air like cinders:
"Run if you must. The world finds you anyway."
The novices stumbled, one crying out as steel grazed his arm. Another scrambled into the brush, only to be dragged back by a hooked strike. Panic made them wild, blades flashing like children striking flint—bright, brief, wasted.
Nameless moved from the hill, slow, always beneath the veil of trees. His steps touched only shadow. From one trunk to the next he advanced, silent as if he had grown out of the bark.
The cultist spoke again, words dropping between blows:
"No one watches here. No ledger. Only the silence of roots."
One novice lunged, desperate, but the cultist turned him aside with ease, striking him down to knees. His tone did not rise, did not fall. It was almost tender:
"Pain is the only tutor that does not lie."
Nameless halted at the edge of the road, his mask catching the dim light. The fight played out below him, raw, clumsy, weighted already toward one conclusion. He could wait, or he could tip the scale. Either way, his plan had space to grow.
He lingered in the undergrowth, gaze slanted through the lattice of trunks. The fight below was already half-written—three novices staggering under the rhythm of one sharper player. Yet what caught him was not the steel, but the voice.
The cultist moved with a composure rehearsed, and every phrase fell like a line in a play: "No one watches here. No ledger. Only the silence of roots."
He even paused, as if for effect, before the next cut.
Nameless smirked behind the bone. "Mise-en-scène." That was the word. The Penumbra must be drilling this into them now—forcing every recruit to step into character, to treat the role as holy as the oath itself. Theatrics as initiation.
"Overacting," he thought. "Every one of them, mouthing dark lines like actors convinced the audience cares." Even players—children in borrowed skins—parroting the cadence, sinking into it as though the game itself demanded stagecraft.
The irony sharpened his grin. "Role playing in a world that already swallowed you whole. Well done."
The cultist pressed another novice to the dirt, the tip of his blade at the throat, his tone still soft, deliberate, almost priestly:
"Learn the lesson of death"
Nameless's hand closed lightly around the staff, though he did not step out yet. He watched, amused, letting the scene play out. For all their pretense of ritual, it was still just a man cutting down children.
The fight broke when Nameless stepped from the trees. His sword arced low, not for the throat but for the blade. Steel clashed, heavy against light, and the cultist buckled. The weight drove him sideways, the dagger spun free, clattering into leaves. He sprawled, robes twisting, breath torn from him.
[Breath: 67/84]
Nameless did not pause. He leveled the blade, gaze fixed.
"Choose. A hand or a foot."
The cultist said nothing, only shifted, fingers twitching as though to shape the word that had become their gospel: Doubt.
Nameless moved first. The blade brightened, edge veined with golden fire. Sacred Flame hummed as it neared the man's throat. His hand froze. His silence deepened.
"Sacred Flame."
(JP − 65 → 53)
Breath:
[Critical Hit — 150 Damage]
[Breath: 42/84]
Nameless tilted the blade away from flesh, toward the novices crumpled nearby. "Get up. Bind him. Use his own rags if you have nothing else. Bind him to the tree."
They hesitated—too young, too raw—but fear answered faster than courage. They tore strips from his cloak, fastened him to bark, awkward knots tightening under trembling fingers.
The cultist's eyes flickered once with contempt. Nameless pressed the sword closer, tracing circles across the skin of his left hand. Fire kissed it, lines drawn like brands. Then the steel drove down, through palm and into earth, pinning flesh to root. His scream ripped through the grove, raw, animal. Nameless twisted once before pulling free, leaving the hole open. Blood steamed.
He set the blade into the dirt before him, point down, watching the man writhe, his body jerking from side to side.
Then his voice, flat as stone:
"Now. Or you will be next."
The novices froze, pale, the words burrowing into them deeper than the flame.
The cultist was bound, his hand torn open and nailed by fire. His breath came ragged, but Nameless had already turned from him, the sword resting like a post in the earth.
Nameless kept his mask angled toward them, the fire in his sword already cooling. Inwardly he counted the words he had spoken, the silences he had kept. "NPC—that's the veil," he thought voice inward, flat. "Better to play the stranger than let the word 'player' cross my lips."
He faced the three shaken novices.
"Was he your comrade?" The words were level, stripped of warmth.
They shook their heads quickly. One stammered: "No—we don't know him."
Nameless tilted his mask as if weighing their truth. "Good. Then he is nothing to you. I am from a nearby village. We watch for these robed ones. They spread rot through the groves. I came to see if any had crept this far."
The bound man strained, lips moving around some curse, but Nameless did not so much as glance at him. His voice carried over, ignoring the captive entirely. "Strange. A stranger among you, and none of you knew his face."
One of the newbies edged forward, anger glinting in his eyes. His hand went to his blade, intent to finish what terror had not.
Nameless's sword lifted a fraction, flame whispering along its edge. "No. He is mine. Do not play festival with another man's crown. If you could have struck him down, you would have done so already. Do not wear another's kill as your trophy."
The boy froze, shame cutting sharper than fear.
Nameless lowered the blade again, as if nothing had passed. "There is a clearing north. Others like you wait there. Walk. Keep together. If you wander, you feed the crows."
The novices glanced at one another, then began to move, stiff and silent, like children ordered from a grave.
He waited until the last of their footfalls had thinned into leaves. Only then did he take his hand from the brooch and turn fully to the man lashed to the trunk, one hand still smoking where fire had gone through flesh and into root.
"Look here, novice. I'm the one sent to replace the incompetent who botched your initiation. Tell me where he is, or I'll cure you of any hope of future grades on the spot."
The bound man's gaze slid to the brooch on Nameless's cloak, then to the habit. Black, not violet. His doubt flared, then faltered—as if his lesson had not covered variations of cloth.
He swallowed. "How do I know you're truly Penumbra? Why bind me? Why not help me finish them? You look like a plant."
Nameless let the laugh stay where it lived: behind the bone. When he spoke, he used the cadence of a catechism.
"Killing without cause is cause enough, provided it accords with the will of an Initiate."
He gave it exactly as the manual did, flat as iron. Recognition went through the novice like a shiver; suspicion gave ground to obedience. Nameless tilted the sword, letting the point hover over the man's unpinned hand.
"I have no wish to convert doctrine into discipline today," he said. "But if I must, I will. Speak."
The blade dipped a hair. That was enough.
"West," the novice blurted, fast, breath breaking. "On the far edge of the rise—an opening like a slanted mouth. Narrow, like a throat that closes on you until it spits you into a small cave. That's the base—the recruiting hollow."
"Who tends it?"
"Manis." The name came out fevered, almost reverent. "Manis of the White and the Black. He brought me in."
"Good," Nameless said. "Then you also know the penalty for confessing our secrets."
The man's eyes jolted wide. He tried to piece together a protest and only managed air.
"How would you know I wasn't testing your initiation?" Nameless asked, voice without angle, without heat. He weighed the ledger one last time: Level 4; a hand already red with other people's hours; Sacred Flame biting deeper than it should on a neutral soul. Impiety, then. Aligned where ash prefers to settle.
He did not wait for more than the beginning of a cry.
The sword rose; the sword fell. Steel entered skull with a dull, sealing sound, as if closing a lid that had been left carelessly ajar. The body bucked once against the knots, then sagged until the bark held all its weight.
[Fatal Hit — 80 Damage]
[XP Gained: Kill — Human (L4)]
[XP +425]
[Short Sword Proficiency +4]
[Short Sword Proficiency 71/10,000]
The corpse slumped sideways, eyes glassed, mouth half-open as though still rehearsing a line never spoken. Nameless let the silence breathe a moment, then muttered low, as if to no one:
"Useful. But not enough."
He turned the token once in his hand, the plates catching the dull light like teeth.
"Manis waits beyond, and I'm still short. A Listener at least… no novice's play. I'll need more weight before I set foot in that cave."
His thoughts ran ledger-like, crisp as columns on a page. "I need more XP before I move on to this 'boss.'"
He stood a moment in the hush that follows final sounds. The graves behind him had smoked with yellow breath; here the air was clean again, as if the grove refused to keep the man's heat.
"The map grows," he thought. "Shards do their work."
Nameless then lowered the sword until its point grazed the earth beside the body. A whisper of fire bled from the steel, coiling upward in veins of gold. The flame caught first in the torn cloak, then in flesh. It did not roar—Sacred Flame never did. It burned slow, deliberate, as though weighing every inch of corruption before erasing it.
"Sacred Flame."
(JP − 53 → 41)
The novice's body arched once, then settled. Skin blackened, hair curled into ash. Fingers stiffened, snapped, until only the clean geometry of bone remained. Smoke curled thin into the canopy, almost invisible in the light.
Nameless watched without flinch, the mask reflecting the glow. Proof enough of the Flame's edge: not fire for warmth, but judgment. Against darkness, even a Level 4 body could not withstand.
He knelt a moment, pressing the flat of his hand against the soil, letting the heat bleed into root and stone. Then he scattered dirt across what remained, covering the ribs one by one until the last ember vanished.
His thought slid inward, slow and precise. "With this name—Manis—it can only be double in nature. White and black. Always two faces. Always a perversor with a missing screw, the pedigree worse than the power."
He straightened, brushing soil from his glove, eyes fixed westward. The path to the cave bent there, waiting.
"Fire proves. The rest is patience," he murmured. Then he turned, cloak settling, and began the walk toward Manis's throat of stone.
He shouldered the staff, adjusted the brooch so it showed without ostentation, and stepped off the rise. Westward. A slanted mouth, a narrowing throat, a cave small enough to swallow novices whole and spit out believers. If Manis kept the door, then the door would open—either to a Listener's test or to a blade.
"Doctrine before discipline," he repeated inwardly, the ghost of a smile touching the word. "Unless the hour demands the reverse."
He moved under the trees with the old, patient economy. No haste, no drag. The forest sagged into afternoon; the light went to coins between leaves.
He chose the ground as he went: not the path but beside it, where roots carried sound away. A fallen trunk. A crease of fern. A bend where the ridge began to lean. He marked each like beads.
When the land finally tilted, he saw it—the dark slit just where the slope ran out, an opening cut at an angle, the earth around it worn with the indecisive treads of the newly brave. The mouth looked like something that wanted to close.
He crouched and watched. A figure in grey moved within the gloom and then withdrew, not venturing into light. Quiet at the entrance. No sentry to posture, only the stillness of someone who trusted the angle of the ground to do the work of bars.
"Manis keeps theatre backstage," he thought. "Good. Then the stage can be stolen."
He drew a slow breath, set the brooch so it could be seen in a single glance, and let his posture fall into that measured confidence the Order drilled into its own.
When he stepped towards the throat of stone, he did so like a man arriving to continue a task he himself had assigned.